Our City of the Violet Crown has almost as many art galleries as music venues. In Hanging Around Austin, we showcase the weirdest, most powerful and most interesting shows currently hanging around town.
Aleksander & Lyuba Titovets
Gallery Shoal Creek, through May 24
The work in this classical exhibit represents a pair of artistic lives lived together in environments situated worlds apart. The Titovetses, trained as painters in Russia, migrated to El Paso from St. Petersburg in 1992 and Texas is all the richer for it. Don’t miss your chance to take in the bold colors and brushstrokes of Lyuba’s folkloric still life work and Aleksander’s impressionist wizardry with light.
Second Nature
Davis Gallery, through May 24
The respective works of naturalists David Everett and Billy Hassell — the former an Austin sculptor and the latter a painter from the eastern portion of the Metroplex — resonate in such harmony with one another that it’s a wonder they’ve only shown together once before. Davis Gallery has got your back this month if you missed the animal energy of this duo’s first rodeo in Abilene two years ago.
Venomous Cabbage and Other Demands Satisfied
grayDUCK Gallery, through June 1
The hiatus is over! grayDUCK opened its new spot on East Cesar Chavez earlier this month after being absent from the scene since last December. To help christen the new space, San Antonio artist Leigh Anne Lester has worked her sorcery on fresh stacks of botanical illustrations and visualized a local crop of mutant flora for your pleasure. Look closely at the ghostly forms of her plants’ aesthetic ancestors and ponder all instances of life as impossibly thin slices of evolution.
Terri Thomas: Pillow Book as Inheritance
Big Medium Gallery at Canopy, through June 7
Fair warning: do not click this link while at work. Detroit native and Austin resident Terri Thomas ditched a 15-year career in the fashion industry to strike sparks against the anvil of Western sexuality and sensationalism, and her show currently up at Big Medium pulls no punches in its critique and provocation. Visit Canopy during Big Medium gallery hours for frank imagery, bedazzled with animal forms in Swarovski crystal, that astonishes the eye and invites you to contemplate the nature of power in a cult of sexuality.
Rocks and Rockers
Modern Rocks Gallery
Despite being relatively new in town, Modern Rocks Gallery is already generating its fair share of buzz. It sits in a sort of art nest out east, set back a few hundred feet from Springdale Road, where several other galleries and creative spaces also make their home. Prepare to be surrounded by music legends in photograph, antique camera equipment, Indonesian log fossils, mineral jewelry and more crystalline bismuth than you can shake a stick at.
Leigh Anne Lester at grayDUCK Gallery.
