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Alan Reid
Choosing a single artist for a group exhibition is like deciding who one should pursue for a love-affair. Why do we love who we love? Is it because they complement us or challenge us? Do we fancy them merely because they carry themselves with aplomb? In acknowledging what we love in people and in art, we reveal a portion of what we what we believe is worth consideration. Admittedly, it can all seem rather arbitrary why one artist is valorized and another ignored. But artists are chosen—and such decisions can be interesting in and of themselves. For my particular role in choosing the artist Alan Reid, I offer this as explanation.
There are many kinds of art that I value; there are fewer examples where I share some sense of kinship with an artist’s aim or point of view. Alan’s art is such that I recognize some connection to my own thinking and yet simultaneously I am forced to reconcile a strikingly dissimilar vision to my own. I invited Alan to participate in this exhibition, however, not because his work reflects something of my own mentality or because his art is an example of a perfectly sophisticated craftsmanship. Nor did I choose him because I thought his work might fit a fashion or supposed trend in contemporary art. Instead I found myself coming back to Alan’s art because his paintings seem idiosyncratic. He makes daring decisions that I find quirky, smart and at times even poignant. There is a comedy and unabashed impudence to his paintings that seems rare and from the seat of my own biases and desires—valuable.
— Matthew Bourbon, Flash Art and Art Lies
Cameron Schoepp
Derived from a variety of materials and a range of techniques, Cam Schoepp’s sculptural projects are characterized by a focused, elemental beauty that is often undercut by provocative language or unexpected formal perversions. Incised in carpets and rugs, for example, are slang words, written in a feminine cursive script, that refer to sex acts or body parts, while a series of plaster reliefs sprout impolite phallic or breast-like protrusions. Despite an aura of naughtiness, Schoepp’s works demonstrate a highly refined sense of color and touch. Whether inherent, such as the color of store-bought carpet, or added in the form of pigmented plaster, a work’s color is tied to its material and intrinsically related to its haptic shape and meaning. With a deep black patina, mottled with smoky grays and subtle hints of bronze, Institutional Memory resembles an ancient monument, formed of individual male figures wearing unique, imaginative hats, one of Schoepp’s signature forms. Eighty featureless herms are stacked in four layers, each consisting of 20 figures and recalling an arrangement of students in a multi-storied classroom building. The weight and density of the bronze and its closely packed novitiates are alleviated by complex and intriguing open spaces between the heads. In these spaces, however, the possibility of dialogue is mischievously restricted, since the heads are arranged so that no one directly faces another. Slated for permanent installation at Concordia University in Chicago, Institutional Memory was commissioned by the artist’s father, who taught there for 33 years and in whose path Schoepp, currently an associate professor at TCU, has followed. Acknowledging the formative influences of universities on generations of young people, it is an insightfully wry tribute to academia.
— Fran Colpitt, Art in America and Art Lies
Kevin Joseph Brown
Kevin Joseph Brown had already been working with glass for a number of years before entering the sculpture program at the University of Texas at Arlington; a program which includes both neon and glass blowing studios. Inspired by the fine art possibilities of glass (as demonstrated by the likes of Dale Chihuly,) as well as by the technical possibilities presented at UTA, Brown is helping to actually develop a new sculptural medium. Brown forms delicate glass vessels that he fills with combinations of certain gases (often in this context referred to as plasma) luminescent when exposed to an electrical charge. Neon of course is the most well known, but others include krypton, argon, and zenon, each with different densities, behaviors, and hues, and full of surprises when combined. The sculptures are seemingly alive, responsive even to the native electricity of human touch, and eerily, magnetically beautiful.
— Titus O’Brien, Glasstire, Art Lies and The Ft. Worth Star Telegram
Margaret Meehan, Rebecca Carter, Libby Black
Each artist will have two small pieces – one sculptural and one flat work, either drawing or photograph. They each are dealing with sculpture in their work and issues around anthropomorphizing objects into playful delicate scenarios. Each with their own technique, Meehan chooses to distort and contort small ceramic girls, while Black chooses imaginary designer objects such as a Hermes Horse Bridle, and Carter uses literally a cat cam to take images in her backyard. I enjoy each artist's serious investigation, while simultaneously remaining curious about the world of objects and possibilities.
— Rachel Cook, Glasstire
Kim Cadmus Owens
The first time I saw her giant urban depth-scapes upstairs at the Continental Gin, I was awed by her sense of space and in-place abstraction. "What is it?" giving quickly way to not knowing or much caring. Ever a balance of palpable reality and integrated disintegration, her controlled explosions are gentled by oceans of connecting texture, a sense of human scale and super-real buzzwords I didn't notice till much later.
