Dallas curator Tessa Granowski has been thinking about cave painting.
“It’s a necessary interpretation of experience,” she said.“ And we do it in the nearest cave.”
The distinct story of a place is recorded because the cave and the charcoal happen to be nearby. For Granowski, specificity is everything. Keeping track of the details, minor or regional as they may be, is a way of caring about where you are.
And Granowski wants you to care about Texas. This is why to prepare for her current exhibition, Granowski spent a day driving across the state through flooded roads, picking up artwork from Houston, San Antonio and Austin.
The exhibition’s title, "Minor Regional Novelist," is a phrase borrowed from North Texas writer Larry McMurtry. He embraced the term after it appeared in a negative review of one of his early novels. This enthusiasm for what others might dismiss as minor or regional is the basis of the exhibition.
Capturing music history
Houston painter El Franco Lee II contributed a piece titled “DJ Screw in Heaven.” DJ Screw was a major player in the Houston music scene who died in 2000, and growing up, Lee visited his studio to pick up mixtapes.
Though it is a fictional representation of the musician –how Lee imagines DJ Screw and other late characters from his scene would interact in heaven – the work is a sort of historical record.
“At the time there weren’t any other depictions of DJ Screw inside of his home studio,” Lee said. “His studio was very mysterious. Of course I would be looking behind him when I'm at the door.”
The exhibition also includes work by Reverend Johnny Swearingen, a folk artist who was born in Chappell Hill, Texas.
Folk artists are as regional as it gets. They often work outside formal training, using whatever materials they have access to. Swearingen painted on Masonite board using house paints.
Granowski points to one painting where a church scene gives way, off to the side, to a pair of gambling tables. It makes a matter-of-fact picture, this collision of seemingly contrasting ideas. Like Lee’s work, it functions as a record of how one person understood the world immediately around him.
“He would sort of form these narrative scenes and use a trick where he would wind the scene down a hill,” Granowski said. “Which is funny to me, because obviously we don’t think of Texas as a very hilly place.”
Still, she recognized the landscape depicted in the works immediately: the softer hills around Brenham and Chappell Hill, where Swearingen spent much of his life.
Texas materials
Other artists in the exhibition explore Texas through material.
Sam Linguist, who grew up in Waxahachie, created a sculpture made from Texas clay. The work’s title, “KCBZ,” references a Lone Star radio station, another small marker Granowski sees as formative.
“The things that shape us,” she said.
Another artist featured in the exhibition, Ali Dipp, uses sewing machines from El Paso’s textile boom to embroider neon images onto denim.
Her contribution to the exhibition reimagines a landscape by 19th-century artist Albert Bierstadt, whose romantic depictions of the American West helped shape popular ideas of the frontier.
Dipp is interested in the aspirational quality of Bierstadt’s work, the imagined future that it represented.
“What I love about El Paso has nothing to do with what I see,” Dipp said. “I really care about where we’re going.”
For Granowski, giving regional radio stations, local clay and stretches of highway the consideration they deserve is a way of caring about a place like Texas.
“I’m trying to appreciate the soil right beneath our feet,” Granowski said. “If you’re seeing how beautiful your own backyard is, you’ll want to take care of it more.”
DETAILS: Nature of Things, 3002A Commerce St., Dallas. “Minor Regional Novelist” on view until May 23. "Earthlicker" runs June 27-Aug.15. The gallery is open Thursday-Saturday,12 – 5 and by appointment.
