Serie `95-'96

Coronado Studio
ongoing

If you've yet to check out Coronado Studio and its immense collection of silkscreen prints by mostly local artists, shame on you. If I have failed to convey how glad you'll be when you do check it out, shame on me. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and tell you about it again.

Coronado's "Serie Program" has given more than 40 artists the means to produce limited-edition prints, half of which go to the artist and half to the studio. The artists do as they please with their prints (Christmas gifts for the entire family?), and Coronado offers theirs at ridiculously reasonable prices to you, the interested-but-not-loaded Austin arts patron. It offers you a great opportunity to acquire excellent work, and it won't cost you your kid's college fund.

The studio recently released its 1995-96 collection, featuring works by both beginning artists and well-knowns such as Sam Yeates and David Serrano. What words can I use to explain what a treat these pieces are? Surreal, subdued, simple, complex, cryptic, colorful... that's a start. Of course, each work is vastly different from the next, and even the common link of past collections -- a Latino flavor -- has become more blurred.

Studio owner Sam Coronado is there every Saturday to give you a look-see. He'll also give you an idea of the immense amount of work devoted to these collections. Okay, I've done my job. Now, head to East Sixth and do yours.

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Emerging Images: Contemporary Russian & Eurasian Photography

Seventh Floor, Harry Ransom Center
through October 11

"I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it." This quotation -- one of many posted throughout this exhibit -- is by Igor Stravinsky, and it summarizes my feeling about this show: I do not understand Russia, but this show illuminates contemporary Russian existence so beautifully that I can feel it.

Prior to the dismantling of the Soviet Union, most Russian artists never imagined their work would see the light of day in their own country, much less in the West. But in 1994, with the Ransom Center's help, the Museum of Photographic Collections was established in Moscow. Thus, a country that once "appropriated" its citizens' artwork began to provide a showcase for it -- and UT gained a resource for contemporary Russian photography. (UT houses one of the largest collections of modern Russian photography in the western world.)

More than 50 photographers contributed to this exhibit, resulting in a widely varied show. Many kinds of style, content, and composition are explored, and facets of a formerly hidden culture are brought into focus. As you might expect, many prints are haunting, such as Yuri Rybchinski's "A Detention Center," showing two young, bored inmates staring at their cell's floor, the shadow of a guard upon the wall. Some works depict what many of us perceive as the definitive Russian family, such as Evgeni Mokhorev's untitled work from the "Environment for Children's Play" series, showing a poor but seemingly content family of four in a dreary apartment, a cigarette hanging from the lip of the complacent-looking adolescent boy. Others are sweet and simple, slices of life that could be from Austin as easily as Russia, such as Gennadi Bodrov's "Old Staircase," which shows a girl in pigtails chasing a bouncing ball.

Mixed media pieces, landscapes, chroma-genic prints... a vast expanse is explored. Absent are political portrayals -- no compromising National Enquirer-esque shots of Gorbachev, no bitterly-retouched images of Lenin -- thus one can sense a lingering repression, even in the post-Cold War photos. I hope it is a repression that continues to dissolve. -- Cari Marshall