Sunday, October 5, 2008

Review of Hallwalls: Rodney Taylor and Andrew Reyes Shows

I was so glad to finally have a chance to visit Hallwalls. I had been hearing about the space for a year, but for some reason I never managed to get downtown to see it. I was curious to see how the church had been renovated to the point that it could house a contemporary art gallery, and I was not disappointed. The new architecture is immediately apparent when you pull in the driveway and see the large glass-enclosed staircase dominating the back of the church.

Walking into the first floor, you are greeted with a space that reminded me most of the Buffalo Arts Studio - one room, set up with movable walls, and holding two completely different shows in each room. What was different about this space, though, was that it seemed that the walls were intentionally set up haphazardly, so you could glance the other exhibition through gaps in the walls. We went into Rodney Taylor's gallery first, and even though his images are rather dismal, (think blood-red tree growing out of the Capitol Building that is drowning in a sea of turbulent waters) I still really liked them. Even though the trees were dead or dying, falling apart, or being burned, I still thought they held a significant amount of power. Then, you get closer and realize that there are pencil sketches on several of the drawings. They add detail, and once again, they aren't particularly reassuring, but they add to the overall auras of the works.

I particularly loved how the works were executed, by layering paint so much that it chipped away and looked like real, peeling tree bark. It also continued to convey the sense of destruction and decay at work in his paintings. These are works on paper, and are attached to the wall only via push pin, which left some of the paper puckering out from the wall. It was a nice reminder that his trees were actually created on a material that would not exist without them.

Andrew Reyes' work was mostly photography, with two mixed media pieces thrown in. The handout from the gallery says that Reyes tries to heighten the mundane, but I didn't think that his photos were mundane at all. They all paid such careful attention to detail and to composition. The photograph of a man with the cauliflower eye was humorous, while the photo of the colorful flower doused in rain was beautiful. Reyes also includes text in some of his works, such as a picture of two birds sitting in a tree, with the caption, "do me a favor dave, shoot me if i'm still working this branch in five years." There were a few photos that I wasn't attracted to, but that's to be expected. Overall I thought it was a good show, and that both artists had something to offer me as a viewer.

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