Arthouse: Unveiling a new curator

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
Friday, February 2, 2007

Arthouse has been serving the visual arts in Texas for some 95 years now, but it's about to get something it's never had before: a full-time curator on staff. While the statewide organization has certainly employed curators in the past -- as evidenced by the sterling job that Regine Basha has been doing for the past three years -- they've worked on only an adjunct or consulting basis. Now, one is coming aboard who'll be pulling down 40 hours a week at the Jones Center for Contemporary Art. (Although, who in the arts ever works just 40 hours a week?) Her name is Elizabeth Dunbar, and she comes to Austin from the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Mo., where she has spent the past three years as curator and garnered national attention for her development of shows with emerging and midcareer artists -- among them a few names familiar to Texans and Arthouse patrons, such as Dallas photographer Nic Nicosia, San Antonio installation artist Dario Robleto, and Austin-based film artists Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler.

"Elizabeth has a phenomenal record of organizing exhibitions of excellence focusing on emerging artists," Arthouse Executive Director Sue Graze stated in a press release. "Her curatorial work is nationally recognized and sets the bar very high for us. Arthouse looks forward to bringing her expertise and community spirit to Central Texas."

That trip will be something of a homecoming for Dunbar, who's a native of the Lone Star State and a graduate of Texas Tech. "Having grown up in Texas, I am thrilled to be returning to my home state and especially to the unlimited opportunities that await at Arthouse," she says. "In recent years, Austin has emerged as one of the most vital, forward-thinking, and ambitious centers for contemporary visual arts in the region and in large part thanks to Arthouse's dedication to experimentation. I am excited to become an active member of this energetic community and to help Arthouse continue its efforts in stimulating discussions about contemporary art and to expand the institution's reach nationally and internationally."

Dunbar hopes to build on Arthouse's public programming with more gallery talks, symposia, and lectures and to develop more programs and events that will promote artists in Austin and around Texas. She starts work on April 1. Regine Basha will continue as consulting curator through March.

For more information, visit www.arthousetexas.org.

Back to top

"Rising Stars 3"
Studio 107, through Feb. 17

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
Friday, February 9, 2007

The select group in "Rising Stars 3," curated by Till Richter for Studio 107, features the local musician and print-based artist Adreon Henry, the young UT photography graduate Fernando Lafuente, and the figurative oil painter Alonso Rey. Henry's woven, plaidlike print series is uniquely sculptural and 2-D glossy at the same time. He weaves together brightly silk-screened vinyl strips, then stretches them like a canvas. The final surface, while bricklike from the side, is treated with the squeegee tool; creatively, colors are wiped into the cracks and faded. Lafuente's straightforward photos of rust and scratches are fairly predictable, yet I like the palette of oxidized steel colors. Lafuente photographed this series from the inside of Austin trash bins, which must be a humorous and enlightening antistudio experience.

Peruvian Alonso Rey has recently learned how to coax well-lighted flesh tones out of a classical, dark green atmosphere. The narrative clarity exercised in his portraits tells Jungian stories of the subconscious. They are brutally honest, sometimes painfully so. In one painting, his highly dramatic Si Dices Que Me Amos. Porque Queres Matarme?, a gorgeously painted arm reaches across the canvas, pointing a knife that tickles a stretched neck. It's a beautiful self-portrait but not exactly relaxing; it's about suffering and words that cut, leaving sadness. Rey says his paintings are real therapy for him; to feel an emotion 100%, he broadly examines his inner desires and urges. In Yo y Mi Diabla, a prim, trim nude sits back scowling at a horned, voluptuous, leather-adorned woman. Rey says it's about the denial of the devil/bodily urges within us all; it's about pretending one is perfect. He also paints his father with a condor and an attorney with house cats. His expressionistic use of animals, theatrical posing, and emotional honesty combine into a powerhouse of information. Rey is available for portrait commissions.

Back to top

Theresa Marchetta: Retreat
Women & Their Work, through Feb. 17

By Salvador Castillo
Austin Chronicle
Friday, February 16, 2007

Front and center, the first painting welcomes you into the gallery with a compact yet strong and bright presence. The vivid color and black outlines make the piece look like cloisonné or stained glass. But what you're looking at isn't clear. In fact, it's quite difficult to find an image in any of the paintings. Drippy, globular shapes and puddles move down the frames, never really settling onto any ground level, except on that first painting, where it somehow seems upside-down. About halfway through the gallery, you may begin to notice some cohesive shapes typifying the human form. Another look around, and you will find them in all but two paintings. Now your mind can funnel an interpretation on those shapes, but as you move away, it isn't possible to discern a representational image from the outlying abstract outlines. That's okay, though. The text in the gallery claims that the artist, Theresa Marchetta, is intentionally playing with abstraction vs. representation. Considering this idea and Angela Fraleigh's show at Women & Their Work this time last year, I can't help but see this body of work as a deconstruction. The paint is breaking down an image into abstraction. With a conflict similar to that in Fraleigh's paintings, Marchetta's paintings satisfy the best when the abstract elements appear to populate the image by a larger percentage. The eighth and final painting is the most harmonious in the gallery. There are sections where the paint is marblized, swirled into looking like some of the abstract shapes. Those intricate branches of color balance out the large, flat hues. Although centrally located, you easily overlook the human form by what exciting things the paint is doing.

