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artists intrigue and alienate |
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Katy O'Connor rocks. Last year, in the Austin Museum of Art's "22 To Watch: Art From Austin," she impressed with large oil paintings of everyday people in everyday settings (bedrooms, shopping malls, street corners) seen from not-so-everyday perspectives. Now, the 30-year-old Austin artist reveals an even more impressive gathering of work at D. Berman Gallery. O'Connor's paintings were always tense and edgy. And now they are even more restive. She starts her creative process by staging photographs of couples, usually romantically linked, whom she poses in some place "of no particular surprise" and then shoots from some totally preternatural angle. Then, after mining her many photos to find the ones that in which the relationship between the two figures is most ambiguous, O'Connor sketches out the scene on canvas and then gradually paints over the sketch. Paint layers up, but in many places the underlining drawing shows through: part of a foot may be left unfinished or the painted edges of a flag may not line up with its sketched borders. The resulting paintings resemble a slightly blurry single frame of a fast-paced movie. Titling her paintings with merely the first name of her subjects — "Jerlyn and George," for example — or some innocuous reference to location ("Texas"), is just O'Connor's final way of intriguing and teasing the viewer even more. O'Connor is sharing the gallery walls with veteran Denton-based painter Robert Jessup. Jessup, a storyteller, utilizes a cast of fantastical characters — Rabbitman, Mr. Rat, The Happy Homemaker — to spin fantastical visual yarns. He's a master manipulator of pictoral space, skewing perspective or rendering quirky picture planes. He obviously delights in an absolute celebration of color. But because the quirky characters and private narratives communicate little, there's not much to engage with. Jessup's private world remains, ultimately, private. "Narratives: Robert Jessup and Katy O'Connor" continues through Dec. 6. Gallery hours: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday-Friday. D. Berman Gallery, 1701 Guadalupe St., free, 477-8877. |
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