September Artists 2007

Neil Maurer, photographer
The aesthetic reference, which has fueled my fascination with these highway constructions comes from visiting the Mosque in Cordoba, Spain. The Mosque covers a city block and is a one-story horizontal space supported by a grid work of columns, The windows are rather small along the outside walls. This produces a large, dark, very mediative, horizontal, space. But in one corner a strong light illuminates an arch and invades the dark Mosque. As I walked toward that light I found myself at an arched doorway of a classic Spanish cathedral. The Spaniards, after they forced the Moors out of southern Spain cut a hole in the roof and seemingly dropped in a European Cathedral.. They decided not to destroy the mosque, but wanted to put a Catholic stamp on it. You can look out at the mesmerizing horizontal Moorish architecture, and then up at the soaring verticality of a European cathedral. The visual experience is captivating. In our highway overpasses the supporting grid of cement columns produce dark areas, echoing those of the Mosque and the soaring ramps of the overpasses evoke the verticality of the Spanish cathedral. In addition, I am treating this subject in a way that retains this horizontal and vertical reference, yet produces a sense of abstraction. One element I have adjusted is to remove any clouds in the sky. This removes any sense of depth clouds in a sky produce. These flattened white shapes, with no far away clouds, move forward and compete visually with the vertical structures. This possibility of photographing a certain reality, yet transforming it, has always fascinated me. Click photos for larger view.
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Dale Jenssen, metal sculptor
DALE JENSSEN was born in western Mass. and attended UMass, Amherst, and the Alfred C. Glassel School of Art in Houston, TX. In 1984 she moved to Taos, NM where she skied, rafted the Rio Grande, and created a line of brightly colored plastic jewelry that she marketed nationwide. Dale later relocated to the West Texas ghost town of Terlingua. Inspired by the desert vistas and rusty detritus from Terlingua's mining past, she began making found object metal sculpture. In 1996, commissioned by a local B&B to make light sconces, Dale proceeded to teach herself welding and sheet metal manipulation. Since then, she has created lights and illuminated sculptures for motels, restaurants, and private homes throughout Texas and the US. Dale now lives in San Antonio, TX.
Click image for larger view.
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Deborah Keller-Rihn and Ramin Samandari, photographers
A concern about the natural world and our place in it as well as deeper questions regarding the nature of the human heart inspires this photographic exhibition. Samandari creates surreal, ethereal images inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s book of dark poetry and prose titled Les Fleurs Du Mal. Ramin Samandari superimposes excerpts from the book onto other worldly photographs of exotic plant forms. Deborah Keller-Rihn explores the ubiquitous modern midden in San Antonio. A midden is an archeological term for a refuse heap. These photographs reveal the surprisingly beautiful compositions and the implications present in what we so casually discard.
Click photos for larger view.
	Hidden in Middens (What Remains We Are) by Deborah Keller-Rihn	Hidden in Middens, #38 (What Remains We Are) by Deborah Keller-Rihn
Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) by Ramin Samandari
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Jane Dunnewold, textile artist
Jane Dunnewold is the author of Complex Cloth (1996; Fiber Studio Press), Improvisational Screen Printing (2003: self published) and most recently Finding Your Own Voice: A Guide to Design and Composition, co-authored with Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan of the UK (2007). Her work has been exhibited in numerous invitational and juried exhibitions and a length of her cloth won the Gold Prize at the Taegu International Fabric Competition (Korea) in 2000. In 2004 she was awarded the Quilt Japan Prize for her piece entitled Two Sides to Every Story. She was a keynote speaker at the international Surface Design symposium in 2005 and lectures and curates exhibits world-wide. In 2008 she will spend the fall teaching at various locations in Australia. Dunnewold produces more than 100 unique lengths of fabric every year and is an advocate of art cloth. Dunnewold publishes a subscription based on-line journal, The ArtCloth Quarterly and maintains Art Cloth Studios in San Antonio, Texas, where she lives with her daughter, Zenna, two dogs and fifteen cats. Click images for larger view.
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Kathy Vargas, photographer
Kathy Vargas is an internationally praised artist/photographer whose numerous exhibitions include one-person shows at Sala Uno in Rome and the Galeria San Mart’n in Mexico City. A major retrospective of Vargas' photography was mounted in 2000 by the McNay Museum in San Antonio, Texas. Her work was featured in "Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry" for the Corcoran gallery and "Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (CARA)." Photographs by Vargas hang in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Southwestern Bell Collection. She was the director of the visual arts program at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center for many years. She currently is the Chair of the Art and Music Department at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas, her hometown. Vargas is a long-time admirer of Cecile Pineda's writing. Click photos- for larger view.
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George Krause, photographer
George Krause was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1937 and attended Philadelphia College of Art on a scholarship. He received the first Prix de Rome and the first Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship ever awarded to a photographer, two Guggenheim Fellowships and three grants from National Endowment for the Arts. In 1993 he was the first photographer selected Texas Artist of the Year. Krause’s photographs are found in the world’s major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. He recently retired from the University of Houston, where in 1975 he founded the photography program, and now lives in Wimberley, Texas with three dogs and eight cats. Click photos for larger view.
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