— J R Compton, DallasArtRevue
Sara Ishii
Since before Sara Ishii graduated from The University of Texas at Dallas a few years back, I'd taken notice of her work for two reasons: her highly developed sense of creative balance and her persistence in exploring the presentation of artwork. From her early digital manipulations and patterned paintings to her recent videos, large oils and self-portraits, she demonstrates a knack for making active, bright, inviting and appealing works while simultaneously injecting several layers of subjective and interpretative meaning. Such a feat isn't unusual for a good artist to pull off, especially within an established oeuvre. But for a young, still-maturing one to consistently achieve that on a level that allows the viewer the choice to address each work's subjectivity is exceedingly rare. Also rare is Sara's verve and experimentalism in presenting art to others, whether it was through the guerrilla-level tactics that her Oh6 Collective employed to limited success in the early 2000s or the ability to translate her cheeky reverse-feminist vision through several media such as painting, computer manipulation, video, performance or some combination of those. Unfortunately for Texas, Sara moved to Cincinnati last summer. Maybe the lack of womanly glitz to lampoon in the blue-collar Ohio River Valley will lure her back for our benefit someday.
— Mike Daniel, The Dallas Morning News
Eric Chavera
Rooted in Japanese animation but laden with art historical references, Eric Chaveraís erotic fantasies bring age-old concepts forward. Teeming narratives inspired by Durer’s Passion of Christ, the Trojan invasion of ancient Greece, and Delacroixís Raft of Medusa star the artist as an androgenous character amid nude figures of both sexes. Baroque compositions ornate to the point of grotesquerie are tightly woven. Arched windows unify the undulating bodies in a Last Supper employing Renaissance perspective. A sea serpentís body encircles a triple crucifixion inspired by Rembrandt’s Three Crosses but featuring Chavera and his identical twin along with Laocoon, the Trojan priest killed together with his two sons.
— Janet Kutner, former critic for The Dallas Morning News
Peter Calvin
The images from Peter Calvin’s Jefferson Boulevard Project record a robust segment of Dallas society. Jefferson Boulevard, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, remains a stretch of “owner operated” businesses, storefront enterprises that cater to the needs of the neighborhood. National chains, mostly in the form of the occasional fast food restaurant, have made some headway here, but for the most part the eateries and retail establishments are family-owned. Calvin’s digital prints bathe the neighborhood in saturated colors punctuated by deep shadows, creating images that acknowledge the eccentric and slightly rundown aspect of much of the street without patronizing the neighborhood or pandering to notions of the picturesque. His portraits of shopkeepers and residents depict people who as owners of their own businesses are participants in a fundamental aspect of the American dream. But what emerges as his overall theme is the fragile status of that dream as we move into the 21st century.
— Dee Mitchell, Art in America and The Dallas Morning News
Josephine Durkin
I became a fan of Josephine Durkin’s work when I first saw it a couple of years ago. Formally inventive and courageously beautiful (you have to be brave to make things so ravishing), her work is also informed by a web of human/social associations. Consider those rocking chairs: They’re made from laser-cut and folded digital photographs (patent pending – really). Chairs conform to our bodies to one degree or another. Their contours and proportions reflect the articulation of our bones. So it’s not a stretch to read Josie’s arrangement in social terms with the chairs metonymically standing in for a crowd of people, an audience for the (blowhard?) fan before them. Little fans of a big fan, they rock and nod agreement to the asymmetrical power relationship implied by the work’s relative proportions and by the unilateral transmission of energy. I’ve been in that situation, and I’ll bet you have, too.
— Mike Odom, Art Forum, Art Papers and Art Lies
Terri Thornton
Terri Thornton’s work navigates the territory between physical presence and the ethereal nature of thought. Using text for both its linguistic and formal properties, she constructs spaces from the inside out to locate the edges of consciousness. “How do you know?” and “how do you feel?” are two phrases that she works with both materially and conceptually. They are enormously complex and direct, verging on ontology, but philosophy for Thornton is phenomenological. Textual language is given the same relationship to the body that spoken language has. Like speech, which is warm breath that lingers over the wet crevices of the mouth, text is a made thing with real material properties, mediated by touch. Like language, touch is a point of contact, a borderland, between self and other. Thornton’s work lives in this zone, an ever evolving articulation of being where thinking and feeling are one.
— Noah Simblist, Glasstire and Art Lies
Amy Revier
At the age of 20, Amy Revier is a busy young artist. As a high school student in Austin, she debuted her own line of clothing, "Revier," and had a showing in 2005 at Lora Reynolds Gallery. In September 2006, she opened R House, her apartment-cum-studio-cum-gallery adjacent to SMU, where she is a Hunt Scholar and art major with a double minor in Art History and Women’s Studies. She has opened R House to the public three times, showing her work in “Language as Speech,” “Dualities,” and most recently “Absences are Inevitable.” Ever hybrid, Revier’s work is a something of a beautiful mutt. It offers a refreshing take on the idea of “new media,” bringing together conceptualism, craft and video. Though Revier is carving a unique niche for herself, certain influences are manifestly present. Revier willfully looks to Fred Sandback’s deliquescent yarn pieces in the creation of her own room weaving. Her clothing design swings between function, non-function and the otherworldly Bruegel-ese of new design in the fashion world capital Antwerp, bringing to mind the work of Matthew Barney, the design mavens known as the Antwerp Six, and young designers emerging from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. And then there’s the architectural aspect of her work – the spatiality of her knitted rooms and clothing – that is reminiscent of work by the American artist Andrea Zittel and Dutch design collaboration Droog Design.
— Charissa Terranova, The Dallas Morning News, Art Lies and Glasstire |
