Visual art news, views & reviews in Dallas, Texas, USA
Visual
art news, views & reviews
in Dallas, Texas, USA
Home Index Calendar Member art Join Ops Resources Feedback Contact us Reviews Search
Outside the Lines 5 with Chad Airhart, Connie Bandera, Alisa Banks, Rita Barnard, Mary Beans, Martin Campos, Jose N. Correa, James Dunn, Nancy Ferro, Jesus Galvan, Ruth Gonzalez, Sarah Hauser, Matthew Jack, Tray La Caze, Susan Lecky, Eli Lorenz, Jean Mccommas, Julia Mclain, Cristina Nava, Linda Rhodes, Brenda Robson, Todd Steincamp, Gisela-Heidi Strunck, Juergen Strunck, Jeanne Sturdevant and Van Volentine is at the Bath House through May 28, 2005.
Click the links above to visit those DallasArtsRevue Supporting Member's pages to see more of their work.
Outside What Lines?
Opinions + Photographs by J R Compton
feedback below
D'Arcy Bellamy - Evolution (detail) - steel - first place
Intersticed spirals — stirring, but new, different, OTL?
Story + Photographs by J R Compton
've submitted work to the Bath House's Outside The Lines competition many times, got in some (not this one) and even won money. Last year I was a juror. And I still don't know what lines the work in these shows are outside of. If any.
After repeated visits, I've come to understand that what's in the big exhibition space is the judges' judgment of the best work submitted — regardless of its status inside or beyond “the lines.”
If you didn't already know the show's title, you'd never guess it from seeing what's amassed in the Bath House's main gallery. Those pieces slip few bonds of art tradition, let alone mark new territory.
Nice work — some very nice — but hardly outré. Not much new, hardly anything exciting and nothing earth-shaking, passionate or inducing thereof. That stuff is not only not outside, it's not even inside pushing. It's just hanging there kinda smug about getting this far.
Extra linear art tends to be scary, and that stuff isn't.
All the prize winners are in the nicer gallery. Not surprising in a competitive exhibition. The work there is not inferior in any way but measure beyond lines.
D'Arcy Bellamy's first place big steel sculpture Evolution (above) is intelligent and inspiring, all curving and shiny and massive. Of the work in this show, I would have awarded it first prize also — assuming I too could ignore the show's guiding principle, “to celebrate the transcendent, innovative and experimental work of local and regional visual artists.”
Bellamy's littler piece (below, center) is less enticing, but the big one and most of the paintings, prints and other sculptures in there are at least good enough for a show just like this one, if mostly conventional.
But there's something's wrong with this picture when, at a show called Outside The Lines, the art firmly stuck inside the lines gets the best placement.
José N Correa - Gold and Diamonds - oil on canvas
D'Arcy Bellamy - Inspiration - steel
Gisela-Heidi Strunck - Path Watcher - fir, padauk, purpleheart, birch,
copper, metalic floss, acrylic - Honorable MentionHall action
The more sophisticated art in the big room is, with few exceptions, not that exciting. Well crafted, nice looking but less than stirring. It fails to offend or make anyone think beyond simple puns.
The bleeding edge work that is interesting in the Elusive Beyond The Real and Imagined Demarcations of Art kinds of ways, is in the hall.
Fewer established artists are represented in that less elegant, bare floored, whiter, brighter space that seems, at first, to be a continuation of the same exhibition as in the main room.
The hallway artists should be honored for their courage, their creative and intellectual, perhaps even accidental escape from tethered thinking — from the tried, the true and the established. Instead, they're stuck out in the hall, which in this oddly ungainly, intrinsically unbalanced exhibition, might just be the better placement.
Linda Rhodes - Hand-Veil - digital collage
Lining that space are pieces like Linda Rhodes' Hand-Veil digital collage, literally reaching from one realm into another, bridging the gap with the creator's hand, the splotched-on color having little to do with the spaces it contains (or doesn't).
Literally, this collage is outside the lines. Visually, however, it defined still by its hard edged rectangles
How can ya think outside the box,
if you don't lose the boxes?
Sarah Hauser - Duality - cyanotype print
In Sarah Hauser's calm, cool and carefully collected cyanotype print Duality, we see more and more overt boxes, but also a gentler vision — soft in form, receptive in nature and easy on the mind, eyes and fingers, were we to touch it.
Simple, nonagressive, interactive as any art, but what does it mean? What's going on right there in front of our eyes? First two times I saw it I did quick double-takes, wondering what was that? Why did I like it? And what was it doing here?
In still wondering that, I am asserting its right to be right where it is. And the more I think about it, the less its meaning matters. Not only is it what it is, that's enough.
Julia McLain - Junk Drawers Series: Nun Rattles His World - mixed media
Also in the hall is Julia McLain's mixed media Junk Drawers Series: Nun Rattles His World in all its fantasmagorical attitude and layout, wild colors, post Post Modern mix of everything and anything in the same proscenium. Fun stuff in an open ended We're All In This Together, New Millennium way. I was only sorry it felt compelled to contain itself rectangularly. At least it wasn't flat.