Katy O'Connor's paintings at Volitant Gallery's recent show share painterly concerns of form and space with Christopher Schade's paintings at D Berman Gallery. "Retreat" is the antithesis to both of those shows. They used paint to construct an image that the viewer could navigate. Marchetta begins with a recognizable image but uses the paint to undermine our perceptions. Instead of using convincing hues and defined forms, the paint is vibrant with nonsensical colors defined by amoebic boundaries. Your mind gets lost trying to figure out what's in front of you.

Usually, a conclusion offers closure to your journey, whether it is narrative or visual. The title of the show and noticing the handrails in some of the paintings allows for an association to some iteration of vacationing or tourist attractions. Discovering exactly what the image is based on destroys the mind's activities, though. The wonderfully elusive lines then congeal into logical, expected contours of what is represented. Instead of revealing the source imagery and sharing in my disappointing denouement, I invite you to get lost in the fantasy of crackling colors and swimming shapes.

Back to top

'The Sirens' Song' Resonates with Art History
Arthouse, March 4

By Erin Keever
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, February 22, 2007

Less adventurous than Arthouse's previous project, "E-Flux Video Rental," and less expected than its annual "New American Talent,""The Sirens' Song" is a well-curated exhibition of good to very good paintings that operate on many levels.

Ably curated by Blanton Museum of Art assistant curator Kelly Baum, the show is somewhat inspired by Maurice Blanchot's 1959 essay, "The Song of the Sirens," about Homer's "Odyssey." Narratives (or stories) are referred to in individual paintings with varying degrees of clarity.

In William Villalongo's "Earth Wind and Fire," cartoonish heads with mouths agape float amid yellow and orange flames, all painted on black velvet. The artist alludes to African American popular culture and revisits the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe.

Seth Alverson creates his own event in "Word Has It That Everything Has Been Permitted for Quite Some Time Now." Divided into two scenes, it is read as a before and after. On the left, two men sit on a sofa in a domestic setting, staring blankly. On the right one falls over, while the other's head blows off. The back wall and ceiling break away to show an ice-capped mountain and sky. The viewer is left to connect the dots of this violent tableau.

Whether German Expressionism, Romanticism, trompe l'oeil or ancient scrolls, nearly every painting makes unmistakable reference to art history's movements, media or techniques. This demonstrates that in addition to being able to understand these works via the discussion of narratives and meta-narratives, we can appreciate them through the history of art, and the combination of new and old, invention and tradition.

Back to top

The Sirens' Song
Arthouse, through March 4

By Nikki Moore
Austin Chronicle
Friday, February 23, 2007

Whether they come in the form of films, advertisements, paintings, or face-to-face conversations, good stories seduce us every day. And while we love -- and pay dearly -- to hear and see the work of good storytellers, most of us usually approach these figures with some degree of skepticism; politicians, lawyers, fishermen, and flirts have given the art of the tale a bit of a bad name. Yet in the work that inspired the name of Arthouse's current exhibition, "The Sirens' Song," writer Maurice Blanchot examines not just the retelling of an ancient story told by the poet Homer (one of the world's most infamous storytellers) but also the fundamental nature of storytelling itself. The question that remains is this: Can anyone escape the call of the storyteller? Accordingly, "The Sirens' Song" is both seductive and reproductive, as the urge to tell what is to be seen in the show repeats the storytelling nature of the work under view in the first place.

For example, the minute I begin here to write about the trompe l'oeil paintings of Kirk Hayes, I have engaged in a written "telephone game" of sorts, where I pass a story on to you based on the story Hayes' pieces have begun to tell me. That story, as told in Only a Flesh Wound, Love and Existential Penguin, is one of visual trickery and painterly skill, as Hayes' pure paintings first appear to be compositions of found objects such as tape, cardboard, and torn paper. On the subject of deception, in stories told about both society and self, Ali Fitzgerald's A Trenchcoat and Its Body Stall at Our Gate looks at the way we use clothing and external cues to tell those tales about who we are, even to tell stories that erase who we are. And as curator Kelly Baum points out on the DVD exhibition catalog being produced by Arthouse for this show, Joey Fauerso's The Woods, built into and painted onto three segments of vintage wallpaper, depicts both a story and the work of storytelling upon an individuals oblivious to a violent world that is slowly moving in on him. From the disturbing double portrait of Seth Alverson, which tells two stories of two commissioning clients, to the Chronicles of Certain Importance -- the best days leading up to my prom date (inside the Shell gas station kiosk), by Xiomara De Oliver, fantasy and fiction hint at storylines that the viewer is asked to put back together again. That request, the call to make plot from paint, is, as Blanchot points out, the lure of the siren. Our responses, be they dismissive stories about an individual painting or praise that narrates the work and talent of the artist, are complicit in the act of storytelling, in the art of seduction, in the song of the siren that will not let any of us pass by unaffected.

Back to top