Many of us have family, friends or both coming to town this month, and our local gallery spaces have got plenty of aesthetic nourishment to help us space out the endless holiday shopping trips and meals at destination restaurants. There’s no snow in the forecast anytime soon (although anything’s possible, right?) so get out there and treat yourself and your loved ones to some of this beautiful stuff.
Folk and Dagger: Suburban Secrets
Yard Dog Gallery, through December 28
Montana native Andrea Heimer spent much of her childhood mutely observing the quiet desperation of her suburban neighborhood and its residents, and her blunt visual narratives recall that place and time in all its hidden tension and emotional claustrophobia. Her work scans as a Cave of the Beasts for the new millennium, presenting scenes both mundane and extraordinary with a gravity that transcends context and reveals the disquieting irreality beneath the skin of everyday life in the American suburb.
Lena Sotskova
ART on 5th, through January 3
Trained in Russian classical painting and tempered in the high-stakes crucible that is fine art restoration, Miami-based Lena Sotskova produces sensuous and lyrical images that have captured hearts across the world. She works without models, preferring to conjure textures and forms through imagination and experimentation, and draws on the essential candor of musical harmony to inform the direction taken by each piece.
Tami Bone: “This is where I’m going to be now…”
Photo Méthode Gallery, through January 9
At the age of two, Tami Bone fell off a pier into the Gulf of Mexico. The title of her current exhibition at Photo Méthode echoes a thought she had as she began sinking into the water, a thought that appeared recently in her work and brought with it deeply nuanced questions of being and belonging. Her ethereal, monochrome photographs and composites often blur the contrast between figure and ground, leaking dreamscapes into the realm of reality and inviting viewers to consider where we draw the lines that separate and connect us.
The Power of Insanity and The Room
Flatbed Press and Gallery, through January 10
Alice Leora Briggs brings a divergent pair of shows to Flatbed this month. In one, The Roomwritten by Pulitzer luminary Mark Strand, is explored line by line into a dozen woodcut studies of frailty and subtle human horror. Meanwhile, in The Power of Insanity, Briggs presents a series of paintings done by street pastor José Antonio Galván, founder of a refuge shelter in the Chihuahuan desert, and the residents of his asylum.
Do Ho Suh
The Contemporary Austin at Jones Center and Laguna Gloria, through January 11
Installation artist and sculptor Do Ho Suh’s work currently installed at the Jones Center downtown illustrates the diaphanous domesticity of the modern nomad, recreating actual inhabited spaces from his time in New York City with colorized, translucent walls and objects. His simultaneous exhibition at Laguna Gloria also addresses the notion of personal space, allowing visitors to step inside a tunnel of fishing net that reveals, upon closer inspection, a web of networked shapes much closer to the skin of human experience.
In Our House And Others I Knew, Redecorating Was A Way To Force Change Without Really Changing Anything At All by Andrea Heimer.
Mesmerize shared this photo thanking Inne Aguilar for her work.