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jonas-vos · 5 years ago

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Pulling up to the secluded building where the latest arms deal Jonas had been negotiating over the last six months was supposed to take place, the Dutch man cuts the engine.

Sits back and lights a cigarette to try and calm himself, though he knows the feat is impossible, knowing just who is inside the building ahead of him. Felix Ward, the eldest of the Ward siblings. Ksenia’s brother. When Ksenia told Jonas of her brother’s plans to kill him along with his brothers as revenge for what happened to his father over a year ago, Jonas laughed. He couldn’t help it. That was why she left? To protect him? Didn’t she know he didn’t need protection? “Tell me your plan,” Jonas’ eldest brother Jasper says from the passenger seat of the car. Jonas knows what he’s doing, making him go back over the plan to keep him from being in his own head too much. He needs to be smart about this, no more going rogue even though that’s exactly what he wants to fucking do. Felix tried to take away the one person who means everything to him. His wife. Ex-wife now, thanks to that miserable fuck.

Parking the car, Jonas leans back and takes another drag from his cigarette. Answers his brother as they notice Johannes pull up on the other side of the building, “When we go in, I’m heading straight for Dom. It won’t take long, I’m not planning to draw it out.” He clenches his jaw at the thought of Ksenia’s bodyguard turning on him, knowing he won’t settle until Dom is drowning in his own blood. “I know you have your own business to settle with Felix because of the photos you received. You can take care of him. They’re under the impression we’re here for the guns deal, so it’s just the two of them with two guards. It’ll be easy,” he promises. They follow Johannes as he leads them into the building, quickly taking out the first guard standing just inside the door. Seeing movement in his peripheral, Jonas motions that he’s going to the left to seek out Dominik as Jasper and their younger brother go in search of Felix.

It doesn’t take long for Jonas to find his target. Coming up behind him, Jonas leans against the doorway and lets out a small cough to announce his presence. He startles Dom, who spins around in surprise. “What? Don’t tell me you weren’t expecting to see me.” He smiles darkly at the look of fear on Dom’s face as he stares at Jonas, an excuse on his lips. “I don’t want to hear it. I really fucking don’t,” Jonas says, walking towards the scared man. His gun hangs loosely from his hand as he circles Dom, kicking the back of the man’s legs to send him to the ground. Grabbing him by his hair, Jonas leans down to speak directly against his ear, ignoring the man’s apologies and stuttered protests. “She trusted you. I trusted you,” he finishes as he takes his serrated knife out of his pocket, slicing Dom across his throat. He drops him to the ground, delighting in the gargled sound of the man choking on his own blood. Before walking out of the room, Jonas takes his gun out of his waistband and fires two shots into Dom’s chest, just because he can.

Walking out of the room, Jonas can hear the screams of who he can only guess is Felix, and he lets out a maniacal laugh as he walks in on Jasper taking a nail gun and nailing every single photo he received of Sofia and Noora from Felix to both of his legs. He shoots Johannes a look. “Did you take care of the other guard?” Johannes rolls his eyes before replying, “Of course I did. I caught him outside trying to run off. Shot him before he could get too far.” Jonas nods at his younger brother, pleased. He walks around Felix tied to his chair, wanting to tear him apart limb by limb. He settles for grabbing the man’s hand, and proceeds to cut off each of his fingers. “I heard you threatened your sister with this if she didn’t give you her wedding ring. It’s only fitting it happens to you now, isn’t it?” Jonas asks, Felix’s screams not fazing him in the slightest. “All of this and you never even got to see the life insurance money from your father you so desperately wanted, huh? That’s a shame,” Jonas says, shaking his head in mock sympathy. As he’s finishing, Jonas watches as Jasper walks up behind Felix, both hands on the man’s jaw. With a sharp flick of his wrists they hear the deafening pop of Felix’s neck.

As the three brothers make their way out of the building, Jonas makes a call to their clean up crew, telling them to get to their location as quickly as possible. Jasper and Jonas say their goodbyes to Johannes, promising to see him back in London, before walking towards their car. Jonas stops, hearing an incessant ticking sound. “What the— Jasper? Do you hear that?” He asks his older brother, turning to look at him. The Dutchmen look around for what could be the source, a sinking feeling growing in Jonas’ stomach as they both stare at Johannes’ car. It feels like it happens in slow motion, watching as Johannes gets into his car. “JO! JOHANNES, NO!” They scream, but it’s too late. The car bursts into flames the second their younger brother turns the ignition, the blast from the car bomb sending both Jasper and Jonas flying back against their own car.

