New Art in Austin: 22 to Watch
Austin Museum of Art
- Rebecca S. Cohen -
Twenty-two is a lot of artists to watch, let alone to write about in a coherent way. I imagine forty-four eyes searching this review, wondering whether his or her name is mentioned. I hate to disappoint. Curators selected work for New Art In Austin: 22 to Watch, the museum’s second triennial, as a “survey of emerging and under-recognized artists who live and work within fifty miles of the state’s capitol,” according to Austin Museum of Art Adjunct Curator James Housefield’s introductory essay. Artists were chosen by Housefield, AMOA Director Dana Friis-Hansen, AMOA Director of Exhibitions and Education Eva Buttacavoli, as well as Joan Davidow, Director, Dallas Center for Contemporary Art and Clint Willour, Director and Curator, Galveston Arts Center.
The first 22 to Watch drew record crowds and substantial attention from the local media. As for this installment, a quick perusal of the artists’ bios reveals that only four were born in the capital city, while the rest began life elsewhere: Pakistan, Hungary, California, Nebraska—even Rusk, Texas. Credentials include stints at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program; two are self-taught. As Housefield notes in his essay, this installment includes many “conceptually oriented ‘crossover’ artists who resist the limits of any single medium, process or genre.” By including such artists, perhaps New Art in Austin can forge a bond between the city’s heretofore unsophisticated audience and the contemporary art world’s diverse practices, which range from installation to traditional media conceived with an eye toward global trends.
In keeping with Housefield’s supposition, Jason Singleton’s site-specific installation greets—or perhaps confounds—would-be visitors before they even enter the museum. The artist reversed the “push/pull” lettering on the museum’s door handles and signage on the smoked glass window wall so that the text reads as if reflected in a mirror. It is a very subtle intervention but infinitely more satisfying than his too-small photographs of strangers peering through the windows, which are mounted over the reception desk.
Alia Hasan-Khan, Greetings from…, 2005
Series of six postcards dispensed from a rack
4 x 6 inches each
Nearby, in a postcard rack, Alia Hasan-Khan displays six different cards with travel images that project a sense of loneliness—even dread. On the back of each, messages relay incidents of racial or social profiling gleaned from interviews with members of the local Arab and South Asian community. Audience participation—and a social ethos—is a key element in the work; visitors are encouraged to take a card with them.
Jerry Chamkis offers sound, an often-underrepresented medium in terms of museum shows. His piece Kosmophone is an electronic contraption that makes, according to Housefield’s essay, the “visible invisible” by “turning gamma rays into sound,” altered as people pass through the gallery. In turn, Kosmophone, which in itself is not particularly interesting to look at, disrupts the visitor’s interaction with other works. This is especially true in the adjacent space where the ink-stained bubbles in Samantha Krukowski’s video, Bubelen, seem to rise and fall to the sounds produced by Kosmophone. Admittedly, the noise interacts less annoyingly with fixed images, such as Krukowski’s bubble-produced drawings on polyester film.
Novel use of media extends past sound and into more familiar visual modes, many of which are taken to the extreme. Young-Min Kang’s two “reshaped” and impossibly energetic print-based works—one piece at AMOA and a second installed at City Hall—confirm Housefield’s analysis that this artist alters his media both “materially and philosophically” by expanding into three dimensions. Rendered from deconstructed Spiderman comic books, Negative Exposure (Kang’s work at AMOA) emerges weblike from one corner of the room. A nearly life-sized digitized scene sliced to ribbons and reassembled on metal armatures, the work caroms toward the viewer to powerful effect. Hana Hillerova also offers a three-dimensional print-based construction that charges out of a corner of the gallery, as if wayward strokes from an abstract painting are attempting to escape into the room.
Samantha Krukowski, Troposphere, 2005
Ink on polyester film
24 3⁄4 x 36 3⁄4 inches
The Architect’s Desk, a complex installation by Peat Duggins, shows off the artist’s prowess as a draftsman, as well as his penchant for smart, suburbia-bashing social commentary and a fondness for blimps. He shares a gallery with Heather Johnson, who—despite her drearily familiar exhortation to the viewer “to think about the space differently” (doesn’t all art do that to some extent?)—creates a delicate and evocative twine and nail “drawing” across two walls and beyond. It is both ephemeral and indelibly rooted in memory. Sodalitas, the third “artist” represented in this gallery, is actually a collaborative trio offering an eighteen-panel painting that, according to the catalog, can be rearranged as long as it maintains its overall rectilinear form. One wonders if that is also true for the collaborators.
Michael Osborne, Interchange #2, 2004
Inkjet print on paper
40 x 50 inches
Shaune Kolber’s digital prints—images of photographers taking pictures of imposing sky-blue and pink vistas, many of which are natural landmarks famously monumentalized by Ansel Adams and the like—have little to do with nature’s grandeur. Rather, Kolber’s images have more in common with the carefully staged scenes of Nic Nicosia or Gregory Crewdson. Likewise, Michael Osborne’s photographs of desolate overpasses and roadways are so monumental and dramatic that they project the historic weight of Roman ruins. Meanwhile, anonymous “found photographs” inform Sterling Allen’s sleek graphite line drawings. Allen’s strangers engage in curiously ordinary behavior, leaving viewers to ponder its meaning if or when they tire of simply enjoying the easy flow of line on paper.
Shaune Kolber, Landscape #2, 2003
Digital print on paper
38 x 50 inches
I often resent the tyranny of videos in which an artist dictates the specific amount of time I must spend to view their work in its entirety. Karen Skloss’ Give and Take is different. Skloss manages to deliver a compelling, cohesive narrative about relationships by alternating the viewer’s focus from one flat-panel screen to another beside it, tracking the footsteps of a child shuttling back and forth between divorced parents. I watched the piece more than once, and I could revisit it again.
Going several steps further, Zack Booth Simpson, a “self-taught artist, database and language engineer, video game designer, and molecular biologist” presents an interactive work that serves as a metaphor for my—or anyone’s—occasional impatience when looking at art. His floor projection of a shallow pool of water ripples when the viewer walks across it; soon, flowers and bright dragonflies magically appear. But if one rushes about trying to hurry the magic along, the projector dims and the fantasy pool disappears entirely. I am chastened!
The catalog informs us that Ledia Carroll is “taking the outside in” by using a series of transparent tubes to channel water—and the viewer’s attention—away from the building’s outdoor fountain and into the galleries. The result is a large, angular yet elegant three-dimensional line drawing that exits the gallery through a door (usually kept closed), pierces the building’s window wall and ends—and then begins anew—in the fountain outside. The soothing sound of water as it flows through translucent pipes fills the space.
It is frustratingly difficult to achieve a full understanding of Carroll’s production—or of many other artists in the exhibit, for that matter—based on the one or two works presented by each. Accordingly, viewers are advised to take the exhibition title at face value—to literally “watch” for opportunities to see additional works by these artists in the coming months and years. I look forward to it.