Various Small Fires: Kohshin Finley: Eight Artworks opening October 8.
Various Small Fires’ Eight Artworks by Los Angeles-based artist Kohshin Finley at its Texas gallery. The exhibition of recent paintings is the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery and in the American South.
Eight Artworks features portraits of significant people from the artist’s community, including family and close friends. Equipped with a camera in hand, Finley captures candid snapshots of his subjects to use as source material for expressive works on canvas. He translates these moments of everyday life into scenes that suggest the heroic and monumental. Deeply interested in portraiture’s ability to construct one’s legacy, Finley creates an elevated platform for his subjects.
We find each subject within a moment of introspective reflection. Finley’s figures do not gaze back at the viewer but peer down or off into the distance, encapsulating a powerful vulnerability. In many of the works, less than half of the figure’s face is visible, reflecting the artist’s interest in capturing an aura rather than a qualitative likeness. The man in Portrait of Ron, With His Menagerie, 2022, has his back turned completely toward the viewer in a relaxed contrapposto. Finley leans into the compositional device of rückenfigur by compelling viewers to form a connection not through a visible facial expression but by observing the subject’s environment and objects like the gloves and garden shears that peek from his back pocket.
Finley’s stylistic choices mirror his conceptual ambitions. His use of grisaille recalls the use of grayscale paintings in art history to imitate marble sculpture. Like the symbols of prestige and care these sculptures stand for, Finley’s paintings emphasize the importance of attending to and upholding his community. In contrast to the artist’s early hyper-realistic work, the paintings in Eight Artworks are executed with expressive brush strokes that capture the immediacy of fleeting moments. Within each painting, tight renderings juxtapose gestural moments, as exquisitely showcased in Portrait of Delfin, in Reflection, 2022. Finley sharply captures the structure of the seated figure’s face which contrasts to the staccato marks that construct his jacket and the background of light washes. These oppositions are akin to the act of recalling a memory, when some details come into sharp focus while others remain blurred in the periphery.
The subjects in Finley’s work have often never had their portraits painted, providing each sitter with an unforeseen view of themselves. Eight Artworksestablishes a meaningful legacy for them, extolling their importance to a wide audience and to each individual depicted.
Kirk Hopper Fine Art: Thousand Year View: New Paintings by Matthew Bourbon on view October 8–November 12.
Statement from the artist:
This new group of paintings is a continuation of my efforts to streamline my work without giving up on an interior complexity. In each artwork I am interested in rendering something simple that can yet hold many associations and potential avenues of exploration. The central object is referent to many things, such as the human body, landscape, architecture, and industrial and handmade objects. The paintings are fragments of experience that are corralled within the basic shapes portrayed.
Essentially my art is driven by a recognition of the limits of our understanding. In most cases, I think we are too certain of our thoughts and beliefs. We act as if we have a thousand-year view, but our perspective is actually quite narrow, filled by the particularities of our fallible opinions and personal histories. In recognition of this propensity to believe our thoughts are accurate and sacrosanct, I begin each new painting with a healthy dose of not knowing. The creation of the initial shapes that I render, the methods of applying paint, and the mood of the paintings is found in process. After a few opening marks I feel pulled to lead the paintings toward something felt or thought. There is a call and response between what I intend and what actually happens on the surface.
In brief, I make my art not to tell things, but instead to find something; to build up a relationship to the painting that feels necessary and expansive. There is a famous Buddhist story about two monks in conversation that feels emblematic of what these paintings are for me.
“A monk named Hogen, who had spent years traveling around China, doing hard Zen practice but never quite finding what he was looking for returns and has the following discussion with his teacher:
Master Jizo asked Hogen, ‘Where have you come from?’
‘I pilgrimage aimlessly,’ replied Hogen.
‘What is the matter of your pilgrimage?’ asked Jizo.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Hogen.
‘Not knowing is the most intimate,’ remarked Jizo.
At that, Hogen experienced great enlightenment.”
