Everyday Voice: Investing the Mundane

A curated selection of 100 word reviews from Eutopia for Temporary Art Review.

Marjorie Schwarz
Dutton Gallery [link] Dallas Art Fair, 2014

Filled with faint traces of everyday objects, Schwartz’s shadowy still lives possess a kind of lightness that acknowledges the dark. As if seen through a tinny x-ray her images play with perception, abstracting the stuff of life into soft, haloed shapes. Spare surfaces and thin washes depict traditionally feminine things: flowers in vases on draped and patterned fabrics, odd keepsakes asymmetrically stacked and on the verge of anti form, bits of ephemera made precious. Like old photos blushing with technicolor, Schwartz’s strange scenes exist awkwardly, as if found in a foreign land–one that is excruciatingly lovely and painfully bright.

~ Kristen Cochran

To signal memory we employ a blurry image, the hazy focus reflecting the supposed impressional vagaries of memory. Schwarz’s paintings employ this method, yet sidestep the initial sappiness of nostalgia: the subjects of contemplation are too mundane to withstand emotional scrutiny. Domestic subjects become soft stains scrubbed free of narrative detail, crisply hemmed into existence by flat tonalities, which tend to show more character, more will to life, than the wilting items exposed. Humbly sized, the eradicated still lives tenuously collapse the grand narrative of formal abstraction with a humanist concern for the fragile banal.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of Dutton Gallery

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Sally Glass
a history of laziness
Deep Ellum Windows, Dallas [link] May 24, 2014

It was the perfect time to visit Sally Glass’s exhibition: late.
The time of dreaming, intimacy, personal reverie. In the cavernous space Glass had erected sheetrock walls to form a small room whose front was the glass window opening onto Main street. Public/private. This room contained a comfy chair, sofa, bookshelves and carefully selected reading material. There was another room in the back -tiny, cavelike- which screened a video of a personal nature. In between was a door mounted with stripes of neon light. The feedback loop between laziness and productivity/inner and exterior worlds.

~Karen Weiner

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Kelly Kroener
corework
RE Gallery, Dallas [link] March 7 – April 6, 2015

Big pieces hang like tapestries; but instead of being insulating and ornate, Kroener’s are breathing and modest, lining a cottage instead of a castle.  They hide and replace real windows with other views: into the interior of her husband’s jeans; or of flowered bed-sheets transformed into curtains fringed like the flaps partitioning coolness in a florist’s shop.  Dyed, netted, and stitched together by Kroener’s hands, the show shares an architecture of intimacy with 2-D shapes echoing the 3-D clothing from which they came or might become; a few singed scraps echo the slower heat of bodies once wrapped.

~ Carolyn Sortor
images courtesy of RE Gallery, photographs by Frank Darko 

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