THE Magazine - Dallas / Forthworth

Marty Walker's Gallery lies outside the confines of "typical" gallery spaces, such as Dragon Street and the appointed areas in Deep Ellum. And that's wholly appropriate for her recent show, Vacant Spaces. The work forces you to travel beyond the usual limits of your comfortable zone of conviviality and intersection with a vibrant, shining world. Here, you peer off the rim, the edge of the earth, and wonder it might perhaps be flat after all. By that, I mean you feel a slight, tugging anxiety that it might be possible to fall off an edge and drop into, well, vacancy.
But no worries, you'll be caught in a safety net of sorts. The operative words are "of sorts." These aren't easy-listening images and there's no recliner in sight. Casey Rae's Mackinaw City 1 Huron, 2007 is a case in point. It's a giclee print that lives up to the medium's reputation for depicting vivid, strong color. It shows a blue ice floe that's not dazzling or jubilant. It's quiet. It's a slush of ice and half-frozen water moving us into a leaden pace, a sullen line of measured cold that we eye as if occupying not our own world but a hollow globe. It's moving in its own right; however, it simultaneously prepares us for Ted Kincaid's images of clouds, coasts, and watery venues. His work is black and white, countering the brilliance of Ms. Rae, but there's a similarity that comes to mind because these pieces are the calculus of disquiet. Mr. Kincaid shows us images of places we'd prefer not to inhabit. They're arid even though they depict water. They'd punch the air out of a swallow mid-flight. He creates his images digitally while Ms. Rae's work is a more typical photographic process -- but beyond technical issues, they're kindred spirits of sorts.
Lastly, Barry Anderson's Lawn Ornaments, 2009 stands alone. It's uniquely quirky and, on first examination, a fun and brilliant departure from the surrounding, eerie images of what feels like a string of sunken suns. But look again. You'll find a brilliantly green lawn punctuated by the faces of pinup girls, circa 1940. Their eyes dart to the right or left and remind us of a period of vacuous culture that was wholly "manufactured" by advertisers and public relations men dressed in immaculate suits and heading to offices in the swanky upper quadrants of New York. And that makes it creepy. There's a marvelous, cornflower-blue sky and vivid grass blades, and we roll past that "real" world of nature only to discover it has been infiltrated. Not by people -- but by simulacra of people. Doppelgangers. They're in the grass. Alas.
Make the trip to Marty Walker's gallery before the show ends February 14. It's worth your time, and you'll find surprising things about voids -- for instance, they aren't so vacant after all.