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'The Deep End' 'The Deep End' By Rachel Koper Images provided by Rachel Koper The pursuit of happiness this time of year in Texas frequently involves immersing yourself in water. We are blessed with many options for swimming, from Barton Springs to Galveston. "The Deep End," the current exhibition at Davis Gallery, is a refreshing and loving look at summer culture. The two featured artists, watercolorist Melissa Grimes and photographer Will van Overbeek, both take water settings as their muse and create rippling tableaus of people swimming, wading, tanning, and boating. I was struck with a blissful feeling looking at the smiling kids jumping waves in bright light. Sun hats, floaties, noodles, and people holding hands are everywhere in these watery environments. It made me think all parents should come see this show and check themselves: Do your kids look like this? Because they should. The enjoyment of water recreation is a universal value that these artists are able to embody. Grimes has created 53 watercolors, all the size of large postcards. The medium of watercolor allows for great transitions from light to dark. Due to its transparency, the paint can be made to appear fresh, light, and airy, like a sea breeze. Grimes is a consistent draftsman, and thus this series of boats and swimmers looks spontaneous, even easily achieved. The reality is that the artist probably made hundreds of pieces just to cull out this strong group. Watercolor is also a temperamental medium. The artist who uses it well has to be working with it every day to achieve this appearance of simplicity. Having a strong work process and an ability to edit is key to both artists' practices. Van Overbeek shoots photographs of Barton Springs, and he's obviously spent countless hours on the grassy hillsides shooting with his camera. It's his ability to capture an overall tone of vitality with his works that interests me the most. The series he chooses to present is very active with lots of movement. Divers bending, swimmers underwater, and plain old splashers are all on view. The Texas heat can bring on a certain lethargy, and yet his subjects appear to have boundless energy; they have beaten the effects of the sun. I recommend this inspirational show; it made me want to get out of the air-conditioned world and take a dip. I've read that if you're feeling hot, just thinking about and looking at pictures of snow and ice can make you feel colder. I think this theory is cool. Both of these artists beautifully remind us of the rituals and pleasures of summertime. |
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A Zen garden for the 21st century By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin What's not soothing about a Zen garden? The orderly yet minimalist arrangement of gravel, rocks, plants and water is meant to soothe and encourage calm contemplation. The miniature idealized pockets of nature have been the meditative tools of Zen Buddhist monks for centuries. Nowadays, the gardens are the stuff of westernized New Age lifestyles. They're even miniaturized as office desk toys. Argentine artist Fabián Bercic questions all of that. In his Zen garden at the Blanton Museum of Art, the commercialization of a centuries-old religious tradition gets played out in bright neon colors and slick fiberglass forms that blink with LED lights. The installation was commissioned by the Blanton as part of its Workspace exhibit series. Bercic's "Zen Garden" is on view through September after which it will join the Blanton's permanent collection. There's nothing natural in Bercic's version of nature. The normally subtle shapes and lines found in a Zen garden are Pop Art goofy — cartoonish versions of the neatly raked expanses of gravel augmented with the subtle placement of stones. And forget a soothing palette of greys and browns and blacks. Bercic's garden is Day-Glo hues of bright blue, green and pink surely not found in nature. Never mind the soothing reflecting pool, either. Tiny bright blue lights flicker in a programmed pattern. Gone also is the sense of the human hand, the painstaking and exacting effort required to produce the neatly raked lines of gravel or sand typical of a Zen garden. Or maybe that sense of the human hand is just distant, as it is in so many manufactured items. After all, Bercic carefully crafted the sprawling sculpture by hand out of polymer resin and fiberglass, even though slick forms that spread out over the Workspace gallery nonetheless look machine-made. In a way, Bercic achieved what's intended from the process of creating a Zen garden — the temporary loss of a sense of self. That's also true of the industrial mass production process, of course — too bad it just doesn't have the same philosophical implications, he seems to suggest. As a whole, the installation looks terribly, terribly cute — a reference, not unintentional, to the "kawaii' style that permeates Japanese popular culture. Think Pokémon. Think Hello Kitty. Ultimately, Bercic asks us to wonder how a Zen garden — or anything, really — can be made meaningful in a culturally reductive, ultraconsumer world. His Zen garden may be a thorough critique of consumer culture, but, like the real thing, some time spent contemplating it still raises big questions. |
