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| Jane Mattingly - Art Contributor for modaustin.net writes a regular blog regularmain.com focusing on Texas Artists. |
| Austin Museum of Art celebrates “New Art in Austin: 15 to Watch” through May 22, 2011 Artists Spotlighted: Debra Broz, Nathan Green, Barry Stone The exhibits at the AMoA focus on 21st century contemporary American art. This much-awaited triennial exhibition initiated by this museum in 2002 selects emerging artists living within a 50-mile radius of the Capitol producing cutting-edge work and “celebrates the city’s thriving ongoing visual arts infrastructure.” Assembled are some of the most interesting young artists in Central Texas, i.e., talents to definitely to keep following. Some 350 artists applied to this fourth edition– a 30% increase over 2008 just shows the prestige this program acquired in a decade. Artists are attracted to this exhibit particularly because some past participants have gone on to be recognized by Austin’s Arthouse Texas Prize, the Whitney Biennial and residences at San Antonio’s ArtPace. |
| The team curating this fourth edition included Andrea Mellard, Interim Curator, AMoA and is accompanied by a scholarly full-color catalog with essays on each artist written by the three eminent curators from where I found the quotes below. The 15 “New Art in Austin” Delighted Finalists: Miguel Aragon (printmaking), Jesus Benavente/ Jennifer Remenchik (performance), Ben Brandt (sculpture), Debra Broz (sculpture), Elizabeth Chiles (photography), Santiago Forero (photography), Nathan Green (installation), Ian Ingram (drawing), Anna Krachey (photography), Robert Melton (video), Leslie Mutchler (mixed media), Ben Ruggiero (photography), Adam Schreiber (photography), Barry Stone (photography), J. Parker Valentine (mixed media). |
| Nathan Green - “There was something like 300 applicants… I’m thrilled to be a part of it.” One of Green’s pieces includes 7000 black polka dots painted onto a white wall. “I cut a small hole into that wall, took it home and painted it abstractly… “It’s sitting opposite the wall now.” |
| ”On The Road To Salvation Mountain,” 2009, mixed media on paper, 35 x 40 inches |
| Nathan’s large-scale paintings full of color and pattern result from the use of obvious blocky brushy shapes and bright paint squiggles straight from the tube. Crowded with detached imagery, thickly layered with vibrancy, in actuality his nonconventional paintings feel as if they’re working hard to extend past their surrounding physical limits. In “On the Road to Salvation Mountain” (2009), a whirlwind of wild linear abstraction overtakes a fast moving car with long-lashed eyes for headlights as it chugs down curvy, hilly intersecting roads in the middle of a beautiful nowhere. Three pyramids suddenly loom in the background while an all-seeing eye, stars and a yin-yang symbol sweetly hover amidst the fluffy white clouds. |
| His installations expand his exuberant work and wide variety of mediums into a conglomeration of playful and layered paintings fusing three- dimensional sculptures huddled together on pedestals into one giant joyful supernatural tableau. Born in Houston in 1980, Nathan received his BFA from the University of Texas at Austin. A founding partner of Okay Mountain Collective, he still shares creative projects with fellow Mountaineers. Group-wise he’s shown at Dunn and Brown Contemporary in Dallas, Freight and Volume, New York and Pulse Miami. Upcoming solos include venues like Art Palace in Houston, Richland College in Dallas and Prospect 1.5 in New Orleans. |
| Barry Stone easily engages the eye in his idealistic landscapes filled with natural beauty combined with the strangely supernatural created by brilliant manipulations of subjects, sets, actors, colors, surfaces and light. In “Artificial Pond Reflection” Barry documents a small body of perfectly clear water too beautiful to be true, “capturing an ephemeral moment when sunlight’s white sparkles group together in the shape of an apparition.” What makes it work, gives it its appeal is this water in Austin as all through Texas is successfully “human-made, fabricated to look natural.” A great influence on Barry is Ansel Adams, and this is understandable because of this famous photographer’s appreciation of nature in his early images of unspoiled nationa l parks. Barry asks “What is the truth? Is it nature, the park that nature has become, the subjective photographic representation of that park, the copy of that representation of that park, or this final painted one-of-a-kind expression?’ |
| “Artificial Pond Reflection, Austin, TX, 3.28.2009,” archival inkjet print, 34 x 22.5 inches |
| In the photograph of a horse with a single horn titled “I Met a Unicorn,” part of his Highway 71 series he “pays homage to those who have teased beauty from the mundane by photographing everyday life on the American highway such as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston questioning the line between the real and imagined, and how an image may mean more than it represents." Barry has exhibited in such special places as the International Center of Photography, Lawndale Center in Houston, Austin’s International Airport and the Arthouse in Austin. His work was covered in the New York Sun, Art Lies, Photography Post and Artnet and he received a commission in 2008 to create a public artwork for Buffalo Bayou Art Park in Houston in conjunction with Fotofest, an international biennial photography festival. This native Texan is represented by Champion Gallery in Austin and Art Palace in Houston. In 2001 he graduated from the University of Texas in his hometown of Austin with a MFA. |
| Debra Broz - creates her own fantastical, well executed hand built ceramic creations which she “substitutes for people, builds suspense in claustrophobic vignettes, and then releases the anxiety with surprises… My work is an opportunity for me to alter the viewer’s perception of an object, or to heighten their awareness of it.” Eleven of the altered ceramic pieces from her Oddities collection are on display. In this series she “seamlessly” reconfigures found “kitschy” porcelain animal figurines through addition, subtraction and recombination of pieces and parts together into not really whimsical but rather serious works of art. |
| “Feeding,” 2010, found ceramic objects, epoxy compounds, paint and sealer on painted wooden stand 7 x 6 x 6 inches |
| “Fun with a Porpoise,” 2011, found ceramic objects, epoxy compounds, paint and sealer 7.5 x 4.5 x 5 inches |
| She grew up in the rural Midwest surrounded by women who made decorative craft items using baked clay– a past common pastime of her compatriots. It wasn't until Debra moved away and trained as a china restorer she “reimagined these precious things.” Using my restoration training I modify the forms of existing objects, emulating the hand and banal, but through alteration they become disturbing and fascinating, little oddities that explore the fine line between the ordinary and the strange.” Since 2005 Austin is Debra’s home where she skillfully works as a porcelain/ pottery restorer, acting director of the Pump Project Art Complex gallery and studios, and editor of the art magazine, Cantanker. |
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