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Part of the festivities for Fall Gallery Night include the opening at FWCAC of Christopher Troutman’s drawings.

The Fort Worth Art Dealers Association deserves a lot of credit for the popularity of Fall and Spring Gallery Nights, so the group can’t get too pissed to see non-FWADA art spaces capitalizing on the event’s popularity. Remember: Uber is your friend. –– Anthony Mariani

 

Beyond Words, Cecil Touchon, William Campbell Contemporary Art (4935 Byers Av, 817-737-9566), 2-9pm Sat thru Oct 10

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Have you ever come across a strange word while reading and been gobsmacked by the infinite? “My God!” you gasp. “All of these little squiggles and lines, all of these little shapes that constitute language, they seem so random and outwardly nonsensical, and yet they are what we use to describe everything from the cosmos to a great martini recipe. It’s mind-blowing!” No? Well, even if you haven’t, you’ll still find lots to love about Beyond Words. Featuring new paintings and collage works by Austin native and UTA/UNT alum Cecil Touchon, the exhibit brings together the suggestion of typography with abstract-expressionism’s love of geometry. Some of these new Touchons resemble text-heavy corporate logos that have been chopped up and reassembled to form elegant hieroglyphs. Other works have a completely deconstructed feel, with binary forms fighting for space like a million New Yorkers packed into a single subway car. Touchon’s work appears in the Museum of Modern Art, Chicago Art Institute, and the Tate Modern, and he exhibited in the Venice Biennale in 2009 and ’01. Touchon also is founder and director of the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage, and Construction (Santa Fe) and co-founder of the International Post-Dogmatist Group. Beyond Words is his first local solo show since 2010. –– A.M.

 

Cultural Affairs, various artists, The Tilt Room at Shipping & Receiving (201 S Calhoun St,

817-887-9313), 2pm-midnight Sat

Lauren Childs and J.W. Wilson were bothered by “a feeling that the majority of local art exhibitions have you surrounded by all white faces.” Collaborating as Fort Works Art since 2013, Childs and Wilson thought it was about time for some diversity, especially considering the sorry state of race relations in the country. Cultural Affairs brings together a wide-ranging cross-section of artists, including veterans (Letitia Huckaby, Lauren Cross) and relative newbies (Riley Holloway, James Talambas). Among the works planned for Gallery Night are two sound installations by Talambas, whose experience as a musician (he co-founded The Theater Fire) and sound guru is more frequently being channeled into complex sonic experiments that conceptually move beyond music and into art. During a studio visit for this preview, I found him working on what will become a quadraphonic experience in a darkened 12-by-12-foot room that will also include an interactive light projection and music that Talambas composed during a panic attack. Be forewarned: It’s meant to reproduce a sense of constriction and claustrophobia.

Cross will create installations from her current body of work and include selections from her series Everyday Use, specifically, the framed digital inkjet print “Daisy’s Casual Corner,” depicting ads for scarves for African-American women. –– Christopher Blay

 

pARTy, various artists, Artspace 111 (111 Hampton St, 817-692-3228), noon-9pm Sat thru Oct 9

It’s not as if photorealistic painting is something just any artist can do, but part of what makes the style especially breathtaking is when an artist’s voice transcends the requisite technical mastery to give depicted moments the energy and feeling they had in life. And while Artspace 111’s Fall Gallery Night group exhibition showcases other artists who work outside photorealism, conveying the personal interpretation of a photograph is the connective tissue here –– Michelle Brandley, Daniel Blagg, Dennis Blagg, John Hartley, Nancy Lamb, Jim Malone, Devon Nowlin, and Leslie Lanzotti are masters of turning a photo’s glare, shade, and arrested movements into captivating, unspoken stories. Even Winter Rusiloski’s abstract landscapes collide with photorealism, using collaged pictures to give her dreamlike swaths of land and sky a toehold in the real world. In addition to works by Lamb, the Blagg brothers, Malone, Lanzotti, and Rusiloski, pARTy also features pieces by Fort Worth’s Alice Bateman, Danville Chadbourne, Matt Clark, Barbara Dybala, Ann Ekstrom, Pat Gabriel, Sarah Green, Kelli Holmes, Cindi Holt, Carol Ivey, Jill Johnson, Jo-Ann Mulroy, J.C. Pace III, Jo LeMay Rutledge, Fred Spaulding, and Carly Allen-Martin. And if you know anything about the local art scene, you know that Artspace 111 is party central on Gallery Night. –– Steve Steward

 

Preservation Is the Art of the City, various artists; multiple exhibits, various artists, Fort Worth Community Arts Center (1300 Gendy St,

817-738-1938), 6-9pm Sat

FWCAC will celebrate the opening of several new shows, including Preservation Is the Art of the City. Partially benefitting Historic Fort Worth Inc., a nonprofit whose main focus is operating, maintaining, and restoring the Ball-Eddlemen-McFarland House and Thistle Hill, the show features several dozen pieces by some of Fort Worth’s most prominent artists. Now in its 13th year, Preservation Is the Art of the City includes a party with the artists (6:30-9pm Fri, Sep 10) and the Cantey Lecture and Preservation Awards (6:30-8pm Thu, Sep 24), in addition to the opening celebration Saturday.

