During 2010 and 2011, Kenneth Parris III accompanied the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on the road in order to document their final tour.  This Legacy Tour showcased eighteen works in fifty cities around the world and featured the last group of dancers personally trained by Cunningham himself. After fifty-eight years of artistic achievement, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company disbanded on New Year’s Day of 2012. Through years of collaboration with artists like Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, David Tudor, and many more, their work forever changed how we see and define art in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

*DON’T MISS THE SPECIAL OPENING NIGHT PERFORMANCE ON MAY 5 AT 7PM FEATURING MERCE CUNNINGHAM COMPANY MEMBERS MARCIE MUNNERLYN AND MELISSA TOOGOOD DANCING TO AN ORIGINAL SCORE BY JEFF KLEIN.

Presented in partnership with Braga Menéndez Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires, Argentina. www.galeriabm.com.

Curated by Flor Braga Menéndez, Guido Ignatti, Laura Spivak, Luis Parenti and María Laura Rosa.

No Justification Required, an exhibition of work by Anna-Lisa Marjak, Florencia Bohtlingk, Laura Spivak, Lorena Ventimiglia, Vicky Musotto, and Monique Altschul, is rooted in collaboration. The artists, all of them female painters from Argentina, were selected by a board of curators and arts aficionados based in Buenos Aires. The curatorial team, assembled by Braga Menéndez Arte Contemporáneo, took inspiration from Mitominas (myth-chick), an exhibition presented in the late 1980s at Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires) that challenged preconceptions about gender-based work. By reexamining the ideas put forth in that exhibition, No Justification Required asserts an approach that is both genderless and gender-centric—one in which the artistic baggage of feminist movements of the past are inevitably threaded through but not intrinsic to how the work is ultimately viewed.

Otis Ike and Ivete Lucas’ One Big Misunderstanding brings together four years of the duo’s film and photography documentation of Vietnam War reenactments.  Throwing themselves into the reality and theater of reenactments in Pennsylvania and Texas, Ike and Lucas emerge with a story that tries to understand its participants and their role in America’s struggle, if now marginalized, to come to terms with an unpopular and misunderstood war.

Few would consider re-staging the Vietnam War a form of recreation, yet reenactments regularly take place all over the country by a dedicated group of enthusiasts.  Ike, a native of Pennsylvania and the son of a Vietnam vet, was introduced to this subculture through a chance encounter at a rural flea market with a full-time military surplus vendor named Bubba, who comes to act as the duo’s guide into the guarded world of reenacting.

Bubba’s crew of  “living historians” emerges as a group dominated by young men on the fringe of society.  Each is drawn to the scene by a combination of veteran appreciation, unrealized military ambitions, and their individual patriotism; however, the opportunity to role-play and the desire to own the look and feel of actors in such epic films as Full Mental Jacket and Platoon is unmistakable. As Ike and Lucas are inducted as reenactors and “war correspondents,” these sentiments increasingly seem at odds, embodying the complicated history of the war and America’s ongoing process of understanding it.

Equally confounding are the corresponding stills, shot in color slide and black and white film. The color images are clearly staged tableaus but the black and white images are disquieting vagaries, which feel inextricably more “real.” Such ambiguity calls to mind the contested authenticity of Robert Capa’s infamous The Falling Soldier (Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936).

Where One Big Misunderstanding ends, an understanding emerges of the unresolved lessons of war and their permutation in American culture.

One Big Misunderstanding is presented in conjunction with FotoFest Houston, 2012.

Upon a visit to a concentration camp and the Jewish Museum in Germany several years ago, San Antonio-based artist Jerry Cabrera first began to consider the importance of light in isolated environments, particularly environments of extreme suffering and those spaces considered sacred, such as a church or cathedral. Light denotes life, knowledge, hope, warmth and energy and has the ability to impact the psyche in profound ways. In situations of confinement, light can serve as a means of visual escape. The Light Paintings in Escapism push this point home. Using the simplicity of spare composition and saturated hues, Cabrera illuminates the canvas with color and line prompting deeper understanding and appreciation of the impact of light subtly creeping across the visual field.

Since its inception, a cornerstone of Ggallery’s mission has been to broaden cross-cultural dialogue among artists and arts presenters around the globe. Building upon the gallery’s 2009 presentation of Blast India featuring the work of Bari Kumar, Om Soorya, Rahul Mitra, and Laxman Aelay, G’s connection to India continues to grow. Later this month, G, in partnership with Redbud Gallery, will feature the work of Texas-based artists Amita Bhatt (Houston), Bill Fitzgibbons (San Antonio), Wayne Gilbert (Houston), Sharon Kopriva (Houston), Angelbert Metoyer (Houston), Rahul Mitra (Houston), and Gary Sweeney (San Antonio), as well as the work of Ramzy Telley (Brooklyn) and Laxman Aelay (Mumbai) at the 4th Edition of New Delhi’s India Art Fair. G is thrilled to be one of only four U.S. galleries represented at the fair and we look forward to the opportunity to present these artists on an international stage.

Curated by Diane Barber.

New York-based artist Scott Teplin is an obsessive drawer known for creating meticulously rendered drawings in which real world objects morph into a fantastical amalgamation of discordant forms, shapes, and colors. For his newest series, CRASH, Teplin collages found photographs of horrifying crash scenes and then redraws these compositions over and over until the hard metal lines transform into softer shapes that more closely resemble organic objects. Ultimately about control, CRASH presents an alternate interpretation of actual events–one in which documentation is transformed and transmuted to create a new reality that is as whimsical as it is disconcerting.

CRASH is only Teplin’s second solo presentation in Texas. In 2003, curator Diane Barber commissioned him to create Lubricious, a site-specific installation presented at DiverseWorks.His animated work was included in the group exhibition, Flicker Fusion (also curated by Barber) in 2008. Teplin has had solo shows in New York and Paris and he has been included in group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. His art has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Keith Smith’s 2004 The Structure of the Visual Book. His work is in permanent collections at the Smithsonian, SF-MOMA, and Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Universities, among others.