Various Artists
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.
Emerging Images:
Contemporary Russian & Eurasian Photography
Various Artists
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
This article appears in October 4 • 1996 and October 4 • 1996 (Cover).