Lauren Kelley creates animated videos that often feature Barbies altered by clay and confectioner’s sugar and that evoke a complex commentary on race, youth and desire. Kelley’s works also engage materiality and the craft of making miniatures. Her show True Falsetto is currently up at Women & Their Work through January 17th. I sat down [...]
Oh how we long for the End! Is there not something slightly disappointing about waking up to an unchanged world after everything was supposed to be snuffed out? That small sense of dread, the apocalypse has not arrived and our daily routines resume as if nothing at all happened (because nothing at all did happen). [...]
Who doesn’t love to receive art books around the holidays? Full of inspiration and far more special than your average paperback, the following books will warm the hearts of all the members in your immediate circle of friends and family. They’re also all available at Domy Books in Austin. Remember guys, shop local! 1) [...]
If not completely exhausting, the end of each semester can be pretty gratifying. The students are relieved to be finished, turning in their last papers and tests, sometimes telling you they enjoyed the class and sometimes dropping anonymous notes on your desk. I teach art history at Texas State and at the closing of each [...]
By the time this is published the new curator of modern and contemporary art at the Blanton Museum may have been announced. I was told last week that an offer has been accepted. I don’t know who the new curator will be, but the director of the Blanton, Simone Wicha, has assured me that, “Curators [...]
I’ve long thought of clay as a very specific medium. By “medium specific” I’m recalling the critic Clement Greenberg’s term as he defined it in his 1961 essay Modernist Painting. According to Greenberg, what defined modernist abstract painting was its ability to criticize itself, therefore “to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” [...]
I ran around E.A.S.T. Sunday afternoon, the last day of the annual Austin arts festival. It was a sunny and beautiful day–perfect for wandering about and looking at local art. E.A.S.T. is chock full of work and I only just barely scratched the surface. I love how inclusive the show is and yet, next year [...]
Emily Roysdon is an artist who lives in Stockholm and New York, when she’s not traveling around the globe, mounting collaborative and site-specific projects. Roysdon was an artist in residence at the University of Texas’s Visual Arts Center this fall, where she developed the installation Pause, Pose, Discompose. While she was in the midst of [...]
Colby Bird is an artist born and raised in Austin, now living in Brooklyn, New York. He often blends the discourses of photography and sculpture, and is currently exhibiting 100 handmade house lamps at the Texas State Galleries in San Marcos. I met up with him to discuss the comfort of a studio practice, craft [...]
I ended my weekend by going to see the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie The Master. The film is broadly about a Scientology-like group in post-war America who believe, through processing, that one can uncover past lives thereby healing deep-seated pains. It’s essentially a story about control—who has it and who doesn’t. Anderson illustrates this [...]
1. New York in the fall is ridiculously seductive. I visited this past weekend and the weather was perfect–blue skies, cool breezes. I walked all around, looking at art, meeting friends for studio visits, and basically falling in love with the city all over again. It’s hard (even for me) to be a cynic in [...]
There’s been a lot of writing on John Cage in the last week in preparation for today, what would have been his 100th birthday. You can read about his influence in the New Yorker blog here, or you can read about his bohemian life in LA in the LA Times here, and here NPR discusses [...]
With the changing of the seasons comes too the changing of the art climate. In the past year in Austin we’ve seen a flourishing of house and apartment galleries from Tiny Park to Red Space to Forus. Perhaps these spaces are filling gaps other institutions in Austin are missing, or maybe it just shows that [...]
Mikaylah Bowman‘s recent series of photographs reminds me of the 17th century Dutch still-life tradition, paintings that depict neatly arranged flowers, their edges crisp with decay. Something sweet and slightly sinister. Flowers are a prominent theme in Bowman’s work, perhaps pointing to the very clichés they so often engender–female fragility, soft scents, forgiveness. In one [...]
Ben Rubin is a media artist living in New York City who recently unveiled his 6-channel video projection, And That’s The Way It Is . . . on the University of Texas campus. The video presents archived text from Walter Cronkite’s newscasts and closed caption text from contemporary news feeds. Rubin’s work is in the [...]
Stephen Vitiello is a sound artist who teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has exhibited around the world and collaborated with artists such as Pauline Oliveros, Tony Oursler, Julie Mehretu, Scanner, Nam June Paik and Steve Roden. Vitiellio’s first Texas solo exhibition was at Texas Gallery and the gallery has also produced the 2001 17:48 [...]
Manscape: Man as Subject and Object opened last night at Lora Reynolds Gallery. The group photography and video show is curated by Christopher Eamon and purports to be about “the subjectivity of contemporary male identity.” The work, largely by young women artists, casts the male gaze back on the male, a kind of meta-male gaze [...]
Catherine Lee is a painter and sculptor who has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. She grew up in Texas, attended university in California and lived and worked in New York for almost thirty years. In the late 1990s, Lee returned to Texas, settling in the Hill Country outside of Austin. An expansive [...]
The surfaces of Ben Brandt‘s sculptures are covered in gray. The objects look like they’re a thousand years old, as if they’d just been pulled from some long-ago construction site, waiting to be carefully brushed off and examined. His process of covering things with cement mixture, or in the case of his Co-Lab show that [...]
Portrait of Waltercio Caldas, image from http://blogs.elpais.com/el_rincon_del_distraido/2011/02/levedad-y-exactitud.html Waltercio Caldas is one of Brazil’s leading contemporary artists. His work is often linked to Neo-Concretism, a movement in Rio de Janerio in the 1960s that included artists such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Caldas is currently planning a retrospective spanning four decades of his work to [...]
