Arthouse Texas
The Siren’s Song Press Release
Curated by Kelly Baum, Assistant Curator of American and Contemporary Art, The Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin
January 20, 2007 - March 4, 2007
The Sirens’ Song is an exhibition about painting, artists and one of the oldest and most powerful forms of communication: the story. In the last few years, there has been a resurgence of interest among artists in allegory and narrative—broadly speaking, in storytelling. This exhibition seeks to understand how artists, in particular painters, employ storytelling as one of their primary expressive devices, not as an end in itself, but rather to meditate on personal memories and collective experiences or to weigh in on history and current events. In the process, these artists create a productive, compelling confusion between the real and the imagined, between non-fiction and fiction, and between representation and abstraction. The title of the exhibition, as well as the general curatorial perspective, takes its inspiration from an essay by novelist and literary critic Maurice Blanchot, who described the myth of the Sirens as the archetypal story—that is, as a story about stories, or about the poetic and structural nature of stories.
Included in the exhibition are works by: Seth Alverson (Houston, TX) Gilad Efrat (New York, NY) Joey Fauerso (San Antonio, TX) Ali Fitzgerald (Austin, TX) Trenton Doyle Hancock (Houston, TX) Kirk Hayes (Fort Worth, TX) Philip Maysles (Houston, TX) David McGee (Houston, TX) Xiomara De Oliver (New York, NY) Vincent Valdez (Los Angeles, CA) William Villalongo (Brooklyn, NY) Hilary Wilder (Brooklyn, NY)
