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'Siting Sculpture' exhibit celebrates Nasher opening

By Catherine Cuellar, KERA 90.1 reporter

Dallas, TX – Catherine Cuellar, KERA 90.1 Reporter: In a field in downtown Dallas, a parked Airstream trailer buckles under the weight of an upright piano. The piece, entitled "Undeterred, They Continued Driving South," is the work of West Texas sculptor Willie Ray Parish.

Willie Ray Parish, artist: If you walk into an arts space and you see something you didn't expect, you're pretty sure it must be art. I like catching the viewer outside the art arena with something they might realize is art. So I'm sure some people will never make the connection that this trailer with a piano crashed into it is art. I'm sure some people will just see it as an accident.

Cuellar: Artist Rod Northcutt of Chicago agrees.

Rod Northcutt, artist: That is one of the problems with going into a space and having to look at work. A lot of people don't go to galleries and a lot of people don't go to museums.

Cuellar: Parish and Northcutt are among the fifteen artists in "Siting Sculpture," the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art's exhibit celebrating the opening of the Nasher Sculpture Center. Northcutt's site-specific pieces include minimalist birdhouses inside, which recall a Donald Judd piece in the Dallas Museum of Art's collection, and outside, a birdhouse in the Victorian style of the Wilson Historic District, where the Contemporary is located.

Northcutt: So if you can be sly about it, and lure 'em in, and present something that really almost blends into the environment but still sticks out a little bit, enough to make 'em think, "Why is that there?" - then it's hopefully getting around that hurdle that we have leftover from modernism. Where people look at the work and they can actually participate in it and they don't feel so put off by it.

Cuellar: Joan Davidow had the idea to commission the show's artists shortly after she arrived as The Contemporary's director two and a half years ago.

Joan Davidow, Director, The Dallas Center for Contemporary Art: Knowing Nasher was opening, and because we're the lesser known entity and on another side of the highway, how to get people that were coming to Nasher to know a little bit about what emerging Texas artists are doing with sculpture.

Cuellar: The opening of the Nasher has inspired interest in sculpture, which pleases Parish.

Willie Ray Parish: Three-dimensional artists have the hardest time in the world - people that do these large things and haul them around. They don't fit in most galleries. Galleries can't store them. Most galleries aren't interested in even dealing with them. But for me, the three-dimensional works actually are something, where flat work is sort of an illusion of something.

Cuellar: Peter Dorsey shares Parish's interest in the creation and reproduction of art. With partner Claudia Joskowicz, he's created a work entitled "Proxy," which combines video images of the Nasher Center with a 3-D element that morphs from one shape to another, resembling Nasher's pieces.

Peter Dorsey, artist: It's an attempt to kind of look at reproduction and, as opposed to the physical, to the real, what does that mean? A lot of sculpture, a lot of work, of architecture gets seen through reproduction, through books or through television or through other kinds of media. We kind of compressed the space, kind of condensed it for viewing in another location. It's essentially a kind of catalog - almost kind of like flipping through a book, but it kind of condenses the collection and mimics the collection almost.

Cuellar: "Siting Sculpture"continues through December 20th. For KERA 90.1, I'm Catherine Cuellar.

 

Email Catherine Cuellar about this story.