11/9/13 – 12/21/13

An opening reception with the artists will be held Saturday, November 9, 2013 from 6:00pm to 8:00 pm at The MAC galleries, located at 3120 McKinney Avenue, in the Uptown District of Dallas. Exhibitions will be on view through December 21, 2013.

Large Gallery
Paul Anthony Smith
Walk Bout

Walk Bout brings together an ongoing series of works on paper and paintings by Paul Anthony Smith. The exhibition examines Smith’s identity as a Jamaican-American artist and the political and social struggles of his native country. Sourcing found and historical photographs of Jamaican generals, British Royalty, politicians, and everyday people, Smith laboriously picks away at the surface material of the photographic prints using a technique termed picotage. The process, derived from a method used by textile artists in 18^th century France, allows Smith to entirely obscure the subject’s identity using references to traditional tribal artwork and elaborate mask designs.

Smith diverges from the picotages with his series, Tarmac. The large, oil paintings picture Jamaican airport employees as they linger on the tarmac.  Smith pays homage to the tarmac workers, laborers of Jamaica’s leading industry, by elevating the subjects to grand proportions and renders them similarly to Jamaican’s intuitive style. Together the dual bodies of work express Smith’s desire to understand private and public identities in his native country.

Paul Anthony Smith was born in St.Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. He was raised in Miami Florida and relocated to Kansas City, Missouri where he received his B.F.A at the  Kansas City Art Institute, 2010. His work investigates autobiographical, ancestral, and cultural self-identification in Contemporary scenarios. He is the recipient of a 2013 Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Award and a 2013 ArtsKC Inspiration grant. Preliminary to his debut solo exhibition with ZieherSmith, New York in early 2013, Smith was named by Huffington Post as one of the 30 best Contemporary Black Artists Under 40. He has participated in residencies at the Art Omi International Artist Residency, Ghent, New York, The Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass Village, Colorado and the Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project studio residency Program, Kansas City, Missouri. Paul Anthony Smith is represented by ZieherSmith Gallery, New York.

 Exhibition Sponsor

Displays Fine Art Services

Square Gallery
Jenny Vogel
Before Our Eternal Silence

The MAC is pleased to welcome Jenny Vogel, an internationally acclaimed multi-media artist whose work explores the world as viewed through new media technology using web-cameras, blogs and Google searches as source material. Vogel’s work effectively communicates the impact of media technology on the individual and individuality, with its resulting misrepresentations and miscommunications. Her exhibition, Before Our Eternal Silence, examines experiences in the age of information including the anxiety of alienation, the desire for meaningful communication and a sense of belonging in a virtual world.

Before Our Eternal Silence is an installation which incorporates approximately 100 lamps programed to transmit a silent message using Morse code. Vogel challenges her audience to engage from a visual and auditory perspective by experiencing the installation of blinking lamps and public horn speakers announcing voice recordings of text from current Craigslist Missed Connections postings in the DFW area. Vogel analyzes the nature and evolution of communication, as well as the purpose. Like the use of Morse Code as a silent cry for help, she juxtaposes the blinking lights with sound of the public address which underlies dependence, desperation and ultimately futility, of a collective city’s hopes and desires via Internet technology.

Through the lenses of contemporary communication technology, Vogel discovers and challenges the failed utopia of the Internet as the “global village”, objectivism in the news and the ideology of science.

Jenny Vogel originates from Germany, but currently resides in New York and North Texas. She received her MFA from Hunter College (NYC) in 2003. She is a 2005 NYFA fellow in Computer Arts and is currently an Assistant Professor of New Media Art. Her work has been screened and exhibited in group and solo- shows in numerous locations and galleries: San Francisco Camerawork, CA; Arnolfini, UK; The Siberia Biennial, Russia; The Swiss Institute, NYC; EFA Gallery, NYC; Kunstwerke, Berlin; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, NYC.

 Exhibition Sponsor

Sally Warren and Jeffery Jackson

New Works Space
Bethany Johnson
Forces, the Will & the Weather

The MAC announces Forces, the Will and the Weather, an exhibition featuring the new work of Bethany Johnson. Forces, the Will and the Weather is an ongoing body of drawings, including two site-specific large scale works, that render a variety of natural sources with an exacting, scientific process. In tight parallel lines drawn with fine technical pens, Johnson painstakingly reproduces and weaves together natural sources from vast landscapes, satellite imagery, and stellar footage on the galactic scale, to small, delicate specimens. The body of work in the exhibition will create an immersive environment referencing the careful study of the natural sciences.

Within Forces, the Will and the Weather, each work is drawn line by line in the artists’ studio with several different colored inks. The resulting textures evoke a variety of historical referents, from antique engravings and cartography through early computer graphics, television monitors and contemporary printing technologies. Although process is not the sole content of the work, the fact of the drawings’ laborious origin invites the viewer in for close, very personal study of a quiet, subtle, and intimate set of images. The work’s titles have been crafted by the accomplished Canadian poet Ray Hsu, contributing additional complexity to the already conceptually layered images.

Johnson’s desire to explore the strengths of visual art in combination with methodical processes and scientific precision reflects the nature of her studio practice as a way to achieve a deeper understanding of our environment in as many complimentary ways as possible.

Bethany Johnson was born in 1985 in Indiana. She earned her BA in studio art at Kalamazoo College in 2007, and her MFA in Painting from University of Texas at Austin in 2011. She is represented by Moody Gallery in Houston, Texas, and she has also exhibited at, among others, AMOA-Arthouse, Champion Gallery, the Galveston Art Center, and the Creative Research Laboratory. Johnson is the 2011 recipient of the Art League of Austin Scholarship, and has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Denkmalschmiede Höfgen in Germany, and the Soaring Gardens Artist Retreat. Johnson currently lives and works in Austin.

There will be an Art Talk with Bethany Johnson on Wednesday November 20th at 6:30 pm. All are invited – free and open to the public!