#[ narrative ]#[ jonas x family ]

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ecotone99 · 6 years ago

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[SF] Off, Never Away

There was no meaning or word for what had happened. All he knew but didn’t understand was that the world around him didn’t exist, and in a moment it did. Consciousness happened first, followed by a constant humming vibration everywhere around his head. Then came the compression, he couldn’t tell if the immense pressure that pressed at every molecule of his being had been there all along or if it had instantaneously appeared out of nowhere, suffocating. Knowledge simply lacked. He didn know anything, he didn’t know what was happening around him, everything was dark, and he was aware that he was trapped, but he didn’t know how he got there, or where he came from. He didn’t even know what he was. The universe shifted around him, and he could feel every motion of it resonating through his body. Unable to breathe, move, or see, he had no choice but to surrender to the constricting darkness that was the only world he knew but couldn’t comprehend. The groaning vibration inside and around his head continued, and in a miraculous instant like a flare igniting in the darkness of his mind he could understand what it was: it was sound. Only he didn’t know what the concept of sound was, or how he recognized it. The universe shifted again, disorienting his perception of existence. The sounds it brought grew louder. Without warning the dense press of black that constituted his world lifted, the pressure on his body loosened, and for the first time he was aware that there were two different entities in the world: himself, and everything else. He didn’t know where this certainty was stemming from, but he was sure that there was his own body which defined him, and the rest of the world around it, and that both were two separate beings. He didn’t know to which extent either being extended, or where his body ended and the rest began. Slowly the black faded to a dull gray, and a world of shadows appeared all around him. It wasn’t much, and there was barely anything to register, but even that was such an immense attack on all his perceptions. Everything invaded his line of thought all at once. Shadows danced and sounds pulsated through his mind faster and faster until the universe seemed to break apart all around him. Then came the light. The flash was instantaneous, faster than he could register or acknowledge, and strong enough to eliminate every streak of darkness or shadow from the entire world around him. It was painful, and it brought a severe reverberation deep inside him that he couldn’t explain. He had no way of knowing what it was called then, but he was experiencing terror for the first time, again.

Twenty-three year old Jo Stipe stared in awe at the giant building in front of him. He couldn’t yet fully grasp what he had just experienced. He couldn’t remember most of it either, an intertwined web of noises, voices, and people staring and poking at him. He remembered being attached to a lot of devices and screens that flashed, clicked, and beeped the entire time. Someone had seated him on a wheelchair and pushed him out of the building, stopping at a bench on the opposite street where a small group of people had already been, the young man pushing him had told him they were waiting for something important but Jo hadn’t been paying much attention. He was busy taking in the world around him, the warm breeze of the red sunset was the only comfortable thing he could ever remember experiencing. The building had a giant marble dome that gleamed in the fading sunlight, the concoction of emotion stirring inside his gut got more turbulent the more he took in the sight. He looked at the people waiting around him, a few were sitting on wheelchairs similar to his, but they looked much older than he was, they all had the same expressionless dazed look planted on their face, like they were in a trance, Jo knew he must have the same look on him. Each person had two or three people huddled closely around them. Looking closely Jo noticed that every seated person had a pale blue bracelet on their left wrist. It was then that he felt the same kind of tag hanging loosely above his hand before seeing it. It was made of a material resembling a cross between leather and plastic. It wasn’t comfortable, his skin itched and sweat underneath the foreign thing in objection. He yanked at it with his other hand, trying to rip it off but to no use, he was too weak. Thin letters were engraved on its small surface, he had to squint his eyes to look closely:

Johann M. Stipe Date of Death: 11/24/1944 Date of Resurgence: 11/24/2017 7:35:03

His eyes hurt from the strain of those three tiny lines of text, he vaguely remembered the people inside the building talking about his body not being in use for a long time, and that even the smallest effort could hurt until the drugs kicked in, whatever that meant. A bus rolled to a stop in front of the group of people in front of him, but it was nothing like any bus he had ever seen. This one was smoother at the surface, sleeker in design, and seemed larger than the ones he remembered driving through town on Sundays when he was a boy. Large letters of light blinked across the side forming the words “PROGENITOR ORIENTATION”. As the group of people huddled together in front of Jo began boarding the bus, the driver jumped out of the cabin and strolled to the opposite side of the street to a booth in front of the building, and started chatting with someone sitting inside amiably. No one took notice of Jo, everyone seemed busy catching up with their own loved one on a wheelchair. Jo didn’t care, he began to stand up. Sharp vertigo immediately flooded his senses, overwhelming him. Nauseated, he braced his knees together. It was painful, but he didn’t fall. His feet felt like heavy mounds of dirt underneath him that screamed in objection as one by one, he turned his back on the pale blue bus and walked away. Memories began flowing back to his mind with every step he took. He had grown up here, he had lived his entire life in this city. And died. He remembered death, he remembered his deathbed and the entire house that smelt of death of days before he finally closed his eyes for the last time. He remembered how much pain, shivers, vomit, and sweat it had cost him to finally pass into the darkness. At the time it was soothing, knowing the suffering of sickness had come to an end. Yet here he was. Strolling through the same streets, breathing the same air that destroyed him once before. Bits of broken conversation from the people inside the giant domed building slowly came to drunk focus. Every seventy-three years… But only for fifty-six hours… They had tried to explain what had happened, he wasn’t even sure if what he heard was what they really said, perhaps it was the other way around. He kept walking. He recognized the shadow behind the city, but not the city itself. There was no mistaking this was the same Philadelphia he had roamed before so many times, but it had advanced beyond perception. It was disconcerting, like trying to recognize a son in a crowd of people only relying on a photo of the father. His old neighborhood had entirely moved on. Where there was once a community of urban middle-class households now stood a compound of black skyscrapers of concrete and steel. He didn’t know what he had been expecting, there would be no one to know or acknowledge him, and he didn’t need to be reminded that he no longer had a home in this world. He kept walking. His energy faded away as his body felt the first pains of hunger. He stumbled into Mathilda’s Diner and sat at the nearest bench. The place was quiet, and seemed open only to families. Jo noticed many of the kids staring at him through small untrusting eyes, darting back and forth between the bracelet on his wrist to his expressionless face. “Good evening sir, welcome to Mathilda’s!” A wheezy voice of a young woman greeted him at his side. Jo had been lost in a gaze through the glass on his other side, watching the new world unfold itself through the giant window. He turned slowly towards the young girl, he meant to turn quicker (or what he thought of as more normal), but his reflexes seemed slower than usual, or at least his movements were abnormal in a way he couldn’t quite understand or describe. The woman was pretty, and looked at least a couple of years younger than he was (or had been, he reminded himself). He stared at her in silence, taking in the view of this generation, and watched her expression slowly shift from warm welcoming cheer to awkward unease. “How can I help you?” She asked, keen on breaking the uncomfortable stare. It suddenly dawned on Jo that he hadn’t spoken a word since he was brought back. “P-ie.” It was a croak, a painful groan of rasping gravel erupting from a hollow body that hadn’t made a sound in decades. “Excuse me?” She asked. “I want… Pie.” “One apple pie coming right up,” and she darted away, eager to get out of his haunting gaze. “Excuse me sir, sir?” A voice brought him back to focus, he didn’t know how long he’d been lost once more in the world on the other side of the glass. “Do you have your Progenitor credit card?” An older woman was standing at his table, a concerned look on her wrinkled face. “What?” “Your credit card, the Progenitor credit card they gave you after your orientation,” the woman replied patiently. “They didn’t give me anything,” Jo said, not knowing who they were. “I’m sorry,” the woman apologized, “They must have made some mistake, but we can only serve you if you hold a Progenitor credit card. Perhaps if you call their hotline they might help.” “I knew Mathilda,” Jo said in a manner that was impossible to tell if he was speaking to himself or the woman. It seemed like the only thing that made sense to him at the time, the only plausible fact. It was a casual statement, there was no intent behind it, and it had a devastating effect on the woman. “Wh-what?” She breathed. She was caught off guard and it showed on her face. “I knew Mathilda,” Jo repeated in the same nonchalance. The woman yanked at Jo’s left wrist in unintentional violence, she took in what was written on his bracelet. “You knew my mother?” “I only knew Mathilda.” Jo was oblivious to the whirlwind of emotion that had swept up in the woman’s eyes. She stumbled into the seat in front of him and tried to catch his stare, but her attempts at meeting his eyes were like trying to hold water in a cupped hand. “She- she died when I was five,” she said solemnly, “I was taken away and lived in foster homes all my life. How did you get to know her?” She added when Jo didn’t show response. “I used to work here,” Jo said, “but she was just a little girl.” Marie was born in nineteen-seventy, which also happened to be the year of the first registered resurgence. It had been a fact of life as she knew it: Everyone dies, and every seventy-three years that pass from then on they return to the world of the living for fifty-six hours. Growing up she thought about death a lot, she had lost her mother at an age too young to register the weight of life, or that of losing it. Seeing someone wearing a pale blue bracelet, and knowing what it meant wasn’t an unusual sight for her. One thing she could never get used to however, was the look of detachment permanently etched on every single Progenitor’s eyes. It was a look of haunting melancholy that pained her whenever she noticed it. She tried to stare into the eyes of the man in front of her. He looked young, he was barely even half her age, yet his gaze was the most haunted look in a man she had ever seen. His face was blank, his expression almost bored, but his eyes told stories of longing, stories of sorrow, and those of abstract abandon. “How did you get here?” She asked. “I walked.” “But the orientation banquet can’t be over by now, it’s too early.” “There was no banquet.” “How come?” Marie was confused, Progenitors are rarely left alone, especially this early after resurgence. “It’s supposed to be the last stop the bus makes,” she explained. “I skipped the bus.”

