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Art Shows in Review
Durango, Marfa, Santa Fe
Critic Neal Brown writing in Frieze in 1999 crafted this phrase that applies to two art shows that recently crossed my desk and attention: "fetishistic attention to detail with grotesque error." He was talking about J.D. Ingres, the French neoclassical painter, and how the level of meticulousness found, say, in Ingres' Grand Odalisque, joined his work "spiritually" to current art practice.
So, have a look at these two. Tom Palmore has had paintings on display at Sorrel Sky Gallery in Durango, Colorado and Julie Speed has had a recent exhibition at Galleri Urbane in Marfa, Texas. Both fuse the absurd with the sublime.
Palmore, who trained at the Pennslylvania Academy of Fine Arts, with classmate-artists David Lynch, James Harvard, and Murray Dessner treats animals in a photorealist style that fuses the expected and the entirely bizarre.
Grounded in hyperreality, Palmore's paintings and lithographs extend into magic realism as they convey his sense of the uncanny. Thus he gives viewers not only what they have come to expect in a Palmore painting-verisimilitude extraordinaire-but also entertainment.
Neither Palmore nor Speed consider the label surrealist to accurately portray their work.
But surrealist artwork has the effect of making familiar objects seem strange, of re-contextualizing things taken for granted or overlooked. 
Speed uses a skewed form of realism to open vistas into psychologically complete, yet contradictory worlds that vacillate between the ominous and the hilarious. Painting in an "Old World" style and technique, Speed's subject matter often includes sly references to current events.
A new book of her work was released in October 2009 featuring series created since 2003: "The Murder of Kasimir Malevich," "Bible Studies," and "Still Life with Suicide Bomber." The book includes a short story by A.M. Homes "Do You Hear What I Hear?," about a phone call being investigated by the Phenomena Police, which Homes wrote in response to Speed's recent work.
--Leanne Goebel
Meanwhile, at 222 Shelby Street in Santa Fe, the Wyoming of True West has been in the lights. The large charcoal drawings on paper
by Shelby Shadwell, of trucks with auras around their headlights or trucks fast-passing, spell the bleakness of the Western road and the insinuations of such volumetric forms that at dusk or night are themselves angular darknesses anthropomorphizing the road. Shadwell teaches in the University of Wyoming art department along with Patrick Kikut and David Jones. Jones contributes sculpture to the show; his work also speaks to big emptiness and industrial forms that, the farther north you go, begin to mark out signs of human habitation in sere landscapes. Think of stories set in Wyoming snowstorms by Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx and the human being, absent from these works, indeed appears very very small.
--Ellen Berkovitch
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