We can sometimes escape some of our lines
but not all of them at once.
In sharp contrast to the craftful intra-box creators in the plushish main space, comprising a clean, almost too serene show we've seen before — already too often in too many other places, the work in the hall gallery felt alive and new and happy to be plowing through some barriers and ignoring others.
The quality may not match that in Tepidville, but the quality of thinking — or of letting go of or even never having known — is more alive, more colorful and more thought-worthy.
Eli Lorenz - I Dreamed I Flew to the Sun
clay, mixed media - Honorable MentionDo oddly juxtaposed materials comprise OTL?
Or hasn't that been the stuff of art pretty much all along?
For one thing, the show is selected by a committee — usually of three local working artists. When I jurred, if it wasn't unanimous, it didn't go in.
I tried to get fellow jurors to go along with a deal where we'd each pick some work that nobody else liked, and it would go in no matter what. That way there was at least a smidgen of a chance to have something outrageous, not approved — or approvable — by a committee.
No deal.
They wouldn't go for it. It didn't happen then, and it didn't happen this year, too. Unless the procedure changes, this oddly named show may never achieve the status of its own name.
I wonder whether it's even possible to have a competitive, truly OTL show, juried by tradition-bound artists. Few artists can see their own lines, let alone get beyond them or recognize that state in others.
Maybe a carefully curated exhibition has some chance of becoming bleeding edge — if it could ditch the inevitable constraints of the group-think committee. Instead, independent individuals, working together on some selections and separately on others, might could put together an exciting and maybe a little bit scary show.
Alisa Banks - Turquoise Transition - oil on paper - Second Place
Does anybody really believe this is OTL —
or just another safe, visual pun?But would a City-run gallery dare show a show that would, if it were successful, scare its audience? Can bleeding edge art exist in a space that flatly prohibits sharp edges, dermal contact or blood?
Is it better to have a quiet little exhibition that calls itself Outside The Lines without actually breaching any real or imaginary constraints, without frightening any patrons, without offending anyone?
We are, all of us,
constrained by our constraints
yet needful of release.
This letter from a friend is broken up E-mail style, so I can get at some of the concepts I didn't manage above:
... so JR, do you think your work is OTL?
Sometimes I hope my work is outside some lines. But usually that pursuit seems irrelevant to what I'm trying to do, to get better at.
Artists who truly are OTL aren't trying to be, they're doing what they need to do, and if it runs over somebody's lines, so what. They aren't in it for the push. They're working on their craft, content and expression. Getting beyond the lines is something that sometimes happens along the way of expressing first person singular.
Not surprisingly, the best work in this show is by artists who've been making art for years and have created a personal style. Done honestly, everybody's is different. That, more than avant thinking, creates work beyond other people's lines.
Certainly Jurgen and Gisela-Heidi Strunck, whose work together and alone is probably the strangest and most different here — are not pushing lines. They are extending their personal visions and honing their craft, despite obstacles. That's a noble and ambitious task. Important. Difficult. Ongoing.
Even though their work is different, it's not leading — let alone bleeding — edge. They've been at it too long to worry about the edges anymore. It's just theirs.
Didn't you say that you had been in the show before? ...
According to my Photo Exhibition Resume, I got in once, in 2003, although I've entered often. I thought I'd been in more, but I'm probably confusing it with other Bath House shows. I love showing in that diverse community space. I like the people, and I love the place, sitting there on the edge of my favorite lake. It's close to me in more ways than geography.
OTL is definitely in the eye of the beholder or juror, which wasn't you this time!
True. I used to get in every show I entered. I thought it was easy. At first. Then, as I worked at my craft, I did maybe half. Now it's about 20%. I'm not hiding that I didn't get in OTL this time, again. (See above.) This story is not revenge.
I was at the opening then came back to photograph two pieces by new DallasArtsRevue Supporting Member Jeanne Sturdevant (whose art is startlingly and stridently individuated, but outside the lines?), and I kept looking around at all that work, trying to figure what lines it was outside of.
It's not accidental that the headline on top of this page is a question.
When I feel this way, I know it's my Dada duty to say something, to write about it and publish, even if it scares me silly.
You were pretty relentless in chewing it up and spitting it out.
When I have a reasoned opinion or am exploring possibilities, that's what I do, why I am here, why I publish DallasArtsRevue.
Like any artist, I need to express myself and my opinions. Make it as me as possible. Individuate my response, which is naturally and semi-automatically different from everybody else's.
Nice if the result is entertaining. Great if I can spur some thought. Scary nonetheless.
E-mail me. I love to publish feedback, positive or negative.
Information
about helping support DallasArtsRevue —
including a new, Easy
Guide to Joining this site
is on the DARts
Member Page Index.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