Jo didn’t know how long he sat there, listening to Marie trying to explain what was happening, but none of it still made any sense. The fog in his brain was starting to lift, and memories were getting clearer in his mind. But they were scattered, it was still difficult to associate himself with any of them. Had he broken his leg when he fell down the flight of stairs in his neighbor Mr. Murphy’s house before or after he had kissed Nancy Albright one afternoon after school? He still remembered how his father had whacked him with his belt as he lay there with his leg protruding at an unnatural angle for embarrassing him in front of the respected Mr. Murphy just as vividly as he remembered the feeling of Nancy’s heart pounding mercilessly under his palm as he fondled her breast while drinking in her breath between his lips. He had absolutely no doubt those events took place, but no clue if they had happened days apart, or years. “What?” He asked, to a sigh of ardent patience from the woman. “Where did you go off to?” She said, “I was asking you what she was like, my mother.” This was perhaps the most jarring fact of all. His brain simply couldn’t process the fact that this woman who was old enough to be his mother, was the daughter of little Mathilda. Mathilda, the eight year old daughter of the man who owned this diner. He tried finding a resemblance but it was hard; and if there was one, his brain simply refused to acknowledge it. For a brief heartbeat their eyes met, and the look of discomfort that shot through the Marie’s face was instantaneous. “She’s a sweetheart,” he said, watching the teardrop bulging at the corner of her eye, “everyone loves her.” Marie insisted Jo spend the night with her in her small apartment above the diner. “I know it’s not much,” she said sheepishly, “but it’s warmer than any place I’ve ever been to.” “Thank you.” “Tomorrow you should do a little sightseeing,” Marie smiled warmly, “do you have any specific place you’d like to see?” “No. I only had my old home, but the neighborhood’s gone,” Jo said indifferently, “there is nothing for me there.” “You sure? Is there anyone you want to look up?” “Look up how?” “Do you know of any family you’d like to see if they’re still around?” Marie suggested, “or perhaps follow up on their children, it’s customary for Progenitors.” “I have no one waiting for me,” Jo paused, “Jenny.” “What?” “Jenny,” Jo repeated, the first spark of emotion flashed across his eyes, “I’d like to know where she is.” “Tell me her full name honey,” Marie’s smile had a warmth that challenged even her apartment’s, “I’ll look her up for you.” She grabbed what looked like a sheet of plastic and gestured him to get closer. To Jo’s amazement, the sheet of plastic came to life in a series of vivid colors that seemed to respond to the woman’s touch. “Oh,” she giggled, “this is an eye pad. It’s like a small computer.” Another bizarre statement that made absolutely no sense to Jo. He nodded his head. “Tell me her name,” Marie repeated. “Jennifer, Jennifer Hewitt,” Jo said skeptically. He watched her prod at the thing with her fingers for a few seconds. “And she lived here right?” “Yes.” “When was she born?” Jo didn’t know where this was going, or how it would help in any way, “October third, twenty-five.” It was a surprise he still remembered her birthday. “Was this her?” Marie handed him the device a minute later. He received it suspiciously, not knowing how this could be a pad for his eye, or how to use it to see Jenny. He let out a gasp of shock at the sight in front of him. There lied between his hands a photo of Jenny, his Jenny. He had been older than her when they were together, but here she was older, much older than Marie, but it was unmistakable. Jo took in the sight with with a heart pounding sorrow and longing through his chest. “She must have been very much loved,” he heard Marie say. “What?” “This is a memorial website,” she explained, “people use it to post thoughts and prayers to loved ones when they pass off.” “Pass off?” “Die.” Jo looked at the photo of Jenny on the screen in his hands, her face was creased and wrinkled, her eyes were tired, but she still looked the same. When he tried tracing a finger across her face the image shifted, and lines of text began to appear in its place. ‘Auntie Jenny you were the kindest person who ever blessed this world, we were lucky to have you. -Jill’ ‘Our world will not be the same without you, your smile was the strongest glue that kept us together all our lives. You will be painfully missed. -Robert’ ‘I don’t know what to say. Bob says it would be cathartic to post what I feel on here, but I don’t know how that would help. You were the best mother any person could ever have, I still can’t believe you passed off, but who knows, maybe one day you will get to see this. Just know that my kids will know what it feels like to have a mother as loving as you, and they will hear stories about the woman who taught me everything I know on being a decent human being. I promise you this, when you do come back, you will have them waiting for you, and they’ll tell you how I had done the best job I could, just like you did. I love you mom. Off, never away. -Jo’ “She passed off thirteen years ago,” Marie said. “Why do you say that, passed off?” “Well because we come back, don’t we? When we die we pass off, not away.”

