Jan
6
2012
Art News, San Antonio By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

Donna Simon’s Seeing Art San Antonio tours

Donna Simon's Seeing Art San Antonio tours

Donna Simon (left), David Shelton (center) greet art tour

Providing a behind-the-scenes peek at the work of San Antonio artists, Donna Simon, a retired Brackenridge High School art teacher, conducts guided tours of the city’s studios, artist-run spaces, galleries and museums, which she organizes through her Web site at www.SeeingArtSanAntonio.com.

On a cold day in early December, she led a small group of art lovers on a tour of Jayne Lawrence’s drawing show “Subject Properties” (which closes Saturday, Jan. 7) at the David Shelton Gallery and the Zollie Glass Studio, the working studio for Jake Zollie Harper and Reagan Johns.

“After I retired from teaching, I wanted to stay involved with the city’s art community so I started the tours in 2006,” Simon says. “Despite the amazing art scene we have in San Antonio, I felt there was a strong disconnect between the public and the city’s artists. Most people don’t have access to artists’ studios. And I feel like one of the best ways to learn about artists’ work is to talk to them and ask them questions about their motivations. In many ways, I still feel like I’m a teacher.”

Owner David Shelton greeted the tour group at his eponymous gallery located in a former convent on South Alamo Street in the King William neighborhood, next door to the Liberty Bar. Known for her elaborate drawings and sculptures that often merge organic and mechanical forms, Lawrence was on hand to talk about her work. She said her career as an artist may have begun with her father’s bedtime stories.

“He would ask me to pick three objects or characters and then he would tie them together into a single narrative,” Lawrence says. “So he would take a doll, a lady bug and a Tonka toy and put them into a story. I feel like that’s when I started putting disparate things together to make art.”

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Jan
6
2012
Reviews, San Antonio By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

“Chinese Jade” at SAMA

“5,000 Years of Chinese Jade” continuing through Feb. 19

San Antonio Museum of Art

Subtle and intricate, Chinese jade carving can seem coolly aloof and perplexing to Western sensibilities, but “5,000 Years of Chinese Jade” presents a tightly focused, high quality, chronological survey of 89 objects drawn from the National Museum of History in Taiwan, the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum in Springfield, Mass. Most mysterious are the solemn, minimalistic Neolithic pi discs, made and used by shamans to channel supernatural powers. A 2,500-year-old pendant decorated with undulating dragons is the most spectacular of five national treasures from Taiwan making their U.S. debut. However, realistic animal figures are probably the most endearing works to American tastes, including the Sackler’s famous Han dynasty bear.

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Jan
6
2012
Reviews, San Antonio By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

Jeff Williams at Artpace

“There is Not Anything Which Returns to Nothing” continuing through Jan. 8

Artpace

If a Cro-Magnon somehow obtained an architectural degree, he might come up with the crude, clunky creations of Jeff Williams. Working with non-traditional materials and eschewing the sleek lines of modernism, Williams is presenting proposals for a new kind of ill-conceived architecture. Reminiscent of a pancaked highway overpass, “Tension and Compression (Evans Rd. Quarry/Alamo Cement Co.)” consists of four planklike slabs of concrete suspended horizontally over the gallery floor by threaded steel rod stilts. The bottom slab is cracked, and the concrete is expected to crumble under its own weight and collapse during the exhibit.

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Oct
21
2011
Reviews, Uncategorized By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

Unit B: Michelle Monseau’s “Elephant in the Room”

Lucky has been anything but. A 46-year resident of the San Antonio Zoo, the sixtyish, female elephant became a cause célèbre for animal rights activists after her longtime companion Alport died in 2007, leaving Lucky alone. Since then, she’s gained a new friend, Boo, but Lucky remains, as she has been since she was captured at age 4 in her native Thailand, a prisoner of man. The zoo refused to send her to an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee where she could have had much more room to roam free like she was born to do.

But it was reading “Water for Elephants” that led San Antonio artist Michelle Monseau to use Lucky as the model for her video installation, “Elephant in the Room,” through Nov. 7 at Unit B. Her video captures some of Lucky’s most disturbing behavior, repetitive swaying and head-bobbing, which indicate psychological distress. However, Monseau’s drawings and miniature vinyl elephant silhouettes have a playful quality reflecting the childhood wonder of seeing an elephant up close in a zoo for the first time.

