Arts Review

"Slick, Furry, Lush, Line"

Studio 107, through June 16

"Slick, Furry, Lush, Line," while a scintillating title to roll over the tongue, only skims the surface of the textures explored in the works of artists Young-Min Kang, Candace M. Briceño, Jeongmee Yoon, and Miguel Cortez for Studio 107's current show. Take, for example, the cultural and economic textures evoked by Young-Min Kang in the Chinese Trojan Horse (2006). Using chopsticks, carefully broken and meticulously placed, Young-Min Kang has reconstructed a railway bridge built by Chinese laborers in Sierra Nevada, Calif., in the 1860s, bearing up under the gallop of a horse made by the same method at 10 times the scale. Clearly, the title of the piece refers back to the Trojan horse of myth, which was brought inside the gates of Troy under the guise of a gift and unleashed a horde of Greeks who then proceeded to level the city. Yet, Kang also calls up the image of the workhorse in his consideration of what is in play when America eagerly accepts Chinese goods and labor while bulwarking our immigration systems to a previously unparalleled extent.

And speaking of unparalleled, Jeongmee Yoon's work here is a disquieting group of photographs featuring children and their collections. Far from the nostalgic and seemingly archaic bug collections and baseball-card sets one might think of when pairing kids and their passions, Yoon's photographs, including Yehyun and her pink things (2006) and Yae Chan and his blue things (2006), are explorations of the color-coded and primarily plastic preoccupations of children seemingly too young to own so much. Child-directed marketing agencies would surely see these photos as a victory for their team, but for the rest of us, the full collection of Yoon's work, including 20 images of children nearly lost among their painfully gender-coded gear, is startling. The intersection of color and content in these images unveils a cultural pattern that is not easy to dismiss.

In the now more-familiar medium of computer renderings, Miguel Cortez has put together what Studio 107 owner Liz Joblin describes as works in meant-to-be-comforting "Martha Stewart colors" that are nothing near comfortable. In another interesting consideration of cultural phenomena and at the extreme of this rethink of the Jetsons' humble abode, Cortez's sharp-lined, auto-techno-scientific-styled graphics point out an interesting disconnect between the false nostalgia of the American furniture and design markets – think Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware – and the high tech industry's state of the art.

Moving from Cortez's artificial interior landscapes to abstract exterior landscape evocations, Marden (2006), by former Austin Museum of Art "22 to Watch" artist Candace M. Briceño, uses felt on canvas to create a mass of small rolls of fabric that look so fun to touch that Studio 107 had to move a sofa in front of the piece to keep bodies and hands at a safe distance from the work. While a strong statement about both the comforting materials and their calming repetition, Joblin's furniture move is a reminder that Studio 107 is a converted apartment, one of many at the corner of Fifth and Brazos, which are conglomerating into a small strip of galleries in our developing downtown. This growing commercial art scene is both a tangible opportunity for collectors and part of many recent and promising developments for artists who make both their home and their work here in Austin.