Heidi Strunck - Path Seeker, 2004
Mahogany, lacewood, wenge, birch,
copper, metal floss, acrylic
Photo by Harrison Evans

The Irving Bible Church has featured intriguing artists and art shows over the past year. I've several times used images they've sent on this page and wanted to others. I'm continually amazed at the quality of work in this church gallery.

Still, I haven't visited. But Heidi's show will draw me there finally. The well-known sculptor, married to long-time U of D printing instructor Jurgen Strunck, has long been a fixture among the better sculptors of this sculptor-soaked city.

Her work is instantly recognizable, even now, after a brain tumor took her sight, and she's again creating her distinctive, colorful shape objects, now simpler, more direct and intimate.

Her materials have changed, the scale is larger and the better and more universal work is smaller, yet components comparatively larger in scale. The titles, once reflective of visits in India, now reflect an inner journey.

J R Compton

 

I don't attend every opening — despite what I overheard someone telling her friends at The Rockwall National in November 2004.  In fact, I'm picky, skipping great gobs of art when my mood shifts unevenly. Or I'm busy learning or doing something.

Some events pique my interest for reasons that are mysterious even to me. I wanted to see Anila Quayyum Agha's latest work (tonight as I write this), because her more recent work intrigues me, although the first I saw of hers clearly did not.

My eyes enjoy seeing it. There's a comfort that's soft and deeply traditional to a tradition I know nothing about. And a daring. Textures, tonalities and techniques I would never think to try. Which she succeeds. Except to talk around it like this, I can neither describe it nor say why I like it.

There were other interesting and, indeed, beautiful art objects in the show at Dhanak. Pretty to look at, odd and entirely unexpected textures, perhaps even traditional in Southeast Asian ways, like I say I can't begin to fathom, even though I've been geographically closer there than, say, Europe or Africa.

Some of the gallery owner's rich color photographs have settled in my mind, still vibrating in the synapses between eyes and mind.

Anila's art snaps something in my understanding of seeing. I photographed each of her four pieces in full and detail views, in vain hopes I would understand better later. It's deeper than I want to explore in words.
 

Where Dreams Come True

I knew I had to see Carolyn Brown's Dallas - Where Dreams Come True at the Afterimage. Exquisite photographs of my city that I told owner Ben Breard when I arrived 15 early, "tell me details of my city I did not know." And I look carefully at this place often.

I can usually run-walk around the walls of a gallery in just a few minutes. I once did four large shows scattered around the old, dilapidated D-Art in less than ten minutes. At the mu for the Lothar Baumgarten show, I shot around all four galleries, pausing usually for a few seconds, fewer than a handful times for as much as a minute.

But for Carolyn Brown's big, beautiful, detailed, rich and strong photographs of my adopted home city, I circled the 29 large prints four times, checking every shot, peering into details that amazed me: The cop, tiny in a big picture from Big Tex out to the spiraling ferris wheel, at an ATM booth; the fading red gargoyle atop The Old Red Courthouse downtown in ever so slight soft focus behind a sharp blazing Texas flag; new angles and vantages of over familiar places all over town, lending a newsness.

A delight. I paged through the book and discovered more images I'd love to see large and unassuming little pictures I'd already seen magnificent.

My fave? The pegasi are natural crowd pleasers, of course. But it's The Spirit of the Centennial by Raoul Josset at Fair Park that kept pulling me back, with its rich, rustic colors, faded textures, worn blue and rippling tiles.

 

And yet another of those mind-opening details I'd never bothered to notice, though I've seen it and plainer photos of it hundeds of times — the long, unbristled smooth arm of a cactus supporting Ms. Spirit and reaching gently to cover the her nether parts.

Ocassionally exquisite, sometimes soaring, but too often forgettable, abstract realist, mostly grayscale photographs of America's railroads, occupying all four of the Barrel Vault galleries. The project probably sounded much more interesting than it ended up looking. But the maybe five gems are spine-tingling. 

I have the deepest, darkest, most forboding feeling about groups organizing themselves to represent all Dallas artists.

The words naivety and mediocrity hang acridly in the air as I try to decipher my feelings about these people, who have been pleasant to me, if overly concerned about my support.

In their quest to net an exhibition space in the Performing Arts Center for downtown Dallas' so-called Arts District, the Visual Arts Coalition of Dallas seeks to fold together every art and craft organization and individual in this diverse community.

Can't you just see work by calligraphers, porcelain painters and quilters sharing exhibition space with avant artists out — as rightly they should — to scare the bejesus out of us all?

The trouble with self-perpetuating, lowest common denominator groups is they end up representing themselves, dragging everybody else down to the lowest level of their least talented members.

Think about D-Art's early years, when they'd show anyone, without regard for talent or taste. Democracy is great for governments of and by The People. But in the arts there's a need and responsibility to promote those who make us think and re-think our precious preconceptions.

Pretty pictures just aren't enough.

Homage

Homage to Pablo Neruda — works by Francisco Casabal, Solange Mariel, Romanho, Adriana Cobo-Frenkel, Amalia Elmasri and a Dia de los Muertos Altar by Clara Borja Hinojosa. Curated by Zonia Elvas Velasco at the Latino Cultural Center opening at 6 through Tuesday, November 2

Judith Baca - The World Wall: Triumph of the Hands (detail)
J R Compton photo

I trapsed through the gallery in the middle of somebody's bilingual speech but wasn't thrilled with anything there. Loved Judith F Baca's The World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear for its obvious, propagandistic manner and giant muralist execution. Wandering into an office with painted groundbreaking shovels on the wall, a very nice lady unlocked my way into Celia Muñoz' vivid color light theatre at the Latino Culture Center. -JRC

Art Beyond Galleries

Always heartening to see that art is alive and well, well outside the commercial gallery circuit. Love the dress code, too — at last somewhere I felt completely at home in soon as I walked in the door. This ersatz gallery set up in a photographer's studio in the Trinity Industrial Area continues a long history of informal art shows in the warehouse district down by the river. Another example of our extended art community being friends and friends of friends, which is how I came to be there.

Blurb and photo by J R Compton.

 

• Sphere

with Anila Quayyum Agha, Garland Fielder, Mary E. Foster, Russ Havard and Jo-Ann Mulroy, was curated by Takako Tanabe as part of the Texas Commission on the Arts Visual Artist Apprenticeship Program in the back gallery at the Bath House through June 26, 2004

More in keeping with the spirit of Outside The Lines than the competitive event itself, this is a lovely, lilting, amazingly synergistic, cutting edge exhibition. -JRC

 

Nautical Mile

with Jeff A Green, Daniel P Sellers and T Stone, Zoomorth by Kathy Boortz and JR Compton's White Rock Lake Journal opens at the Bath House Cultural Center through May 1, 2004

Hey this is a great show, even if I am in it. The nautical-related sculpture in the main gallery (above, shot before the i.ds went up) are fine, and my photographs of the lake are atmospheric and strange, but it's Kathy Boortz' found object sculpture in the back room that really gives this water-based triple exhibition its magic.

 

We've been watching Kathy's work for a long time (See Artists Worth Watching), but some of these pieces are especially inventive visual treats that make you think — something all artists aspire to. I'd write more about Jeff Green's wonderful fish, if I were still writing about art. -JRC