To “not know” seems the space from which we can directly encounter the world, less encumbered by our own preconceived thoughts and ideas. I try and meet my paintings in this manner—with fresh eyes and an unvarnished wonder. I hope you will too.
Cris Worley Fine Art: Paul Manes | Requiem & Robert Lansden | at·one on view October 8–November 11.
Paul Manes | Requiem
Mystery surrounds the latest works in Paul Manes’ Requiem. Known for his paintings of stacked bowls, cut logs, raindrops and fighter planes, Manes has always had a parallel practice of abstraction. Manes loves the physicality of paint.. This is evidenced in his use of loose strokes to articulate light and dark, the exposure of raw underpainting, and thin drips running down the canvas. He explains that the refuse bucket in his studio has seen years upon years of paint build up as he wipes and cleans his brushes at the end of the day. This thick and dark primordial sludge appealed to him in many ways: the unctuous build up is beautiful in a purely formal sense, but also because it contains a story through the marking of time.
Robert Lansden | at·one
Robert Lansden’s synergetic drawings combine obsessive mark-making with meditative discipline. Each individual line is methodically rendered as a single step within a larger algorithm, resulting in geometric patterns that at first glance resemble digitally generated graphics. There is a warmth however, as the human hand is detected in each mark.
12.26: A stranger every time, a solo exhibition featuring new works by Dallas-based artist, Keer Tanchak. October 8–November 12.
Women populate Tanchak’s pictorial spaces, harnessing the uncanny immediacy of film stills. Her female protagonists are joined by a visual lexicon that digs at, explores, and foregrounds the matrix, the lattice and the cross-hatch. This netting is a catalyst for striking, unintended beauty. Even as it introduces a degree of abstraction, it forms clusters of props and set pieces which, in turn, work in their own ways. The women are at times subsumed under floral sprays or lush patterns like wallpaper. They ask us to question: Is this a wedding veil? A curtain? Is it a hijab? Both tone and narrative escape us. Are we glimpsing a debutante or heartbreak? Tanchak avoids direct answers just as in her loose yet controlled style, she eschews likeness. She wants us to inhabit the zone of slippage.
Each woman is a flickering screen on which the viewer projects— allusive and deliberately elusive. A delicate theatricality is at work. Additionally, repetition creates an effect like a fashion runway or album, a formal vessel for both dreaming and perceived unity.Tanchak also plays with scale and blurs the dubious boundaries between painting and drawing. To the arena of smooth aluminum as a surface, she adds paper and canvas, juggling the hierarchy of substrates, creating synergistic confusion through the medium, as well, again turning viewing into a question of point of view. Thus, while the froth of a performance has a viewer oscillate between vectors of joy and gravitas, Tanchak’s work offers the premise, or promise, that a moment can be a stranger every time and yet simultaneously a new beginning.
Erin Cluley: James Gilbert: I Don’t Know, You Don’t Know, They Don’t Know
In his artistic practice, James Gilbert traverses a breadth of media all with an eye for whimsy, sincerity and style. His obsessive repetition of objects—rarely without his signature pink and white coloring—gives scale to the overwhelming accumulation of contemporary social injustices. Nonetheless, his flair for humor betrays a certain optimism, a willingness to play not as a coping mechanism, but as an exercise in possibility. Across his work, Gilbert allows for introspection: as viewers are encouraged to see clearer the blemishes and devastating absurdity that color our shared histories.
For his solo exhibition, I Don’t Know, You Don’t Know, They Don’t Know, James Gilbert explores themes of cultural heritage and genetic lineage—all with cutting wit. His bold figures show the talent of an artist fully confident in his abilities. Incorporating drawing and sculpture, Gilbert’s new work acknowledges the messy nature of community, not helped by the equally messy political and social climate of the past few years.
