Kim Dingle at Front Gallery

by Robert Boyd

The ecology of art means that sometimes galleries close and sometimes now ones open. I was driving by the old Apama Mackey and saw a "for sale" sign on its cool container-car exterior. Sad but it happens. It's a tough business, making a gallery go. More hopeful are the appearance of two new galleries on the scene.  Cardoza is located where The Temporary Space used to be. What's exciting there is that Mark Flood has a show coming up on October 14. Ironically, Christopher Cascio has a show opening there in November--he showed there when it was the Temporary Space.

In the meantime, Front Gallery had its inaugural exhibit on Saturday, October 8. The Front Gallery is so named, I'm guessing, because it is the front room of artist Sharon Engelstein's house. It's my experience that galleries in houses are kind of half-assed affairs. If people live in the house, it feels like you are walking into someone's private living space. You find yourself stumbling over furniture. If the house has been converted to a gallery, the rooms often feel like they are the wrong dimensions--ceilings too low, the hallways between "gallery" rooms are awkward, there are awkward windows, etc. This awkwardness is in part due to the fact that I have a certain expectation of a gallery--big room with a high ceiling, painted white.

And there is no doubt when you walk into Front Gallery that it is quite literally a front parlour. But it worked as a gallery for this show because the art was perfectly in scale with the room and because it was clearly separate from the rest of the house.



Kim Dingle installed at Front Gallery

So not only does Front Gallery look great, but it started off its life with a completely excellent show. Kim Dingle is a Los Angeles artist who is best known for her drawings and paintings of hyper-active girls--Priss, the Wild Girls, Fatty and Fudge. I believe the girls portrayed here are Fatty and Fudge.



Kim Dingle, untitled, oil on vellum, 2011

She has said all of the girls are based on herself, but also specifically references Wadow Dingle, her neice, who was born with brain damage that caused violent outbursts during her childhood. That's what we see in these drawings--explosions of violent energy.



Kim Dingle, untitled, oil on vellum, 2011

The medium is interesting. Anyone who has painted with oil paint knows how slippery it is (unlike acrylic paint, which is sticky). And vellum, a transparent, ultrasmooth drawing surface, is also quite slippery (unlike, say, canvas). Using oil on vellum allows an artist to paint in two ways simultaneously--to put paint down onto the vellum and to pull it off. In short, erasing paint is potentially as expressive as adding paint. That's what we see in these pieces.



Kim Dingle, untitled, oil on vellum, 2011

The double-slipperiness of the medium encourages a sketchy, expressionist approach, which suits the subject. There's just enough there to show you what you need to see. In the vigor, violence and economy, these paintings remind me the comic strips of the 1920s and 30s--not the pretty, highly rendered ones like Price Valiant or Little Nemo, but the more streetwise, working class comics like Popeye, The Bungle Family, and Krazy Kat.



Kim Dingle, untitled, oil on vellum, 2011

The west wall of Front Gallery is where the fireplace is. So for this show, the works on that wall were distinct from the Dingle pieces on the north and east walls. Over the mantle was this drawing:



Robert Crumb, untitled, ink on a placemat, 2000

Robert Crumb is another artist whose work recalls those early 20th century newspaper comic strip artists. But as he has gotten older, his work has become more detailed and baroque. One can see that in this sketch. These placemat sketches were done in restaurants in the small town in France where he lives. He is, obviously, a compulsive doodler. (So compulsive that three books of these sketches have been published.) It's astonishing to look at this or to read the books and realize that this is what he does while sitting around waiting for his pizza to be ready.



Sharon Engelstein, various maquettes

Finally, on the small shelves beside the fireplace, Engelstein placed what appear to be maquettes for some of her own pieces.It's interesting to see them so small and devoid of color.

In short, a successful first show for Front Gallery.

Looking At Art Around Town

 Robert Boyd

I started out this weekend driving out to Sharpstown to Alta Arts. I have a lot to say about this relatively new art organization. Their new structure, pictured below, is amazing. And Sharpstown, just outside the Loop, needs some art. The question is, is Alta Arts the organization to facilitate this? It can’t be denied that they have put their money where their mouth is. Their galley is the whitest white-cube in town.

The current exhibit, abstract painters by David Hacker is only the second in this new space.

Alta Arts Director of Programming, Alexander Squier, told me that Hacker’s work is purely abstract, but I kept seeing landscape elements. That space between landscape and abstraction made me think of Richard Deibenkorn or, closer to home, Bas Poulos.

Over at Front Gallery, which recently celebrated its 10th annivesary (I was there for its first show, Kim Dingle). Their current show feature work by Erika Whitney. The painting above is called Intentions. This painting reminded me of word paintings by Dana Frankfort and Christopher Wool. Closer to Frankfort than Wool. Legibility is not the function of these painted words.

But only a couple of them feature painted words. This one is called Wacky Garden.

This is You’re Getting Warmer.

Over at Bill Arning Exhibitions, I looked at a big group show. Led Zep by Austin artist Alyssa Kazew made me laugh.

