I am preparing myself for something very dull—an exhibition Staring at the Wall:  The Art of Boredom at the Lawndale Art Center in Houston. But, I wasn’t bored. In other words, I didn’t feel a sense of rote dis-ease, which boredom often engenders, or a sense of entrapment (except for Clayton Porter’s “work, try, hard” lyric looping in the background as audio to his video, which I’ll discuss below). I approximate boredom to: F–k. I’m stuck in study hall and I’m completely turned-off, nothing I can do here will arouse me.

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Almost alien, skinny, young white women hardly clothed with a look of wanting in their faces and perfectly messy hair—these are the muses of fashion photography. We’ve seen spread after glossy spread of them. Pretty Much Everything, on loan from the Gagosian to Dallas Contemporary, reveals all in a hundreds-plus exhibition of photographs by notorious fashion photographers Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin.

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Mathew Tom is winner of this year’s Jerwood Drawing Prize. Exhibitions presenting winners held at JVA at Jerwood Space in London. Here is Mathew Tom’s website. I am loving this artist.

Recently, I contributed to Willy Bo Richardson’s latest catalogue, “Music to Drive to” with an essay of the same title.

Expert: “Colors present themselves in continuous flux,” writes Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, 1963, “constantly related to changing neighbors and conditions.” Opposing blues and oranges vibrate rapidly when placed next to one another—causing excitement. Vibrating boundaries heighten interactions between two colors. Like Albers, color serves as Willy Bo Richardson’s primary subject.

For more information, visit Willy Bo Richardson’s website.

The Dallas Art Fair boasts growing numbers over the past three years, and in its fourth year seems to have elevated to a new level of maturity with over 70 galleries in attendance. Housed in the Fashion Industry Gallery (F.I.G.) near the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas Museum of Art and Crow Collection—with new Rem Koolhaas, the Winspear, and Santiago Calatrava in close proximity—Dallas certainly has the architecture to support such a fine event.

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As of 4:30 pm on April 19^th, the University of Texas amassed its latest piece for Landmarks public art collection—Ben Rubin’s tribute to Walter Cronkite, who attended the University in the 1930s. Titled And That’s The Way It Is projects massively sized text onto the side of a building in the Walter Cronkite Plaza.

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Photos by Rowan Ogden

Nick Schager of Slant Magazine wrote of Dragonslayer in his review, “…it’s a film that makes a strong, if unintentional, case for the pathetic emptiness of the punk-rock life.” If Schager had seen past the main character (Skreech, pictured above), perhaps it would have been easier for him to see that “making a strong case for the pathetic emptiness of punk-rock life” was the intention of the film.

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Irish artist Tom Molloy makes work that addresses current global affairs, collecting together and subtly altering political imagery. “Shake” stretches around a central wall in the gallery, featuring 59 black and white photographs of various world leaders — Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush included — shaking hands. Each photograph includes a handshake or embrace; usually the men are smiling, the pictures mounted in ordinary, household frames.

Full story on Visual Art Source

When we think of murals on public walls, we might imagine childlike portraits stretched across city blocks—or, the popularized work of Shepard Fairey (currently in Dallas).

But we might not imagine a mural which touts an anti-American slogan like, “Down with U.S.A.,” or depictions of the statue of liberty as a skeleton, which the Associated Press reported February 2, 2012 represents several murals throughout Tehran, Iran—as “Government-sponsored murals became a centerpiece of the Islamic establishment’s image-building machine,” writes the publication in “Revolutionary art: Iran murals gallery of defiance.”

Full story here.