Before Marie went to bed she handed him the eye pad again, only this time Jenny’s photo had disappeared and was replaced by a long article by someone called Wikipedia. “They were supposed to give you all the details in the orientation,” she explained, “but this will do just fine I guess. To help you better understand.” She showed him how to scroll through the text and make the words appear bigger or smaller just by using his fingers. The article brought foreword more questions in Jo’s mind than it answered. It was full of long sentences and jargon that were just too complicated to follow. He found himself skimming through most of it, sometimes skipping entire paragraphs. No one knows how resurgence came to be. The fact remained that throughout the entire multibillion year history of Earth dead meant dead. It was regarded as the end of life, and that was it. Many theories on what started resurgence and how it works are being introduced every day. From a ‘freak undetectable supernova on a neighboring galaxy cluster that splashed the Earth in radiation in the year eighteen-ninety-seven which caused a fundamental rift in the core physical properties of the biosphere’ to ‘alien technology that was observing us all along deciding to change things up’. The fact remained that no one knows why this happened, it just does. And the same microbial activity that happens within the body of those deceased begin appearing once more and at the same pace after their second death following their resurgence, suggesting that they would once again resurge, another seventy-three years later.

For two days he roamed the city, it was the same place, same roads, and even some of the same buildings. But he still couldn’t identify his presence to this world. In his mind two worlds existed, his and theirs. Perhaps it was the different for the people of this world, they knew what to expect, and they had incorporated their acceptance that life didn’t end into their definition of the world around them. But he didn’t. Jo was angry, he couldn’t shake the feeling of betrayal that kept creeping up in a knot inside his gut. He had been stripped of the solace he’d been forced to accept when he got sick decades before. This world however, had adapted to the new order. Entire businesses and services were readily available for Progenitors as they called them. From hotels to cultural exploration museums (where they exhibited the old life they knew and the new one they were now exploring) to Progenitor exclusive sex houses. He’d also noticed many other Progenitors as he explored the city, and he’d learned to identify them without needing to see their pale blue bracelets, they all had the same look of detachment echoed on their features. Jo walked on, remembering how Jenny’s look of devastation haunted the last thought he ever had as he took his final breaths. The thought broke him more. There was no world where they would ever be together for all eternity as Father Collins had promised, they would both keep coming back to walk this town forever, but never together. Jo had less than an hour left. He dreaded dying again, more than the first time. He didn’t want to come back to a different world, one where he would surely be detached from even more than this one. To what end? He didn’t know. He longed to find a way to escape this loop. But no matter how hard he wrought his brain he couldn’t find a way to break free. What would happen to those who weren’t buried? Would a person who was lost at sea experience resurgence only to drown again for all eternity? How would resurgence happen to those who were cremated? Would their consciousness return without a body, stuck in limbo? Jo was angry, he was exhausted, and he was defeated. His time ran out as he stood on the pier lost in thought amidst the salty breathing of the sea. The familiar wings of darkness fluttered at the corner of the peripheral sight of his eye, they’d been there all along, ever since his resurgence. Following him, waiting for this moment. It drew closer and closer until black was all that existed. Only black wasn’t enough to explain this kind of darkness. To fully understand it, one would have to erase every presence of it in their head. Jo doesn’t understand it. Its emptiness is all-encompassing. Its color isn’t black, color doesn’t exist here. Null. Not zero, and not less than zero, because both instances have value. This world doesn’t have value any more, the world no longer exists.