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'Katie Pell: Tiny Acts of Immeasurable Benefit' By Rachel Koper San Antonio artist Katie Pell has named her Women & Their Work solo art show "Tiny Acts of Immeasurable Benefit." I'm glad to report that her art is not tiny; it features bombastically human-scaled butterfly wings, a 4-foot spinning stupa, and a huge charm bracelet carved out of wood that gives a respectful nod to Claes Oldenburg. To me, Oldenburg's genius was his simple humor. He had the ability to shift the scale of ordinary objects, giving them grandeur; a giant scale engages viewers in a new situational position and view. The act of enlargement by the artist is an underutilized tool, because actually, yes, everything does look cooler really big. It works for Oldenburg, it works for Blue Genie Art Industries, and it works here for Pell. Rock Star Butterfly and You Are a Beautiful Butterfly, Meant to Be Adored are the titles of the two human-scaled wing sculptures in the show. Pell lists "you or me" as part of the media on the wall cards for each work. With built-in steps and seats, she invites viewers to enliven the bug wings, to be the center star inside the bright cheerful wings. While I just described them as sculpture, both pieces contain large amounts of drawing and painting, respectively. They are ornamented with a cacophony of jungle animals treated in a flowing, connected way reminiscent of Sixties rock album covers or psychedelic posters. Tropical flowers and vines weave around ferrets, birds, foxes, deer, and other creatures. These images are rendered with clear confidence and seem to feature the happy land of things Pell likes. They include portraits of the Rolling Stones, large glowing eyes, and a blank spot labeled "you." The immeasurable benefit of viewing Pell's artwork is that you are left with a feeling of abundant energy, of a certain liveliness left unexamined, a naive verve unleashed and unapologetic. Maybe it's just me, but I got a feeling that if a girl wanted to be a rock & roll groupie, Pell would advise her to dress up hot and be the best groupie she can be. I don't know how that relates to third-wave feminism; to me, there is something more Mariah Carey about Pell. She likes butterflies, charm bracelets, flowers, animals, sunsets, the Stones, and the Allman Brothers. She is a true patriot, an all-American woman. Her series of serigraphs, also in the show with a combination of text, print, and painting, reveals more complex inner states relating to frustration and desire. A more conceptual piece with a crisp patriotic self-awareness to it adds gravity and depth to her body of work. Stupa for America and People Who Love America sweetly lists "canister containing Pledge of Allegiance in my best handwriting" as part of the media. I say the strongest prayers are those of a righteous woman, so thanks, Pell; America wants your good vibes. |
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'Cynthia Camlin: Extremities' By Wayne Alan Brenner To be precise, we have to acknowledge that people aren't destroying the planet; the planet itself will continue to spin along just fine, regardless of what havoc is wreaked by Homo pimped as sapiens. It's the people who are doing the wreaking who will eventually be destroyed, in a sort of extended exercise in global self-flensing and poetic justice. "Men come and go, but Earth abides," as George Stewart and the Book of Ecclesiastes so lyrically remind us; and with "Earth," we include the inorganic (icebergs, say) and much nonhuman life upon the substrate: grasses, insects, perhaps even more complex flora and the patterns thereof. Imagine: tangled vines of ivy, the interlocking shadows of trees. Those last two are the sorts of things rendered in oil on canvas by Marianne Green in her "Silence and Sound" show at D Berman Gallery, while the chilling magnificence of icebergs in all their immensity is captured in deep azurine watercolors on Arches paper by Cynthia Camlin in the concurrent "Extremities" show in that elegant venue. These natural wonderments are captured with expert technique, the