Arts+Culture North Texas

Art Review: Hadar Sobol

 

Hadar Sobol: GO

January 11 – February 9, 2013

Valley House Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Dallas

 

The commitment to her one-of-a-kind technique alone makes Hadar Sobol an interesting artist.  She draws like a dream and her beautifully simple small-scale pen and ink figurative drawings show one level of her artistry.  When she recreates those drawings with thread and fabrics on antique linen, the work is elevated to another level.  Collections of figures, figurative movement, and abstract thread and textile drawings are a third level of mastery.  And finally, wall-sized collaborative work using other women’s thoughts and dreams to create art with her is Hadar Sobol at perhaps her finest – as an artist, a woman, and a social commentator.

Hadar’s fabric work is quiet and respectful.  It often is small scale – the size of a linen handkerchief perhaps.  Drawing with black thread, she sometimes uses other ivory shades of fabric to “dress” her figures, other times presenting them nude.  The women she depicts are real women – not stylized female models, but women you’d see on the street.  They emanate strength and solidarity of spirit – these are women who have met the world and survived.

Hadar’s art honors ancestry and heritage.  She is a storyteller.  In that role, she created a wall-sized piece of collaborative work with 20 women she knows titled, “The One who brings forth something from nothing is not deficient (a quote by Rabbi Azriel translated from Hebrew).”  The women came together to an event armed with responses to Hadar’s thought-provoking questions about life and love.  She provided linen strips for them to write their responses.  Finally, the linen strips became part of a huge labyrinth populated with an army of her women figures marching shoulder to shoulder.  It is a masterpiece of the strength of women united to meet the challenges of life.

Included in this show are two large portraits done with mixed media – pastels and paint.  One is a composite of Hadar’s face and her mothers.  They are both bold and spectacular.  Hadar Sobol seems to know who she is, where she comes from, and where she is going.  Her works, and her viewers, are the beneficiaries of this groundedness.

The show ends February 9.

— KENT BOYER

CADD Art Bus Tour

CADD is continuing its popular bus tour program with a January adventure to two member galleries, a unique Dallas art space, a prominent art collector’s home and lunch provided by Hypnotic Sushi.

CADD’s bus tours have become a much sought-after Saturday event for the Dallas community. Participants enjoy a leisurely and informative journey to art exhibitions, artist studios and collector’s homes. The experience offered during these bus tours is exceptional. Rarely does the public gain access to the creative nest of an artist’s personal studio or a private collector’s home filled with notable art. Another great part of these tours is that driving is not required. CADD provides the bus, refreshments and lunch.

Past tours have included a visit to the Dallas Cowboy’s Stadium to tour their remarkable contemporary art collection. The most recent CADD bus tour visited Denton art studios and the University of North Texas printmaking studio (where they received a gift print by the artist-in-residence).

January’s bus tour will be led by Janet Kutner, one of the most respected art critics in the country who had a 30-year career writing for The Dallas Morning News. A different person within the visual art community guides each CADD tour.

January 19th Schedule
10:30 AM Start at CADD member, PDNB Gallery, 1202 Dragon St., Suite 103.  Ample parking available.
11:15 AM Travel to CADD member, Barry Whistler Gallery, 2909-B Canton St.
12:00 PM Travel to The Reading Room, 2715 Parry Ave.  After a brief gallery talk, lunch will be provided by Hypnotic Sushi
1:00 PM Travel to the home of Dan and Lizzie Routman
1:45 PM Return to PDNB Gallery

Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas (CADD) is a non-profit membership organization of galleries formed in 2006 for the purpose of promoting the advancement of contemporary art on all levels. CADD’s members function as an important component of the Dallas art community, providing the means by which artists reach their public and collectors gain access to works of art.

Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas (CADD) includes the city’s foremost contemporary dealers who are experienced and knowledgeable in their field. Member galleries are committed to represent the highest standards of contemporary art, while recognizing the importance of integrity and responsibility in working with artists, collectors, museum professionals, and the cultural community of Dallas.

This event will contribute to the Annual CADD- Booker T. Washington Scholarship fund.

Bus Tour Tickets are $50 per person.

Ricardo Paniagua’s CHAMP! at RE gallery

RE gallery presents CHAMP!, 33 works by Ricardo Paniagua made from poly chromed and multi-pigmented cast resin.

Ricardo Paniagua has been a prolific artist in Dallas for nearly a decade. His vibrantly colored geometric paintings and sculptures are exquisitely precise. Paniagua is self taught and a descendent of four generations of Master tile setters and craftsmen. He has shown in Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, as well as at the 2011 Texas Biennial.

This new body of work produced exclusively for his first show at RE gallery emerged from his latest resin casting, painting, and molding experiments. Each piece is of similar size and shape, and yet the three dimensional impressions created from reforming the surfaces through hand sculpted foil and vinyl molds, as well as the various layers of pigment, present a rigorous iterative process, making each one invariably unique. This new body of work moves away from his more Cartesian based graphic experiments, and more towards topological and tactile making.