As you can see from this detail, she lays down the black paint wet on a red underpainting, then scrapes away the darker paint. The effect has an uncanny feeling of memory for me. Like Proust and his madeleine, this gives me strong high school nostalgia. Of desks that have had rock and roll bands and logos carved into them—Led Zep, Skynnard, Blue Oyster Cult, etc. I am transported back to Memorial High School in the late 70s looking at this painting.

I’ve seen Gerardo Rosales’s work before at the Blaffer Art Museum. It is colorful and intense. It almost sparkles. This painting is called Danta, which is Spanish for “elk.”

Another sparkly painting is Tigra Mariposa (“Tigra” doesn’t translate into English, but is similar to “Tigre” meaning tiger. A Mariposa is a butterfly.) When I saw it, I instantly recalled Gabriel García Márquez’s descriptions of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I thought of Macondo because every square centimeter of Tigra Mariposa is teeming with life.

Robert Boyd's 2011 Honorable Mention

All of the shows listed below were excellent, and on a different day, I might have placed any one of them in the top 10.

Lisa Gralnick: The Gold Standard at Center for Contemporary Craft. This was a very interesting show that included sculptures made of plaster and gold--where the percent of gold was determined by how much gold it would take to buy the thing depicted.




Stephanie Toppin's couch in Jim Peterson, Jr.'s garage

Stephanie Toppin's couch. Of all the things associated with the Art Car Parade this year, this is my favorite. After the parade, Toppin's couch was lost for several months until I happened to find it at Jim Peterson, Jr.'s house. Mystery solved!


The Time Travel Research Institute Presents by Patrick Turk at Art League. Instead of his usual dense psychedelic collages, Turk made these pieces have a sense of physical space and even added motion to some. Mindblowing.

Jim Nolan, Today is Tomorrow at Art Palace. Jim Nolan's art is what happens when minimalism goes downscale. Made often from items purchased at 99¢ Only stores, it is the perfect art for our belt-tightening times.


Jim Woodring, Lazy Robinson, charcoal on paper

Jim Woodring and Marc Bell, Walpurgis Afternoon at Lawndale. I'm picking a show I curated, which is a bit unfair. What can I say? I thought it was great--two cartooonists/painters whose work I've admired for decades, and between whom I felt there was a connection. It seemed natural.



Raul Gonzalez, More Work Ahead, ink and spray paint on floor laminate, 2010

Raul Gonzalez at the Caroline Collective. Raul Gonzalez is a real street artist--and by that, he paints Houston's streets and uses as motifs street signs. Indeed, the colors of street signs pervade his work. He has created the vision of Houston that seems most true.


Myke Venable, MV 25 Silver/Scarlet Red/Black, acrylic on canvas, 2011

Myke Venable at Sonia Roesch. The only way these paintings could be more minimal would be to turn them from two or three color paintings to one-color paintings. As a consequence of their minimal content, they lack autonomy--they collaborate, in a sense, with the room they're in. And that's what I like about them.

Southern/Pacific at Lawndale. Really lovely show filled with interesting pieces curated by recent transplant to Houston, Paul Middendorf. This was road-trip art--he picked up art in Portland, Oregon (where he used to live) and Marfa and finally Houston. It was a fine way to introduce Houston art viewers to some interesting out-of-towners.

 
Hagit Barkai, Aisen and Tyson, Oil on canvas, 2010

Hagit Barkai, Resistance at Nau-Haus. Hagit Barkai's paintings linger in my mind. It's not the extreme one, the ones showing highly distressed people--although those are good. It's piece like Aisen and Tyson and Home More or Less that stick with me.


Dennis Harper and Friends, iPageant at the Joanna. This show was a giant performance extravaganza. Dennis Harper constructed some of his patented oversized paper sculptures--this time of a 60s era television soundstage. It was within this construct, aided by multiple closed-circuit televisions, that Harper staged his variety show. I only hope it wasn't a one-time event.

Ward Sanders at Hooks Epstein. San Antonio artist Ward Sanders has had four shows at Hooks-Epstein, but for this one, he added a new element. In addition to his mysterious, lovingly-created boxes, he has a piece of text. It turns out his writing, at least in these short fragments, is excellent. The world of visual art could lose Sanders to the literary world.

Ibsen Espada, Reformulaciones at New Gallery. One of the original Fresh Paint artists, Espada has apparently laid low for a while. This show was a powerful (and hopefully triumphal) return. Muscular abstractions.


Sharon Engelstein's Green Golly got its own room at Pan Y Circos

Pan y Circos at PG Contemporary. Curated by yours truly. We had a huge space for this group show, and it turned out great. I am especially proud to have brought El Dinersito by Jorge Galvan to the attention of Houston's art crowd.

Robert Pruitt, You Are Your Own Twin at Hooks Epstein. Every time I've seen Pruitt's portraits, I've loved them. There seems to be a rising generation of artists and intellectuals who are heavily invested in African American identity and history and simultaneously into science fiction and gaming and other nerdy pursuits. For example, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. And Robert Pruitt.

Kim Dingle at Front Gallery. The Front Gallery is Houston's newest gallery, and its smallest. The inaugural show, full of oil-sketches of hyper-active girls, was a fantastic beginning.

Lisa Qualls, absence at Koelsch. Here is a highly conceptual show (portraits of an ancestor who left behind no visual image) that is simultaneously highly personal. I found it quite moving.