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.
In March 2010, an exhibit of works by artist John Scott opened at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. Featured in the exhibit, “Our Love of John Scott,” are the paintings, sculptures, and woodblocks created by this beloved artist who died September 1, 2007 in Houston after two double lung transplants and a long struggle with pulmonary fibrosis.
Visual art does not emerge from a void. Instead, it is bound by its own history and the temper of its time. In fact, now more then ever, art is riddled with cultural references—cues one must recognize in order to register the full measure of an artist’s intent. Such references can be arcane and idiosyncratic à la Matthew Barney, or retrograde and comical like George Condo.
The Dallas-based digital artist has for 20 years been recognizable for his uplifting, vibrantly colorful digital cloudscapes (one of his “thunderhead” clouds was shown earlier this year at the Dallas Museum of Art). But his latest exhibition, on display through July 17 at the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, resonates with a profound sense of loss and melancholy.
Botanical art has been with us since the earliest days of civilization, turning up on ancient Egyptian tombs and Greek and Roman monuments. Plants and animals are always in a state of evolutionary flux, so the artists of the past have been a major source of information about species no longer with us today. But art too evolves, and Courtney Egan’s Field Recordings expo reflects a turning point, not only for botanical art but also for video, liberated at last from monitors and projection screens. All that Egan’s work requires is a room with twilight lighting, a cool aesthetic gloom of the sort closed curtains or blinds can easily provide.
If a distinction exists between art and social and political commentary, it vanishes in the current exhibit at the Kemper Museum, David Bates: The Katrina Paintings.
Remembering Katrina by Forgetting the Politics A Review of David Bates: The Katrina Paintings By Sarah Jesse, REVIEW It has been almost five years since Hurricane Katrina, and the tragedy is still a raw and dangerous subject for an artist to tackle. Complicating the matter is the role race and class played in both prevention…
Rugged, blue jean clad and with a speaking style somewhere between Joseph Campbell and Johnny Cash, James Surls may be the most famous Texas artist.
As the death of the Gulf Coast ecosystem comes gushing blackly from the Macondo Prospect oil field 5,000 feet underwater, Dallas painter David Bates is in Kansas City for the opening of The Katrina Paintings, his exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
In the dimly lit studio, where Egan was preparing for an exhibit of her works titled “Field Studies” at Heriard-Cimino Gallery, the spinning flower seemed almost real, as if you could reach out and touch it. But it was actually an example of what Egan, one of New Orleans’ premier video artists, described as her “pretty trickery.” The trumpet flower, bee and yellow droplets were all the product of sly video projection.