And that’s the trouble with zoos, because it’s hard to abhor something that you enjoyed so much as a child. Besides the chance to see animals in a way no documentary can match, zoos also do important animal research and help to preserve species. Monseau says her exhibit is not intended to make a political statement, though she makes a poignant, humanistic one.

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Oct
21
2011
Uncategorized By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

Laura McPhee: River of No Return

“Laura McPhee: River of No Return” continuing through Nov. 20

Southwest School of Art

In her monumental photographs of Idaho’s remote Sawtooth Valley, Laura McPhee investigates the contemporary reality of the majestic landscapes in the West, reminiscent of landmark paintings by Albert Bierstadt or Thomas Moran. Her approach is decidedly 19th century. For three years, she lugged around a 55-year-old Deardorff 8-by-10 viewfinder camera and used the traditional darkroom wet process for printing each mammoth 6-by-8-foot color print. The scale and breath-taking clarity of the mural-size photographs in “River of No Return” is even better than HD, providing a life-size perspective that places the viewer in the midst of the landscape, though the natural beauty of the rugged mountains and birch forests is besmirched by evidence of humankind.

Calendar-perfect mountains along “Fourth of July Creek” — peaks lit by the setting sun with a picturesque, zigzagging wood fence in the foreground — provide the backdrop for an irritating parade of little red flags lined up to deter wolves from killing calves. A blue tarp covering irrigation pipes intrudes on the same landscape during a windswept Winslow Homer rainstorm. The sun streams through a birch tree grove like a Robert Frost poem, only the tree trunks have been crudely carved with the names of sheep herders.

In the grisliest image, the butchered remains of a Rocky Mountain elk have been strung from trees and stacked on the snow-covered ground. The blood-splattered snow is a graphic symbol of the close connection between man and nature. Though it’s easy for city dwellers to keep nature at a romantic remove, the 100 or so residents of the Sawtooth Valley engage daily in the messy struggle of trying to wrest a living from the land.

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Sep
28
2011
Reviews, San Antonio By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

David Shelton: Kelly O’Connor’s “Post-Utopia”

Kelly O'Connor

"Portrait of the Artist's Room as a Child"

Somewhere between childhood wonder and adult disillusionment, Kelly O’Connor is creating a psychic landscape from fragments of familiar movies, TV shows, vacationlands and fairy tales. While she’s been making the collages mined from her childhood pop culture for years, O’Connor’s “Post-Utopia” show at the David Shelton Gallery seems more intimate and introspective, inspired by a photograph of the artist as a young girl standing in front of the Mammoth Terrace Falls at Yellowstone National Park.

With rainbow-colored water, the falls provide the setting for O’Connor’s most complex, three-dimensional shadow box, “Portrait of the Artists’ Room as a Child.” Judy Garland as Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” serves as her alter ego. The Scarecrow is surfing the falls, while Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka appears ready to leap using three open parachutes. On a cratered plain beyond the falls, the young girl in “The Poltergeist,” instead of a haunted TV, is kneeling before a silver vortex of six-sided polygons. Cosmetic bottles with clown tops, a lonesome coyote, Shirley Temple and a buffalo roam this psychedelic phantasmagoria of Americana.

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Sep
12
2011
Art News By Dan R. Goddard | 1 comment

Fotoseptiembre USA 2011

Ramin Samandari's "Gaze Furtively on Waters Serene" at Gallery Nord

A tsunami of  photography exhibits sweeps across San Antonio each fall during Fotoseptiembre USA, a month-long festival that floods practically every museum, gallery and art space in the city with more than 60 two-dimensional shows featuring upwards of 200 photographers. Organized since 1995 by Michael Mehl, festival director, and partner Ann Kinser, festival coordinator, Fotoseptiembre is open to just about anything that can be called photography from the blue chip avant-garde to amateur snap shooters. Taiwan is a special focus this year, part of the Year of Taiwan celebrating San Antonio’s sister city relationship with Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

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Sep
9
2011
Reviews, San Antonio By Dan R. Goddard | 1 comment

Gallery Nord: 21 Centuries of Abuse; Earthly Bodies

Carla Veliz works to repair silk she abused

For 21 days representing all the societal and environmental abuse of 21 centuries, San Antonio artist Carla Veliz beat, scraped, tore, kicked, stomped on and generally tormented a soft, innocent piece of silk. Then she spent another 21 days trying to undo the damage to create “XXI: Who We Are and Who We Could Become.”

