Dallas art world III

Last night I couldn't persuade Leila to join me on my gallery hop. She was excited about it before hand, but when push came to shove she said she was tired out.
After dinner I went over to PDNB for the "Hidden Treasures" show, with a variety of artists. It was an interesting mix of artists.
Then Holly Johnson had Virgil Grotfeldt. Interesting, but not compelling. Some work in the front room by ? made me think however. They were ledger sheets and letters with drawings on them- as an artist, to take something irreplaceable and draw on it demonstrates a confidence in your ability to make the image you want the first time through. Unless, of course, the artist first scanned the original and then would have countless copies to mess up on first.
Marty Walker, on the other hand, had a very interesting show. WAYNE WHITE: I Fell 37 Miles to Earth 100 Years Ago. It is an installation of paintings with large text running through them. I say running, because the text moves from the back to the front, or weaves across the painting, like the WordArt function in Microsoft Word. The paintings themselves looked like thrift store finds, and I suspect that may be what they are, which echoes my musings from Holly Johnson. There was one paining of a little boy sitting in a chair holding a marble maze of the letters THAT. A middle painting, a small landscape,had is, and then the boy painting was repeated, the marble now at the end of the THAT maze. So I don't know if he painted that from scratch or copied it or what.
I then went on to Conduit, persuaded by the wonderful gallerista at the gallery talk on Wednesday night. Four artists were showing there, but none really demanded my attention.
I finished up the evening at Modern Ruin, another temporary exhibit, this time in a Washington Mutual bank building that is about to be torn down. It was fun to go inside a bank building and get to go behind the scenes. My favorite art pieces were the leaking ceilings- ceiline panels were removed and a plastic sheet with water in it was put in it's place. The water slowly dripped into a metal bucket below. There were several of these scattered throughout the building. The other piece was conceptual. The viewers went into the drive through room- where the tellers usually sit, and a helmeted person in a convertible sat in the drivethrough. When a viewer sent the money tube out, he would send a dollar bill with something written on it back to the viewer. Getting to be on the other side gave a different perspective. With the helmet and the post in the drive through it was hard to see the driver, but we could see more of him than he could of us.
All in all, an interesting evening. I should have written down some of the artists at the last show, but I kinda dashed in and out. I enjoy seeing who I run into that I know and what gallery it's at. I don't usually see people I know at PDNB, but I did run into a former classmate who is now interning there. Other classmates, professors, and fellow students pop up here and there, and a former colleague and some current ones were at Holly Johnson.