Steve Brudniak, the artist as mad scientist, or maybe vice versa, has invented a new “emanating reflection optical lens,” a dark, reflective glass that appears to project hologram-like images when you look at it just right. Incorporated into his new series “Noumenon,” named for the “ultimate source of all things,” the dark glass components provide a glimpse into an abyss of endless darkness pierced by startling visions.

Resembling artifacts recovered from Captain Nemo’s Nautilus or maybe scavenged from Nikola Tesla’s laboratory, the Austin artist’s found-object sculptures are on view in “Noumenon and Other New Work” through July 31 at the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center. Brudniak is set to give a gallery talk at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 28.

The faint Victorian cast of Brudniak’s well-crafted pieces that resemble obsolete or even occultish 19th-century scientific instruments has been described as “steampunk,” but his work has a conceptual and now a more autobiographical underpinning that is more intuitive than technical. He collects all sorts of odd-looking mechanical objects in his studio, which he sometimes spends years fitting together.

“I have always worked in a parallel with the surrealist modus operandi, dipping into the subconscious for inspiration, trying to get a glimpse of the other side,” Brudniak writes in his label notes. “The wicked witch has her crystal ball, Nostradamus had a pool of dark water, the Azetecs their scrying mirrors of shiny black onyx.”

Parts of a cast iron stove and an old fireplace have been placed within a dark, heavy, somber ipe wood frame to form “Noumenon,” an altar-like assemblage resembling an old tabletop jukebox with a dark glass window that appears to shoot out countless red dots of light when viewed from the proper angle – no glasses required. Brudniak says the effect is especially pronounced when he uses a laser pointer to create a beautiful spider web of geometry that twists and contorts with each movement of the beam.

Weird brass tentacles dangle from most of the pieces in the “Noumenon” series, intended as Ganesha-inspired elephant trunk-like symbols of the searching ego, or what Brudniak calls “the reaching out egoic manifestation brought on by thinking.” “Noumenon: Objectifying in Four Parts” looks like a row of four brass mail slots with tentacle snouts, while “Noumenon and Awareness of the Endless Succession of Thought” has windows pregnant with little baby tentacles, unborn thoughts.

“The Vagus Leviathan,” is the most personal piece, centered on the portrait of an old girl friend that appears and then blurs out like Auntie Em when Dorothy looked into the witch’s crystal ball in “The Wizard of Oz.” The way she moves in and out of sight reflects the ups and downs of a relationship as well as the fading and then sudden sharp recall of memory. Parts of the piece include a 1940s cinema projector, a water main cover and a Volkswagen engine block. Tentacles dangle and there are gauges that rather than the physical are set to measure the emotional.

Brudniak used the other half of the ball of fiber optic material he cut in two for the crystal ball effect in a piece inspired by his recurring dreams of moving along the banks of various waterways. Photographs he took while canoeing on Lake Austin are lit from behind and seen through the distorting curved fiber optic lenses in “Canal Dreams.”


 
Organic material is a recurring element in some of his work. Brudniak has used blood in the past, but he settled for hair as part of small sculptures that rode into space on the Russian Soyuz TMA-13 rocket with Austin video game wiz Richard Garriott, who also carried a lock from his father, former shuttle astronaut Owen Garriott. In “Astrogeneris Mementos,” Bruniak secured the locks of hair into memento chambers inspired by 18th and 19th-century memento mori lockets.

Salt crystals containing 250 million-year-old bacteria, which came to life after being released from its dormant suspension, are displayed in a grid in “The Menagerie of Eternal Life.” Brudniak acquired the tiny chips from Dr. Russell Vreeland and Dr. William Rosenzweig of West Chester University in Pennsylvania, who discovered the crystal in a New Mexico salt mine.



Prosopocoilus bruijni, a stag beetle from the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, can be detected, barely, through the dark glass of “Scrying the Present in the Shadow of a Doubt,” which also has a side frame of off-kilter gauges.

Most mysterious is “The Dark Glass,” made from a mail drop in Austin’s Alamo Hotel built in 1929 with the slot now a window of dark glass, which reveals multiples of reflected images and shifts in the color spectrum when looked at just right.




          
    

   
Working somewhere between abstraction and representation, Robert Moskowitz isolates silhouettes of familiar objects in his paintings, reducing them to minimalist essentials. But you can always see evidence of the artist’s touch – a sprinkling of fingerprints in the white spaces.

    In his last show in San Antonio in 2007, the New York artist showed his paintings of modernist icons that had become a sort of trademark – the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Though he is known for his monochromatic paintings in oils and pastels of skyscrapers such as the Empire State and the Flatiron buildings, he stopped painting the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

    “Now the images seem unbearably grim, and I haven’t been able to sell one since 9-11,” he said at the time.