Gilbert’s use of raw, naturally-flawed materials—wood, wax and metal—conveys an honest uncertainty in what to make of the unfolding future. Half-human, Half-abstract figures continue their creator’s line of questioning; What is the legacy of contradicting ideologies in education and culture? How can we reconcile a dangerously forgetful history? Who knows what are the right questions to ask?
Presented in the gallery will be a selection of sculpture alongside a body of drawings – a dynamic and complex intersection of Gilbert’s practice. An installation of 130+ drawings will cover one of the large walls in the gallery reinforcing the artist’s fascination with the stories told by faces and the changing of information over generations.
Gilbert states, “I believe in making work that unveils our human condition and also gestures toward the effort to understand cultural history and memory of being, time and place. For in this moment, I want to remain optimistic as sometimes you find yourself in a strange place and other times in a strange place you find yourself.” I Don’t Know, You Don’t Know, They Don’t Know will be the artist’s second solo exhibition in Dallas.
Also at Erin Cluley, Chul-Hyun Ahn: Light/Continuum
Korean artist Chul-Hyun Ahn creates sculptures utilizing light, color, and illusion as physical representations of his investigation of infinite space. His interest in the gap between the conscious and subconscious compels him to construct illusionistic environments providing a space for contemplation. The resulting light sculptures urge the viewer to consider man’s boundless ability for physical and spiritual travel while exploiting illusions of infinity and the poetics of emptiness. Light / Continuum is the second solo exhibition of Ahn’s work at Erin Cluley Gallery.
Both exhibitions will be on view October 8–November 12.
Laura Rathe Fine Art: Traces – A Two-Woman Exhibition featuring Lucrecia Waggoner and Audra Weaser. 0pening reception on Saturday, October 8th from 4:30-7:30pm with an artist talk at 6:30pm
Shadows and Light II, 2022, Natural & gunmetal glazed porcelain tulips with moongold, 4.50 x 7.50 ft.
Blue Tides, 2022, Mixed media on panel, 48 x 48 in.
Traces explores the timeless impressions of art, both physically and metaphorically, and the various processes in which they are created. Lucrecia Waggoner and Audra Weaser’s particularly unique practices of mapping and excavating exemplify how art can leave an everlasting footprint.
Born and raised in Mexico City, Lucrecia Waggoner’s culture and upbringing has had a profound influence on her work. Her hand-thrown porcelain installations stem from her journey into reinvigorating the vestiges of ancient artistry. Waggoner’s work features organic forms, full of movement and wonder, charted to harmonize its surroundings and transcend the physical.
Los Angeles-based artist, Audra Weaser, blankets successive layers of mixed media, continuously refining then obscuring the composition with a thin veil of white. From there, the highly physical process of excavation begins, using a sander to reveal the final balance of color and form. Her abstracted landscapes are illuminated from within, capturing the history of this symbolic unearthing.
Green Family Foundation: Black Abstractionists: From Then ’til Now, curated by Dexter Wimberly, on view October 8, 2022 – January 29, 2023.
Black Abstractionists: From Then ‘til Now, curated by Dexter Wimberly focuses on Black abstract artists spanning multiple generations, starting in the 1960s with Alma Thomas and ending with young artists working today, such as Michaela Yearwood-Dan and Vaughn Spann. The history of Black artists working in abstraction is inseparable from the history of modern and contemporary art.
Galleri Urbane: Inconsiderately Happy, October 8, 2022 – November 12, 2022
Inconsiderately Happy, an exhibition of artworks by Dallas-based artist Benjamin Terry. For his third solo exhibition with Galleri Urbane, Terry continues his painting practice in paint on plywood, taking on new challenges of gesture.
During a recent dinner with friends, the discussion arrived at a song: the lyrics of Dolly Parton’s “The Grass is Blue.” In it, couplets reveal a series of falsehoods, contradictions that demonstrate the narrator’s denial at the loss of a loved one. One line in particular caught Terry’s imagination: “Can one end their sorrow, just cross over it and into that realm of insensitive bliss?” Parton’s inquisition in grief sparked further curiosity in Terry. “For this show, I thought it was worth spending time with the acknowledgement that some people’s happiness can bring others misery.”
