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For urbanites who yearn for open spaces, Cory Steffen’s Lost and Found Scapes offer a vision of the countryside reclaimed. Though sublimely rendered, these images of trees, rivers, vineyards, and skies amount to an ironic departure from traditional landscape fare.
Exactly 100 years ago, a seasoned cowboy boarded a train for New York, hoping to fulfill his dream of becoming a professional artist. When he returned to his native California a dozen years later, Edward Borein was considered by many to be among the finest interpreters of the American West, an artist whose depictions of cowboys, Native Americans, and the rapidly disappearing culture of the Old West were valued as much for their accuracy as for their artistic merit.
Although mention of Texas conjures images of cowboys, cattle, and conservatism, the Lone Star State is also host to a noteworthy contemporary art scene, generally unconcerned with stereotypical Texan iconography. The seven Texas-affiliated women artists featured in Don’t Mess with Texas infuse their works with a playfully provocative and firmly female exploration of culture and identity.
Genevieve Erin O’Brien’s dark night of the soul took the form of an abusive relationship, a lost job, and a trigger-happy president. With nothing left to lose, the young performance artist fled Los Angeles in 2003 to seek spiritual healing in the refuge of her parents’ house in Vietnam, just as the U.S. was about to invade Iraq.
The point of departure for this varied and stimulating exhibition is the year 1957, a watershed in American history and culture. Gathering paintings and objects from far and wide, exhibition curator Jeremy Tessmer demonstrates a discerning eye; there is more than historical coincidence at work in his selection.
“Nothing is worth painting without an element of jeopardy,” Robin Gowen maintains. It is a philosophy that yields a fascinating diversity in her current exhibit of landscapes.
There is a famous quote from the annals of surf history in which former world champion Nat Young, addressing the derogatory stereotypes of wave riding and the people who pursue it, comments, “We went wrong when we told everyone it was a sport.” Since the wave of surfing mania first broke across the landscape of pop culture-blasting a Beach Boys soundtrack and carrying a cute California girl named Gidget all the way from the Pacific Ocean to Ohio and back-it has been gobbled up by the masses like some sort of sweet but hollow brain candy: ideal fodder for commercials, crappy movies, and short-lived, neon-infused fashion movements that viciously betray the true underpinnings of the original Sport of Kings.
It is dark in the vast Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern museum; the only light emanates from two tracks of fluorescent light bulbs arranged runway-style along a length of white canvas. In between these tracks walks a naked man, his entire body covered in white grease paint. He walks slowly, like an overweight runway model on codeine. His languid pace might be intentional, or it might be a result of the catheters in his arms that hold open his veins, allowing his blood to drip onto the canvas beneath him.
Chris Messner’s photographs translate details into found art by isolating features of architecture and natural scenes and treating them as elements of composition. It is possible to view the results as mere decorative objects, an impression strengthened by their display in a retail setting.
Since its arrival on the Santa Barbara art exhibition scene, one of the greatest virtues of Brooks Institute’s Cota Street Gallery has been its willingness to embrace the photographic medium’s full range of techniques and aesthetics. From x-rays of deformed vertebrates to the kaleidoscope of colors found in the markets and wildernesses of far-off places, exhibitions in this space have run the photographic gamut
