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James Orellana & Two Pair by
Rebecca Cohen |
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D
BERMAN GALLERY David
Berman, founder and director of d berman
gallery, one of Austin’s newest art venues, invited J Hill and
Hillevi Baar of Houston and James Orellana and Pat Johnson of
Fayetteville, Texas to come together for a month-long exhibition.
Think of these two art couples in terms of Edward Albee's Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and
you get the impression that their encounter might produce sparks, not
to mention unforeseen truths. Like
Albee's George and Martha, James Orellana and Pat Johnson appeared to
dominate at first with their brash, bare all style, while Hill and
Baar seemed soft-spoken by comparison.
But things are not always what they seem.
James Orellana lays out his angst
through his imagery. Just
in case you don’t get it, his written statement explains that
"these images appeared to me by the hand of God after traumatic
experiences." He presents this work as "Carlos Maria,"
a pseudonym meant to distance this dream imagery from the small
painted landscapes he exhibits elsewhere. Here a little guy with a sword does battle to stave off the
artist's demons, which include the unruly Rio Grande, apocalyptic
storms, and abstraction-the figurative artist's true nightmare.
Orellana illustrates these dream sequences with more than passable
skill in charcoal, pencil, pastel and paint, producing thematically
varied compositions that echo how familiar nightmares repeat
themselves unbidden.
Pat Johnson presents ceramic murals
with a postmodern Aztec spin, ceramic tableaux in which she and
Orellana appear as actors. We
see them locked in what is clearly a familiar dialogue of overlapping
plot lines and fantasies: man and woman sail in a small boat, woman
perches precariously on a ceramic cloud; man and a moth couple
mysteriously. Five small
terra cotta female figures, each with a quirky array of personalized
details, stand side by side in a kind of fictionalized
autobiographical splendor. You
begin to wonder what these two artists talk about when they're alone
at night.
On the other side of the angled
center panel that runs diagonally through the gallery, J Hill and
Hillevi Baar conduct a cooler, more dispassionate exchange.
Quiet and whimsical, their work is made of less conventional
stuff - false eyelashes, hair, wax - as well as more traditional media
delivered with a lighter touch. Hill is the one with a Tammy Fay
fetish, setting a lavish assortment of false eyelashes against silk
brocade for Butterflies (The
Social Type), lashing tiny hairs to the heads of steel pins for Spiced
Up. His materials
list also includes chocolate, strawberry and vanilla -colored women's
high heels made of wax, and a pair of men's shoes cast in bronze.
And then there is the hair, a long Rapunzel braid, in once
case, and a bunch of smaller ones in Pin-up
Ponytails. You might say that while James Orellana preoccupies
himself with emotions and dreams that roil within, Hill explores and
pokes fun at the external condition.
He is hardly exorcising demons, but there is an edge to his
commentary. Hillevi Baar's esthetic sensibility is much like Hill's, though her process is more layered. She makes colored ink drawings on Herculene, a thin plastic, then cuts, reshapes, and pins the paper to make diminutive sculptures- in the case of 0pen Spiral and Column, she makes large sculptures out of small slivers of this plastic. Large or small, the delicacy and apparent vulnerability of the work is its basic appeal. Baar's Little City is a grouping of very small pieces of painted plastic and pin sculptures, a tiny universe that shimmers unprotected on a white pedestal, courting destruction from any gust of wind or ill-directed sneeze. During the exhibition it stood entirely apart from James Orellana's talky narratives, separate from the earthy, clever musings of Pat Johnson, and distanced from J Hill's social commentaries. But by the end of the party, Little City’s petite forms and diminutive colors dominated the conversation. And by standing alone, Baar had gotten in the last word. |
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