Lubbock Top Ten:
Ten Artists from the High Plains
Paul Fleming: Mint Lab
Redbud Projects at Gallery 101 | Barbara Davis Gallery
- Catherine D. Anspon -
Two fall shows in Houston highlighted the dual—and dueling—concepts of regionalism and internationalism that still coexist side by side in the Texas art arena. One could almost subtitle Lubbock on Top and Mint Lab as Westworld and Futureworld respectively, in a nod to the 1970s camp film classics about theme parks run by robots, and as a way to underscore the vastly different artistic approaches at play in the two exhibitions.
Lubbock on Top, billed as a roundup of the Lubbock art scene, presented ten protagonists (and one collaboration) in the cavernous space of Gallery 101. In total, 132 works were loosely curated in a survey that left the viewer wondering what commonalities might exist among any of these artists besides the shared geography of living and making art in West Texas. The works that really shone—the witty, irreverent cartoon-themed fare by the group that revolves around the Wheeler Brothers—would have been showcased to better effect in an exhibit focused exclusively on those five artists. They are: Jeffrey Wheeler, Bryan Wheeler, B.C. Gilbert, James Porter and Franklin Ackerley. The last, a fictitious artist, is a collaboration between Jeffrey Wheeler and James Porter, hybrid moniker formed by melding the middle names of each painter.
The remaining six artists simply did not fit with the Western-themed program of the Wheeler Bothers et al., leaving the viewer to try to decipher many disparate talents and styles. The two standouts amid this half dozen were James W. Johnson and Sara Waters. Johnson’s nightmarish paintings are alternately weird and sick, yet his oil on canvases also offer compelling examples of technical virtuosity. Their banal imagery with its puerile undertones is beguiling and beautiful, dazzling the viewer in the way that Dali’s seamless surrealism or, more recently, John Currin’s buxom babes achieve that goal. In stark contrast to Johnson’s strange figuration, Sara Waters’ simple minimalist drawings, produced by placing a rusting object on a square of paper, are spare and elegant. The other artists included make proficient work but are not cutting edge; instead these painters reinforce the idea that regionalism thrives in Texas, particularly outside the art making centers of the state.
Franklin Ackerley, But of course…, 2003
Oil and charcoal on paper
48 x 60 inches
The Wheeler Brothers can best be understood as anti-regionalists, good-naturedly spoofing stereotypes of Western art and life on the Texas Plains. They’re also often compared to The Art Guys. In fact, founder Jeffrey Wheeler has admired and emulated Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing for years, organizing annual springtime art events in downtown Lubbock that draw upwards of a 1,000 participants. These freewheeling happenings, entitled Ulterior Motifs, are something of a legend on the High Plains. It was no accident that the group made their Houston debut in a grand Ulterior Motifs extravaganza in November 2002 at The Art Guys’ World Headquarters, which provided an imprimatur and just the right amount of insouciance to launch the Wheeler Brothers into more mainstream, contemporary art circles in Texas.
Remove the happening aspect from the Wheeler Brothers and there’s still valid work in evidence. In fact, the best of this group’s efforts, crafted from a signature medium of oil and charcoal on paper, are paintings that recall both R. Crumb and Raymond Pettibon in their wry observations of local culture in places as unique as Happy, Texas. In terms of style, Jeffrey Wheeler fills his space with motifs of weirdness, while Bryan Wheeler, his brother, takes the same subjects (fast-food culture, the vast landscape of West Texas, American politics and art historical icons) and leaves sections of his painting empty. This is an effective vehicle for conveying the cultural blandness of Lubbock from the viewpoint of artists who probably both love and want to flee their hometown.
Bryan Wheeler’s Brown Bag Special exemplifies the group’s sassy cartooning: two stylish women clad in retro chic and rendered in charcoal gaze across the white space of the painting towards two cultural icons—boldly colored signage from Sonic and McDonald’s. Similarly, Franklin Ackerley’s But of Course hints at dark humor in the wide open spaces of West Texas with a composition featuring a gun toting child, a ’50s-era television set whose program features a woman holding her ears and a flat landscape enlivened by grain silos, a barbed wire fence and windmills.
Bryan Wheeler, Brown Bag Special, 2003
Charcoal and pastel on paper
30 x 40 inches
Wonderful vignettes like those described above provide droll takes on Americana glimpsed from a small town metropolis that makes Houston seem like New York City. The stylistic outsider is B. C. Gilbert, whose outrageous, oversized canvases contain sculptural elements. Gilbert’s kitschy imagery and brazen fauvist palette provides a foil to the finely detailed paintings of the Wheeler Brothers, while his tongue-in-cheek content also humorously skewers life in Lubbock.
In contrast to the Wheelers’ anti-regionalism, Paul Fleming creates sophisticated sculptures whose sexy curves and reductive coloration would be equally at home at the Menil or in Milan. (In fact, Fleming has an upcoming exhibit slated for Milan and recently exhibited to success in a group show at Sergei Tossi Arte Contemporanea in Florence.) His nonobjective abstractions are both minimal and poetic, and conceptually about as far from the West Texas imagery of the Wheeler Brothers as Houston is from Lubbock.
Fleming’s fall show at Barbara Davis, aptly titled Mint Lab, hinted at the scientific approach of the artist. It was also one of the most memorable solos of the season, as Fleming’s futuristic sculptures created an engaging energy with the gallery space, located in the historic 1920s-era Warwick Hotel.
Paul Fleming, Unit 2-28 (detail), 2003
Hydrocal and resin
5 x 56 x 1 1/2 inches
Fleming’s methodology begins with casting ubiquitous consumer items in luminous, white hydrocal. These can be as simple as a plastic salad bowl or the packaging from an electronic device. After molding a series of identical, curvilinear objects, Fleming applies resin colors to the orifices of the sculptures. His palette is optimistic and juicy—aqua blue, deep tangerine, egg-yolk yellow, rosebud pink—hues that feel like fashion-influenced shades. (The artist once told me that he clips lifestyle magazines as sources for his buoyant colors).
Mint Lab highlighted sixteen recent sculptures whose varying sizes, configurations and palettes yield visual surprises afresh with each piece. Recognize Summertime featured five vertically arranged circles of hydrocal, dinner-plate-sized, and filled with sunny yellow epoxy. The horizontal Unit 2-28 resembled upside down Popsicles, with alternating resin bands of aqua, amber and velvety brown. Another standout and the sole floor sculpture (the others were wall-dependent), Padder II suggested twenty-third century amoeba-like life forms, whose tangerine and yellow centers gazed at the viewer like all-seeing Cyclopean eyes.
In summary, both the Wheeler Brothers and Fleming indicate how far we’ve come in several decades with, respectively, their adroit anti-regionalism and pure internationalism. Both currents happily co-mingle in the Texas art scene circa 2004.
Paul Fleming, Padder II, 2003
Hydrocal and resin
4 feet in diameter x 3 inches