"Sugarcoated"
Women & Their Work Gallery, through June 17

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
Friday, June 2, 2006

I like having choices in a show, and co-curators Lisa Choinacky and Katherine McQueen have put together a quirky troupe in "Sugarcoated," an energetic mix of drawings, oil paintings, sculpture, textiles, and mixed media by female artists.

Perhaps ironically, the two artists in the show who literally used sugar held my attention the least. Theresa Vargas presents chocolate covered tools, which seemed more like a waste of perfectly good tools and chocolate than a way to achieve the stated goal of addressing gender issues. Lisa Ludwig's installation of sugar-frosted sculptures was more successful. Her white Rabbit is made of icing in a realistic scale near the floor. It portrays a perky jackrabbit, and I was able to conjure some fond domestic memories of making coconut lamb- and bunny-shaped cakes.

Funny art is hard to come by. Sarah Lasley of New York has terrific six-foot charcoal drawings. They demonstrate a strong understanding of anatomy, drawing facility, and good humor. While the subjects in the photo-based series are recognizable as various women in bathing suits, Lasley distorts the proportions in a caricatured manner reminiscent of local fabulizer Heyd Fontenot. The women are half-naked, but their faces share a smushed-up, squinting-into-the-sun expression that effectively desexualizes them. They leave a nicely unidealized impression of wholesome fun.

Also tickling the funny bone is Lisa Krivacka of Germantown, N.Y., who presents four delicately detailed oils on panels. My favorite is These Woods Are Crawling With Bears. It's a heavily forested landscape with lots of little clearings. In these, bears helpfully demonstrate their various family and daily activities like little actors. With the recent ballooning of nature programs on TV, it is a sweet commentary on our tendency to anthropomorphize just about everything and our desires to control the wilderness.

Totally out of control and blowing my mind are the mixed-media paintings of Aimee Jones from Houston. If you liked the Art Palace show by Austin artists Nina Rizzo and Stephanie Wagner a couple of months back, then you'll dig the abstract explosions of ridiculously bright colors here. Day-Glo colors are quite hard to handle in combination. Jones is so comfortable within a highly keyed-up environment that she adds little beads and toys into small areas of the compositions. The work is so blinding that, in spite of the inclusion of plastic and glitter, the lasting impression is that of a painting. They are a bit scary, a bit shocking, a bit overwhelming, and surreally intriguing. Jones seems to have enough vim and vigor for 10 people; perhaps she chewed up colored candies and then passionately vomited out these rainbows.

Austin's own Bonnie Gammill is more down to earth. She hits the streets with candy colors, painting carscapes in delicious pinks and oranges. Her palette is bright with pastels but also limited and nuanced. Her layering of cut-tape edges give the work a sleek graphic feel. These sharp edges, combined with the subject matter of trucks, roads, power lines, and Arby's signage, contrast nicely with the dreamy colors. She focuses on sweeping and rather soothing compositions of traffic.

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'Sugarcoated' Has A Fun, Girlie Buzz

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, June 8, 2006

Thanks to its installation, "Sugarcoated," the group exhibit currently at Women & Their Work, is the most comely show in a while to land in the longtime indie art space.

Credit guest curators Lisa Choinacky and Katherine McQueen for taking a Women & Their Work exhibit to the next level. Usually shows in this venue are plagued by poor lighting and haphazard placements that feel incomplete.

But Choinacky and McQueen got all girlie and fun, splashing the gallery walls with playful colors, creating cartoonish backdrops (clouds, zigzagging shapes) that frame paintings and smartly defining a border along the lower edge of the wall. It's a terrific approach for show that's chock full of eye-popping color and material.

And it's also good way to bring together the work of eight artists into a pleasing whole, even if none of the work is super deep or super fresh.

Much of what's trendy in contemporary art right now is evident in "Sugarcoated." There's the use of crafty materials such as fabric and felt (Donna Huanca's plushy guns) or neon puffy paint, glitter and sequins (Aimee Jones' swirling abstractions). Then there's the food-substance art (Theresa Vargas' chocolate-covered tools and Lisa Ludwig's sugar-coated plastic roses). And of course, there's some creepy hyper-realism and a sort of cerebral, minimal realism (paintings Lisa Krivacka and Bonnie Gammill).

