Review: Davis Gallery’s “Late Summer Dreams”

Lying in bed on a sweltering summer’s night, conscious mind shifting toward the wonders of dreamtime, you’d be fortunate to witness such visions as are held within the air-conditioned rooms of Davis Gallery’s new group show, “Late Summer Dreams.”

The collection showcases recent work by 34 Central Texas-based artists – longtime members of the gallery’s family of creative makers – offering fresh takes on painting, mixed media, assemblage, sculpture, and photography, decking the walls and plinths of the gallery with vividly wrought renditions of the waking world and more.

It seems appropriate that this exhibition’s subjects are often images or embodiments of the outdoors, as if offering the heat-wracked environment and its denizens a respite from the furnace that Texas has lately become. There are David Everett’s color woodcuts of avians – a kingfisher, a woodpecker, a caracara – chilling on one wall near the pedestal that holds his polychromed wood sculpture called Eventide that captures a barn owl in midflight. There are Jan Heaton’s large watercolors of botanical abstractions, colorful shards from a garden of delight, bringing framed floral lines and hues to the Davis verticals. Denise M. Fulton’s realist oils on panel capture the beauty of local trees, each one like the candid photo of an old friend, especially her Pease Park. And Nest Egg II by Fallon Bartos is a three-dimensional wonderment of bamboo, geode, and gold leaf.

It’s not all about the outside coming in, though. Sometimes it’s about who’s done what to the outside and the people who once lived there. Dana Younger’s Legends of the Lone Ranger pieces are high-relief portraits, rendered in polyurethane and wax, comprising a series of American presidents – John Tyler, James Polk, Martin Van Buren, and Andrew Jackson, each wearing a domino mask – who presided over this country’s early westward expansion.

“I’d like people to take another look at our shared history,” said Younger. “Each president did something that made westward expansion possible, but at a great cost to our natural or cultural resources. I like the mask because it can be good or evil, depending on your perspective. I hope that humor, familiarity, and the unexpected will draw viewers in and get them thinking.”

The undulating lengths of Caprice Pierucci’s entanglements of polished wood are equally organic and engineered, providing rhythmic punctuation throughout the gallery – between the more representational works, the playful paper foldings of B Shawn Cox, the meticulous found-object constructions of Randall Reid, the painted-paper patternings of Amy Banner Updegrove, the surreally evocative assemblages of John Sager.

And – we might say finally, though there are more artists to discover in these storied rooms – there are the sculptures of Steve Brudniak. These are the stuff of mad scientists’ dreams in any season: painstakingly wrought from antique laboratory equipment, sliced and spliced, transmogrified into apparatuses that aren’t merely inside a contemporary space, but seem ripped from technology that might’ve existed in a more steam-powered future that we unfortunately dodged.

Pay a visit to “Late Summer Dreams” at Davis Gallery, though, and the only thing you’ll dodge is the oppressive Texas sun, all while treating your waking life to a variety of wonders seldom glimpsed while conscious.

Davis Gallery’s “Late Summer Dreams”

This article appears in August 25 • 2023.