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I
can attest to Faith’s continued use of recycled commonplace materials
- the piece I own consists of floating imaginary configurations
of melted (with an iron) brightly colored plastic beads she carefully
attached herself with straight pins to the wall. Not obvious initially,
the nature oriented symbols in her radiantly happy looking compositions
range from rainbow rays, fluffy clouds, mountains peaks and
striking lightning. As in my piece, for this new body of work
Faith applies her signature treatment of vivid colors and repetitive
whimsical shapes.
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Gay delights in reconfiguring throwaways such as stickers, colored
tape and ribbons fromdaily life because she wants “fewer limitations
to break rules…(to) investigate notions of excess, consumer culture,
and artistic freedom in the midst of economic pressures…
Whether it be Texas thunderstorms with triple rainbows, birdfeeder
hierarchies, plants
that flourish in 110F… I can always count on being delighted and
inspired by the
living world around me…” To sum up her philosophy of life “typically
an artist’s basic
living skills are honed to live within their means, make do with
less, and think harder
and smarter about how to use what is left over.”
Her BFA is from the University of Texas in Austin.
The last time I saw her was in the fall of 2006 in Marfa in
a group show at Galleri Urbane holding the hand of Honey, her
sweet young daughter.
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Faith shares the gallery walls with Raymond Uhlir’s brilliantly
colored fairy-tale vignettes of his personally ingenuous happy-go-
lucky cartoon characters cajoling in a coordinated brightly lit
background. The bodies of work of both artists exude in exuberant
personality and imaginative symbolism to lift the viewer way up
high in the sky into a close to perfect make-believe world.
To present a more serious
examination and bring us back down on the ground to reality,
Uhlir brings together “disparate visual and contextual devices
from popular, historical, and sacred culture…he constructs a
loose narrative reminiscent of religious or folkloric tales
while commenting on “the repetitive collision of ideologies
(as) a source of unending conflict in our civilization… to critique
and question the hierarchical status quo of our society, the
conflicts between religious belief and rationality, and the
mythologies our culture is built upon.”
Uhlir received his MFA
from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Both artists’ shows will
be on view to cool off in, if any art can possibly do that this
art
can, through the hot Texas month of August.
Show ends August 21.
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