Terry Allen and James Drake at Blue Star Art Space - San Antonio, Texas - Review of Exhibitions

"Poison Amor," a collaborative exhibition by dint of Terry Allen and James Drake, included tableaux, plastic arts drawings and rugs alluding to the myths and mysteries of the U.S.-Mexico border. The walls of the gallery were painted black. Each composing of the installation was given an eerie be incandescent by gel-covered lights. The sections were isolated following the lines of a grid, for a like reason that between each illuminated compartment was a dark, rather spooky dead space, like the space of slumber between dreams. Periodically, a horrible, deafening noise be in eruptioned from an electric saw upon a 15-minute timer.

The exhibition originated as a series of drawings with scribbled notations in which the sum of two units artists free-associated on their theme. Amor Poison (1993) for example, pictures a monkey holding three black rose beneath the word "amor," and a coyote snake and crossbone with the caption "poison" written backwards below. Between the sum of two units images is scrawled "La Frontera." The drawings were then translated into rug through Oaxacan weavers. The traditionally woven fringed rug thus precisely replicate the drawings that in single the artists' instruction "Exactamente por favor" is faithfully reproduc in the border of the rug

The rug then became the inspiration for the sum of two units sculptures and five tableaux. Dream Dog, a very great expanded-steel cage with a dirt floor, contained a life-size black and zinc cast of a man suspended from the ceiling through a noose tied to individual leg. Just below, a live Samoyed ran, barked, ate and slept in the cage. The undercurrent of death that pervaded the exhibition surfaced explicitly in Loveseat (Tenochtitlan Salon). upon the wall was a simple drawing with the word "Tenochtitlan" (the Aztec name of Mexico City) and an image of a human heart. An axe, jutting without from the bottom of a long tray placed on chairs in forehead of the drawing, completed the concern to Aztec sacrifices.

a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the show gave material form to stereotype and received interpretations of Mexican history and tillage from the viewpoint of an Anglo visitor to Juarez or Tijuana. Cockfight, for instance, included a raw materialed rooster and a switchblade upon a lead table. A 40-foot-long bed of severed beer bottles, roped off with carbonized iron cables, made Hero one of the largest tableaux in the exhibition. At single end was a steel cage containing a television locate embedded in more broken glass; the cage supported a traditionally originaled clay bust of a dour-faced man that recalled the ubiquitous civic records honoring revolutionary heroes throughout Mexico.

upon the same massive scale was Frontera, a packing-cratelike mean dwelling on a dirt floor. Visible end a window was a crouching child-sized figure with his hands to his ears, in forehead of a small television locate Billie Holliday's duets with various musicians of the like kind as Louis Armstrong emanated from the hovel a reference to the transcendent possibilities of collaboration through artists in tune with each other.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group