Moskowitz, who divides his time between New York and Nova Scotia, came to prominence in 1978 when his work was included in the “New Image Painting” exhibit at the Whitney Museum, though he had his first one-person show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1962. He had a mid-career retrospective organized by Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum in 1989.

In his current show at the Lawrence Markey Gallery on view through July 16, Moskowitz is showing a more eclectic range of images with more emphasis on nature than architecture. Although his paintings tend to look like messy graphite drawings, he actually works in pastels and oil on paper. His fifth solo exhibit with Lawrence Markey features a fully illustrated catalog with an essay by Philip Van Keuren.



    Dominating the show is a large painting of a symmetrical tree in black and white on two large sheets of paper with a velvet matte finish. The tree has an almost folk quality with highly stylized limbs that seem like chunks of frozen black lightning. His fingerprints seem to buzz around the trunk and limbs like insects, though the tree also resembles a cross, perhaps a symbol of crucified nature.

    Other images of nature are compressed onto much smaller sheets of paper. An iceberg floats on an inky black sea. A red bird looks at a burnt black tree limb in a snowy landscape. A glowing red sunset appears over a blackened, desolate landscape. The partially obscured sun appears to burn through a dense layer of haze in a series of yellow-orange drawings titled “Vincent.”

Moskowitz’s simple, richly textured images that appear to bubble up from his subconscious can be uncannily prescient, anticipating our heightened sense of endangered nature because of the BP oil spill. Or, maybe his images are so stripped of the superfluous that it’s easy to project topical concerns onto them.

“Red Cross (White on Black),” the other large painting in the show, looks like the flag for the international relief organization rendered in grim black-and-white, perhaps a symbol of our efforts to render aid to a natural environment damaged beyond human help by all-too-human greed.

A light on top of the Empire State building appears to be a beacon in a dark night sky as if there was a total blackout in New York. A lighthouse outlined by a dusky blue sky glows as a beacon of hope in “Eddystone.” And there is a silhouette of a discus thrower, with just the arm holding the discus and the curves of the athlete’s back and legs suggesting the vestiges of an ancient Greek myth.

Though primarily concerned with the pared-down formal qualities of the images he works with, Moskowitz seems to be in touch with the deepest, darkest parts of the nation’s psyche.

Philadelphia sculptor Donald Lipski suspended giant, lighted longear sunfish under an I-35 underpass. Bill Fontana of San Francisco amplified the sounds of the San Antonio River, from bird calls to droning insects. British artist Martin Richman created a light show on the surface of the river using prismatic strips suspended from the bottom of a bridge.

The San Antonio River Foundation has published a softbound coffee-table-ready book, “The River Spectacular: Light, Sound, Color & Craft on the San Antonio River” (Maverick Publishing, $38.95), that documents the nine installations by eight artists along the new Museum Reach extension of the River Walk, easily the city’s most ambitious public art project.

San Antonio artists include Carlos Cortes, a third generation master of trabajos rusticos who constructed an elaborate faux bois carved concrete grotto in a bend of the river, accented with waterfalls and ghostly faces. Stuart Allen sampled bits of sky to come up with the colors for his shifting metal panels. Mark Schlesinger experimented with pigmented concrete, and sculptor George Schroeder hammered and bent steel into shapes inspired by agave for hand rails.

With references to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Haruki Murakami and Naomi Miller , arts writer Wendy Atwell provides some theoretical context for these works of sound, light, painting and sculpture. She interviewed each of the artists and allows them to explain their ideas, as well as describing the large-scale installations under the nine bridges along the 1.3 mile stretch of the river from downtown north past the San Antonio Museum of Art.



Photographer Mark Menjivar found plenty of colorful drama in the unfolding art projects, though most of these installations are best seen at night, and his most memorable shots tend to be at dusk, such as the inspiring two-page spread of the Cortes’ grotto that shows the “invisible” outline of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the steeple-like pinnacle, or Richman’s dancing reflections.

Artist Andrea Caillouet designed the book, which features her richly textured photograph of rippling blue water on the cover. Publisher Lewis Fisher of Maverick Publishing wrote the introduction, and other contributors are Kim Abernethy, executive director, and Mike Addkison, project director. Perhaps the funniest part is the short essay about the red tape involved in creating public art, which doesn’t have a byline.



Atwell goes into detail about each project. Allen had his two children take snapshots of the river, from which he extracted pixels of native colors that he then applied to the stainless steel mesh of his panels, which seem to flicker with different colors as you walk past. Fontana sees himself as a curator of sounds who has focused his attention on sounds we tend to be unaware of, amplifying them in his installation near SAMA so that, for example, the calls of birds are exaggerated and made more vivid, causing listeners to be more sensitive to their environment.