The tortured and then revived 16-by-6-foot piece of silk is the centerpiece of Veliz’s Fotoseptiembre exhibit at Gallery Nord, which is also featuring the romantic figure and landscape photographs of Ramin Samandari.

A native of Piedras Negras, Veliz wanted to illustrate the stark contrast between the poverty of Mexico and the prosperity of the United States by showing all the abuse that humans inflict on the planet as well as acknowledging the beauty and joys that life has to offer. “I came up with the idea to purchase a large, raw piece of white silk because of its natural beauty and softness,” she says. “I associate innocence and something being pure and simple with silk.”

She documented the process of abusing and healing the silk in a colorful, lyrical, 21-minute video. She begins by hanging the silk on a tree and then stuffing it with brush. She cuts it with knives. And then she washes it in a metal tub.

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Also check out new, improved guide to local arts on VisitSanAntonio.com

And a guide to the heart of the SA art scene in Where magazine

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Jul
30
2011
Reviews By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

Gudjon Bjarnason: Sculpture Goes Boom

Icelandic sculptor Gudjon Bjarnason

Before the era of car bombs and IEDs, Icelandic-born sculptor Gudjon Bjarnason began using high explosives to create unorthodox shapes and forms in his work. He was looking for unexpected dimensions to use in his architectural designs for unconventional houses. A maquette he created for a house he’s planning has a front entrance that looks as if it’s been ripped away by a tornado.

“I started in 1995, but now there is always a reference to 9/11 and terrorist bombings,” Bjarnason says. “And I may have started as a response to the terrorism in the world, but now the work is much more than that. There’s a certain kind of energy that comes from these forms caused by explosions. It doesn’t fit our ideas of symmetry and balance; instead, it’s the opposite, which suggests a new way of seeing.”

During a residency at the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, he enlisted the aid of the San Antonio Police Department Bomb Squad to create ten new large-scale metal works for “DySTOPic ProgressiONs.” Bjarnason asked the members of the squad to do highly-controlled explosions designed to create specific effects in his compositions of welded square steel profiles, though the frayed edges and rips in the steel are the spontaneous results of the explosives.

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Jul
5
2011
Reviews, San Antonio By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

Tracey Moffatt at ArtPace: Mothers, artists and lovers

Tracey Moffatt pine-apple cannery from "First Jobs"

Tracey Moffatt works on the assembly line in a pineapple cannery from "First Jobs"

Emotions roil and crest like crashing waves in Australian-born artist Tracey Moffatt’s “Handmade,” seven cinematic mashups made from 1999 to 2010 on view through Sept. 11 at Artpace. Her movie montages are made up of nearly 1,000 TV and film clips linked by common themes, ranging from the various permutations of motherhood in “Mother” to Hollywood clichés about the lives of artists in “Artist.” Working with her collaborator and editor Gary Hillberg, Moffatt has compiled these clips in fast-moving sequences that play on the emotions like a musical score.

Her films and photographs often deal with how women and people of color are portrayed in popular culture. During her residency at Artpace in 1995, she created a photographic homage to the female stars of roller derby made popular on TV in the 1970s. Moffatt is known for her professionally produced short films such as “Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy,” which screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989, and she has worked in television and made music videos. “Night Cries” reflects her childhood experiences as an Aborigine orphan adopted by a white foster mother.

“I know mothers because I had two of them,” she said at her Artpace lecture. “While I was working on ‘Mother,’ the emotions were just too powerful and I would break down crying. These montages were not put together as an academic exercise. I could play with the images; it gave me more freedom.”

“Mother” is the most powerful collection of moving images, highlighting mothers at their best and worst, from Woody Allen’s giant, hectoring Jewish mother in the sky to Katherine Hepburn and Jane Fonda bonding glowingly as mother and daughter in “On Golden Pond.” Moffatt’s technique in these montages is to assemble similar scenes within the larger theme, so “Mother” has sections devoted to loving mothers, yelling mothers, spanking mothers and martyred mothers.

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