Christo and Jeanne-Claude
'Over the River' and through their words

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
Friday, April 7, 2006

A sold-out house at the Paramount may be the equivalent of the "Dog Bites Man" headline for performing artists such as Lyle Lovett – in other words, old news – but for a pair of visual artists? Now we're in "Man Bites Dog" territory. With 1,000-plus bodies packing the opera house last Thursday, March 30, clearly Austin wanted to hear what Christo and Jeanne-Claude had to say about their remarkable 45-year career of creating epic art and how work is progressing on their latest effort, the Over the River project in Colorado. The first half of this Austin Museum of Art program concerned the latter, with Christo narrating a slide show that detailed the project's scope and history: how the idea of suspending miles of fabric panels over a river was conceived in the early Nineties; how Christo, Jeanne-Claude, and the project team visited 89 rivers across the Rocky Mountains before settling on the Arkansas River in the Centennial State; how the bureaucracy they have to navigate is as treacherous as a stretch of whitewater (17 government agencies involving federal, state, and two counties); how they deal with the local communities; and how they've field-tested the cables and fabric to see how they'll behave in natural conditions. The presentation made this astonishing new artwork seem a more than worthy follow-up to The Gates, but also gave fresh insight into the care that Christo and Jeanne-Claude put into their projects on every level: the creative, the technical, and, most crucially, the human. The couple then spent close to an hour answering questions written out by audience members during an intermission. The queries ranged from the practical ("How are the project materials recycled?") to the personal ("How do you have the patience to spend years realizing a project?"), and the answers ranged from the intriguing (fabric for Wrapped Reichstag was shredded and laid under carpets) to the insightful ("It's not a matter of patience, it's a matter of passion."). The artists' priorities were made clear in an anecdote Jeanne-Claude told about being contacted by NASA some years ago. The agency wanted to see if the couple would do a project in space. Our work is made to be experienced by people, Jeanne-Claude responded. "When you've got lots of people up there, call us back."

Back to top

Flato's New Works a Pixel Party

By Erin Keever
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, April 13, 2006

Malou Flato is best known for her paintings. Particularly popular are her watercolors and acrylics of regional landscapes and still lifes often filled with flowers and fruits. Recently, she has delved into brave new territory -- digital prints.

The results in "Barely Still Lifes" at the Davis Gallery are an amalgamation of scanned items from nature, dead animals, as well as scanned paintings and actual painting. One could call them digital collages. This attempt to blend traditional and digital media has become relatively common and often poses visual problems.

As seen in similar experiments with such processes, some of Flato's final images work more successfully than others. The few that highlight texture, repetition of form and abstracted details, such as "Tasajillo," are relatively seamless and very appealing. However, some of the final prints seem to force too many competing images into one space. The pieces just don't fit together. There are uncomfortable aesthetic gaps and gestural applications of paint that appear to be an afterthought.

That said, Flato's technical undertaking is still impressive, including the fact that she used an extra large scanner and Photoshop to capture, juxtapose, heighten and saturate elements, creating an original body of work within roughly a year's time. She could be on her way to something exceptional, something seemingly effortlessness in feel, much like her paintings.

("Barely Still Lifes" continues 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays through April 15, Davis Gallery, 837 W. 12 St., 477-4929.)

Back to top

'Xtra-Ordinary' Is Bold, Sometimes Beautiful

By V. Marc Fort
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, April 20, 2006

The current exhibit at Arthouse — "Xtra-Ordinary: Francesca Fuchs, Thomas Glassford and Katrina Moorhead" — was ridiculously under-attended last weekend. Opportunely, the quiet, expansive rooms in Arthouse provided the appropriate atmosphere to view the extra-large scaled exhibit.

Thomas Glassford's fluorescent tubes-based sculpture/installation immediately commands the eye. Nearly 30 Sylvania fluorescent lights shine outward from a spherical base, akin to illuminated points on a star. The fluorescent tube sculptures' clean design recalls the minimalist art in Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange." Glassford's command of artistic engineering is palpable, but it is the subtle way in which he reconstructs ordinary objects into something beautiful that makes his work transcendental.

Katrina Moorhead's white carnation installation adds a necessary organic life to the predominately inanimate exhibit. The flowers are arranged together on the museum floor to spell out text that Moorhead appropriated from random bathroom graffiti: "closer to maybe than ever." Unfortunately, the subtext of Moorhead's piece is lost on American audiences, as they remain mostly unaware of the British tradition of using floral beds to spell-out temporary advertisements.

Francesca Fuchs' enormous paintings use the most traditional medium to shine a macro lens on an unconventional subject. Two pastel-tinted, slightly expressionist, wall-sized paintings of a mother nursing her baby consume the viewer in the color of human flesh. The artist cleverly requires the viewer to gaze upon this most intimate moment between mother and child — the very moment that most humans are used to turning their heads from when they come upon such a sight in a public space.

"Xtra-Ordinary," curated by Arthouse director Sue Graze, quietly presents thought-provoking work. The entire exhibit can be viewed in less than an hour's time, but the work will likely linger in your heart and mind's-eye for far longer.

("Xtra-Ordinary" continues 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays-Wednesdays, Fridays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays through April 30. 700 Congress Ave. Free. 453-5312)

Back to top