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nofomoartworld · 8 years ago

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Hyperallergic: At the 2017 Dallas Art Fair, Big Ambitions and the Big Mo

Enoc Perez, “The Statler Hotel, Dallas” (2016), oil on canvas, 30 x 42 inches (photo courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery, New York)

DALLAS, TEXAS — Here in Texas, things can be big — vast expanses of ranch land and sprawling cities born of oil and other big-industry money under very big Texas skies. To spend time in these iconic American cities is to notice the dynamism and diversity of their cultural communities and institutions, and how much more they deserve to be recognized on the national and international scenes.

With unabashed pride, the annual Dallas Art Fair opened here on Thursday. It will run through this Sunday, April 9, serving as a locus for the ever-stronger vibe of this city’s growing visual- and design-arts scene, and the institutions and resources that have developed to support it.

At a time when a reactionary federal government is targeting the National Endowment for the Arts, public broadcasting, and public education for destruction, Dallas’s civic leaders, unequivocally, all seem to get it — that a city’s vibrant cultural life is not only good for society but, in contributing to its overall quality of life, is good for business, too. Nowadays, any politician who fails to grasp that irrefutable, vital link between culture and the economy deserves to be given the boot (with a fine, handcrafted Texan snip-toe) into those dry, far-away pastures where only tumbleweed roams.

Sedrick Huckaby, “Just the Two of Us” (2017), oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches (photo courtesy of Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden, Dallas)

Mayor Mike Rawlings recently announced that the city’s annual Dallas Arts Week would become Dallas Arts Month, starting on April 1. Its centerpiece, the Dallas Art Fair, now in its ninth edition, has become a symbol of the local arts scene’s impressive growth and increasing momentum. At the fair itself, those trends are reflected in the greater visibility of galleries from other parts of the United States and overseas, as well as in its deepening relationships with local collectors and museums.

Money-where-their-mouth-is evidence of this kind of partnering was especially notable in a $100,000 purse provided by the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program to the Dallas Museum of Art. These funds, contributed by a pool of local collector-donors, enabled the museum to acquire works by the artists Justin Adian, Katherine Bradford, Derek Fordjour, Andrea Galvani, Summer Wheat and Matthew Wong from various exhibitors at this year’s fair.

The DMA’s new director, Augustín Arteaga, calls Dallas “an exciting city, with the largest arts district in the US.” Born and educated in Mexico City, Arteaga took over his new role here last September after several years as the director of the Museo Nacional de Arte (known as “MUNAL”) in Mexico’s capital.

Garth Evans, “Mirror Mirror” (1990-91), epoxy resin, fiberglass over foam board and paper, 28 x 17.5 x 13, and, at right, small watercolor-on-paper drawings, circa 2016-17 (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Against the nation’s current political backdrop of racism, xenophobia, and disdain for culture, science, and the life of the mind, Arteaga’s appointment sends a strong signal that the region’s bicultural history and heritage have been enthusiastically embraced by the Dallas Museum of Art, which has firmly positioned itself as an international institution.

By coincidence, one of the museum’s current, large exhibitions, México 1900-1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco and the Avant-garde (on view through July 16), which had been on its schedule before Arteaga’s arrival, focuses on one of the richest art-historical periods of his native country. Presented completely bilingually, this broad survey recounts Mexican modern art’s development across genres in the first half of the 20th century, showcasing paintings, photographs and other works by leading figures of that time.

Back at the art fair, painting in its many forms is highly visible. Some galleries are showing smatterings of drawings, sculptural objects, photographs, or photo-based works. Mixed-media installations are few.

Joe Mancuso, “Chandelier” (2014), steel, roses, concrete, approximately 84 x 48 inches (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Dallas galleries tend to represent artists from Texas as well as other parts of the US. Among these exhibitors, Conduit Gallery’s booth features Houston-based Joe Mancuso’s spooky-elegant “Chandelier” (2014), a seven-foot-long, cone-shaped, wire-framed structure hanging from the ceiling and adorned with long-stemmed roses that have been dipped in concrete.

