XL Arts

Arts: Diverse show of 'New American Talent'

By Jeanne Claire Van Ryzin
Thursday, June 29, 2006

Juried group exhibits of new work are the art equivalent of "American Idol." Who gets selected and who doesn't can spawn chatter as entertaining as the art itself.

Let's start with the numbers. Some 1,152 artists threw their hats into the ring this year to vie for a spot in "New American Talent: 21." That's doubled from last year, when 573 took a shot at Arthouse's annual juried exhibit.

Why the increase? Could it be that Arthouse's profile grew thanks to the flashy new Texas Prize, the $35,000 no-restrictions biennial plum that launched last year? In all probability, yes. How else to get starving artists to sit up and take notice than to dangle a big cash carrot in their faces?

Something else, too: The juried group show of new work is alive and well these days. Despite the usual moaning over this year's iteration of the Whitney Biennial — the granddaddy of juried shows — it garnered a blitz of attention. Indeed, biennials and triennials continue to proliferate and grab headlines. The success of last year's Texas Biennial and its anticipated return next year already are buzzing through the art world.

For this version of "New American Talent," curator Aimee Chang made her choices by confining her gaze to the art itself, not paying any attention to the maker's name. Chang, currently the curator of contemporary art at the Orange County Museum of Art, selected 59 artists, 22 of whom live in Texas, with eight from Austin. (Serving as this year's judge is a bit of a homecoming for Chang: She earned her master's at the University of Texas in the late 1990s.)

Chang clearly has a pluralistic, democratic and inclusive outlook. Hence "New American Talent: 21" is expansive, electric, even a little jumbled. It even feels a little messy, in a good way.

Messy certainly might be the hip new aesthetic. Take Robert Lee Vanderpool's painting "Western Tendencies." It's overthought, understyled, even kind of disheveled — but so much so that it's compelling. Elisa Lendvay makes a glorious, spindly mess of umbrella parts that fill one corner of the gallery and even creep up the wall. Noelle Allen reinterprets a piece of driftwood with "The Mortivore," dripping shiny black resin on the wood to spooky — and sloppy — effect.

In contrast to the aesthetic of slovenliness, there's a certain cerebral smoothness and neatness that defines a good deal of the work Chang chose. Rebecca Holland's two large sheets of cast sugar — pink, transparent and perfectly square — epitomize this. So does Austinite Rebecca Ward's tidy installation of colored duct tape in Arthouse's storefront window. (Ward currently has a similarly impressive installation at the alt-East Side gallery Donkey Show.) Another Austinite perfecting the art of neatness is Tom Hollenback. His pink Plexiglas and steel "Sluice," a phone booth-sized structure, is as tidy and geometric as can be but also menaces, with its doors poised and ready to drop.

Truly disconcerting — in a good way — is Karen Liebowitz's painting "Reviving the Bird (from the Phoenix Series)." Using a gooey, glowy color palette of oranges and purples reminiscent of fin de siècle American illustrator Maxfield Parrish, Liebowitz paints a very stylized young maiden kneeling over a dead peacock-like bird. None of Liebowitz's painting seems right politically or artistically at first. Yet it's that deliberate wrongness that makes "Reviving" so compelling.

Chang selected 11 video and film artists for "New American Talent," but interestingly, she confines all but one of them to two unceremonious corners, where monitors display the videos in a loop. And that's just fine. Like so much video work coming from young artists, what's on those monitors is largely patience-trying, self-indulgent junk.

However, San Antonio's Joey Fauerso gets his own piece of wall space for "Four Ways to Disappear." The hand-drawn animation shows four brief little variations of what looks to be the artist's cartoonish self-portrait fading away via different forms of erasure (smearing, puffing away in a cloud, collapsing into nothing and actual erasing). "Four Ways to Disappear" is a beautiful, proof that the pen can be so much more artistic than lens.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699