“Lizzy Wetzel, Bradley Brown & Edward Setina: Agent on the Road”
Art Palace, through June 2
The space looks sparse as you first encounter the work of Lizzy Wetzel, Bradley Brown, and Edward Setina, the three artists from Dallas-based Road Agent Gallery, at Art Palace.
Three sculptures on porcelainlike soap trays sit along the first wall. One shelf holds tightly rolled advertisements within gel capsules; a few shelves hold cigarette packaging, gum, and its packaging reconstructed into a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and sticks of gum; while the final shelf holds a faded dollar bill with a pile of pink eraser shavings on top. The difficulty in identifying the advertisements within Spill and the playfulness of Synonymous blur the target of indictment. Is it the drugs and their addiction, or is it the business and promotion that deplete your bank account?
The next wall holds two large photos. In both, people wear or hold plastic animal masks. Candid shots from some Saturday night kegger? The congregating sheep and lion masks in The Coming of March suggest Isaiah 11:6 (from which we derive “the lion shall lay down with the lamb”), but the pairs of scrawny, hairy, pasty white legs bring up memories of Lambda Lambda Lambda. The narrative comes off as incomplete, if there is indeed one being told.
On the final wall hangs a heavily decorated and modified skull, The Mask for the Crystal Corridor. Ribbons, beads, crystals, and extra bone structures take a Texas symbol, the chalk-dry cow skull, and jazz it up into hyperbolic mysticism. The underlying sheep skull is made more terrifying and supernaturally attractive, almost enough to sell at a souvenir shop. Nearby sits a combination mandala/axis mundi with artiodactyls that might bear the prized mask. Powders and geological ingredients decoratively encircle mutant outgrowths of psychedelically flowered, crystal blossoms. Layers of the native (kitschy craft, landscape, indigenous religion, Texan identity, etc.) lead to a god rockin’ the nirvana.
Bradley Brown’s sheep masks in The Coming of March echo the sheep skull in Lizzy Wetzel’s Mask for the Crystal Corridor. Meanwhile, the tie-dye colors evoking a hallucinatory freak-out whisper to the pills in Edward Setina’s work. The distance between the artists and the works diminishes with the recurring elements, real or perceived.
When thinking of Art Palace, some of the more prominent artists in the stable create a graphic identity for the gallery and, by extension, the city. From Duggins, Fitzgerald, and Sieben to the visiting Cordero, de la Rosa, and the Trevinos, there are elements of illustration and graffiti. This first part to the Road Agent/Art Palace artist exchange brings a youthfully similar yet stylistically different perspective to Austin. Like the binding elements between the works, this transaction of art should strengthen our scenes and encourage more across the state.
This article appears in June 1 • 2007.