Before the lockdown, Fall and Spring Gallery Nights raged. Local exhibition spaces invited the community into their art-filled embrace, and we responded by tippling on often free beverages, adult and otherwise, while getting philosophical with fellow gallerygoers and taking lots of pics. For me, this Fall Gallery Night will be my first in a while. Taking in some new art. Catching up with some fellow old-heads. Sipping on some Coke Zeroes. Parking. Can’t you just feel the excitement? Well, I can, and my wife and I will be all over the city. From the Cultural District and West 7th to the West Side and downtown, there’s lots of splendid work to take in.
One show I definitely don’t want to miss is at Fort Works Art (2100 Montgomery St, Fort Worth, 817-759-9475). Seriously?! gathers more than 20 local, regional, and national artists to “explore the potent role of humor and satire in contemporary art,” itself a lost art. Achieving the right balance — between funny and cringe (or worse) — requires just the right imagery, and it’s almost always representational. Anyone ever seen a humorous or satirical Ab-Ex piece? References for their own sake won’t work, and silliness can come off as juvenile. Fort Works Art sees humor and satire as important segues into meatier topics, opening the door to “reflection and conversation, breaking down barriers and reducing stigma.”
The opening reception for Seriously?! is 6-9pm Sat, and the show will be up through Sep 21.
With the most important presidential election in our lifetimes in a couple months, maybe a little lightness now is what we all need. I’m not saying that Fragmented Serenity is humorous or satirical, but John Fraser’s one-person show at William Campbell Gallery (4935 Byers Av, Fort Worth, 817-737-9566) is definitely soothing. In his built two-dimensional objects — maybe they’re paintings, maybe they’re sculptures — the veteran artist employs a lot of beiges and browns and always geometrical shapes on unbusy, unfussy backgrounds to suggest a cleanliness or order that evades our lived everyday existences. The opening reception is noon-9pm Sat, and the show runs through Oct 19.
At the other William Campbell Gallery (217 Foch St, Fort Worth, 682-224-6131), former football player Desmond Mason tackles Black life via street imagery filtered through a fine-art lens. The reception for Blurred Lines is noon-9pm Sat, and the exhibit will be up until Oct 12.
For more calmness, local legend Dennis Blagg has been depositing Big Bend directly into our cerebellums for decades. For Fall Gallery Night, Artspace111 (111 Hampton St, Fort Worth, 817-692-3228) offers Journey of the Lost Lobo, a series of paintings Blagg created last year after the deaths of his best friend Vernon Fisher and older brother Woodrow Blagg. In the background of most of the pieces is Alsate, or Pulliams Peak, a feature resembling the “brave Apache warrior lying in a deathlike repose,” Dennis says. Lit by the full moon, the West Texas terrain becomes a “stage for a play about death as the final act.” Among the cast of crows, buzzards, horses, and mules is the Lost Lobo. Casting “no shadow” like a ghost, he represents “those in the grip of death and the spirits of those we have lost.” Woodrow and Fisher both died of cancer, and for such inspirational, intimidating figures in Dennis’ life, they “deserved a better option than chemotherapy.” Journey of the Lost Lobo is dedicated to their memory. The opening reception is noon-9pm, and the show will be up until Nov 2.
Equally moody but weighted by the natural world itself rather than heavy metaphysical subtext, mystic sea at J. Peeler Howell Fine Art (3521 Locke Av, Fort Worth, 817-386-0638) draws tight focus on “interconnected systems known as hyper-objects,” says artist Adam Fung. Some “spaces that feel simultaneously real and unreal” include Alsate and the painter’s subject, directly and indirectly here, the sea.
“As we spend more time within a truly globally connected world,” Fung says, “further understanding of the planet as a hyper-object can help inform future personal decisions, governmental policies, and even our romantic tendencies toward the natural world.”
Inspired by Vija Celmins, Gerhard Richter, Caspar David Friedrich, Inka Essenhigh, and other master naturalists, the TCU art professor worked from photos he took during a 2023 artist residency in the Arctic Circle aboard the Barkentine in Antigua.
“In returning to the archipelago of Svalbard, moving about the land and seascapes, listening to the place, I found the same power, fragility, and ominous warnings that were present” on his initial Arctic Circle residency in 2016. The result is a gallery’s worth of large-scale paintings (primarily oil and wax on linen) dominated by ripples and waves.
“In suggesting an oracle-like quality to the landscape,” Fung says, “I want to pause and ask: Do we look for, listen [to], or heed what the natural world foretells? Shifting to the sea as a site — that is literally connecting the entire globe through its fluid, shifting state — allowed me to expand the focus outside of the polar regions to our everyday experience.”
The opening for mystic sea is noon-9pm Sat, and the exhibit will be up through Nov 2.
As fantastic as J. Peeler’s and all the other shows sound, our last stop will probably be Artspace. It’s sort of on the way home, and Journey of the Lost Lobo seems more apt for nighttime viewing, when the ghosts come out — including (hopefully) ones from my very recent good-timin’, art-looking-at’n past.