The standouts? Alika Cooper's stylized gouache landscapes on butcher-block paper beguile with their half-hidden narratives. And Sarah Lasley's expressive charcoal drawings of cranky-faced, bikini-clad teenagers with disturbingly oversized heads speak volumes about teenage attitude.

But for Cooper and Lasley, "Sugarcoated" remains sweet but not deep.

("Sugarcoated" continues 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays through June 17. Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca St. Free. 477-1064. www.womenandtheirwork.org.)

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"Pillar and Stretch"
Davis Gallery, through July 3

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
Friday, June 9, 2006

David Leonard and Christopher St. Leger have built up quite a show this month at the Davis Gallery. Both artists make very precise paintings of skyscrapers, water towers, houses, telephone poles, roads, and all of the essential aspects of our urban environ.

St. Leger's choice of watercolor lends itself to be read as an architectural drawing and an imagined painting. Commissions from real estate developers, depending on how you feel about your architect at the moment, can be reminders of great success or failure. In The Advent, St. Leger constructs dramatic angles, layering in rhythms and some rich golden tones. Some of St. Leger's layering is more cloudlike, and the perspectives and roofing angles are buried under a color field. The repeated lines and drawings in these works are quite soothing and nice. One thing that seems missing to me is some pure white spaces. I studied watercolor with a Chinese teacher, so I was taught to seek out the dragon veins, the white lines of the paper that connect throughout the composition. These paintings do feel warm and cozy. The artist gave some loving layers to the intimate sentiment, "Vessels shelter my friends and family."

David Leonard paints buildings in Austin and places he's traveled. When I look at this new body of work, I can see his years of hard work and efforts paying off. His color is much stronger now. In the past, he mixed many of his tones by adding black, but in the current work, the grays shimmer with blue, the highlights glisten with peachy intonations. His palette is full spectrum, and the direction of the light source is clear. His basic grids, drawing skills, and attention to detail remain solid. Even though the topic of all of the works is architectural or landscape, certain pieces show a subtle humor and general pleasure. Wireless Sunset is a great little painting; the title is a jab, as the piece shows a vista of telephone poles, wires, and such crossing over a road receding into the distance. One of the most pastoral landscapes, El Paso, is basically a swirling grey smog cloud. Meanwhile, skyscrapers glow beautifully. One might guess that Glass Prairie is a grid of windows, but its abstractness shows a quiltlike lushness. Leonard has eliminated the horizon line and works purely with reflected light and the grid. Due to his newfound strength of color, these pieces are like mystical gems.

This is a great show; Davis Gallery is big enough to show a large series of paintings and some of the smaller but funnier pieces that occurred during the process.

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Arts: Creativity abounds, over and over, again and again

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, June 15, 2006

Ah, stuff! Ah, bunches and bunches of it -- maddening collections of quotidian stuff!

Marker caps, pencils, tires, dollar bills, playing cards, plastic cups, pasta, twist ties.

Thankfully, the 13 contributors to "Over and Over: Passion for Process," now at the Austin Museum of Art, have channeled their compulsions for the accumulation and repetitive arrangement of that everyday stuff into beguiling works of art. Better they did that than, well . . .

And with this iteration of the traveling exhibit organized by the Krannert Art Museum, AMOA executive director Dana Friis-Hansen smartly pairs the obsessively compiled artworks with eight video and light projects that employ many of the same repetitive pattern-making.

There's something else Friis-Hansen's "Again and Again: Cycles in Video and Light" illuminates: Austin has a small but savvy group of collectors adding media-based art to their holdings. Of the eight beguiling works on view, five are from Austin collectors: Deborah Green, Jeanne and Michael Klein, Chris Mattsson and John McHale, Bettye and Bill Nowlin, Julie and John Thornton. And all of the eight works in "Again and Again" are beautiful.

Burt Barr's nine-minute film of a melting ice cube, "The Long Dissolve," and Jason Salavon's computer animation of a slowly transforming still life of a cup and saucer, "Still Life at the Speed of Sunrise," both compel with the same elegance of form and arrangement you'd find in a well-composed painting. Yet the glow of their artificial light mesmerizes more. Equally hypnotic is Jennifer Steinkamp's "Paint the Lily" -- a wall-sized, neatly arrayed quilt of digitally animated flowers that slowly and soothingly undulates.

