"Lizzy Wetzel, Bradley Brown & Edward Setina: Agent on the Road"
Art Palace, through June 2

By Salvador Castillo
Austin Chronicle
Friday, June 1, 2007

The space looks sparse as you first encounter the work of Lizzy Wetzel, Bradley Brown, and Edward Setina, the three artists from Dallas-based Road Agent Gallery, at Art Palace.

Three sculptures on porcelainlike soap trays sit along the first wall. One shelf holds tightly rolled advertisements within gel capsules; a few shelves hold cigarette packaging, gum, and its packaging reconstructed into a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and sticks of gum; while the final shelf holds a faded dollar bill with a pile of pink eraser shavings on top. The difficulty in identifying the advertisements within Spill and the playfulness of Synonymous blur the target of indictment. Is it the drugs and their addiction, or is it the business and promotion that deplete your bank account?

The next wall holds two large photos. In both, people wear or hold plastic animal masks. Candid shots from some Saturday night kegger? The congregating sheep and lion masks in The Coming of March suggest Isaiah 11:6 (from which we derive "the lion shall lay down with the lamb"), but the pairs of scrawny, hairy, pasty white legs bring up memories of Lambda Lambda Lambda. The narrative comes off as incomplete, if there is indeed one being told.

On the final wall hangs a heavily decorated and modified skull, The Mask for the Crystal Corridor. Ribbons, beads, crystals, and extra bone structures take a Texas symbol, the chalk-dry cow skull, and jazz it up into hyperbolic mysticism. The underlying sheep skull is made more terrifying and supernaturally attractive, almost enough to sell at a souvenir shop. Nearby sits a combination mandala/axis mundi with artiodactyls that might bear the prized mask. Powders and geological ingredients decoratively encircle mutant outgrowths of psychedelically flowered, crystal blossoms. Layers of the native (kitschy craft, landscape, indigenous religion, Texan identity, etc.) lead to a god rockin' the nirvana.

Bradley Brown's sheep masks in The Coming of March echo the sheep skull in Lizzy Wetzel's Mask for the Crystal Corridor. Meanwhile, the tie-dye colors evoking a hallucinatory freak-out whisper to the pills in Edward Setina's work. The distance between the artists and the works diminishes with the recurring elements, real or perceived.

When thinking of Art Palace, some of the more prominent artists in the stable create a graphic identity for the gallery and, by extension, the city. From Duggins, Fitzgerald, and Sieben to the visiting Cordero, de la Rosa, and the Trevinos, there are elements of illustration and graffiti. This first part to the Road Agent/Art Palace artist exchange brings a youthfully similar yet stylistically different perspective to Austin. Like the binding elements between the works, this transaction of art should strengthen our scenes and encourage more across the state.

Back to top

"Tom Molloy: Lone Star"
Lora Reynolds Gallery, through June 23

By Salvador Castillo
Austin Chronicle
Friday, June 8, 2007

A diptych of a dove skeleton -- one rendered in pencil on white paper, the other white on black paper -- hangs in the back room of Lora Reynolds Gallery. The skeletal rendering of Dove mimics the artist Tom Molloy's Self-Portrait. In the front room, Frame presents another template for mass-produced objects. Everything except the decorative frame of the U.S. dollar bill is discarded in this collage. A whitewashed miniature globe dangles in the center of the room. Only the colorful lines shared by neighboring nations are visible in Borderline.

White signifies purity and innocence.

Calligraphic characters removed from six sheets of paper identified as Arabic text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The presentation is delicate, but it feels like a violent act. The titular piece, Lone Star, consists of 50 red stars replicated from a carnival shooting-card game arranged according to the stars of Old Glory. The destruction of the stars might suggest assassination attempts, the Red Scare, refusal of communist ideology, and efforts to remove Republican leadership in current U.S. representation.

Red signifies valor and bravery.

The press release states that "Molloy is careful to avoid overt arguments ... humanist rather than political." There is no doubt that there are multiple tiers to interpreting the many symbols used in the show. However, the construction of a world map using a dollar bill and the diptych George to Osama, Osama to George identify Molloy's incriminations as critical of current U.S. leadership. The skeletal investigations break down our interests in peace, liberty, and the pursuit of property. They can be either the structures for new beginnings or the decayed remnants of spoiled ideals. The incised works reveal our actions, reactions, and inactions toward our interests. Altogether, it is a neutral argument that's presented, and it opens queries instead of plugging in answers. Like that purple dinosaur and yellow bird always say, "Asking questions is a good way of finding things out."

Blue signifies vigilance, perseverance, and justice.

