Austin Museum of Art selects triennial artists

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Tuesday, October 9, 2007

The Austin Museum of Art just announced the 20 emerging artists who have been chosen for the much anticipated show New Art in Austin: 20 to Watch. The triennial exhibition, started in 2002, features emerging artists from within the Austin community whose work stretches the boundaries of contemporary art.

The 20 artists are:
Yoon Cho
Meggie Chou
Ali Fitzgerald
Alyson Fox
Buster Graybill
Jen Hirt & Scott Webel, (Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata)
Jules Jones
Baseera Khan
Andrew Long
Kurt Mueller
Jill Pangallo
Scott Proctor
Matthew Rodriguez
Shawn Smith
Xochi Solis
Sarah Sudhoff
Raymond Uhlir
Stephanie Wagner
Rebecca Ward
Eric Zimmerman

The exhibit will be on view at the museum downtown Feb. 16-May 11, 2008. Then it will travel through 2009 to Blue Star Art Space in San Antonio, the Grace Museum in Abilene and DiverseWorks in Houston.

The museum received 254 artist submissions, a record number. The pool of artists was developed from a public call for entries, nominations from past artists, local curators and critics and museum curatorial staff interest over the past three years. The statewide curatorial team evaluated the work of 32 finalists, all living within a 50-mile radius of Austin.

Eva Buttacavoli, the Austin Museum of Art’s director of exhibitions and education and one of the curators of the show, said “The curators and I were invigorated by immersing ourselves in Austin’s evolving art scene during a week of meetings with artists.

“Some exciting themes artists are addressing include architecture, class, personal narratives, manipulation of found imagery, and a return from the digital world back to the natural world. Materials used are as varied as medical equipment, vinyl tape, displays challenging the museum itself, as well as refreshing looks at painting and drawing.”

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'Femme Fantastique'
Volitant Gallery, through Nov. 10

By Salvador Castillo
Austin Chronicle
Friday, October 12, 2007

What looks like a giant centipede curling up on the wall welcomes you into Volitant Gallery. Upon closer inspection, you see that it is a collage of ski masks with pairs linked by a wisp of smoke and feathers wiggling from the sides. Farther away but still clearly visible from the entrance stands a colorful collage of fabrics. Bright greens and yellows alternate with bright pinks and oranges in an almost phallic construction. From the patterns of triple concentric circles, diamonds pointing in the cardinal directions and other Andean cultural symbols, a woman emerges. Daphane Park and Donna Huanca begin the stories with the father and mother. The "feathered serpent," Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, and the "mother universe," Inca goddess Pachamama, bring their influence of life (maize and harvesting) and death (resurrection and earthquakes) to make sure things get Grimm and Goosey.

Nancy Baker and Annabel Linquist waste no time in conflating and dispelling any timeline trajectory. Baker's vibrantly colored, tightly rendered early-Renaissance compositions are disrupted with rocket ships and oozing blossoms. Linquist's graffitilike paint drips and pencil scrawls portray a century-old writer. Complex prismatic characters gather their arms. At least one of Frankie Martin's videos feature flashily costumed persons with suggestively placed "X" emblems. Debra Hampton, Angeliska Polacheck, Wendy Red-Star, and Huanca each piece together elements to create stimulating works, figures depending on their disparate parts to become whole.

Like fables, totem animals confront a vertigo of challenges. Carla Gannis pre- sents an uneasy Ms. Phenomenal Woman surrounded by lions and tigers and bears. Joan Jonas plays two Brothers Grimm tales about facing fear, one involving a frog. Frogs and rabbits play baseball in Mimi Kato's bleak cityscape. Nicola Costantino creates a bleak operating room reminiscent of the French film Delicatessen. Maybe the Troglodist characters from the movie help in understanding Costantino's nod to Gottfried Helnwein? In this back area of the gallery, Kato and Costantino are joined by Amelia Winger-Bearskin and Jaishri Abichandani in sci-fi industrialism. The evidence of Winger-Bearskin's collaboration Haircuts by Robots isn't sufficient in bending time and space in order to witness the performance, but a visit to the website lends more clues. Abichandani does succeed in bending space and combines four pairs of cities into new seamlessly amalgamated postcard vistas.

If we follow Joseph Campbell's recipe for the monomyth, then we must walk back to the entrance with the elixir. The artists in "Femme Fantastique" create fantastic narratives. At times cold and menacing, the gallery allows for intimate and warm resolution within the intricacies of the work. The patches of fabric, magazine cutouts, and references pulled from across history are masterfully woven. Like the daughters of Minyas, both the stories and the work entertain. But mind the clock, or else Bacchus will release the Mexican free-tails.

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'Transactions'
Blanton Museum of Art, through Nov. 18

By Nikki Moore
Austin Chronicle
Friday, October 26, 2007

It is that time of year. If you aren't looking for a costume, you're looking for the perfect pumpkin-soon-to-be-jack-o'-lantern. So whether the disguise is for you or your local gourd, at this point in October the opportunity to put on a mask and be someone else for a night is pretty much irresistible. Maybe it's just the season, but I wonder if art doesn't enjoy the same mimetic temptations. As far back as Plato's and Aristotle's musings on art, the skill of an artist was based on his ability to paint the perfect mask of the real from the artificial. But this ability to "reproduce nature" has always come at a cost: "Imitation," as translator Michael Davis writes in The Poetry of Philosophy, "always involves selecting something from the continuum of experience, thus giving boundaries to what really has no beginning or end. Mimêsis involves a framing of reality that announces that what is contained within the frame is not simply real. Thus the more 'real' the imitation, the more fraudulent it becomes." So it seems that art, at its best attempt to re-create an accurate picture of reality, is really trafficking in fraud, in deception, in lies and mimesis. Initiating a culture of suspicion, art's lies change the way artists, curators, and critics think about artwork. We look for anything but realism anymore, knowing that the search for "representation" can only lead us further and further from the thing we hoped to see or understand in the first place. Yet while "representing nature" is seen by the contemporary art world as a bit of an old-school way of approaching art, I'm beginning to wonder if at least a few of the art world's most contemporary movements aren't simply wearing mimetic masks of their own.

Take the current "Transactions" exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art. Following through on years of her own doctoral research, Kelly Baum's curatorial work brings together a group of artists that operates as something more and something less than representative artists. While "Transactions" focuses on the many ways in which art can and does happen outside the gallery space, many of the works also straddle the borders of truth and deception, politics and play, art and business, in ways that barely distinguish their projects from the projects of everyday life. As Daniel Bozhkov gives the Fastest Guided Tours of Unfamiliar Places, running innocent tourists through sites he barely knows himself, is he creating a tour experience, an art experience, or a scam? And when Zoë Sheehan Saldaña trades her seemingly run-of-the-mill but actually handmade brown paper bags for the factory versions given out in places of business, is there really art happening in the exchange? Part of what exhibitions like "Transactions" help us to see is that art sometimes occurs in the transfer of ideas, of information, of nonmaterial goods and practices. While these projects are not "representing nature" as early painting hoped to, they are certainly representing, masking, and mimicking the world as we find it – even and especially while opening our eyes to it.

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