A few feet away in the next room, Devorah Sperber's "Lie Like a Rug" undulates and intrigues in a similar, yet more static manner. Sperber took 18,000 caps from colored marker pens and arranged them in a pattern that mimics Persian carpet. It's a handmade, three-dimensional version of pixelated digital imagery writ as large as a bedroom rug. Clever.

As if not to be outdone by sheer numbers, Rachel Perry Welty gathered more than 5,000 twist ties (collected from friends and family) and strung them end to end to make "Center Spread." Totaling more than 2,600 feet in length, the colorful twist ties ribbon neatly across the gallery wall in tight horizontal lines that form paragraphlike blocks that then hang on the wall in two page-like formations. "Center Spread" reads as a tale of consumption and time passing more than anything else. (For a 2004 exhibit in Boston, Welty presented a sculpture made from 208,896 plastic bread-bag tags.)

Jennifer Maestre sharpened hundreds of colored pencils down to the nubs, drilled a hole in them and then stitched them together to fashion her spiky, nightmarish table-top sculptures "Spine" and "Primal Scream Therapy." Scream, indeed -- Maestre's works howl with the message that even in our digital age, the handmade art object still holds visceral appeal.

Of course, all the festishizing of stuff -- not to mention the obsessive, almost ritualistic compilation of all that stuff -- more than hints at the fine line between singular fascination and addiction.

It's a line Tom Fruin walks with finesse. He stitched together into a quilt hundreds of small, glassine heroin bags, each emblazoned with a red skull and crossbones, to make "Red Zone."

Oh yeah, that's right -- there is that dangerous, damaging side of compulsion.

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Arts: Diverse show of 'New American Talent'

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, June 29, 2006

Juried group exhibits of new work are the art equivalent of "American Idol." Who gets selected and who doesn't can spawn chatter as entertaining as the art itself.

Let's start with the numbers. Some 1,152 artists threw their hats into the ring this year to vie for a spot in "New American Talent: 21." That's doubled from last year, when 573 took a shot at Arthouse's annual juried exhibit.

Why the increase? Could it be that Arthouse's profile grew thanks to the flashy new Texas Prize, the $35,000 no-restrictions biennial plum that launched last year? In all probability, yes. How else to get starving artists to sit up and take notice than to dangle a big cash carrot in their faces?

Something else, too: The juried group show of new work is alive and well these days. Despite the usual moaning over this year's iteration of the Whitney Biennial -- the granddaddy of juried shows -- it garnered a blitz of attention. Indeed, biennials and triennials continue to proliferate and grab headlines. The success of last year's Texas Biennial and its anticipated return next year already are buzzing through the art world.

For this version of "New American Talent," curator Aimee Chang made her choices by confining her gaze to the art itself, not paying any attention to the maker's name. Chang, currently the curator of contemporary art at the Orange County Museum of Art, selected 59 artists, 22 of whom live in Texas, with eight from Austin. (Serving as this year's judge is a bit of a homecoming for Chang: She earned her master's at the University of Texas in the late 1990s.)

Chang clearly has a pluralistic, democratic and inclusive outlook. Hence "New American Talent: 21" is expansive, electric, even a little jumbled. It even feels a little messy, in a good way.

Messy certainly might be the hip new aesthetic. Take Robert Lee Vanderpool's painting "Western Tendencies." It's overthought, understyled, even kind of disheveled -- but so much so that it's compelling. Elisa Lendvay makes a glorious, spindly mess of umbrella parts that fill one corner of the gallery and even creep up the wall. Noelle Allen reinterprets a piece of driftwood with "The Mortivore," dripping shiny black resin on the wood to spooky -- and sloppy -- effect.

In contrast to the aesthetic of slovenliness, there's a certain cerebral smoothness and neatness that defines a good deal of the work Chang chose. Rebecca Holland's two large sheets of cast sugar -- pink, transparent and perfectly square -- epitomize this. So does Austinite Rebecca Ward's tidy installation of colored duct tape in Arthouse's storefront window. (Ward currently has a similarly impressive installation at the alt-East Side gallery Donkey Show.) Another Austinite perfecting the art of neatness is Tom Hollenback. His pink Plexiglas and steel "Sluice," a phone booth-sized structure, is as tidy and geometric as can be but also menaces, with its doors poised and ready to drop.