Conduit’s founder, Nancy Whitenack, who told me she appreciates fine craftsmanship, is also showing the collage and assemblage artist Lance Letscher’s newest works made from flattened and stapled-together pieces of antique metal toys. Conduit is also featuring small-scale, oil-on-gessoed-panel portraits by the British artist Sarah Ball, who in the past has produced unassuming but eloquent portraits based on police mugshots. With similar modesty, Ball has based her recent paintings on photographs of immigrants taken by Augustus Frederick Sherman, a registry clerk and amateur photographer who worked at Ellis Island from 1892 to 1925. He routinely asked his sitters to wear their home countries’ native garments.

Marc Dennis, “Jacob’s Ladder” (2016), oil on canvas, 58 x 48 inches (photo courtesy of Cris Worley Fine Arts, Dallas)

Dallas’s Cris Worley Fine Arts is showing new paintings by Marc Dennis, who, in the past, working in a hyperrealist mode, conjured up cheeky send-ups of art history, such as a picture of two superheroes and a Russian mobster ogling the barmaid in Édouard Manet’s iconic “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” (1882), or a version of Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” (1656) featuring a disco ball. At the fair, Dennis’s new paintings fill canvases with explosions of luscious flowers, like classic still lifes on steroids. Worley is also exhibiting paintings by Paul Manes, an artist who recently left New York for Colorado and whose images regularly feature circular forms. Here, his big, oil-on-canvas “Jammed” (2017, 78 x 104 inches) depicts a pile-up of cut logs that serves, he has suggested, as a metaphor for today’s political stagnation.

Sarah Ball, paintings from the “Immigrants and Accused” series, 2016-2017, oil on gessoed panels, each piece 7 x 5 inches (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Worley, who opened her gallery in 2010, said, “Local collectors who used to buy art whenever they went out of town are finding an ever-bigger selection and range of available work right here in Dallas. Plus, thanks to the Internet and the easy availability of information about art, people are better informed than ever before and more interested in art. These trends have helped the Arts District here develop.”

Dallas dealer Erin Cluley, who opened her eponymous gallery a few years ago after working at Dallas Contemporary, a non-collecting museum whose programming is local, regional and international in scope, said, “The Dallas Art Fair has fueled its own success by helping to educate people about art. This fair feels friendly and welcoming, and for many people here, it offers an opportunity to make discoveries. All of this has helped encourage buyers.” Cluley’s offerings include Dallas-based artist Nic Nicosia’s black-and-white photographs of scale-model set-ups of rooms filled with wire sculptures and other objects he makes himself. Meanwhile, at Cluley’s gallery space in West Dallas, the little props Nicosia uses in these staged photographs are now on view.

Sedrick Huckaby, “Gone But Not Forgotten: Sha Sha” (2017), oil on canvas, 72 x 36 inches (photo courtesy of Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden, Dallas)

One of Dallas’s oldest venues for modern and contemporary art, Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden, is featuring new pictures by the African-American painter Sedrick Huckaby, whose commitment to portraiture reflects his abiding interest in the theme of families and communities as extended families, and by the Georgia-based artist Miles Cleveland Goodwin, whose portraits and images of nature or people in nature — farm fields, leafless trees in wintry settings, a little boy pulling his ailing dog along in a small cart — capture moments of heightened awareness of the world around us and, in reaction to it, of the stirrings of the soul.

Valley House co-director Cheryl Vogel recalled, “Miles Cleveland Goodwin seems quite reserved when you first meet him; he is a quiet man, but not aloof. One time he said, ‘I don’t talk much,’ and then, after I asked him a simple question about a painting, he went on to speak movingly, for two hours, about art, his ties to the land, and life. It was fascinating.”

Miles Cleveland Goodwin, “Mountains” (2017), oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches (photo courtesy of Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden, Dallas)

From New York, dealer Peter Blum is showing paintings by the Puerto Rico-born, Long Island City-based artist Enoc Perez, who has long been interested in architecture and employs a complex process of pressing a sheet of paper covered with oil paint against the surface of a canvas, and then drawing on the back of the sheet as it if were a piece of carbon paper. He has referred to this method as “printmaking.” It gives his finished images a haunting quality: modern hotels, Philip Johnson buildings, and Puerto Rican casitas become mysterious monuments, trapped in time.

