Saturday Art Stroll
I always go to see art on the weekend. Sometimes a show makes enough of an impression on me that I want to think about it as a whole. And if I’m feeling motivated, I’ll write a review. Saturday was not one of those days. Instead, here are a disparate, unconnected bunch of artworks that I saw that I found individually interesting. I started my stroll at Moody Gallery. In the back gallery, they were showing some works by various artists they represent.
James Drake has always struck me as a sensitive but macho artist, and this huge work fits right in. There are probably visual artists working in this vein of rugged Western male art, but Drake makes me think of literary artists like Thomas McGuane and Jim Harrison.
Al Souza has made art from all kinds of weird-ass materials, including spitballs. But he is best known for his collages of puzzle pieces like this one. One’s eye is rarely allowed to rest in an Al Souza joint.
These two pieces by Kermit Oliver, on view at Hooks-Epstein Galleries, made me think of Rosa Bonheur, a 19th century French painter who specialized in images of animals. She was more-or-less written out of art history by the time I was a student, partly due to sexism (duh) but also because she didn’t fit into the progressive narrative of modernism. While she painted, Impressionism was being born and she wasn’t on that train. Oliver has always had a degree of the rural in his art, as these two paintings demonstrate.
Shed fascinated me mainly because of its age. Oliver is quite old—he was born in 1943. So he was in his late 20s when he did this spare painting, which combines aspects of the rural with a kind of minimal existentialism.
This was in the back of Hooks-Epstein. Aside from liking Clara Hoag’s clay faces/urban landscapes a lot, I always like seeing her work because we used to be neighbors. I lived in the same building as her and Earl Staley.
Then I went over to Anya Tish Gallery to see an artist whose work I quite like but who doesn’t get enough props. Anya Tish is exhibiting a three person show, and one of the persons is Candace Hicks.
She has been producing artists books that are hand-crafted versions of old-fashioned composition books since at least 2012, when I first encountered them in an exhibit at Lawndale. The weird thing for me is that they seem like actual notebooks one might have for jotting down stray thoughts about whatever one happens to be reading, watching, ot thinking at the time. But instead of being relatively unimportant stray thoughts, these are extremely laborious. No one puts this much work into recording stray thoughts. They are clearly things that Hicks finds important to record.
I saw an exhibit of these composition books at Blue Star in San Antonio a few years ago, and they provided viewers with white gloves so we could turn the pages. No such gloves were available at Anya Tish. I asked Hicks about it, and she said it was OK to handle the works. (Just have clean hands, OK?)
The Notes for String Theory also come from the world of composition notebooks, but here she eschews the “notes” part. They reminded me a bit of illustrations of space-time one might find in a physics textbook.
Then I went down the hall to Barbara Davis gallery, where I saw this gigantic installation by Donald Lipski.
This little objects pinned to the wall are all fairly ordinary bits of flotsam. I include it here because the huge nostalgia I felt when seeing it. In the mid-80s, I was working overseas in Nigeria. On break, I would go to London. I was reading lots of art magazines like ArtForum and Flash Art at the time, and a current artist who was covered therein who interested me was Lipski. I was checking out Time Out and there was a show by Lipski at a London gallery while I was there. At the time, I had almost no experience going to commercial art galleries. It may seems strange to say this for readers who have been reading about my expeditions to such establishments over the past 13 years or so, but this was one of the first gallery shows I ever saw. Many of Lipski’s sculptures were clever and post modern, and on one wall was a work much like this—little doodads pinned to a wall. It was weird and pleasurable to see a similar work many decades later by the same artist.
To close out my gallery-hopping, I headed over to Redbud, where there were two exhibits. First was Heads and Fables, a two person exhibit by Carter Ernst and Paul Kittleson. These two artists are husband and wife, but usually they don’t collaborate (these are a couple of collaborative works in this exhibit). They have quite distinct approaches. Carter Ernst is an animal sculptor; for this show all her pieces were ceramic, mostly busts. They are a little like a hunter’s trophies, but I suspect she would prefer people not think of them that way.
This little fella was greeting visitors when they entered Redbud.
Ernst touches on some obvious political-cartoon-level symbolism in a few of these, and it has to be admitted there is a degree of cartoon-like representation. This is not a criticism—I love cartoons and fine artists whose work touches on that means of expression: Philip Guston, Peter Saul, Jim Nutt, etc. Ernst’s animal busts are delightful.
Kittelson work is quite varied in the exhibit, but I want to look at his drawings.
On the left we see a series of giant Judd boxes, not unlike the untitled concrete boxes at Marfa, but in a much more lush, neo-classical landscape. They are being observed by a robed philosopher type, completely unlike any images I have ever seen of Nicolas Poussin. I think we are meant to relate the image to Et in Arcadia ego, the 1638 painting by Poussin, in which idealized classical figures are gathered around an ancient tomb. On the right is a series of drawings of heads that reside in the collection of the Menil museum, including Max Ernst’s portrait of Dominique de Menil.
A nice little bit of art history from Kittelson. Here are two of his inspirations:
Then in the small gallery at Redbud was a show of tiny, postcard-like painting by Elena Rodz, an artist with whom I was until Saturday completely unaware of. Her show was called Dilly Dally and was about observing the world as a pedestrian. All the images are from Corpus Christi.
The landscapes have a flat, humid suburban feel to them.
I liked the water on the street and sidewalk. Looking at this series by Elena Rodz reminded me of a project I undertook a few years ago. I would ride the red line train here in Houston every day, stopping at a different stop and walking the surrounding neighborhood. Partly it was exercise, and partly it was me becoming familiar with neighborhoods I had never been in before. There are things that are impossible to discover at automobile speeds. Elena Rodz’ painting express this perfectly.
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