AUSTIN -Volitant Gallery

Femme Fantastique

by Alana Keres

            If you are administering Austin’s most civilized art gallery (have you seen that marble floor?) every now and then you are going to want to curate it.   After a year and half of directing Volitant Gallery,  Xochi Solis  has gathered up 34 works from  14  women, who are --not insignificantly-- scattered around the planet.  

            Every curator finds and rides the line between discussing a premise and acting it out; if you’re an Art Church type (cf. Angeliska, et al.) it comes down to balancing liturgy and ritual.  When the curator steps over that line and plants herself firmly in the realm of ritual – as Solis appears to have done -- the show will have certain natural advantages.   It will  be uncontainable (absent a controlling syntax it’s going to  cross-reference to hell and back); it’ll be indelible, since the imagery will glide, satin-handed, into the unconscious; and it will be a wee bit feral. 

            Which isn’t to say Xochi Solis doesn’t name her premise.  Femme Fantastique: the eidolon of Womanity that sloshes around behind our collective gaze.   Solis shrewdly flashes a couple of  pictograms of power,  while setting loose something quite a bit more subtle.    Cross the threshold into Volitant’s well-mannered ambience and you confront a subcomandante Quetzalcoatl twirling like intestinal smoke on the glazed floor; to his right (our left) the skin of  the Incan Pachamama riots on the wall. 

            If this dada/mama moment makes you a little queasy,  back up and try again.    Deep right and near left hang the faux-Flemish stylings of Nancy Baker, whose very tight brushwork belies something chill and dainty inside of violence (even as a muffled  wahoooo  comes through the wall).   Around the corner, Angel Polachek’s cosmos-in-a-cupboard --scarlet, noir and pearl eschatologies– delivers its argument in a more wistful key.    And a few feet away Wendy RedStar’s Indian princess timescapes could be plopped into the  kitsch basket, but I wouldn’t advise it.   They’re freighted with symbols (where is that decoder ring when I need it?) from someone living off the edge of  what our sisters-in-sociology like to call Hegemony.

            There is a takes-one-to-know-one clause in reckoning the subtleties of this show, so here’s your homework:  toward the back of  main chamber  is a suite of four C-chrome “photosculptures” by Jaishri Abichandani, cities all.  They warrant a long look; without examining the titles, see if you can place them  (Hint: even after breakfast, you can…). 

            That’s five, enough to get you started.   While writing a review half the work is in gently suppressing the  punchline of a exhibition,  but I will say this:  what we have here is some mighty fine, post-Apocalyptic juju.     If  you are one of the few still  frolicking under the impression that Judgement Day hasn’t already arrived, you need to see this show.     While it will not  provide redemption or any of its subsidiary consolations, you may find yourself rehearsing an emotional palette beyond the current terror/security continuum.     And is there a better fantasy than that?  

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Alana Keres, who has not yet won the Nobel Prize in Literature, is currently at work on three books, two of which stake all sorts of  outrageous claims for art.   The other one is fiction.    

Images:

Daphane Park

guess who the fuck is coming to town, Quetzalcoatl remix. 2007

Dimensions variable

Mixed media installation

Donna Huanca

PACHAMAMA, 2007

7’ x 3.5’

Fabric on canvas