precision of the depictions almost scientifically pure, yet orchestrated and amplified by an artist's eye. Green's near-monochrome silhouettes of plants, gray and dun and dusky, are complexities of pattern broken, almost bracketed, by brief geometric intrusions of complementary or contrasting colors. Their titles – A Victoria's riflebird at the climax of his extraordinary display, A bobolink in its summer home, and so on – suggest that what we see are floral details of larger images from which the named subjects are here conspicuously absent. The silhouettes themselves are muted studies in absence and presence, the positive and negative spaces dancing a shattered quadrille against the canvases' vertical floor. In the other half of the gallery, Camlin's icebergs, staining sheets of thick paper half the size of a refrigerator door, are symphonies of all the hues that ice of such size and depth can accommodate. Although inorganic, these floating mountains of frozen water can seem, above and (especially) below the waterline, like the internal organs of a body gone fully blue with cold. Appropriately, the delicate and enormous watercolors, enhanced by the artist's complex lattices of white lines so often structuring the bergs' submarine portions, may wreck the Titanic of your heart after prolonged viewing. These objects, whether living or nonliving, exquisitely celebrated in this pair of exhibitions, are some of what will remain long after we're gone. And here they are now, in two well-worked dimensions, to enjoy while there's yet time: such marvelous adornments for the walls of this big handbasket we're going to hell in. |
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'WorkSpace: Fabián Bercic' By Rachel Koper One feature of the big new Blanton Museum of Art is the unique WorkSpace gallery, a large exhibition room for which new work by contemporary artists is actually commissioned. This is an important function, allowing artists to achieve the scale and scope of public art in a secure and scholarly environment. Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, former Blanton curator of Latin-American art, is back in town from his new post as director of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a large collection of Latin artists, and he's brought us a sculpture show by Argentinean artist Fabián Bercic. Bercic has chosen polyester resin, fiberglass, and LED lights to convey his message in a huge, three-part piece called Zen Garden. Pink is not my favorite color, but in this case, Bercic has chosen a saturated bubble-gum tone that is shiny, happy, and lush. Working with plastic, in a painstaking manual process, Bercic created something which looks machine-made. This is a tough challenge, and he's succeeded in his ambitious task of creating an Asian Candy Land atmosphere. Bercic has made white scrolling clouds, a vine with flowers, and a stream with lily pads. The scroll is used in each design, and the forms stretch across the floor and up the tall walls. The 1930s plastic is everywhere in our mass-produced society, but it's not commonly customized to form art. Other media are cheaper and easier to access than resin-based technologies. Surfboard designers and marine restorers offer models for how to manipulate fiberglass. It strikes me as a medium that is not forgiving and where any mistakes would be costly. Anyone who's bought a two-part resin at the hardware store knows that it's going to run you a chunk of dough. Then you go home and pour your piece, and it fills with bubbles. Then you do it again and again until your texture within and on the surface is what you were envisioning, and you're out several hundred bucks. Each piece, Bercic has made looks perfectly smooth, bendy, and shiny. These pieces feel very finished, carefully planned to look simple. Even though Zen Garden is Japanese-inspired, something about the even rhythm of it is art deco. A plastic generic modernism permeates the room. I kind of wanted to sit on the piece – something about the durable look and large scale made me want to perch on a lotus flower. I like the concept of a manufactured garden. Parks and gardens are highly controlled and planned to give off effects. The twinkle of the blue LED lights in the water was not necessary to the sculptural impact of the work; it appeared a bit too literal. It gave me a momentary vision of the artwork in a store window displaying clear Plexi boxes that contained bonsai kittens; it was a groovy, nonexistent future store. I think folks should do a quick Google image search for bonsai kittens and then go see the show. Don't be afraid of this rare creature, the plastic artist. |
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