It’s a hardy concept, that many environments are zero-sum in terms of winners and losers. Terry’s examples of this phenomenon include enduring overzealous laughter in a theater for a film that’s not very good. Others might be akin to a loud roommate, enjoying an album while you’re studying for an exam.
One might imagine that it’s a bit of self torture to choose to work with cliches. A watchful guard of the painterly gesture, Terry has avoided the soft, neon of flat, toothless gradients. However, Inconsiderately Happy is an effort from the artist to continue to develop his choice of gesture. During the aforementioned dinner discussion, Terry remembered that there was a piece developing in the studio which featured a green blade, an abstraction of foliage. He gave himself permission to investigate the other side of painting, one he formerly wrote off as mere kitsch, to deliver something new.
“The synchronicity between this painting trope, how various audiences respond to it, and the idea of
Inconsiderately Happy became intrinsically intertwined,” writes Terry in an exhibition statement preparing for the show. The trope of the splatter has become so pedestrian, so fatuous that it inhabits a fermented visual space; one that is ripe for sowing new compositional approaches.
If you’re following this inversion, then congratulations. It’s about the place where the discerning and the masses conflict. Terry is working his way through the bitter ironies of painting in order to find a balance in his work. It’s not so much about loving or hating any motif in art, but that there will always be something new to find in the old.
Craighead Green Gallery:
David Crimson: Dislocated Histories
Crismon opens alongside Carlos Ramirez and Heather Gorham on October 8th at Craighead Green Gallery. Crismon states “In the 21st century we are inseparable from information. The ceaseless flow of data in and around our lives has become seamless with our perception it. This is especially apparent with respect to history. Technology renders history as something endlessly in flux. Categories such as “past” or “history” are subject to investigation, reinterpretation, splicing, editing, and re-framing. Through these reiterations, various distortions and interferences of information occur, whether intended or not.” Crismon continues, “My works displace images from the past into the present. I wish to accentuate those distortions and changes, brought about by time and changing technologies. I try to reconstruct various historical works where some information has been duplicated, altered, or is missing altogether. It is not my intention to duplicate the works from the past, but to alter these historical references to show history being transformed into a kind of abstract data, a painted image where neither the past nor the present exists without the interference of the other.”
Ramirez describes their body of work in the exhibition, On the Road, opening on Saturday as, “Ah! the road trips of these past few years – studying maps, cruising winding roads, exploring new areas – being on the road has provided a respite from the day to day. A way to disconnect from life and enter a personal space where thoughts can stream in and out as quickly as the landscape can change outside the car window. This new work brings a deeper level of exploration for me. Lines and strokes criss cross the canvas as on a road map making connections within the work that lead you further into the piece. The interplay between thick and thin application of paint creates a richer more tactile surface. A strong use of negative space coupled with a bold palette give this body of work a clean, modern presence.”
Gorham translates her pain and emotions on to the canvas in My Loss for Words describing the works as:
Throughout all of the world’s suffering, we’ve made art. Art restores the habitat for our imagination. It allows for the appreciation of both the magic and the mundane. Art celebrates the good that we are, and occasionally, shines a light on the shit job we’ve made of our time here. Art shows what we pay attention to and hold dear. Without it we are lost. It is certainly my go-to coping mechanism for a decidedly ungraceful time. Making art is how I process things around me that I don’t understand, or that I want to understand better. I turn them into pictures. Finding humor and beauty in the pathos, rather than despair. The work in this show is an homage, an appreciation of things I find beautiful, things lost or possibly soon to be. My way of processing uncertain times full of absurdity and chaos and beauty. A way of reflecting on the realities of life by creating things that tell a story and create a world that makes sense to me, all of those inner workings made outward, especially those that I have no words for.”
All three exhibitions will be on view through November 12th.