Conduit Gallery:
Conduit will open three exhibitions on May 21, Phantoms, a solo exhibition of recent work by Dallas, -based artist Barbara Glazer Rosenblatt; Jeff Baker: Gaia’s Rant; and Something Like My Neighborhood, a solo exhibition of recent work by Denton-based artist Steven J Miller.
For Phantoms, Barbara Glazer Rosenblatt created a variety of soft sculptures that are at once whimsical and menacing. Trapped mice, sardines bursting from their cans, and flying skeletons are all rendered in fabric, some with elaborate stitching, beading or painted detail. Anthropomorphized butterflies with their chrysalises, moths, and hybrids of real and imagined sea creatures and forest animals invoke ancient myths, contemporary metaphors, and even a bit of wordplay. Metamorphosis—the transition from one state to another, be it animal to human or innocent to threatening—is an overriding theme. These small-scale, yet intricate, objects convey the intensity of their required labor, a comment on the meditative power of art-making.
Jeff Baker’s photographs of charred timbers falling across a mountainous New Mexico landscape on first glance cast a gorgeous view of pattern, shadow, and light. Closer inspection tells indicates the fire-wrought destruction to acres of natural wilderness and reminds the viewer that all is not well. Baker’s themes mine a cautionary tale of humankind’s impact on climate change.
Says Baker, “In New Mexico, still in search of a more deconstructed view of the accuracy inherent in a photograph, I’ve played with abstractions that appeared in the Jemez landscape of burnt trees and mountain snow, within the living forest. These images are interspersed with more conventional landscapes to complete an essay linking the interplay between environmental collapse and our own pandemic disaster. The analogy of the fallen among survivors couldn’t be starker.”
Steven Miller creates environments of contrasts where no living creature stirs, but the architecture and sculptural elements give plentiful hints to human industry. There is a harmony to the painted scenes, but discomfort in the perfection of what’s rendered. The work is magnified by the very flat use of paint to create a one-dimensional picture plane.
The MAC
Chris Wright Evans: Country Mile sees the 2021 CADD Fund Winner in a solo exhibition at The MAC on Saturday, May 21st. Evans makes images about the vernacular landscape, occasionally using practical, in-camera effects to highlight the illusion of representation that photography facilitates.
Evans’ work circles around an interest in the role of the familiar as the backdrop for a digital life. He graduated from the University of North Texas with an MFA in photography in the spring of 2020. Evans was a CADD FUND finalist in 2018, 2019, and 2020. In 2020, he was selected to participate in the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s MODERN BILLINGS as well as a “how-to film” series with the Art Galleries at Texas Christian University, in collaboration with Melissa Gamez-Herrera, Chris Wicker and David Blandy.
He currently lives and works in New York City. Country Mile is a book project consisting of photographs made between 2012–20 along desolate stretches of highway and the outskirts of tourist destinations and roadside attractions. The photographs are often superficial sites that sell coffee mugs celebrating our founding fathers alongside a salted pretzel and a cheese coney. These places are, in their own way, mile markers of a misunderstood and incomplete picture of America’s cultural heritage. Funding from the CADD FUND paid to produce 65 first edition books, and kick-started several studio projects.
Cris Worley Fine Art:
Kelli Vance: We Don’t Sleep, opens May 21st and runs through June 25th with an artist’s reception on Saturday, May 21st from June 25th. This is the Houston-based artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Vance’s luxurious and masterly paintings have often presented women in states of anomie or conflict—personal, social, physical. This is the feminine in a quietly hostile environment of her own making or trapped in a set of expectations that she either works with, to maintain equilibrium, or against, with mixed results—sometimes defeated, sometimes defiant. Vance’s women are in a kind of unseen, unstoppable trouble, or they are recalling it, or are bracing for it. They are often in their final minutes of innocence before the sinister shadow overtakes the narrative.
Galleri Urbane:
Urbane will host two solo shows beginning on May 21st, Rachel Hellmann: The shape of Color and Mel Prest: Time is Knots on a String. The Shape of Color, featuring fluorescent-painted relief sculptures, paintings, and an analogous mural.
This body of work echoes her recent paintings and installation at the Rockwell Museum (Rockwell, NY), Leaning Toward the Sun, which will be on view through March 2023. These pieces provoke ephemeral conversations of light and assumed dimensionality between various mediums. Time is Knots on a String expands on the geometric line-based work that has been the focus of the artist’s career for numerous years. In these newest works, Prest explores the feeling of deep, elongated time and optical shifting.
