EUTOPIA

Iva Kinnaird

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Iva Kinnaird

Iva Kinnaird “Broke, Please Advise” 2018 _ Walmart shopping cart, bricks

 

Iva Kinnaird
A Two Page Paper on Impasse
The Reading Room, Dallas [link]
February 17 – March 24, 2018

Employing absurdist humor, Kinnaird’s exhibition riffs on Camus’ Sisyphus myth. Although many artists experience existential crises in the search for validation and meaning in their work, the timeliness of Kinnaird’s exhibit in context with the past 1year46days0hours44minutes36seconds resonates with a strong Barthesian punctum. The collapsed shopping cart of bricks and the grad-school dartboard reference the despair facing artists mired in mountains of art-school debt combined with the current bleak political culture. Using the metaphor of play, Kinnaird’s “games” provide diversion, while simultaneously pinpointing the futility of said gestures. Yet Camus’ ultimate message is about revolt. And we only have 1049days8hours26minutes24seconds left.

~ Colette Copeland
photos courtesy of the Reading Room, by Kevin Todora

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Paper into Sculpture

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Paper into Sculpture
curated by Catherine Craft
The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas [link]

The digital has emerged as the primary material for communication, replacing paper. Works featured in this exhibition engage paper’s historical links to systems of knowledge and its material (im)possibilities in intimate and epic works that render the invisible: time, space, and cycles of decay. The sacro-profane nature of paper is conceptualized from maps and scrolls to shredded, torn, and crumpled refuse. Franz West’s Sisyphos IX, 2002 confounds, as paper’s fragility is recast as an enduring mass. In Noriko Ambe’s Inner Water, an intricately cut wave unfurls, like pages, in a glacier-slow persistence of vision. In Marco Maggi’s Global Myopia, an encrypted topography of tiny, cut particulates is a metaphor for more is less in the information age.

~ Sara Cardona
images by Ryder Richards

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Tom Sachs

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Tom Sachs
Tea Ceremony
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas [link]

Sachs’ new focus, in coopting and hyperventilating the “religion” of the Japanese tea ceremony, manifests as highly American provisional approximations. Embodying the reductive apparatus of utilitarianism whereby traditional systems or concepts can become lightweight, cheap and nomadic embraces Eco’s “Travels in Hyperreality” or Venturi/Brown’s “Learning from Las Vegas” sign-as-system culture. Taken to insane levels of excess, one can track the adept’s passionate re-valuation through selective interpretation: a whisk becomes motorized = shortcut, while only one in one-hundred handmade bowls is acceptable.
This conversion to American systemic foibles dialogizes contradictory knowledge through subjective insight, allowing the possibility for rich, discursive reappraisal.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the Nasher Sculpture Center

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Acts of Aggression

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Manuel Chavajay, Oq Ximtali / They have tied us, 2017. Video performance, 2:58 min. Image courtesy the artist and Galería Extra.

 

Acts of Aggression
curated by Laura A. L. Wellen, Ph.D
SMU Pollock Gallery, Dallas [link]

Twelve Guatemalan artists, working 20 years after the end of the Guatemalan civil war, display a range of socially insistent works. Unified in their poignantly personal exploration related to the challenges of negotiating community, the exhibition highlights social projects, furtive acts of resistance, poetic games and performative gestures as proactive remembrance strategies. By channeling the reality of Guatemala (the socio-political environment) each work engages the viewer as witness, forcing the personal to become political, insisting on connectivity in public spaces and more intimately as strategies for resilience and tools for private insurrection.

~ Sara Cardona
images courtesy of the gallery

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Alison Jardine

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Flood, 2017, cement with pigments, 23 X 23 X 6″

Alison Jardine
Objects From a Future Past
Erin Cluley Gallery, Dallas [link]
Sept. 9 – Oct.14, 2017

Alison Jardine has transitioned from rural to urban landscapes, from delicately painted twigs to delicately concrete-cast plastic bags. Her former rambles on ancient UK paths provided fallen tree-trophies. Walks on paved trails now reward the artist with contemporary Dallas artifacts, recovered flotsam and jetsam from congested run-off streams.

Colors, tones, and textures are mixed into the wet concrete itself, not applied later. The finished skin of each work weaves a density of surface, a unified consistency that penetrates the whole organic mélange.

Like excavated steles, Jardine’s iconic formats suggest emblematic associations, recalling ritualistic, semiotic shapes, votive amulets, or generational site-markers.

~ Thomas Motley
images courtesy of the artist

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Frances Bagley

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Frances Bagley
The Lay of the Land
Kirk Hopper Fine Art, Dallas [link]

Articulated tendons of steel suggest a global meta-architecture tenuously propped, stretched and weighted. Signifiers affix the stabilizers, clamps and levels calling out for attendance to maintain and gauge the structural precarity. The “apparatus” manifests woes and catastrophe at each junction: sculptural ice floes leak or blanket a globe on a spindle, a human-o-replicant display parcels the body into fragments.

Our troublesome inaction is not simply casual denial; it is faith in Flusser’s “programmatic cosmology.” Decision making has been granted to the “apparatus” compelling us to blindly tend our ethos, to trust that the machine will produce our salvation.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the author, gallery and artist

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