Thursday Night Art Hot Spots: Art Palace and West End Galleries [Art Preview]
Thursday, September 3
Art Palace (2109 E Cesar Chavez Street)
8-10pm, free
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Art Palace, on East Cesar Chavez, is presenting two solo exhibitions: Use Your Illusion: Sterling Allen and Rx Garden: Jessica Halonen. The exhibitions will be on view through October 10, and the opening reception will take place tonight from 8 to 10pm. The aptly titled Use Your Illusion, features a new works by Austin-based artist and co-founder of Okay Mountain Gallery, Sterling Allen. Through video, photography, sculpture, and drawing, Allen plays out his experiences with optical illusion, visual perception, and trickery.
Rx Garden showcases new works by artist Jessica Halonen that explore the relationships between the body, nature and medical world. For this exhibition, Halonen is particularly interested in issues surrounding the use of genetically modified plants in the pharmaceutical industry. It includes a series of gouache on paper portraits of plant-based drugs as well as sculptures inspired by biopharming (a process that uses genetic modification to ‘grow’ chemical components, including human proteins, in plants that are harvested to make drugs). The two exhibitions make nice counterparts and will be interesting to view together. Art Palace is a little white house on the East side, but there is nothing little about the openings. They are always packed and a guaranteed great time.
Before heading to Art Palace, stop by West 6th Street for the West End Galleries’ First Thursday event. This monthly happening features six galleries, all within a block of each other, that stay open until 8pm: Wally Workman, L Nowlin Gallery, the Russell Collection, Stephen L. Clark Gallery, Art on 5th, and Haven. Tonight is the last chance to see New Paintings by Angie Renfro, the current show at Wally Workman. The Gallery will host a closing reception from 6 - 8 PM. It is well worth a visit. Austin-based artist Renfro paints haunting scenes of the Texas landscape, not haunting in a scary sense, but in the way a memory can haunt you. Her images capture the quiet beauty of objects often overlooked and forgotten.
Use Your Illusion and Rx Garden will be on display at Art Palace through October 10th.
