The evening started at Barry Whistler, where Ann Stautberg is showing large scale floral photographs, with enhanced oil wash color saturation. Lush, tasteful and fleshy, and interestingly enough, somewhat non-erotic. Next door, in the project room at Road Agent, new sculptures by Thomas Feulmer of tiny creatures cavorting on candy-color gloss pedestals looked good enough to eat.
Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls
Steven Larson at The Public Trust
A couple of standouts from the excursion were in the On Solid Ground group show at The Public Trust. Steven Larson's graphite and watercolor drawings place oddly disjunctive piles of urban decay within a traditional landscape format, the distressed layering of erasure and smears belying a draftsman's precision.
Alongside Larson, hung Phoenix-based artist Colin Chillag's take on the Tree of Life. Here, he puts a new and humorous spin on Ernst Haeckel's discredited theory of recapitulation. This large format (76x76 in.) painting of the phylogenetic family tree looks more like hacked plumbing work, with various branches connecting a tapir, marmoset, a Walt Disney bluebird, Homo Sapiens, a tangled mass of spaghetti, and well, you get the idea. Owner/director Brian Gibb says each of these guys is in New American Paintings No. 78 (West edition), if you want to check them out.
Collin Chillag at The Public Trust
Peter Barrickman at And/Or
As I arrived at And/Or Gallery to close out the night, owner/director Paul Slocum and crew were comparing Sharpie rendered eyeball and scar fake tats drawn on each other's hands. Milwaukee artist Peter Barrickman had one of the cooler looking of the faux ink jobs, but his mixed media paintings on paper were the real scene stealer. Squishy, messy street depictions with cobblestone paint squirts and doodles are my best attempt at quantifying this talented Midwesterner's oeuvre.
Nights like this show that there's still life breathing in this carnival pavilion known as Dallas. This ghost, on the other hand, may or may not be dead.