The other Fall Gallery Night openings run the stylistic gamut. Christopher Troutman’s Drawing Narrative is a collection of several large, dramatic black-and-white pieces portraying mostly human figures in contemporary urban settings, depicted from unusual points of view. In Landscapes of the Southwest and Beyond, Charles Field uses watercolor and oil to render skylines and clouds that pinpoint the tension between nature’s vulnerability and power, and FW15 will feature 15 women artists from Fort Worth in a variety of media. –– Eric Griffey

 

RAD, various artists, Riverside Arts District

(2804 Race St, 817-800-4512), 7pm-2am Sat

On the last weekend in May, Near Southside artists Jeremy Joel and Jay Wilkinson co-curated Bobby on Drums, a mixed-media extravaganza showcasing some of Fort Worth’s most promising up-and-coming artists, filling Shipping & Receiving’s Tilt Room with everything from a sonic installation to a giant sculpture of a homeless man. The duo’s Fall Gallery Night show on Race Street will feature work by Diana Urbina, Paul Thomas Leicht, Kevin Thornton, Olivia, Brandon Pederson, Hillary Dohoney, Guillermo Tapia, Devin Selby, Christopher Michael Waldon, Aimee Cardoso, Fever Dream, Jessica Fuentes, Scott Prather, Jasmine Flores, Alexa Alarcon, and Erin Margaret Alison Rambo, in addition to Joel and Wilkinson. Where Bobby on Drums was set to dazzle with its size, cleverness, and wild abstractions, RAD is also geared toward having a good time –– besides the paintings, sculptures, and photographs, local punk or punk-inspired rockers Sur Duda, Toy Gun, and Star Bass will perform. BYOB. –– S.S.

 

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts (2900 W Berry St,

817-257-2588), thru Oct 10

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s work here is a surreal odyssey of saints and sinners, gods and monsters. The drawings, on a variety of found paper and then dipped in wax, reflect a dark sense of humor and sexuality, with narratives that connect to history and art. Though the Chilean’s art has hung at Centre Pompidou in Paris, Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, and the 2012 São Paulo biennial, the exhibit has a strong local connection. Earlier this year, de la Horra did a brief residency at TCU School of Art, where she completed two Fort Worth-inspired pieces. “La Pieta after Phillip Johnson” and “Trinity Trail” are departures from the rest of the exhibit. However, as drawings transformed into sculptures, they make for perfect metaphors for the Contemporary’s mission: to build a bridge between Fort Worth and the wider, international art world. The show, in this respect, is probably out of Fort Worth’s comfort zone, where myths, shamans, and demons frolic. “El Mamon de Afrodita” may provoke a sophomoric response from viewers, especially Gen-Xers. The depiction of a childlike figure suckling Aphrodite bears an uncanny resemblance to The Great Cornholio. The point is that you shouldn’t leave your sense of humor at the Contemporary door. –– C.B.

 

Soon Warren, Atrium Gallery, University of North Texas Health Science Center, Carl E. Everett EAD Building (3500 Camp Bowie Blvd, 817-735-0301), noon-8pm Sat thru Sep 28

“What I like about this gallery is that it’s a true community gallery,” Soon Warren said. The fixture of Tarrant County’s art scene is talking about the Atrium Gallery, where she has a number of paintings on display this Gallery Night. The largest one is of a koi pond, the size of which dictated that she render the fish and the water in oil. “If you have watercolors with this size, the painting becomes too heavy,” she said, which has an effect on shipping and transportation costs as well as framing the work. Water seems to be a recurring subject for her — there are also two other paintings depicting rivers and rocks. In addition, she also has contrasting sets of oil paintings of horses, with two portraits of Friesians rendered in a fairly realistic style with a brush, while two other horse paintings are done up far more expressionistically, the thick layers of impasto created with a palette knife. Her contributions are rounded out by various paintings of flowers, one of glass marbles in a glass bowl, and two striking pictures of birds, one of a male cardinal and the other of a roseate spoonbill. (The latter picture is whimsically entitled “Spoonful of Sugar.”) Also of note in the exhibition are Gemma Haas’ realistic portraits of children and Debbie Ford’s studies of Grey Goose vodka bottles. –– Kristian Lin

 

20something, various artists, Gallery 414 (414 Templeton St, 817-336-6595), 2-9pm Sat thru Oct 11

The revered nonprofit gallery on the edge of the Cultural Distrct will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a multimedia group show by artists who’ve never shown at 414. Curated by gallery director John Hartley, 20something is about “the new,” he has said. “New faces, new perspectives, and new directions.” Painters, sculptors, photographers, mixed media artists, illustrators, and outsider artists will be represented.

Next month, Gallery 414 will feature the first solo show in seven years by Fort Worth photorealist Jesse Sierra Hernandez. –– E.G.

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