Truly disconcerting -- in a good way -- is Karen Liebowitz's painting "Reviving the Bird (from the Phoenix Series)." Using a gooey, glowy color palette of oranges and purples reminiscent of fin de siècle American illustrator Maxfield Parrish, Liebowitz paints a very stylized young maiden kneeling over a dead peacock-like bird. None of Liebowitz's painting seems right politically or artistically at first. Yet it's that deliberate wrongness that makes "Reviving" so compelling.

Chang selected 11 video and film artists for "New American Talent," but interestingly, she confines all but one of them to two unceremonious corners, where monitors display the videos in a loop. And that's just fine. Like so much video work coming from young artists, what's on those monitors is largely patience-trying, self-indulgent junk.

However, San Antonio's Joey Fauerso gets his own piece of wall space for "Four Ways to Disappear." The hand-drawn animation shows four brief little variations of what looks to be the artist's cartoonish self-portrait fading away via different forms of erasure (smearing, puffing away in a cloud, collapsing into nothing and actual erasing). "Four Ways to Disappear" is a beautiful, proof that the pen can be so much more artistic than lens.

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Are You Experienced?
In a new ad campaign, the Blanton redefines 'art,' raising questions about what it means

By Nikki Moore
Austin Chronicle
Friday, June 30, 2006

The Blanton Museum of Art's new "Art is Experience" PR campaign is canvassing Austin, pun intended. The slogan has shown up in every corner of the city. If you haven't received a postcard or sticker bearing the phrase in your mailbox, then you've almost certainly seen the myriad bold-colored ads on TV and billboards that announce a new definition for an age-old materialization of creativity. The promotional blitz is not only a catchy, effective, and vibrant way to integrate Austin's young population into the art culture, it's a whole new way of viewing and defining art itself. And while it may help to reposition the Blanton within the local community, the "Art is Experience" mantra goes beyond the building of a new museum and into the heart of some of art's most fundamental questions.

History has, through the course of time, temptations, and empires, seen art defined in radically different ways. "Art is beauty" may be the most popular answer to the question of what art is. Yet, from "art is communication" (think: Ransom Center, hieroglyphics, and cuneiform) to "art is teaching" (as it often was for the monks and religious clergy of the European Middle Ages), art has both defined and been defined by the culture it builds and inhabits. Both in the United States and elsewhere, the Sixties and Seventies saw "art is resistance" and "art is critique" spring up from the throes of a world divided by communism and capitalism and wracked with fighting in countries seeking independence after long periods of dictatorship and colonization. Against this shifting history, it is no small thing for the Blanton to send out smart orange stickers calling Austin to art that is now being defined as "experience."

But the Blanton was taking its cue from the people it wanted to come to the new facility it was building on the southern edge of the UT campus. Jessie Otto Hite, the Blanton's vibrant director, knew the new museum space would need to engage potential art viewers on familiar terms. "Early in the process of designing the new Blanton," Hite relates, "we did a branding study and found that Austin, as we knew, is full of creative and curious adults," and they wanted to know what would draw them to the museum they were creating. In a series of focus groups, words like "experience," "choice," and "inviting" kept coming up, along with phrases like "things to see and do" and, particularly among younger respondents, the desire to see something new that was "not your parent's museum." That led the Blanton staff toward the idea of transforming both the structure of the art museum and the public perception of what a museum is and could be, both for and in the Austin community, into one rooted in experience.

"Experience" has become a big word these days. The common understanding of the word has something to do with personal participation that is somehow transformative because of an interaction. But experience in today's culture is not that simple. We're less and less content to experience something through a book or watching or hearing about it secondhand. Increasingly, we want to get our whole selves involved, to immerse ourselves in a thing, via things like virtual reality, surround-sound movies, and interactive learning. This has led to changes in the way our whole society is driven. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore's book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage relates how the American sales and services industries have rapidly undergone a series of consumer-oriented transformations from the industrial age to the information age. In the 1970s and 1980s, the authors write, "successful companies, such as Nordstrom, Starbucks, Saturn, and IBM, discovered that the best way to differentiate one product from another -- clothes, food, cars, computers -- was to add service," which led to a shift from a goods-based economy to a service economy. But now, this idea is slowly yet forcefully being superseded by large groups of consumers who are looking past service companies for engagement with brands that can offer the full encounters of an "experience."