Back to top

Blanton summer exhibits celebrate classical styles
Before impression, 19th-century artists revelled in formal aesthetics

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Sunday, June 17, 2007

When most people think of 19th-century European paintings, what comes to mind? Impressionism, of course. And why not? The modern rediscovery of the Impressionists coincided with the rise of the blockbuster exhibit in the late 1970s. Suddenly, the public was lining up to coo over the vivid brush strokes, fractured hues and dreamy scenes found in canvases by van Gogh, Monet, Cézanne and others. (And yes, buy the matching mouse pads and coffee mugs.)

But as mainstream as the Impressionists seem now, they were the radicals of the 19th century. What was understood as the standard aesthetic for several centuries of European paintings were the exacting aesthetic standards established by the state-sponsored art academies.

With "A Century of Grace: 19th-century Masterworks from the Dahesh Museum of Art," the Blanton Museum of Art reveals what made for a blockbuster exhibit in a bygone era.

The exhibit's more than 50 works are from the Dahesh Museum, the New York institution that is the only one in the United States devoted to collecting and exhibiting works by Europe's academically trained artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The museum's collection originated with Dr. Dahesh, the pen name of Salim Moussa Achi (1909--1984), a popular Lebanese writer and connoisseur. Friends brought Dahesh's collection from Beirut to the United States and founded the museum in 1987.

Now, Blanton curator Chery Snay -- who culled the exhibit from the Dahesh collection -- brings to Austin the very stuff that attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors to the annual Salon de Paris by the mid-19th century.

Beginning in the mid-1700s, aesthetic ideals were codified in the various national art academies, such as England's Royal Academy of Art and France's Académie de Beaux-Arts. These state-run institutions held a monopoly on art education and exhibition. And what they preached was practiced by any artist who had any hope of a career.

Essentially what the academicians preached was a trifecta of aesthetic ideals that held sway for centuries, traces of which still hold today. First, drawing was considered the foundation of all art; artists-in-training clocked countless studio hours pencilling away. Second, the academicians believed classical Greek and Roman art held the best examples to be copied. And finally, the human figure -- above all else -- was the most worthy artistic subject matter.

By the mid-19th century, with the artists shut out of the academies fomenting such radical styles as the fluid and highly personal Impressionism, the classically trained artists dug in their heels, celebrating an idealized version of the human figure to almost saccharine effect.

"A Century of Grace" brims with examples of this, and Snay has done a smart job of presenting the paintings thematically and not in chronological order.

While to modern eyes Adolphe-William Bouguereau's "The Water Girl" of 1885 seems at first to be just a sweet image of a peasant girl carrying a water jug, she's actually highly idealized. Her face is perfectly cherubic and relaxed; her bare feet sparkling clean as they tread the dusty ground; her simple dress classically proportioned. What village could she possibly be laboring in?

Lawrence Alma Tadema's 1874 "Joseph, Overseer of Pharaoh's Granaries" is a prime example of another vein of 19th-century artistic idealism well demonstrated in the exhibit. As European nations claimed colonies throughout the Middle East and Asia, the cultures of the faraway lands stirred up much romantic fascination with the general public, which artists gladly fed. Hardly an accurate record of history, it reflects more of what 19th-century Europeans wished the ancient Middle East to be.

Offering a nice palette cleanser to all the highly finished and fancified figures in "A Century of Grace" is the Blanton's other summer offering, "Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery." Preliminary studies, rough drafts, or small and casual variations of grander works of art, the 87 drawings that span the 15th to the 19th centuries offer an intimate and informal view of the artistic process.

In practice at least, even classically trained artists needed to experiment.

Back to top

Photoasis
Will van Overbeek's camera captures the eternal allure of Austin's favorite swimming hole

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
Friday, June 29, 2007

At the height of summer, even the tree-studded oasis of Austin can seem like the interior of an industrial blast furnace. The G-type star anchoring our big Texas sky bears down with all the intensity of Wal-Mart impacting a local economy, evaporating the moist, withering the vital, inciting melanoma among unscreened citizenry. One source of refuge from this onslaught, a source that's millennia older than the Homo sapiens who eventually invented air conditioning and the hissing of summer lawns, is the gem of liquid sapphire dazzling this city's violet crown: Barton Springs Pool.

The fourth largest system of natural springs in the state, Barton Springs was created by the same seismic event that brought us the Balcones Fault and who knows what potential for future cataclysm. The pool itself has been around, in almost its present, sidewalk-bordered condition, since the 1930s. It had been a popular swimming spot even before the putative improvements of civilization, though, especially after becoming an official part of Zilker Park in 1917.

It's still a popular swimming spot in these days of wireless laptops, terror levels, and debate about the effects of global warming, and it remains popular because, global shmobal, it's hot here, it's hot now, and how better to soothe one's rotisseried flesh than a swift plunge into the perpetually 68-degrees-cold waters of a natural spring surrounded by century-old pecan trees?

