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Top Rated Marfa Photos in the Marfa.Org Gallery
Most Recent Additions to the Marfa.Org Gallery
Collection of Original 1950s 8x10s of Mitchell Ranch
WOOLGATHERING by Mary katherine & Metcalfe Earney
Tim Jetton Resigns from Marfa ISD Athletics
The Blow Lists Ballroom as Favorite Venue
Google Maps: Marfa, Texas
Dia Appoints New Director: Next Stop, Manhattan
Dan Flavin’s Light Works Illuminate At LACMA

Marfa Talk
As you probably have already noticed, the discussion forum is out of commission, BUT not for long. We are currently working on a killer update that is going to make discussion even easier - check back.

Marfa's "Pleasures" Rocked Burque

Marfa's tight-as-you-can-get punk trio, The Pleasures of Merely Circulating, conquered the Albuquerque punk kingdom (and earned a few fans in the process.) Jean, Chris, and Robert showed them how it is done at Burt's Tiki Lounge on Saturday night, and this reporter can attest: The Pleasures are a pleasure. (What's up in Burque?)

The Marfa.Org ®@ŋd¤m‡zЄ®

Marfa Independant School District Job Vacancies
Big Bend bids farewell to the Burro Lady
Permit review committee a possibility at City Hall
Christie's Catalogue DONALD JUDD Collection (ebay)

This Old House (GQ)
An art icon's private world opens to the public
"Sky-high rents and tourists looking for H&M have notoriously erased SoHo's avant-garde street cred, but today's opening of an iconic sculptor's former home proves there's some art in this New York neighborhood yet. The icon in question: Donald Judd, the minimalist trailblazer who moved into a five-story cast-iron building at 101 Spring Street in 1968 and began filling it with permanent installations of his geometric, often brightly colored work. "Don was known for saying that the placement of a piece of art was almost as important as its creation," says Barbara Hunt-McLanahan, the executive director of the Judd Foundation, which has preserved the place since..." full article

Bloomfield, Wilkes at HWY 90 Gallery

Recent paintings by Jenny Bloomfield and Leslie Wilkes will be shown at HWY 90 Gallery in February. Although the work of both artists is colorful and non-representational, the works’ similarity ends there. Bloomfield’s work is typically large, painterly and expressive, while much of Wilkes’ work is on a smaller, more intimate scale and is composed of flat, colorful patterns.

Working from her studio in Oakland, California, Bloomfield creates luminous paintings and drawings on canvas and paper. Born in London, Bloomfield earned a BA from the Central School of Art and Design, London, in 1980 and since then has exhibited her work in Great Britain and the United States.

“I first chose to paint because the marks could be seen as a direct expression of an emotion: line, color and movement, there to be read like a large book open on the wall,” said Bloomfield. “It was satisfying to arrange the emotions and create an order and balance. This was a long time ago, but it was the beginning of my need to contemplate my responses to life."

“Painting is rich in the qualities that reflect these needs. It is direct and responsive, private and flexible. It proposes solutions and then raises new questions that are better than those with which one started.”

Marfa resident Leslie Wilkes will display recent gouaches on paper that reflect her life-long interest in pattern and bright color. Wilkes’s current work is based largely on geometric patterns from the 1960s, which she translates into black and white line drawings. She then uses layers of color to explore variable compositions. Every color shift redirects the rhythm of the pattern, creating a kind of controlled chaos.

"It is, in a way, a personal metaphor for me – the way I try to control life events, but ultimately encounter disturbances along the way,” said Wilkes. “Disturbances that lead to things unpredicted and often, like the images, something more compelling.”

In 2003 Wilkes saw the exhibition Quilts of Gee’s Bend at the Whitney Museum and was inspired by the quilt-makers’ faith in the intuitive process and their creative use of pattern. Originating with a grid-based framework, the quilts depart from their original structure, but retain enough connection to the pattern to stimulate the viewer’s involvement with the complexity of form, color and construction.

Ultimately, this is the type of visual experience for which Wilkes strives, when the eye can no longer focus on a singular passage within the painting, but is propelled to search and visually attempt to reassemble the repeated pattern. “When the painting becomes a labyrinth of shape and color, one may experience a kind of pleasure that is revealed through sight alone,” said Wilkes.

Wilkes received a BA from the University of Texas and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has had solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Austin and Marfa. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was the recipient of the Milton and Sally Avery fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. Before moving to Marfa in 2005, she was Fine Arts Graduate Program Manager and faculty member at the California College of the Arts.

