'Chill'
D Berman Gallery through Feb. 6

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
January 8, 2010

Congratulations, friend. You've breached the abstract membrane between one decade and another, successfully piloted your aging ship of self into a hangar of possibilities called The Rest of Your Life, and now it's time to chill. Now it's time for "Chill," to be precise, although that winter group show of visual art opened at D Berman Gallery in December of this past year. It's time for "Chill," because nothing quite becomes a hangar of possibilities as original artwork that delights the eye, that dazzles or soothes or sparks deeper cogitation in the mind, that does any or all of those things. It's time for "Chill," because the show is up for another month and because it's never not time to witness the beauty and ingenuity and documentation of reality, objective or otherwise, as rendered by artists as talented as the ones represented here.

(Maybe you've been to D Berman before, if only in your better opium fever-dreams, and so the huge room bisected by a freestanding wall is familiar to you. Maybe some of the works displayed are familiar, too, as this is a sort of retrospective of some of the best the gallery's offered in the recent past.)

In any case, behold: Cynthia Camlin's delicate watercolor renditions of icebergs, the parts we always see and the parts normally occluded by icy brine, their myriad facets defining and redefining what we mean by the words "blue" and "green" and "shadow" and "translucent."

Behold: Steve Wiman's arrangements of natural litter and humanity's abused and discarded everyday objects, laid out with the compelling precision of a Dorling Kindersley volume on material waste.

Behold: The sublime sculptures that Jennifer Maestre, inspired by sea urchin forms, builds from pencils – simple, yellow pencils – to achieve a divinity of curves and depths you'd think were beyond such quotidian instruments.

Behold: The modern sculptural landscapes that Leslie Mutchler has wrought toward illustrating the dovetails of human architectural order and relentless worldly chaos.

Behold: Sara Frantz's beautiful graphite renditions of sere and serene vistas marked by human shelter in Iceland and West Texas, Raychael Stine's photorealistic dogs hounding among and confounded by wild swaths of paint, Sydney Yeager's turbulent abstractions like stills from a horror movie about a hardcopy inbox possessed by Freddy Krueger.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so they say, and it's also in this fine exhibition at D Berman Gallery this winter, offering you an opportunity to brighten the beginning of 2010 with art while you simply, as the title slyly suggests, "chill."

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In the Game
For her first museum work, Jade Walker steps up to the plate and swings big

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
January 22, 2010

When you step into the space holding the large installation that Jade Walker has created for the Austin Museum of Art, there's no question where you are. The crunch of artificial turf under your feet, the bleachers filling the room: This is a stadium, and by virtue of the fact that you're looking up at the stands, you're on the field. In the game. Where the action is.

It's a place that the creator of this imposing, ambitious work should know something about. In Austin's visual arts scene, she's as deep in the action as it gets. Since making her way to Austin in 2002 to pursue graduate studies in sculpture at the University of Texas, Walker has taught art courses to children at AMOA's Art School. For six years, she's been teaching three-dimensional design to university students in the UT Department of Art & Art History. Since 2006, she's been the director of Creative Research Laboratory, the off-campus contemporary art gallery run by the department; 16 months ago, she was also named the curator for the gallery in the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center at UT; and this year, she's taking on the position of director of the new Visual Arts Center in the art department. On top of all that, she's been extremely busy as an artist, with her signature sculptures of found objects, fabric, and thread showing up in the annual faculty exhibitions at CRL and People's Gallery exhibitions at City Hall, the juried "New American Talent" exhibition in 2008 and Texas Biennial in 2009, and the solo installation "Trophy Room" at Domy Books this past September. At the risk of belaboring the sports metaphor, that much activity qualifies Walker as a starter for the local team. Certainly, AMOA saw her that way when it tapped Walker to be the first person to exhibit in its "New Works" series, which spotlights innovative local artists.

"We knew we wanted an artist who would experiment and transform the gallery," says AMOA assistant curator Andrea Mellard, and "we thought of Jade. We'd been watching her work shift in scale from small wall installations to human-sized floor sculptures and ceiling installations. We thought that she was ready to try a room-sized installation in a museum. Her work is also engaging formally, visually, and conceptually. Austin is known for a strong craft community, and while Jade has an M.F.A. and doesn't consider her work craft, we thought her use of textiles, DIY practice, and stitch-work would be exciting to that audience. Mostly, we wanted to choose an artist taking a leap in a new direction, and we thought Jade was ready to accomplish that."

Mellard called on Walker at her studio to broach the subject of her possibly taking on a "New Works" project: "I posed the question, 'If you could do anything in that room, what would you do?' Often, emerging artists have parameters to work within, like making work that fits into an allotted space in a group show or that will sell in a commercial gallery. I want this to be a place for experiment and play."

That's just what Walker was primed to do: "I was very interested in working on a large installation. There were no real parameters on the exhibition, and this was what really excited me about the opportunity."

