Inman Gallery is pleased to participate in the 2022 Dallas Art Fair (April 21-24), presenting work by Jamal Cyrus, Jackie Gendel, Dorothy Antoinette (Toni) LaSelle, Shaun O'Dell, Robyn O'Neil, and Alexis Pye. Exhibiting a dynamic mix of figuration and abstraction, as well as varied media, the displayed works explore a conceptual range from the climate crisis to music history, from surveillance to family histories. Included in the booth are punch stitch embroidery works by Alexis Pye, mixed media landscape drawings by Robyn O'Neil, a new monochromatic denim work by Jamal Cyrus, a painting by Texas Modernist Dorothy Antoinette (Toni) LaSelle, paintings on paper by Shaun O'Dell, and a salon of figurative watercolors by Jackie Gendel.
Jamal Cyrus (b. 1973, Houston, TX) recently opened his mid-career survey entitled "The End of My Beginning" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. a continuation from its presentation at the Blaffer Art Museum. He currently has a solo show at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, titled "FOCUS: Jamal Cyrus," on view through June 26, 2022. Drawing on the languages of collage and assemblage, as well as the cultural politics embedded within Black American music, Jamal Cyrus' work pursues sculpture as a series of metaphysical encounters. Cyrus is engaged with an aesthetic practice that aims to transform the most mundane materials and objects into rich, densely packed networks of meaning and purpose. For the fair, we will be presenting a new denim work that draws upon the rectangular "redactions" from Billie Holiday's leaked FBI file.
Dorothy Antoinette (Toni) LaSelle (b. 1901, Beatrice, NE, d. 2022, Denton, TX) is one of Texas' most celebrated modernist painters. Having been exposed to European modernism in college in Nebraska, she went on to study at the University of Chicago, where she received an MA in Art History. Subsequent studies in Europe before World War ll and then in the US with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Hans Hofmann in the 1940s cemented her modernist credentials. From the 1950s onward until the 1990s, LaSelle practiced her own unique style of geometric abstraction, characterized by bold color and enthusiastic paint application. From the 1960s on, she increasingly worked on paper, in series, using oil pastel, watercolor and ink. Not unheralded in her lifetime, she had solo exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art (1948) and the Fort Worth Art Center (1959). She is currently included in the exhibition "Texas Artists: Women of Abstraction" at the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, on view through May 8, 2022.
Robyn O'Neil's (b. 1977, Omaha, NE) prodigious career places her in the company of some of the great landscape artists in the history of art. Known for her detailed narrative drawings that often contain art historical references, her work ranges from the most intimate of renderings to monumental multi-paneled works. Often surreal or symbolic, her drawings reference personal narratives and art historical allusions, all while dealing with themes of memory, identity, and climate crises. Her mid-career survey exhibition "WE, THE MASSES", organized by Alison Hearst for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, was on view October 2019- February 2020. For the Dallas Art Fair, we will be presenting examples of her recent foray into experimental mixed media drawing that engage watercolor and collage alongside text showcasing a looser approach to landscape compositions.
Alexis Pye (b. 1995, Detroit, MI) is a Houston-based artist whose painting practice has explored the tradition of portraiture as a way to express the Black body outside of its social constructs. Her first solo exhibition, in Summer 2021, focused on portraits of Black men situated within a garden or foliage setting; the works were meant, as she has stated, to evoke "playfulness, wonder and blackness, as well as the joys amidst adversity." For the Dallas Art Fair, we are presenting two recently completed works, "Going Out" and "Found," that comprise small gouache paintings on vellum surrounded by an artist-made punch-stitch frame, alongside a large-scale painting. As part of the Dallas Art Fair programming, Alexis will be in conversation with Bianca Gracie, Managing Editor of EDITION, Friday, April 22, 12pm at the Nasher Sculpture Center.
Jackie Gendel (b. 1973, Houston, TX) paints colorful, narrative compositions that blur the distinction between figuration and abstraction in their rendering of human figures. Included in the fair are seven new watercolor paintings. Embracing a fluid approach to her work, Gendel has commented how she develops “scenes, characters and situations through deliberate figuration, intuitive mark making, color and chance procedures,” often painting over works, or creating the same image in different colors and sizes to subvert the singular image. This procedural evolution mirrors the evolving identities of the characters she paints, allowing the narrative to theatrically unfold and resolve. Her work is informed by a range of artists, from Rubens to Laurencin, "late styles" (of Kirchner, Picabia, and 19th c. French painting), as well as minor fictions, the mise en scène of 1930s film, and the tart, wry, political girl groups of post-punk.
Shaun O'Dell (b. 1968, Beeville, TX) makes drawings, videos, music, and sculpture that explore the intertwining realities of human and natural orders and critique the destructive nature of the American myth of manifest destiny. O'Dell's early work was characterized by symbolic images harkening a lineage of what the artist calls "paternal destroyers" like George Washington, Daniel Boone, and Robert Oppenheimer, followed by a phase of pure abstraction. In 2018, two events of impact brought these two distinct formal chapters of his work together; O'Dell's hometown of Paradise, CA burned in The Camp Fire (the largest and deadliest wildfire in California history) and he began a series of visits to the Cumberland Plateau where his paternal ancestors started their respective journeys west through the Kentucky wilderness Daniel Boone had carved out in the 1800s. Included in the booth are two works, "Gorge Taxonomy" and "Pathway," that directly reference these histories and highlight the indigenous flora and fauna of the Cumberland Plateau region.