Kultur: Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Local painter Ian Floyd finds the Ab-Ex in the everyday. Faces and the JFK Paintings Thru Nov 29 at Artspace 111, 111 Hampton St, FW. 817-692-3228. The Plains of Sweet Regret Thru Feb 15 at the Amon Carter Museum, 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd, FW. 817-738-1933. Artist Mary Lucier will speak at 11am on Sat. Hubbard/Birchler: No Room to Answer Thru Jan 4, 2009, at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St, FW. 817-738-9215. Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman 2pm Sat, 2pm Sun at the Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd, FW. 817-332-8451. Horizons: An Exploration of Landscape Thru Nov 29 at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center, 1300 Gendy St, FW. 817-738-1938. Texas Ballet Theater 7:30pm Thu at Scott Theater at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. For tickets, call 877-828-9200. Painter Leslie Lanzotti takes visual documentation of JFK’s assassination as a point of departure into her new exhibit at Artspace 111. A D V E R T I S E M E N T A D V E R T I S E M E N T Camera Eyes A garden of visual and balletic Eden awaits. By ANTHONY MARIANI Cinema has gripped arty-farty Fort Worth. Coinciding with the second annual Lone Star International Film Festival are several art exhibits informed by moving pictures. At Artspace 111, paintings based on pictorial documentation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Zapruder film are part of painter Leslie Lanzotti’s Faces and the JFK Paintings, a show that also features several generous, blanched, nostrils-centric portraits. As part of the exhibit, author Robert Groden, the technical advisor to filmmaker Oliver Stone’s alternate-historical JFK, will speak at the gallery at 7:30 p.m. Saturday. At the Amon Carter Museum is The Plains of Sweet Regret, a series of videos by Mary Lucier, who was one of several artists commissioned by the North Dakota Museum of Art in 2000 to respond to the population shifts in the northern plains that are still forcing residents to “re-imagine their lives,” according to museum. At the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the pics and vids that comprise an exhibit that opened in September, Hubbard/Birchler: No Room to Answer, will stay up until early 2009. At the center of the show is “Grand Paris Texas,” a video commissioned by the Modern and headed for the museum’s permanent collection. Lastly, the Kimbell Art Museum gets in on the action, hosting two screenings of an LSIFF entry, Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman, a documentary by Eric Bricker that traces the career of the titular 97-year-old architecture photographer and champion of Modernism. Whether plotted or accidental, the synergy stands to benefit both the festival and local visual-art community. For the most part, movies and video art have only the use of camerawork in common, though many artists on both sides of the aisle seemingly live to shatter the distinction. Basically, the folks lining up to watch some of the festival’s more accessible offerings probably won’t be the same people piling into the Amon Carter for Lucier’s show. However, if you’re in the mood for moving pictures but reluctant to brave the megaplexes, you’re totally in luck. For more information on the festival, visit www.lsiff.com. Horizons Nature is hot. In September, the New Museum in New York City opened After Nature, a group show that gathered post-apocalyptic works in various media, including filmmaker Werner Herzog’s “And a Smoke Arose: Lessons of Darkness” natch. The exhibit also, according to famed New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz, signaled a shift from flashy art to something resembling seriousness. (Is the current recession to blame for the boom in gloom? Most likely.) As Saltz writes, many artists – perhaps too many – had been “getting away with murder, making questionable or derivative work and selling it for inflated prices. …. Many younger artists who made a killing will be forgotten quickly. Others will be seen mainly as relics of a time when marketability equaled likability. … The good news is that, since almost no one will be selling art, artists – especially emerging ones – won’t have to think about turning out a consistent style or creating a brand. They’ll be able to experiment as much as they want.” Ha! As on the money as Saltz is (or seems), he’s up in the epicenter of the art world, not in Fort Worth. Because here, artists have been experimenting as much as they’ve wanted for decades. And a homer bias notwithstanding, local artists also have been serious – and about nature. At the Fort Worth Community Arts Center, three artists with local ties – Eddie Brown, Michael Daniel, and Ian Floyd – have combined to present a diverse collection of their paintings, old and new, called Horizons: An Exploration of Landscape. Floyd finds abstract-expressionism in female nudes and everyday details. Here, he magnifies the intimate details of his lithe models and other subjects into nearly indistinct and dual-tone terrain. In other words, he abstracts ideas from stone-cold reality. Eddie Brown takes a hyper-Modernist approach to his colorful, scattershot action paintings – the angular slashes and chaotic intersections that are evocative of tree limbs may, for a second, come off as just mismanaged plans of attack. Of the three artists, Brown is the most accessible, rendering his brilliant floral tableaux in ways that suggest both the topical angst of Gerhard Richter and Barnett Newman’s eloquent verticality. – A.M. Get Behind Your Ballet To continue their heroic efforts, Texas Ballet Theater’s dancers are putting on a benefit program tomorrow (Thursday) at the Scott Theater in the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. The dancers have already raised about $180,000, and Dallas’ Meadows Foundation has given the company $500,000, a lot of dough but still not enough to get TBT into its comfort zone. The program features four ballets, including the Fort Worth premiere of Dominic Walsh’s 1998 Flames of Eros, set to a score by Ennio di Barardo. A Houston-based protégé of TBT artistic director Ben Stevenson, Walsh left Houston in 2004 to devote himself full-time to his own contemporary group, Dominic Walsh Dance Theater. Also on tap are two Stevenson ballets: Endangered Species, a solo piece for the company’s teenage wonder, Lonnie Weeks, and Bartok, an ensemble piece for six dancers. Rounding out the evening will be associate artistic director Tim O’Keefe’s African Waltz, an excerpt from a popular piece seen last season, Jazz Royalty. FWCAC has donated the theater use, and all proceeds will benefit the company. General admission tickets are $35, and VIP tickets that include a backstage tour and champagne reception after the performance are $75. – Leonard Eureka Contact Kultur at kultur@fwweekly.com. Email this Article...