I've curated this show of work by Laura Lark, Ted Kincaid, and Shawn Smith in the Gaddis Geeslin Gallery at SHSU. My intention was to put together a show of work that had a basis in photography, but transformed the photographic image into an "art object".
Ted Kincaid
Shawn Smith and Laura Lark
Laura Lark is showing drawings of women appropriated from a fashion magazine article that offers instruction on the application of make-up. The works are eleven feet tall and drawn with pantone marker on tyvek. The installation of five of them on one wall effectively creates a "valley of the dolls" in the gallery. She is also showing a three dimensional tableau of Neely O'Hara's bedroom from The Valley of the Dolls. It looks great illuminated against the black walls in the new media room and the sound track from Lark's video Aura fills the gallery with a pleasantly nostalgic soundtrack that makes one of the gallery sitters feel like she is "in a soap opera." (The video uses stop motion to show one of Lark's drawings being made dot by dot, and is set to a Henry Mancini score.)
Laura Lark
Shawn Smith takes images of animals from the internet and creates three dimensional objects made of wooden cubes. They make you feel like you are looking at a blurry photograph in three dimensions. There is a nice interplay between his pixillated technique and Larks pointillistic drawings.
Shawn Smitth, CMYK vs RGB (not the title)
Laura Lark, Shawn Smith
Ted Kincaid's prints are also created pixel by pixel. They have the quality of looking as if they were created by some antique photographic process using wet plates and glass negatives, but are in fact, created on a computer. Like everything else in the show, they are fictions. Images taken from images and mixed into the thin air and spun back into pictures. Pictures that create a reality that exists only within them.
Ted Kincaid
The show is October 3-27, 2011 in Huntsville, Texas at the Gaddis Geeslin Gallery.
Laura Lark talks tomorrow, October 5 at 11am in the art auditorium.
Shawn Smith talks later, December 7, 2011 at 11am in the same place.
