"Palinka & Lone Star," Radu Runcanu & William Witte at Box 13 ArtSpace

Box 13 ArtSpace on the east side of Houston just opened their first set of summer exhibitions featuring a roster of artists from around the world. At a time when most places have stopped doing exhibitions of international artists, it is encouraging to see an artist-run space still fostering art as an global conversation, budget be damned. The exhibitions are well worth the trip to the east side and the navigation of the light rail construction currently taking place in front of the building. Do not be discouraged! The building with Ariane Roesch‘s window display of soft, outmoded personal computers is still open, and the current exhibitions will be up until June 23. Make sure to catch Roesch’s display before you enter the building as it is much easier to see from the sidewalk. The floppy computers will make you smile and wish that you could cuddle with them.

Playmates, Ariane Roesch at Box 13 ArtSpace

Shanghai-born artist Miao Jiaxin has an exhibition of performance works in the main space. On the opening night, Jiaxin did a live performance sleeping in a child’s bed in the middle of the gallery while chatroulette was projected on a wall in front of him. Visitors could use a laptop to chat with people from around the world to talk to them about the artwork or whatever was on their mind. Other performances documented in videos and photographs shown in the gallery were of more provocative subjects. In collaboration with Ei Jane Janet Lin, Jiaxin performed on internet pornography websites making such things as “ass prints” and money suits. My impression was that though the images are striking and sometimes shocking, the concepts seem mostly straightforward and do not draw you deeper into the work.

Miao Jiaxin Collaboration with Ei Jane Janet Lin, Collaboration #4(2010), Internet live feed performance/video/Photo

The back gallery has a two-person exhibition curated by photographer and Box 13 member Emily Peacock, who recently had an exhibition at Lawndale. Palinka and Lone Star features two artists who are friends, colleagues, and true believers in the cause of painting, Radu Runcanu and William Witte. Runcanu is a recent transplant from Romania who paints landscape-like abstract canvases that incorporate washes of saturated, cool colors with a gestural sort of drawing reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s automatic marks. Witte’s fun paintings and drawings are sophisticated plays of color and line that merge the absurd and profound, silly and melancholic, iconic and cartoonish. They have some of the most interesting use of drawing that I have seen recently.

Breathe, Britt Ragsdale at Box 13 ArtSpace

Upstairs is a video installation by Britt Ragsdale, who is also Peacock’s collaborator on the Lens Capsule project. Ragsdale’s installation Breathe shows gleaming rippled circles that dilate to sound of recorded breaths. The dark meditative installation is especially impressive given the challenges of adapting an open gallery to a video room. It is a meditative space where it is easy to go into a trance listening to the rhythm of inhale and exhale. Breathing was also a part of the video installation in the Closet Box: Micro Gallery/Wonder Emporium where a video of a man exhaling smoke was projected on a plexiglass box full of fog in a closet of all while clothes and objects. The piece by Harry Dearing III, 7 Minutes of Heaven, has a cool visual effect and references teenage closet escapades in an open, almost abstract way. The exhibitions at Box 13 thus offer a wide range of media and ideas and show why they have one of the most diverse programs of any artist-run space in town.

John Goodyear, Rapid Reflect, 1966 (detail)

The Blanton Museum in Austin has announced the online launch of a massive digitization project: 17,000 images and  attendant info about objects in their permanent collection are now accessible through the museum’s soon-to-be-redesigned website.  In addition to free range browsing, the Blanton has organized their pics into 122 “portfolios” some grouped by place of origin and chronology, others by exhibition, and a few oddballs like “Plaster Casts” and “Cowboys, etc.”

Tom Lea, The Lead Steer, 1941 (detail)

In addition to his ongoing jobs, West worked as consultant for many cultural nonprofits, he developed a comprehensive marketing action plan for Fair Park, did strategic planning for the Old Trinity Trail. He also consulted on the Trammell & Margaret Crow Museum of Asian Art; the Origins of the Southwest Museum; the Dallas Architectural Forum; the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Texas Commission on the Arts. West taught the popular inter-disciplinary undergraduate course entitled Mythologizing Kennedy at UTD from 2001-2004.

The joint venture, and the whole WEST event ((as it is called) is seen as part of a new effort to involve downtown Austin in the boisterous, largely artist-driven creative ferment that has so far defined Austin’s scene. The Austin Chronicle’s Robert Faires offered a guide to the sprawling multi-venue effort on Friday.

Jackie Tileston, 2009, "Auspicious Circling of Mad Utopias," 60 x 72 inches

Jackie Tileston’s latest exhibition Freefall at Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas includes paintings from 2007 to present. I’ve followed Tileston’s work for the past ten years and I never get tired of looking at it. The artist draws inspiration from a variety of sources including abstraction, physics, traditional eastern imagery and contemporary visual culture. Co-mingling such disparate sources would prove fatal for a less-skilled artist. Yogis are drawn to her work because they sense a spiritual component. Painters always comment on her unusual use of space. I’m most interested in how Tileston creates worlds where discord and harmony coexist.