Serge Attukwei Clottey, “Beauty and Presence” (2014), plastic and wires, 75 x 51 inches (photo courtesy of Jane Lombard Gallery, New York)

Also from New York, Johannes Vogt is showing elegant abstractions — a wall-mounted, mixed-media sculpture and gentle watercolors on paper — by Garth Evans, the British sculptor who was once a teacher to such sculpture-makers as Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley and Tony Cragg. Manhattan’s Jane Lombard Gallery is featuring the work of the Ghanian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey, who uses cut-up pieces of large plastic oil or gasoline containers and little bits of wire to craft tapestry-like wall hangings with rich textures and a sculptural presence. A red-plastic afro comb affixed to a yellow tile on one of these large works serves as a reminder that Clottey’s found, repurposed raw materials once had practical value in someone’s daily life. Also from New York, De Buck Gallery is showing splattery, acrylic-and-broken-glass-on-canvas abstractions by Shozo Shimaoto (1928-1913), a member of Japan’s post-World War II, avant-garde Gutai group.

Serge Attukwei Clottey, detail of “Beauty and Presence” (2014), plastic and wires, 75 x 51 inches (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Numerous dealers from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Japan and other countries are participating in this year’s fair. Newcomer Eduardo Secci, from Verona, Italy, is showing conceptual artist Andrea Galvani’s photograph of an aircraft breaking the sound barrier (which the Dallas Museum of Art just picked up thanks to the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program), as well as a kinetic wall piece by the Swiss artist Zimoun, in which small, motorized cardboard tiles flutter like a bird’s wings. “Zimoun loves for his mixed-media sculptures to make noise; he likes the texture of sound,” Secci explained as he showed me photos of some of the artist’s large installations, in which 240 motorized cardboard boxes wiggle in a warehouse-like space, or 329 motorized cotton balls attached to strings pop and fly around a round, white room.

Merlin James, assorted recent drawings, ink and other media on paper, variable dimensions (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

From Dublin, Kerlin Gallery offers a selection of bold-stroke drawings on paper by the Welsh-born artist Merlin James, who now lives in Scotland. Their subjects: trees, buildings, a curious tower, and a printing press. Hales Gallery, which has branches in London and New York, is offering a rare view of mixed-media drawings by Jeff Keen (1923-2012), a British maker of fast-paced underground films of juxtaposed imagery — today they would be considered visual mash-ups — who came from Brighton and whose art voraciously gobbled up its source material — found film footage, comic books, and more.

Leonora Carrington, “Matsya” (1969), gouache on vellum, seven sheets, 12.5 x 6.75 inches (photo courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco)

From San Francisco, Gallery Wendi Morris, long a champion of Leonora Carrington’s work (as well as that of other, less-familiar Surrealists), has on display some unusual, small Carrington works on paper alongside the geometric color weaves (paintings in acrylic on paper or canvas) of the veteran American abstractionist Peter Young. At Miami’s Cernuda Arte, one of the leading outposts in the US for Latin-American modern art, a fine selection of Cuban modernists’ works is on view, including Manuel Mendive’s oil washes on canvas depicting wispy spirits from a primordial dreamland.

From Los Angeles, Richard Heller Gallery is showing some of the humblest but most memorable selections of the whole fair — the Swedish artist Joakim Ojanen’s cast-bronze sculptures of cute-quirky animals; human heads with long, ribbon-like ears; and little heads with caps or top hats. With their subversive charm, free of self-conscious irony, this is the kind of art a tired ironist-entertainer like Jeff Koons could not even imagine creating. That’s because, for all its offbeat aura, Ojanen’s work is filled with soul.

At the opening of this year’s fair, co-founder Chris Byrne told me, “In 2008, when John Sughrue and I co-founded the Dallas Art Fair, we considered ourselves to be the audience; our intention was to create an event which, in addition to exposing the city to galleries from other parts of the world, would build upon the strengths of the local community.”

Joakim Ojanen, assorted bronze sculptures, (2017), variable dimensions (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

In a conversation with one gallery director from overseas, I remarked, “There’s a lot of money in this town.”

“Yes, and I hope to find it,” the dealer quipped, adding, “You know, I’ve done a lot of fairs, and of course everyone wants to sell. This is a business, after all. But I came here because the infrastructure of relationships they have built up between museums, collectors, galleries and the public really is attractive.” Another dealer, from London, said, “This business is all about building relationships; the commerce flows from those relationships.”

For all the bluster these days about the “art of the deal,” when it comes to dealing in art, infusing the familiar art-fair model with a discernible human touch might just be this event’s most valuable contribution to the field. In true Texas fashion, that alone is something big.

The author was invited to present a film at the Dallas Art Fair, which helped cover his expenses to attend the event.

The Dallas Art Fair continues at FIG (Fashion Industry Gallery) (1807 Ross Avenue, downtown Dallas, Arts District) through April 9.

The post At the 2017 Dallas Art Fair, Big Ambitions and the Big Mo appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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