Holly Johnson Gallery:
Ana Esteve Llorens: Possibility of Line, is an exhibition of woven textiles created over the past two years. The exhibition opens with a reception on Saturday, May 21 from 5-8 p.m. Possibility of Line, premieres the first investigation dedicated to what the artist calls “spatial weavings.” In 2015, the artist began her work with yarns and weaving techniques encountered while living and traveling throughout Mexico and combining them with those of her native Spain. Since then, she has continued to research and enact the sculptural possibilities of fibers.
Possibility of Line expands on the expressive and spatial potential of textiles, taking the intimacy of hand-crafteded to a sculptural scale. These works are woven on a backstrap loom, a traditional method of textile production that starts defining dimensions and densities of threads, that is, length and width of warp.
Laura Rathe Fine Art:
Lyrical Moments is a two-woman exhibition featuring new works by Carly Allen Martin and Nina Tichava. LRFA will be hosting the opening reception on Saturday, May 21st from 4-7 p.m. with an artist talk at 6 p.m. The artists will be in attendance.
Lyrical Moments reflects upon Carly Allen Martin and Nina Tichava’s individual artistic processes. Each artist draws from personal experience to create delicate yet purposeful compositions. The distinct and various components are glimpses into the story of each dynamic painting, expressing their own emotions in an imaginative and lyrical way. Layering details over time, both artists use moments of creativity and inspiration to generate autobiographical and visually complex artworks.
Carly Allen Martin juxtaposes the careful placement of lines and gestural moments of color, which allows one to get lost in the subtle textural nuances hidden within every brushstroke. She lays each work on the floor and begins spontaneously mark making, only to then pause to reflect on her next step. Allen Martin states, “I have learned that the pause is as critical as the mark”. In layering these moments of quietude, she captures bursts of movement and suspends harmonies in their stillness. Moving amongst drawing, painting, and reflection, she completes works that are rich in detail and rooted in each painting’s history.
Inspired by nature, architecture, and textiles, artist Nina Tichava relies on the processes of layering and intricate patterning. While Tichava’s work is seemingly geometric, dominated by leitmotifs of circles across parallel and intersecting lines, upon closer inspection, each painting is rendered organic and delicate by the underlying texture. Her unique system of collaged dots punctuates the work with a three-dimensional quality, drawing the viewer even closer to appreciate every moment. Tichava explains: “My focus is the complex subtleties of detail and transient moments, as well as the materials themselves. The paintings are romantic, emotional and imperfect reproductions of the ‘things’ that make up daily life—they represent a tangle of images and objects depicted with a beautiful inaccuracy.”
Pencil on Paper Gallery:
JD Moore’s A Honing of Self lends viewers witness to a collection of four individual series, each containing its own intimate narrative and nuance that embody a collective whole. Each work provides sources of inspiration that span over a six-year period of the artist’s practice. Moore utilizes the subtly of light amidst the softness of each form. Each image, whether a hand resting on a neck or a seated woman, displays images that speak through gazes seen and unseen. Imagery meets intimacy in each composition, past, and present, where tender moments in time take precedence. These bodies of works serve as the artist’s autobiography of his journey as a visual artist. Though the show is currently on view, the gallery will host an artist talk this Saturday from 4–5PM.
Valley House Gallery:
An exhibition of Henry Finkelstein’s recent paintings will open on Saturday, May 21. Henry Finkelstein will also give an Artist Talk on Saturday, May 21, 11:00 a.m. with an opening reception for the exhibition on Saturday, May 21, 6:00-8:00 p.m. Of his work, Finkelstein states: “I paint from emotion. To me, emotion is the most specific and authentic thing one can have in a work of art. My work is also rooted in aesthetics. Color is my chief concern—color to make light, and color as feeling. Often, colors have a ‘sound’ for me. They come alive through their particular combination on a canvas, just as an assembly of notes in a piece of music creates a theme. Rhythm is also essential to my work; the way one form or line leads to another. I’m selective about the materials that I use, the type of pencil, the paper, and the quality of the canvas. A sense of touch is crucial for me to find a rhythm. I’m not so interested in nature as much as in what I have to say about it. The place I am in plays a role, but my priority is the feeling that a painting suggests. Bonnard described it this way: ‘a sentiment that holds the wall.’”
Daisha Board Gallery:
Romulo Martinez: Reflejos, allows us to find ourselves and relate to shared stories, and more than portraying a stranger, the abstraction and absence of faces allow us all to see each other inviting us to introspect, seek memories, enjoy a laugh, and connect to that feeling with which we identify.
Romulo Martinez is a Venezuelan artist residing in the city of Frisco, Texas, was born in Maracaibo, has a degree in Plastic Arts, Mention in Painting, from the University of Zulia and a Master’s in Artistic Production, Artistic Practice specialty, from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain.
The gallery hosts Martinez through June 4th.