The holidays tend to draw people back to family, memories and shared stories. Craighead Green Gallery is opening a new exhibition that leans directly into the question many of us quietly consider this time of year: Where do we come from?
The Dallas gallery will debut a free three-person exhibition featuring artists Faith Scott Jessup, Linda McCall and Damián Suárez. While their styles span realism, impressionism and abstraction, their works converge on a shared inquiry into belonging, covering themes of heritage, personal history and how imagination shapes the way we see ourselves in the world.
Gallery director and owner William Bardin said pairing artists with such distinct practices is intentional.
“We want to give every artist their own platform,” Bardin said. “But they have a combining story, even though they're from different backgrounds. They're all three really intentional about their choices of stories and colors and images that they choose.”
For Mexico City–based artist Suárez, that story begins with lineage. His series, “Kinetic Landscape,” carries forward the legacy of the Venezuelan artists who influenced him, but transforms it through his own technique of winding thousands of thin threads across wood panels until they form fields of shifting color.
“They create this kind of rhythm and almost like a moire effect,” Bardin said. “People expect it to be painted in different stripes, but they're always very astounded when they see it's all done in thread.”
Suárez spent two years preparing the pieces on view, researching kinetic art movements and developing compositions that merge craft, mathematics and emotion. His work is exhibited internationally, and Bardin said this new work highlights both the artist’s technique and culture that informs it.
Denton-based Jessup brings a different, surrealist kind of movement to the show. Her pieces are filled with floating leaves, patterned fabrics and natural motifs that seem to exist somewhere between the imagined and the real.
Her series of paintings, “Duets,” introduces a patterned fabric draped and painted as empty dresses mimicking garments without bodies.
“It has a surrealist power where you wonder who might be wearing this dress,” Bardin said. “And who is identifying themselves with this kind of fabric or with this kind of clothing.”
Jessup’s detailed brushwork and symbolic elements create what she calls visual conversations. Her work, rooted in an ongoing dialogue with the natural world, reflects on consistency and limits.
In a separate, more enclosed section of the gallery, Fort Worth artist Linda McCall presents “Rituals,” a series of impressionist scenes shaped by her memory and mood.
Figures in her paintings walk alone, sit quietly or move through soft-edge environments. Some scenes are sketches of her travels while others pull from memories of daily life.
“Private moments where people are seen to be walking down a street by themselves or being on a river in Venice,” Bardin said. “These kind of private intimate moments she identifies with.”
Unlike the correlation between the elements of Jessup’s and Suárez’s work, McCall’s paintings each stand alone, invoking the theme of privacy
Though the exhibition is not explicitly holiday programming, Bardin said its themes feel especially timely during this season. The gallery expects visitors to find their own relation in the three artists' perspectives.
“Being with family and exchanging your personal stories,” he said. “Really keeping up with old friends, maybe. It is just a way to be human and get together and share stories. I think that's what makes us human, too.”
Details:
Dec. 6 through Jan. 10 at Craighead Green Gallery. 167 Parkhouse St, Dallas. Free
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