Not all the projects are a 100 percent success. Richman, who once did light shows for the Velvet Undergound, didn’t reckon on the force of the wind under his bridge, which has caused dozens of the prismatic strips to break off and fall in the river. Though Schlesinger’s glow-in-the-dark concrete sounds like a good idea, which he plans to patent, the actual effect is so minimalist as to be hardly noticeable.

But the River Foundation is to be congratulated on its gamble on public art, which is often seen as an “add-on” rather than an integral part of the project as it was on the Museum Reach. Lipski’s glowing fish and Cortes’ magical grotto are just as much a hit with the locals as the tourists.

Note: All photographs by Mark Menjivar and courtesy of the San Antonio River Foundation, except for shot of the book's creative team.


  
 
    

Jack Gron’s macabre, medieval-looking cast-metal toys include a wheelbarrow heaped with skulls, the chilling curves of a hydrogen bomb and a grinning death’s head that make three-dimensional the folly and futility of war.

As anyone who watches the Antiques Roadshow knows, cast-iron toys are highly sought after, and Gron’s toys have the look of collectible antiques. But what if instead of bright uniforms and the glory of the battlefield, war toys showed the horror and destruction that are the inevitable result of military combat? Think Goya’s “Disasters of War” in heavy metal.
  
“My work has grown into personal statements, experiences and reflections of the times in which I live,” Gron says in his artist’s statement. “I find satire and humor with an edge serve as powerful tools to enable me to state my views through industrial processes and materials.”

Gron’s “A View from My Toy Box” is on view through June 16 at Gallery Nord, along with new paintings and assemblages by San Antonio artist Missi Smith.

Head of the art department at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, Gron is originally from Steubenville, Ohio, where his family worked in steel mills, plants and mines. He worked on blast furnaces producing iron that was converted into machine parts as well as structural and sheet steel. Now he uses these industrial processes to make sculpture. While his earlier works appear more formalist and abstract, these latest pieces are playful and accessible, but with a bite.



A shiny, silver-colored, smiling kewpie doll -- like a little angel run amok -- pushes the wheelbarrow full of skulls in “Angel of the Harvest.” With rust-colored stains accenting its crevices and creases, a giant skull rides in a wooden wagon being pulled by a bomb across a battlefield strewn with bones, bullets and the bodies of soldiers in “Celebration Parade.” “Pacifier” could be a suitcase-size atomic bomb. A death’s head wearing a straw hat grins evilly from the grille of “Little Sweeper.”

Grisly and with a dash of Big Daddy Roth meets Halloween, Gron’s war toys are handsomely crafted, yet appear old and worn. Gron considers color important in conveying meaning and emotion. He rubs oil color into the surfaces, buffs them, and then seals with a clear lacquer or wax, which creates a stain or patina that allows the metal to shine through. He uses forged, fabricated and cast metals as well as steel, stainless steel, bronze, brass, cast iron and aluminum.

But not all the pieces are war-related; some just comment on everyday atrocities. A clown’s head delivers a hamburger on a wagon in “24 Hour Delivery,” with only a small skull riding the front-end plow. Cubicle-dwelling salary slaves can probably identify with the man who hanged himself over his desk chair upholstered with spikes in “Chair-man I Don’t Like Mondays.” A space shuttle that looks ready for the wrecking yard blasts off in “Monument to a Crumbling Culture.”


 
With a BFA degree in sculpture from the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, Gron operated a sculpture studio in Chicago and taught at the University of Cincinnati, University of Kentucky and Northern Arizona University before moving to Texas in 2005. He’s also taught internationally in Italy, England and Poland, where he had an artist residency in 2007 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk.
  
In Corpus Christi, Gron has created a Mobile Foundry, equipped with a portable crucible furnace fueled by bottled propane, which he uses to visit schools and introduce students to the joys of molten metal.





The BP oil spill has added resonance to Louisiana-native Missi Smith’s blackened paintings and assemblages, which can appear like wet debris daubed with thick splatters of tar. She began the series called “Some Kind of Wheel” as a response to the Katrina disaster of 2005, using found objects textured with expressionistic slashes of paint. Some of her new paintings at Gallery Nord resemble aerial views of the BP oil spill -- green, blue and orange organic forms surrounding floating gobs of tar.


  
“I have used objects that have been discarded or lost and considered to be trash and with them created surfaces and environments that hopefully provoke the viewer to reflect on the mysteries of our history and our powerful relationship with the planet and the universe,” Smith says in her artist’s statement. “It can be a dirty business but also an exciting and challenging one.”

Other paintings have more of a suggestion of architectural forms, such as a pair of black slablike monoliths. Another suggests the sun setting in a haze of pollution. She doesn’t title her paintings, but her assemblages of boxes, lumber and wire covered with bright bursts of natural color spotted with Industrial Age soot suggest the uneasy reliance between the manmade and natural worlds. While Smith says she hopes to encourage people to reuse and create something new from discarded materials, her paintings also reflect mankind’s trashing of the natural world.