With Blanton assistant director Ann Wilson's vision of a museum experience and ideas from The Experience Economy, Jessie Otto Hite led the Blanton team in the redefinition of their museum into an "experienced-based" institution. At a time when many older institutions settle for face lifts or consultant-driven rethinks, the Blanton snatched the opportunity to do something truly cutting-edge as a museum and for Austin. Hite proudly points out how their reinvention of the Blanton puts it in a unique position among museums today: first, in its engagement of the public through experience-based interactions; and second, in the fact that it is a solid institution with 40 years of collections-building and exhibition-making that is now being given the chance to start new, fresh, and now. Considering the marginal face of the Blanton prior to its move into the new building, and the outstanding public engagement they are currently experiencing -- 30,000 visitors in its first month -- they are certainly doing something right.

Still, while experience has certainly always been part of art, art as experience has always been just one branch of the art field among many. Yet we live in a world where, as Eva Buttacavoli of the Austin Museum of Art describes it, more and more "people are listening to their iPods, checking their cell phone messages, and surfing the Web all at once." In this scenario, experience is not only existence, it is an almost infinitely craved commodity. Billion-dollar industries are booming as our checkbooks run to catch up with our desire for instant gratification, coupled with a looming national attention deficit. So in this consumer culture we have nearly perfected, doesn't it just make good sense for, not only art museums, but artists who, as Sue Graze, director of Arthouse, says, are "expressing the now and creating what all of the rest of us are feeling anyway," to be a part of and even lead this experience-based scenario? Isn't it logical for art museums to be conducting target-market focus groups and basing their publicity campaigns on those results? For those of us who once believed that artists and the field of art are supposed to resist commodification, it seems we are all in for a big surprise.

Or are we? Galleries, museums, and art institutions of all kinds have been at this art and commodification game for decades, if not centuries. Even Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel had a price tag attached. To be fair, the questions that outline the mixing of art and our experienced-based culture and economic system should be asked in a more complex way than I have just outlined. For example, why can't experience be resistance instead of its suppressor? As Annette Carlozzi, the Blanton's curator of American and contemporary art, astutely points out, Paul Chan's "Present Tense" exhibition at the Blanton offers a very powerful and pertinent example of experience engaging -- and even inciting -- resistance. In discussing Chan's two-channel video piece My birds ... trash ... the future ..., (2004), Carlozzi points out that as viewers begin to realize the broader perspectives offered by both sides of the dual imagery, "the decision to engage and deepen their experience of the piece by moving back and forth through space directly mirrors the political process for individuals in society." At the same time, keenly aware that the "spectacle, high-production values, and theatricality of My birds ... might overwhelm real investigation," Carlozzi notes, "Chan moved to the modest, more humble space of the floor, to the space we walk on for his next work, 2nd Light." In this digital projection piece, Chan again co-opts the viewer into a point of decision regarding his or her own involvement in the work, as each viewer's presence in, and even on, the projected image causes direct transformations of the image, either by shadowing, obscuring, or merely changing the visible sequence. In other words, as problematic as it may be, Chan's work calls for responsibility, not just gratification, from experience.

So perhaps Chan's investigation is really one of our own, and the Blanton's as well. Where art has been pulled out of its purist avant-garde margins into the center of culture, the same shift that is so profoundly marked by the Blanton's "Art is Experience" motto will make its way into the artworks that surface in its wake. Chan's body of work maps out a newly emerging ground for artists in an economy where "experience"-centered arts, such as video, film, and graphic design, are all pervasive. At the intersection of market research, stellar public relations campaigns, and our current "experience economy," art is again being redefined, and Austin, via the Blanton, seems to have suddenly found itself at the forefront.

"Paul Chan: Present Tense" is on view through Aug. 13 at the Blanton Museum of Art, MLK at Congress. For more information, call 471-7324 or visit www.blantonmuseum.org.

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