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On the first floor of the century-old red brick building on the corner of a historic block in downtown Elgin, English artist Margo Sawyer works in her studio, a 3,000-square foot-white box. From here, she creates plans for large-scale installations of her signature powder-coated steel boxes in vibrant hues that can be seen around the world, from Kosovo to Houston, where her “Synchronicity of Color” at Discovery Green is a popular photo spot. Sawyer, an art professor at the University of Texas for almost thirty years, moved to Elgin in 1998 and in 2002 bought the building, which was once a grocery store in the early 1900s—she affectionately calls it the “Bright & Early” building after the faded hand-painted sign on the side...

“I don’t really have a fixed idea when I start a painting,” says Houston painter David Aylsworth. The exhibition Wherefore & Hence, which runs through March 24 at Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas, showcases works from the last two years in which Aylsworth has further refined and evolved his distinct style and approach to painting while also venturing into uncharted waters.

“I end up gravitating towards certain shapes, forms, and colors. In this show, a large number of the paintings seem to have the appearance of a landscape or seascape to them in an abstract way,” he says. “Previously my paintings occupied a shallow space or depth; now I like the idea of being able to read something in the distance, like looking across a big wide ocean for miles on end.....”

Dornith Doherty’s photographic project Archiving Eden is a multi faceted approach to addressing the worlds concern of decreasing biodiversity and the extinction of natural species in the face of climate change.

For the past ten years she has collaborated with scientists at international seed banks around the world including banks in North America, England, Brazil, Italy, The Netherlands, Russia, and Australia.

Doherty’s photographs include detailed images of highly secured isolated vaults set deep within the earth; doomsday facilities that act as human kinds final chance if the worst should happen and the flora of the planet was suddenly lost. Additionally, the project includes expansive landscapes, greenhouses, incubation chambers,
various laboratory equipment, as well as highly enigmatic collages made from x-ray images recording seeds at various stages of germination....

It was 1963 in Lubbock, Texas. Coming of age in the twilight/dawn of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, Terry Allen and his friends generated a rite that echoed a pioneer Texas pastime, the ranch dance, when folks would travel long distances to gather and dance to a fiddle band. “A dozen carloads of us would head out to the cotton fields, loaded down with bootleg beer and whiskey,” the artist recalls. “We’d park in a perfect circle with the headlights aimed in, tune all the car radios to the same station and dance in the dirt. At 10 p.m. or so, we’d tune in ‘The Wolfman’ on XERF out of Del Rio with its massive transmitter in Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila and drink and raise the dust to that....” 

Crowded public art openings at galleries are not ideal for spending quality time with art, but sometimes you take what you can get.

And sometimes a work will sneak up on you and lock you in for a surprising moment, despite the distractions.

When a new season kicks in, like it has in this post-holiday week, you may find yourself at openings while also vowing (to yourself, to an artist, to the gallerist) that you’ll be back on a quieter day to take another look. How many times have we thought and said this and not followed up? We mean to. But then the next round of openings happens the following weekend, and then the next, and obligations pile up while time is squeezed...

“Handbook of Unknowing” is Jackie Tileston’s sixth exhibition at Zg Gallery since joining their roster in 2004. The works in this show continue on the path that she’s been forging since the start of her artistic career and offer a consistent follow-up to her 2014 exhibition, “Field Guide to Elsewhere” ....

It is a new year and with this time of renewal, I would like to lament about a few shows coming or came down in January before I preview some exciting new shows for you to get out and see...

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce the opening of Wherefore & Hence, an exhibition of ten recent paintings by David Aylsworth. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will be held Saturday, January 6, from 5 to 8 pm. The exhibition continues through March 24, 2018.

David’s Aylsworth has spent years cultivating his painting practice – with exuberance, quirkiness, and imperfections embedded in his method. Refinement has never been an Aylsworth goal, yet in Wherefore & Hence he reveals a certain restraint evinced by more simplistic compositions.

When describing his work,art historian Sandra Zalman states, “Where there are brushstrokes, drips, clotting and scraping… it is evident in the almost discursive way that shapes coalesce to articulate a larger story of meditation- the fine line between form and figure, or plane and ground, which speaks to the very human quality of finding opportunity in uncertainty, near connections, qualifications, and do-overs. The paintings may play, and tease, and flirt, but their force derives from the quiet, unassuming way they confront these larger concerns.”...

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce the opening of Reflect, by Austin-based sculptor Margo Sawyer. A reception for the artist will be held Saturday, November 18, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. The exhibition continues through February 3, 2018.

Throughout her career, Margo Sawyer has created installations which translate sacred spaces into a contemporary vocabulary. The central actor of Sawyer’s art is color.  Reflect 2017, is a large-scale floor installation that converses with the architecture in an ever-changing way, with the play of light and reflection moving throughout the space and uniting an array of complex and unexpected unions of color. Reflect, holds fragments of a career long fascination with glass, its optical color play, how transparency, reflectivity, luminosity, physicality, materiality, perceptual, material and shape affect the psychological effects of color, as a window into our emotions. Elements of the work were produced by the artist in residence at Pilchuck Glass School and recently at Franz Mayer of Munich, Germany in 2106...