A reception for the artists will take place tomorrow, Thursday, February 8, from 5 to 7 p.m. The work will remain on display through March 10. The gallery is open every Friday and Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m.

PRELUDE TO RED by Cassie Worley

Galleri Urbane / Marfa announces a new exhibit, Prelude to Red by Cassie Worley. To understand Worley’s show you may want to first check out the artist’s website. The site opens with the image of a deceased wolf, sprawled against a white backdrop. Only the wolf isn’t a wolf, but a child dressed in wolf’s clothing. Before the implications of the image can fully register, a shower of heads – of wolves, of Little Red Riding Hood – come raining down in a pool of animated blood. The scene is both familiar and foreign, the juxtaposition of a fairy tale narrative made famous by the Brothers Grimm and an adaptation of said narrative, in which the ending is far from happy.

Prelude to Red features a series of ten mixed-media illustrations, 30” x 40” each, entitled “X Begat Y Begat C,” as well a short film entitled “Rise and Shine.” The illustrations are select pages from a David and Goliath coloring book, which the artist scanned and manipulated into a new story. In Worley’s version, the heroic David, king of Israel, gives birth to Saddam Hussein, who later gives birth to the traitorous Absalom. When David learns of his grandson’s plot to kill Saddam, David slays Absalom to save Saddam, who, in an act of vengeance, then kills David, and spends the rest of his life grieving for both his father and son. Throughout this tale, the line drawings have been paired with hand-drawings and found illustrations from fairytale and nursery rhyme picture books. There’s a jet plane in one frame, a flying witch in another. Sleeping beauty makes an appearance, as does Little Bo Peep, Old Mother Hubbard, and a host of ambisexual characters. As a result, the viewer is pulled back and forth between a youthful past and an extremely adult present.

Worley reinterprets another Biblical story in her short film, “Rise and Shine.” Here, it’s the tale of Noah’s Ark that’s being manipulated and retold. The film is comprised of a montage of images – illustrations of Noah and his animals from children’s books, photographs of snorkellers, of dead fish, of floating cadavers and tidal waves – being flashed before the viewer at increasing speed. Naturally, the soundtrack is “Rise and Shine,” its familiar “the Lord said to Noah, there’s gonna be a floody floody” being enthusiastically belted out by faceless girls and boys. But when set against the starker images, the innocence of the children’s singing, like the ebullient piano score accompanying them, creates a profound dissonance in the viewer. Noah’s Ark is no longer simply a tale about saving animals, but an ominous portent of natural and man-made disasters to come. “Fairy tales and Biblical myths are constantly adapted to suit the needs of modern times,” explains Worley, of her preoccupation with Biblical and ancient mythologies. “However, as one adaptation replaces another, the original goals of the tale become displaced. Characters become tattered, confused and often interchangeable. The moral becomes difficult to reach.” By altering these stories, presenting them in a way that generates a new narrative while calling attention to the alterations, Worley imbues the classic tales with clear morals – of the particular story, and of the stories as a whole. “All of my work is connected in that the study of one mythology leads to another,” says Worley, for whom the stories of Noah and David led to that of Little Red and the Big Bad Wolf.

About the artist: Cassie Worley was born in Richmond, Virginia. She received her BFA in Studio Art from James Madison University, as well as her MFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Feb 9th – March 30th 2007
Opening reception Feb 9th 6-9 pm

Pleasures Tonight at The Goode-Crowley Theater

The Pleasures of Merely Circulating will kick off a southwestern tour with a show tonight in Marfa.

Channeling a line of high energy from Bo Diddley through “Helter Skelter” to The Stooges, Husker Du and beyond, The Pleasures of Merely Circulating are fast, powerful, and delicious.

A trio based here, The Pleasures of Merely Circulating are a happy contradiction of Jeanne Sinclair’s golden throat and violent guitar riffs, with a rhythm section schooled in, well, everything: rock, swing, reggae, country—you name it. In previous lives, drummer Robert Halpern made a living playing the Texas dancehall circuit, bassist/songwriter Chris Cessac played bluegrass and wrote a book that won a national award for poetry, and Sinclair secretly mastered most of the Robert Johnson catalog on her acoustic guitar. In this life, they have come together to conquer the world as The Pleasures of Merely Circulating.

TPOMC will be making their El Paso debut at 10 p.m. Feb. 16 at the House of Rock & Roll, 4645 N. Mesa. They will also be playing at 10 p.m. Feb. 17 at Burt's Tiki Lounge in Albuquerque, and 9 p.m. March 3 at the Liberty Theater in Marfa. Band myspace is here.