Seventeen minutes into the Okay Mountain Collective’s (OKMT) new work at AMOA, Water, Water Everywhere So Let’s All Have a Drink (2010), a woman appears. So far the interlaced segments of the 28-minute looped video have been filled with images one would find while channel surfing late on a six-pack-filled Saturday night.
Featuring work made between 1978 and 2003, Willie Birch’s Looking Back expo provides a fairly comprehensive sense of what this 67-year-old African-American artist has been doing for the past few decades.
As I’ve meditated on this sad anniversary and the art Katrina inspired, I’ve found myself thinking mostly about three artists whose work is ambitious and very much about Katrina but also transcends that single event in addressing the broader themes of suffering and disaster. I’ve been thinking about David Bates, Mark Bradford, and Robert Polidori.
Dallas artist David Bates was about to show some paintings depicting the beauty of the Gulf Coast he loves when he instead became a reporter with a brush and canvas.
The New York painter Deborah Kass became well known in the 1990s for a series called the “Warhol Project” where she expertly reproduced paintings of Barbra in a style very reminiscent of Warhol’s mid-1960s screen-prints and in a manner that seemed to correct the omission.
Lesley Dill: Hell Hell Hell/ Heaven Heaven Heaven by Eric Bookhardt, GAMBIT WEEKLY This was unexpected. Since the 1970s, Lesley Dill has been known for her gossamer sculptural works based…
I first interviewed Willie Birch in December 1996 for an article that appeared in the January/February 1997 issue of theGulf Coast Arts & Entertainment Review for the opening of an exhibit at the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans.
An enormous television made of wood dominates the small back gallery at the Austin Museum of Art. On its larger-than-life screen runs a 28-minute continuous video loop that resembles inveterate channel surfing. Snippets of footage flash by: low-budget infomercials, self-serious history programs, blundering local news reports, didactic educational cartoons, exploitative reality shows.
The internationally esteemed sculptor, Jesus Moroles, although brought up in Dallas lives and works in Rockport, Texas, that is when he’s not on his way to Shanghai to finalize designs for a sculpture, lighting and landscaping commission or to Santa Fe for a one-person celebratory 200-year anniversary exhibition (2010) at the Mexican Embassy.
Jack Kerouac once said that if you own a rug, you have too much stuff. But for many middle-class Americans, too much is not enough. That is the subject of this amusing installation by Okay Mountain, a 10-person collective from Austin, Tex.