A R T   L E T T E R

The Timely Magazine of Art

Shawn Wallis at Davis/McClain                                  ends	11/18

Two-tone gray panels, oh-so-sensitively scuffed and rubbed to a smooth
graphite finish. This work is tailor-made to speak to your refined,
understated taste, like a chic marble floor. It looks just like  art, classy
and smug, which makes me sigh with boredom and with frustration at its
pretentious triteness.  Uninteresting and dismissable.-Delfina



Catherine Colangelo at The Jung Center	10/27

An unusually firm sense of design is evident in these elaborately patterned
painted paper and cloth pieces, but the references to Indian and African
fabrics make me think of these as good proposals for scarves and skirts.  
What's missing is a really unshakeable idea, a sense of a clear, purposeful
vision: that leap from just design to art that kicks you in the head.-Delfina



Paul Kittelson at The Art League Courtyard	12/21

Kittelson's technique is unassailably cool: he drips dyed hydrocal over
chicken wire forms and then sands away the outside surfaces to reveal
layered color patches that are integral to the material itself. The blackened
banana peel, that icon of garbage on the modern sidewalk, is utterly
convincing, in a novelty kind of way. The orange peel is great too, though,
well, real orange skin is actually all puckered. The zucchini is perfect in
the details of the stem and the end, and the color is great, but, uhm, why is
it hollow? The pumpkin at first looks strangely eroded by persnickety
laser-worms: then you notice it's incongruously cut away in exactly the
shapes of the earth's continents. Why? Seems like a throwaway neat-o idea,
which is a fundamental problem that nags all four pieces.-Delfina  



Meg Webster, Joe Havel and George Stoll at Hiram Butler 	10/28

George Stoll's tiny city of tupperware fruit cups and popsicle molds
precisely mimics aged plastic while retaining the cool, faintly translucent
monumentality of a marble bust. Stoll compares a sense of timeless
antiquity with plain old obsolescence. Meg Webster's Sugar  is  as solid and
as ephemeral as a snow fort, complete with magical crystalline sparkles.
Webster orchestrates subtleties of scale, texture, staining, and  thickness
to generate an impression of  pure sensual presence. The impulse to touch
it or lick it is irresistible.-B.D. 

Jack Pierson at Texas Gallery	11/11

      Hip installation of old sign lettering and objects evoke a stereotypical
hollywood movie about the corrupting influence of fame and money, Las
Vegas style. Interesting contrast of junky memorobilia and slick billboard photomural.-B.D.

Address letters to: Bill Davenport, 801 Tulane St., Houston TX 77007

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