The creative team for this Capital T Theatre Company production seems fully aware of the darkness in Haidle’s comedy, but they bring to it a brightness that keeps the whole affair surprisingly light. Mark Pickell’s living-room set, with its flat, butcher-paper rug and walls outlined in thick, black marks and shaded in pastels, recalls a cheery coloring-book illustration. And Tiny Robinson’s Lucy seems just like the kid who colored it in; the actress – who is an adult – plays the child with the exuberance of a kindergartner set free at recess, all giddy, playful energy busting loose…More at AustinChronicle.com

Wine and dine —er, snack — while working on the craft of your choice. read more at austin360.com

German artist Michael Wutz is this year’s visiting artist in printmaking at the University of Texas. In a solo show, he exhibits his eerie landscapes that depict a quasi-apocalyptic vision of our world close to flat-lining.read more at austin360.com

Katherine Bash — aka the Principal Investigator for the Itinerant Laboratory for Perceptual Inquiry — looks for new meaning and new philosophy in the quotidian landscape around us, then uses photographs and poetry to bring it together.read more at austin360.com

Through numerous sequels and countless slasher knock-offs, not to mention the recent Rob Zombie “reimagining,” John Carpenter’s Halloween is still the best of its kind, a suggestive and genuinely frightening horror film that’s worth the grisly flotsam left in its wake. After stabbing his sister to death as a young boy, the remorseless Michael Myers spent years in a mental institution under the supervision of psychiatrist Donald Pleasence, waiting patiently for a chance to return to his hometown. Assigned to babysit two kids on Halloween night, Jamie Lee Curtis is the only person standing between the killer and the town’s many horny teenagers. Defusing the tension somewhat here is Master Pancake Theater’s cadre of expert hecklers, who will be joined for this special performance by one of the originators of the genre, Mystery Science Theater 3000 writer Mary Jo Pehl.

n Heather McDonald’s odd yet thoughtful one-man play, a lapsed Episcopal priest faces the ultimate test of faith when his wife, after several miscarriages, gives birth to a beautiful baby girl who is covered with downy white fur.read more at austin360.com

David Harrower’s explosive and tense dark romance gets its Austin premiere. more at www.austin360.com

Sam Raimi began his relentlessly inventive Evil Dead series in 1981, establishing the modern blueprint for young filmmakers with tiny budgets, clever ideas, and little interest in art for art’s sake. The plan: Make a grubby genre picture and load it up with ironic humor and excessive style. Raimi blew a stack of Hollywood money on the third installment, 1993’s Army Of Darkness, a good-natured but half-baked homage to Ray Harryhausen. The now-iconic Bruce Campbell stars as a dim retail clerk who’s sucked back into the medieval era with only a chainsaw and a shotgun as defense against the battalion of skeletal demons that plague him. It’s the least of the series, but it appeals to the sort of cultists who prefer their love objects to be deeply flawed, the better to celebrate their own offbeat taste. They should be out in full force for this quote-along, which provides the opportunity to shout lines like “This is my boomstick!” along with a theater full of fanboys.

by Andrew Long
August 2007
A noticeable shift in this year’s New American Talent (NAT) exhibition, at Arthouse in Austin through August, is the curator’s exacting attention to photography. Digital technology is increasing the amount of photography being created and presented today.

Image
Dave Woody
Amelia
2006
Digital print
38 × 30 inches
While photography is intermittently included in survey exhibitions, NAT would suggest that the kids are now being allowed to sit at the grown-ups’ (i.e., the painters’) table. Although the photography in NAT often feels like an afterthought, curator Anne Ellegood of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., has made a bold move in bringing the medium front and center. The overall quality of the photographic works from the 850 applicants is surprising, given that many photographers are reluctant to apply to this annual juried exhibition due to its exclusion of this medium in past years.

The major weakness of NAT is the presentation of too many subsections, resulting in the feeling of a clump of work here, a clump of work there. This is true of theme (race and alienation), medium (ink, found materials and works on paper) and style (juxtaposition, overlay and sparseness). The unifying factor is the very lack of resonance — not one part jumps out or tends to be all that exciting.

NAT artists ask more questions than they provide answers to the exhibition’s question of what is new. To paraphrase choreographer Martha Graham, You can’t make up work, you have to discover it. But it seems as if many of the artists are mimicking one another’s styles rather then forging new ground. (This may simply reflect a national trend as more and more artists are graduating from MFA programs.) What you get here is fewer tour de force, whizbang pieces and more of a slow burn. While the former can sometimes be too much sugar, not enough substance, there are several exceptions.

