'Merrick Ales: Photography'

Austin Art Garage, 2200-J S. Lamar, 351-5934

www.austinartgarage.com

Ongoing

Been a while since we last stopped in at the Austin Art Garage south of Oltorf, and now look at how it's still a bastion of more local goodness than you can shake your Grumbachers at.

This is the place you go when your eyes want the most diverse bang for their buck, as the walls of the gallery are chockablock with creations from about three dozen different people of solid visual talent: oh, Adreon Henry, Darvin Jones, Judy Paul, Rachael Cook, Graham Franciose, and so many other names with bright works attached to them.

Not only are the artists from around these parts, but the subjects, too, are frequently of a local focus – the sights and delights of the ATX or the honky-tonkin' West in general captured on canvas, on panel, on metal, on paper, on and on, almost floor to ceiling, but none of it so high-concept as to be over one's head.

If art were some competitive game, gallery co-owner Jake Bryer would've had the most to lose by including Merrick Ales as the newest artist among these many. That's because Bryer's Austintatious, detail-nailing photography, which we, well, raved about in these pages a year ago, would be the thing most likely to be challenged by the glory of Ales' own local-vista shutterbuggery. But, no, this isn't the gridiron or whatever sports fans call the court that quarterbacks play hockey on – this is art. And so Bryer's own oeuvre of photographs remains unvanquished by the panoramic, full-color miracles that Ales has captured with his cunning lenses.

You know when you're touristing in other cities and you see little postcards that are perfect images of the place you're visiting? I mean, sights that are almost breathtaking, except they've been reduced to easily mailable size and are marketed in every retail outlet that bears a spinner rack? Imagine the best of those, capturing this bat-enhanced city, but beautifully reproduced on canvas at 20-inches-by-30-inches size and just one step away from the man responsible for their existence. Yeah. And it's like that for much of the other artwork – the paintings, the prints, the stencils, the stamps – in the Austin Art Garage, too, thus helping make a decent case for the contention that, around here, local might be properly spelled 7-8-7-0-4.