Jackie Tileston, 2009, "El Dorado Depot," 48 x 60 inches

In the works on display, Tileston paints with oil, powdered pigment, oil enamel and image transfers on brown linen canvas. Vibrant bursts of color exist alongside wide expanses of bare canvas, sometimes shimmering with gold dust. The work Suspension of Disbelief (2007) represents the chaos and peace found in so many of Tileston’s paintings. An explosion of color ruptures the luminous landscape. The background reminds me of the quality of light and expansiveness found in a Thomas Cole painting. The eruption of color suggests a bomb sending out paint shrapnel. A cluster of small, brightly painted circles references pop (art) or Japanese anime. The cluster doesn’t seem to fit, and its presence adds humor to the work.  In Tileston’s personal cosmology, the paintings present a utopian space, not one birthed from violence.

Jackie Tileston, 2006, "Freefall," 72 x 60 inches

Another aspect to Tileston’s work is her blatant rule-breaking. She acknowledges art history, but is not bound by its conventions. She interweaves styles, cultures and materials in a way that seems at odds. She can sling theory with the best of them and her titles playfully reference ideas from theorists such as Baudrillard, Batchelor and Foucault. Yet the work is not inaccessible to those unfamiliar with the ideas. In Freefall, a small rectangle of a painted striped pattern appears at the top of the canvas and a black and white zigzag pattern borders the bottom. A large area of bright pink, blue and black enamel obliterates the harmonious landscape, much like an oil spill. The effect should be incongruous, but it works.

Jackie Tileston, 2007, "Luminous Neurology," 72 x 60 inches

The term “free fall” refers to the trajectory of a body where weight is the only force acting upon it. Free fall is also used to describe a jump without a parachute. At some point in the fall, the skydiver will feel supported by a cushion of air. The themes of risk, weightlessness and trajectory are apt metaphors for Tileston’s work. Tileston embraces the free play and freedom that comes from the current and contradictory state of contemporary culture.

Freefall: Paintings by Jackie Tileston
Holly Johnson Gallery
May 12 – August 14, 2012

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Multi-media artist Colette Copeland recently relocated to Dallas from Philadelphia. She writes for Afterimage—Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism and Ceramics: Art and Perception Magazine. Her work can be found at www.colettecopeland.com.

Brandt moves beyond the finite object in this show entitled All_Over as the entire interior of Co-Lab is blanketed in a thick layer of loose insulation. Objects emerge from the all-over treatment, pushing and pulling between abstraction and figuration, a world of undifferentiated gray and dumb things found in the world. Brandt told me that he was thinking about grotto’s while he was working on this project and specifically cites the Buontalenti Grotto in Boboli Garden, a space filled with classical sculptures and artificial geological formations. A site both romantic and nostalgic crusted over with man made material.

Brandt’s site-specific installation recalls the netherworld of structure and insulation, or what he calls the “overlooked grotto-like domestic spaces of the attic and basement crawlspaces.” In one spot, a plaid work shirt emerges, a pattern amidst the gray fuzz, a flag-like banner of construction. The show opens tonight at Co-Lab.

Palm Center, 1965

Our Town Southeast Houston, a project of the UH and the National Endowment for the Arts is inviting residents to make their diverse community a more interesting, healthier, and prosperous place” by participating in FOOD|FAMILY|FUN today Saturday, May 19 from 9am-2pm at the resurgent Palm Center at 5330 Griggs Road, one of the earliest  shopping centers in America. Visitors are supposed to bring a family heirloom: a family photo, handicraft, favorite recipe, etc. to show off.

The event is part of an NEA Our Town grant initiative spearheded by Carroll Parrott Blue, whose interactive multimedia works include the Third Ward Story Mapping Project. NEA Our Town grants support “creative placemaking projects that contribute toward the livability of communities and help transform them into lively, beautiful, and sustainable places with the arts at their core.”

Gabriel Martinez performs at Scope

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), has given the 2012 Meredith J. Long Core Program Award to Gabriel Martinez. The $10,000 prize, presented at the Glassell School of Art Benefit and Auction Friday, May 11, was inaugurated in 2008 and is given annually to a second-year Core artist-in-residence in recognition of exceptional artistic merit.

Winners of the Video Association of Dallas’ 11th Annual 24-Hour Video Race were announced on May 14 to a packed theater at the Angelika Film Center in Dallas and can be seen online.  Fifteen winners completed a five-minute film in 24 hours, beginning Friday, May 4 at 11:59 p.m. and ending Saturday May 5 at midnight, in a competition sponsored by the Video Association of Dallas.  A total of 62 teams started the Race, and 54 teams finished on time.

Three finalists were chosen in each of several divisions and were awarded first, second and third places, some with serious prizes: The Hollywood Division winner receives $5000 worth of equipment rental from Panavision.