Photographer Will van Overbeek has captured images of Barton Springs Pool for 24 years, framing summer after summer of Austinites at rest and at play in the cool depths and the surrounding shores. Van Overbeek, who studied at UT under master photographers Russell Lee and Garry Winogrand and whose work has been featured in some of the planet's finest glossy magazines (as well as numerous issues of your Austin Chronicle), began his Barton Springs journey with a commission from Rolling Stone in 1983, shooting what was to be part of an article about similar summer escapes around the country. After that, the professional shutterbug returned again and again, of his own accord, drawn to the annual vibrant blossoms of human life, the time-stained narratives of youth and old age playing out among the currents, both aquatic and cultural, of this natural resource.

The Austin Museum of Art, ever canny when it comes to linking the national with the local, has chosen this portion of van Overbeek's bright career to accompany its current "Target Collection of American Photography: A Century in Pictures" exhibition. Two entire rooms of the AMOA are dedicated to the photographer's images. These images are immensely reproduced via digital inkjet pigment on archival paper, as stunning as personal fireworks in their bursts of color, the balances between subject and background, the shock of recognition from our own sojourns, our own plunges, our own nightswims in the inviting waters of Barton Springs Pool. Herewith, a small sampling of that exhibition, to wet as well as whet your appetite for both the current show and the eternal springs nourishing the heart of our ever-changing city.

"24 Summers at Barton Springs Pool: Photographs by Will van Overbeek" is on display through Aug. 12 at the Austin Museum of Art -- Downtown, 823 Congress.

In conjunction with the exhibit, the museum will present a special Austin Responds program, AMOA Celebrates Barton Springs Pool, on Thursday, June 28, 7-8pm, at AMOA -- Downtown. The program will feature poems by Susan Bright and Robin Cravey, a reading from the book Barton Springs Eternal by author Turk Pipkin, and selections from the play Keepin' It Weird, performed by actor Tom Green, and the Steve Moore play Nightswim, performed by Chronicle Arts Editor Robert Faires. Visitors are encouraged to bring their own stories about the pool to share and personal photos from the springs to add to the Austin Responds Photo Wall. Admission proceeds will be donated to the Friends of Barton Springs Pool.

Photographer Will van Overbeek will present a slide lecture of his work on Thursday, July 19, 7pm, at AMOA -- Downtown.
For more information, call 495-9224 or visit www.amoa.org.

Back to top

Sterling Allen: The Allen transformer as self-generator ...

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
Friday, June 29, 2007

The recent drawings by Sterling Allen, as seen in the exhibition "Writesy Drawsy" at Art Palace, are so confident that I can relax and enjoy them. His assertions with the pencil are so decisive in placement and texture that I am immediately sent to a happy place as a viewer. Sometimes frustrated realist painters default to drawing because it's easier to control a pencil or similar hard material than a brush and squishy paint. Allen is something else altogether: a photographer with the heart of a documentary filmmaker, always editing his work. He draws fast, listening to music and trying superhard to be spontaneous. But rather than obsessively adding details and density to every bit -- a common pitfall of artists with rendering skills -- he pares down his compositions, treating each one as a fresh snapshot, not a realist masterpiece. It's the cost of paper, and it's not too precious. It's fun. In a three-part process, he takes a dense scribble monster into a manga creature contour. Then he deconstructs the shape and, with one bold stroke of editing after the other, turns an emotional blobby mess into a curvaceous character, then, finally, a pop hybrid.

This final drawing is nothing like the first or second versions, unless you count the reliance on the outer edges. The third derivative pieces are forcefully reconceived and energetically drawn in full color with shading. Visual evidence of the character is there, but gone are the eyes and the continuous line. Allen combines disparate items, built into a central figure, which is oddly of the moment. The imagery Allen "samples" is like channel surfing a TV: bits of animals, cars, food, buildings, people, logos, and office supplies. Perhaps he's watching the world flash by in one way. Allen ingests these images and spits them out in patterns only he could achieve. He wills himself to a place of focus, looking inward to develop his editorial power -- of choice, of self-interest, and of self-generation. Allen gives himself a problem to solve and doesn't quit drawing until he renders a series in ridiculously skilled illustrative technique derived from a highly personal source.

The fact that he leaves "dragon veins" or blank spaces between items is important; it lets the composition react to the rest of the page. This also helps him avoid a straight centered format that could feel predictable. Eyes are left out, while legs, arms, and other parts of figures appear in the pieces, though they are cropped to feel generic. As anonymous body parts, they become clip art; once depersonalized, they relate to other animal and food imagery in a surprising manner. This helps the odd narrative; the contemporary elements connect through scale. I am put at ease, knowing that time spent looking and close observation will not reveal flaws. Technically, the application is tasty and efficient. These irrational, exuberant pieces delicately connect items of our time that have conformed to Allen's steel will.

"Sterling Allen: Writesy Drawsy" is on display through July 7 at Art Palace, 2109 E. Cesar Chavez. For more information, call 496-0687 or visit www.artpalacegallery.com.

Back to top