As Mellard notes, Walker had been in the process of expanding her work, in terms of both the size of the individual sculptures and the space in which they were presented, and AMOA's invitation would really allow her to get big with it. She wanted to make work of a size that would command the space, confront the audience. "This exhibition afforded me the chance to completely take over a large space and push my skill set in terms of handling scale," she says. "It was necessary to have the staff and installation crew to make this piece happen." For Walker, "New Works" was the artistic equivalent of – okay, one more sports metaphor – the minor leaguer with dreams of the majors getting called up to the show.

In the AMOA project, Walker chose to take advantage of the opportunity not only to play with scale but to dig more deeply into a subject that had become a focus of her work: sports. While her previous art had been rooted in the human body, specifically in how it is affected by disease, aging, and physical abnormalities, it didn't include the strain and trauma that can be inflicted through athletics, mostly because Walker had little personal knowledge of or experience with sports.

"It was not until I read an excerpt from Michael Sokolove's text Warrior Girls in The New York Times that I homed in and started thinking about the ailments to the body caused by the drive in athletics," she says. "I found this text particularly interesting because it addresses young women's athletics. Gender issues in the arts run parallel with women's athletics. This led to discussions with female athletes, as well as investigating spaces that contain or glorify this intense passion. I am attracted to the way female athletes push the limits of the body while also feeling that this is not necessary and wondering how this will affect our future feminist efforts."

Walker took a swing at the topic with "Trophy Room," her site-specific installation at Domy Books. She carpeted the floor of the 11-foot-by-11-foot room with green artificial turf and swathed the walls with sky-blue fabric that rippled and puckered over indistinguishable shapes, bulges, and small ledges. Perched on each ledge was a small piece of sports equipment – a football, a bowling pin, a golf club head – with pink and tan fabric sewed over it. The work managed to evoke in this tightly enclosed space a sense of the outdoors where these sporting activities take place, and the fabric suggested the flesh with which we touch and grasp and play with these objects, almost as if skin had grown over them from all that contact and someone had carefully, tenderly sealed these playthings inside it. Walker had created an immersive setting for the viewer in establishing a relationship between our bodies and athletics, but she thought that, in the words of Mellard, "there was more to flesh out of the subject for her AMOA piece."

As curator for Walker's "New Works" project, Mellard assisted her in the fleshing out. "I contacted a friend who is a sports historian, and he gave Jade and me a reading list – books on women's sports history, documentary photographs of stadiums and sporting events, et cetera, and contacts for a sports historian at UT. We talked about artists' work relating to sports that might inspire her, particularly a group show called 'Mixed Signals' about masculinity and sports. I was mostly a sounding board for Jade as the project developed. Once she had a pretty clear idea of what she wanted to do, I encouraged her, asked questions, and helped solve logistical problems. We had four more studio visits, when I'd come see the progress of the sculptures and give her feedback."

It was assistance that Walker found invaluable. "Andrea visited my studio a number of times. We corresponded often throughout the process. She also was very involved in helping with print pieces and solving mistakes that came up during the installation process. When they delivered green instead of orange turf while I was out of town for work, she found a way to get the mistake remedied within days. The encouragement from Andrea to think big and to make the piece exactly what I imagined – with no compromises – was also important. I told her this was the first 'large-scale' piece that came out to be exactly what was in my mind and in my sketches."

What came out of Walker's mind was a full-size section of bleachers, like you might find behind a backstop at Krieg Fields or a Little League ballpark, but completely covered in pale-beige fabric with a ruffled skirt around its base. Where the spectators sit are an assortment of different of seats and cushions, on which are set abstract sculptures made from sports equipment, colored fabric, plastics, and fur, some of them tied with ribbons or sewn with thread. Most don't look remotely human, yet we make the connection with them as such through the way these objects occupy the seats that we would at a sporting event and the recognizable fragments of items we use that poke through the enveloping, binding cloth: a barbell, a showerhead, the rubber tip of a crutch, a hot-water bottle, a boxing glove. Because some of them appear worn or used, they convey a sense of damage sustained on the field of play, the thread suggesting sutures to bind their wounds, the cloth their protective bandaging. Given that the artist has purposely placed us on the field – you can't take a step without being reminded of it by that skeevy scrunch of the bright-orange plastic turf – we're left to consider what it means to still be in the game (whatever game that is) and what injuries we might yet incur that would consign us to the stands beside these wounded "players." Walker's choices of certain fabrics and decorations and the protuberances of a distinctly sexual nature that she's added to some of the objects bring gender into the game and provoke questions about just who gets to play when it comes to sports, who's left to watch, and what that means. With Spectator Sport, the artist has succeeded in filling up the "New Works" exhibition space not just with the commanding physical structure but with ideas and questions that linger long after you've stepped away from the field. No wonder Walker is pleased.

She isn't alone. "I'm thrilled with Spectator Sport as our first 'New Works' project," says Mellard. "The room glows with color, the carpet crunches under footsteps. The overwhelming scale of the bleachers draped in fabric and seated with abstract figures confronts you like they are watching you on the field. Longer looking surprises you by revealing all the found materials Jade recycled, covered, painted, wrapped, and turned into art. Jade's installation works on several levels: Schoolchildren love playing 'eye spy,' M.F.A. art students appreciate her connections to feminist art history, UT athletics fans are surprised to find contemporary art about sports, and tourists have never seen anything like it. It's exactly the kind of cutting-edge new work I hoped to see in that space."