Image
Mark Schatz
Moving Gehry
2007
Cardboard Installation
Dimensions vary
Dave Woody’s large, meditative photographic portraits are a rare treat. Their power lies in their simplicity: you carry away only what is present. With so much recent attention garnered by European photographers like Rineke Dijkstra and Thomas Ruff, the portrait is hard to make fresh. But Woody conveys a newness through a reduced color palette and the positioning of his subject, thus encouraging us to look full on. Allison Wermager’s BEEEEP, a sound installation of found answering machines, is perfectly done. Most of the messages are trivial and inconsequential, lacking any real interpersonal connection, although at times a more emotional message surfaces. Wermager serves up these vestiges of late technology in a huge jumbled pile, where distorted voices, power cords, and telephone wires have been preserved in a bizarre chasm of posterity. Roberto Bellini’s video work Landscape Theory captures the artist at work attempting to tape a horde of black grackles gathering at sunset. An older man approaches off-camera and warns Bellini at garrulous length that he can’t tape the birds: “People are on edge. Looks like you’re videotaping that overpass. The police have been making arrests for things like that.” The whole interaction is heard as a voiceover to other sunset images. Normally difficult to pull off, Bellini’s post-9/11 discourse speaks brilliantly to our collective loss of innocence and public space.

Image
Rebecca Rothfus
Untitled (highway one)
2006
Gouache, pencil and paper on panel
14 × 11 inches
The setup to Damien Gilley’s Parking Lot Miracle video piece starts off predictably –– a man walks across a deserted parking lot, sees a boombox on the ground, then continues on. Seconds later he returns to look around, and realizing he is alone, he presses play and begins to dance. The payoff to this short video is a memorable section halfway through: As the dancer is in the middle of a midair barrel turn, Gilley suspends the tape and jogs the frame back and forth a number of times, mimicking the break-beat scratching of a cheesy Casio keyboard loop. The gravity-defying choreography is charming and humorous and fresh even upon multiple viewings. Equally engaging is Elizabeth Axtman’s video American Classic, which effectively moves the race discussion forward in a cunning, yet direct manner. Framed by her hair, Axtman faces the camera directly and lip-syncs lines lifted from old movies about racial passing. Although we see her underlying torment, Axtman could also break out laughing at any moment as the joke is on the viewer, or at least on those viewers with bigoted perceptions. There are several other strong race-based works present, including Sonseree Verdise Gibson’s Let’s Discuss the Word “Nigger” and Brad Farwell’s An African Mask Looks at Sites of American Blackness: New Orleans Superdome.

Image
William Hundley
Checkers
2006
Digital print mounted on Plexiglas
22 1/2 × 30 inches
Several works of note for their material investigation include William Hundley’s photographs of suspended fabrics; Jonathon Durham’s Foreskin, composed of tobacco, oil clay and a remote control helicopter; Suzanne Wright’s large-scale colorful drawing “Rainbow Highway” (G.W.B.); Wonjung Choi’s delightful mixed-media installation evoking a kindred spirit to the fish imagery of Lee Bontecou; and Ansen Seale’s crafted screenprint Oil for Food, with its purposeful substitution of the artist’s blood for ink.

Relational works in NAT abound: Jenene Nagy’s topologically themed sculptures; Joseph Phillips’ works on paper; Miguel-Angel Avila and Michael Cambre’s use of collaged imagery; the sparse nature of both Jennifer Nelson and Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s works on paper; Felice Grodin and Elwyn Palmerton’s migrating Mylar ink drawings; and the organized line qualities of work by Tom Mueske and Kirk Stoller.

On first view, NAT seemed exciting in its new commitment to photography, but subsequent viewing revealed an overall palette that felt gray, both in tone and vision. But this is the current state of the union, is it not?

Radio and its dwindling efficacy as a modern medium becomes the lens through which performance poet Zell Miller III tackles current events in his newest show. ‘Radio Silence’ features performances by Miller along with Wanda Holland and Ebony Stewart. Choreography by Ananda Maya Moss.
— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
more at austin360.com

‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: An IMAX 3D Experience’ — Bring the kiddos out to decorate their own magic wand and create their very own crest (of the Gryffindor or Slytherin type)more..

The Blanton Museum of Art is showing the artwork of Chilean artist Josefina Guilisasti in the exhibition titled “WorkSpace: Josefina Guilisasti.” The exhibit features eight canvases called “Marfa/Puerto Viejo,” influenced by the artist’s 2005 trip to Marfa.read more at austin360.com

Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres to accompany a display of short films by dog photographer William Wegmanread more at austin360.com

New York photographer Brian Hamill, most famous for his work with director Woody Allen on more than 25 films, exhibits his newest collection, “La Fiesta Brava,” at the downtown location of the Russell Collection. “La Fiesta Brava,” which documents a Venezuelan bullfight, is both raw and elegant.read more at austin360.com