Titus O.

Not to overstate the obvious, but most of us find ourselves enmeshed in a world increasingly made-over in our own image. Very few of our rapidly multiplying billions now open the door-flap of our yurts and walk out into a landscape more dominant than the products of a civilization built to subdue it.

Art now is often about the tensions we experience with this evolutionary success, processing an inevitable sense of loss despite our resultant comfort and longevity. Not just mass species extinction and impending biospheric collapse, but more often subtler psychological effects, and the daily efforts to reclaim our native connection to earth, wind, and fire (and I don’t mean those fine, disco-era hit-makers.)
“Elemental” at Marty Walker Gallery brings together five artists under a  timeless conceptual conceit. Every culture developed a cosmology initially based on the forces most apparently operative in the natural world, including our own bodies. From European medieval ‘humors’, to Indian Ayurvedic ‘doshas’, increasingly familiar to us are the five elements of East Asian philosophy and their specific applications in traditional Chinese medicine. That system of Earth, Fire, Metal, Water, and Wood becomes the rubric through which the art works here are evaluated.
From its small side room, Robert Boland’s video infiltrates the gallery with the sound of a crackling fire. In the darkened space, you see a figure carefully tending it, though the fire itself is off-screen, as are any identifying characteristics of our fire-keeper. You’re quickly swept up in the mysterious, primordial activity, warming somehow despite the remove, settling into a non-narrative time.
Rupert Deese’s monochrome paintings are topographical, their lit geometric elevations and depressions acting as tonal shifts enlivening the surfaces. They mysteriously conjure Jasper John’s targets as much as they do the terrain of American west, and that’s a real trick: to work as almost pure formalism, and yet remain so evocative of place and larger space.
Tom Orr follows up on the heels of his excellent Dallas Opera set designs and recent solo show with a commanding post-minimalist arrangement of his signature sculptural stripes-in-space. Informed by his well-honed optical strategies, rectilinear metal conduit optically seems to bend and flow like water. A small sculptural coup.
Jay Shinn’s seductive tracings of wood grain physically act out the mesmerizing fantasy many of us know from meditatively gazing at the whorls in plywood, or at water stains on ceilings. Andrew Bennet abandons the paisley patterns, if not his signature burnt-surface shtick, with more measured and symmetrical explorations of incidental carbon mark-making.
It’s a sound, handsome show acting, like Smithson’s “Site/Non-Site” pieces, to help place one firmly in relation to the material works before you, and yet contextualized by much larger forces of nature we will ever move in and be composed of.

I ran into artist Noah Simblist as he put the finishing touches on his installation “Home-Land” at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary. After complimenting him on the depth, rigor, and beauty of the work, I added “Plus, it looks like real art.” Flippant maybe, but honest. I had the same reaction a bit later, just up the street at Brian Fridge’s latest solo effort at Dunn & Brown; this satisfying, if somewhat nebulous, sense that I was witnessing the products of good artists who are playing for keeps. Professionals. Gallery hopping, this is not so routine as you’d think. People make art for a lot of reasons, with varying levels of capability. We are luckier than we often realize to have the number of solid artists we have here, at various stages of career. I’m telling you, something’s happening in North Texas, a scene vigorous enough that if there were stock to buy, I’d be quietly snatching it up (I guess there is – the art; though I’d hate to just join the speculators. Not that Texas suffers much yet from that dilemma.) 

Proofs du jour, messrs Simblist and Fridge, both thirty-something, have notable resumes, and are solidly engaged in signature pursuits. A professor at SMU, the former stakes his claim at the intersection of modernist formalism and poetic geo-political agitprop; think a kinder, gentler Hans Haacke. The sheer beauty of his work belies its difficult conceptual scaffolding. This is his métier: using the seductive façade of good design to generate fascinating questions about the deeper resonance of symbols we become inured to in our daily lives, and how they reflect complex historical realities. Fridge occupies far more ambiguous territories, but with equal designerly aplomb. He has an obvious fondness for Arte Povera and process-oriented conceptualists, and his work finds the dreamily poetic in the mundanely concrete. Labeled differently, some of his products could stand in for chemistry or math experiments. Frozen ice crystals floating in a dark refrigerator, surreal anthropomorphic fractals in the knotted surface of an osage orange, the mesmerizing drift of a few lazy dots on an orange field. These errant moments of disjuncture act like the mind coasting in those moments when the ego’s clutch is pushed in. The possibility for humorously beat, but no less cosmic insight into reality’s true nature (at many levels) is the real opportunity provided by Fridge’s broke-down science lab aesthetic.