-Wanda Dye, Founding Director of RE gallery + studio

Artist Statement for these New Works

“These works represent a great alchemy in life. They represent transcending normalcy. My newfound process allows me to take life and its everyday scenes and immediately make them interesting / beautiful / different / abstract / counterintuitive / unexpected; furthermore, redefining these notions as frozen facades of seemingly impractical surface terrain. The idea of ‘painting as object’ has been a compelling factor in these works as well. By abstained use of traditional painting materials such as canvas/linen, artists paints, and instead opting with unconventional and industrial resources and applications, I achieve the informal notion of objectivity in a seemingly painterly territory of non-descript materiality.”

-Ricardo Paniagua

Artist Talk Sunday – 01.13.13 – 6-7 pm
Closing Reception Friday – 02.01.13 – 6-9 pm

ENVIRONS: Ron Clark, Susan Perkins, Betty Sewell at Cohn Drennan

Cohn Drennan Contemporary initiates the 2013 calendar year with ENVIRONS, presenting the work of Ron Clark (Dallas), Susan Perkins (Dallas) and Betty Sewell (Horseshoe Bay, TX), an exhibition of artists with diverse personal histories in Dallas and whose diverse applications of their work present a commonality of respect for their experiences with the Environs they inhabit.

Ron Clark moved to Dallas after completing his studies at Parsons, but not before making important career connections. New York gallerist Walter Wickiser represents Clark’s work as part of The New Abstractionists project that the gallery inaugurated in 2009, and has since toured iterations of the exhibition to Chicago, Toronto, Los Angeles and Miami. The artist’s current series of paintings, Impending Presence, will be represented in the ENVIRONS exhibition.

The initial viewer’s reaction to Susan Perkin’s Luminous Impressions series is an appreciation of the intricacy and delicate nature of the woven paper and fibers that she incorporates in the work. But that first response belies the truth that these pieces are stronger and more durable than the accepted concepts of paper as medium, and that the intricate and fluid design el­ements are based on principles of environmental sustainability and green methodologies.

Susan Perkins’ work has the ethereal quality of seeing shapes in the clouds. Elements of familiarity appear and then
disappear. Calligraphic elements whisper through these woven sculptural works.

Her work is as much about meditation as it about craftsmanship. The first step involves gestural drawing in black ink across white paper. These intuitive drawings often express her feelings. This is followed by the slicing or sometimes delicately tearing of the paper and then arranging it, transforming it into a new beginning. In arranging the paper, Perkins cre-ates what she calls her “personal calligraphy”. Then, using a loom, she weaves these new compositions through shimmering fibers, suggesting the rhythm and flow of life. For her, “this process is prayer.” In the final step, she uses medium gel to adhere the paper to the fiber. “This represents union,” Perkins says. The finished work reflects the contemplation that goes into each piece. —Nancy Cohen Israel

Susan is active in her role as part of the Advisory Council of the Meadows Museum and the formation of Contemplating Art. Susan and, her husband, Kent Wittman are international members of the Dallas­ Valencia Citizens Committee that recently welcomed the Valencian delegation during the inauguration of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. She is on the board of the Nexus mentoring program for children and adolescents and is a spiritual director who leads contemplative prayer groups.

Betty Sewell has been involved with commercial and residential design projects in Dallas for most of her life, and her work has been featured in publications such as D Home, Veranda and DFW Home Living. When the artist moved to the Hill Country, she went back to school and secured her BFA in Painting from Southwestern University and promptly embarked on a series of minimalist paintings inspired by the view of the lake from her studio. Betty’s work returns to Dallas in a form that reflects her design experience by providing a knowledge and quality of what her contemporaries in Dallas expect from the Design District.

Opening Reception
Saturday, January 12, 2013, 6 – 8 PM
Cohn Drennan Contemporary
1107 Dragon, Dallas 75207

 

Scottie Parsons Signature Abstract Paintings at William Campbell Contemporary

Selected works from the estate of acclaimed Texas artist Scottie Parsons will be on display January 12-February 9, 2013, at William Campbell Contemporary Art. The show will feature Parsons’ signature abstract paintings, which address notions of space, time, and the sublime via color interaction and subtle texture and layering.

“I approach each painting with the idea that the canvas represents a field, a space in which to explore by means of color, shape and line, some meaningful form that speaks to the infinity of space, time and celebrates that mysterious quality of our lives.”

Parsons’ paintings employ simple visual elements to deconstruct then rebuild the pictureplane, transforming it into a multidimensional environment of interactive shapes and textures. Bold swaths of pigment define planar segments that fuse with wisps of color and lines to form deep, ethereal layers. These complex gradations overlap and parallel one another to seemingly infinite depths. As the elements emerge and recede, they travel through the space, alluding to the passage of time. And time, the fourth dimension, often played an integral part in Parsons’ quest to transcend our corporeal existence through visual means.

Parsons’ work emits an unmistakable energy via a complex amalgamation of color, layering,and texture. The pieces often include obscure text as well-a technique that adds additional texture, as well as a human element to the otherwise nonrepresentational paintings. Overall, the work inspires a feeling of physical and spiritual infinity, evoking a sense of the human essence “beyond everyday life.” Each piece creates its own indefinable atmosphere, inviting the viewer to enter, explore, and experience the sublime.

Opening Reception
Saturday, January 12, 6:00-8:00 p.m.
William Campbell Contemporary Art
4935 Byers Avenue, Fort Worth 76107