The public reception to the work pleases Walker, too: "The response to the work has felt superpositive. My favorite responses were from children the night of the opening and the preview night. Their interpretations are always innocent and honest, and I have found their delight in the work inspirational."

Inspirational. A quality that's common to narratives about sports – the athlete who trains, who perseveres, who triumphs, sometimes against injury, personal tragedy, seemingly insurmountable odds – and Walker's work with the subject seems to be informing what she hopes to do as an artist, a teacher, and a curator. "In thinking about my aspirations not only as a part of the Austin arts community but specifically in each of my roles, I keep thinking of a word that is so overused: inspire," she says. "I want to arouse viewers with my work as an artist. I want students to think about new ideas as we engage in conversation, and I want to challenge the community as I program the Visual Arts Center. The Visual Arts Center will be an instigator – a place for process and risk. Qualities applicable to the Visual Arts Center may include being immediate, flexible, vital, welcoming, all-encompassing, experimental, educational, open, evolving, collaborative, collective, explosive, and challenging."

Sounds like Jade Walker plans to be in the game for a long time to come.

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'David Bates Since 1982: From the Everyday to the Epic'
Austin Museum of Art – Downtown through Jan. 31

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
January 22, 2010

Those who love to be out in nature won't mind going inside the Austin Museum of Art to see "David Bates Since 1982: From the Everyday to the Epic." In large paintings such as The Rookery, we're encompassed by the cacophony of the bird world. The swampy landscape is devoid of people, glorious and dangerous: A snake eyes a bird in the marshes, the trail of alligators swimming registers. But the sounds and riot of a burgeoning natural world hold sway. The life force of the swamp just explodes – there sits a frog, there a woodpecker pounding out its tune, water lilies bloom, egrets nest – yet it is all under a foreboding sky that one hardly notices.

We haven't seen much of Bates' art in Austin in a while, so it is great to see nearly three decades in the evolution of this Texas artist laid out in rooms that encapsulate chapters in his story. Organized by AMOA Director Dana Friis-Hansen, this core sample of Bates' work goes back 27 years and focuses on the faux-naive or folk-inspired paintings for which he is deservedly well-known, along with his forays into sculpture.

While Friis-Hansen has long admired Bates' work, one facet that drew him to organizing the show was the Katrina paintings. For Friis-Hansen, Bates is a "talented and interesting painter, but his current work is spectacular." The show is organized to introduce Bates' evolution from work that focused on the quotidian as subject matter – Gulf Coast scenes and paeans to people who influenced him, such as the folk artist William Edmondson or the painter's father – through to the Katrina series, which now carries an even larger resonance in the wake of Haiti's recent disaster. Friis-Hansen notes that with the Katrina paintings, Bates is "adding to the dialogue, not just following trends. It is about what art can tell us about experiencing the world."

In essence, for 30 years, Bates has been creating a personal cosmology that embodies the everyday and has grown to include the epic. Perhaps Bates wouldn't have done the Katrina series if he had not experienced losing his parents in old age. We see Bates' father in a bookend experience: hale and hearty in Woodcutter and lost to the foggy throes of Alzheimer's in W.M. 1998-2001.

In Woodcutter, as in many of the paintings, the large scale fills our vision, placing us nowhere but there. The up-tilted, orangey-brown earth glows warm from sunlight we feel but don't see and jauntily presents the image to us like a bouquet. The woodcutter is surrounded by a view of the edge of woods, a cabin, and a pile of the day's labor. Tree rings in every imaginable form abound in the stack of logs the satisfied woodcutter has produced, and they seem to be there, along with the plaid shirt on the happy woodcutter, to create a riot of pattern that, though familiar, you haven't seen in nature quite that way before. Nor have you spied a shirt like that in any L.L. Bean catalog – its pattern reflecting the windows of a house more than a checkered work shirt. Yet Bates' patterns, throughout the show, are specific, familiar, and recognizable.

We see the artist's father again near the end of the show, just before the Katrina paintings, yet one would not connect this portrait with the woodcutter. The once strong and vibrant man is painted in grays and broken lines, the boundaries between his brain and the world completely eroded. He is there, and he is dissolving before our eyes.

Each of these paintings is a tree-ring time capsule in the artist's journey. The center of the exhibit shows Bates wrestling with what seems to be a dead end in his painting style – as in the sculpture Man With Snake II, which depicts a man wrestling with a lively snake. Bates turned to sculpture to crack his art open, and his paintings became richer, deeper, and more complex spatially. As I leave the show, I walk between The Sculptor, a painting of the folk artist William Edmondson carving his art as well as gravestones, and the life-affirming Woodcutter. It is easy but sobering to leave the show thinking that life, like art, is in the making.

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