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| moderndallas.net Special “Eye” to Watch June Mattingly // contributing art writer Revelation: The Art of James Magee at the Nasher Sculpture Center James Magee's 40-year commendable and wide-ranging career of making art will be introduced in the Nasher's exhibition of this admired living artist, albeit from Texas. Now Magee will receive the critical attention he deserves all around the world. Nasher's worldly director Jeremy Strick proudly claims "it is the first instance of a new engagement with art produced in this region." |
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| Previous Articles by June Mattingly Holly Johnson + Craighead Green details Conduit Gallery + PDNB Gallery details + THE MAC // details + HCG Gallery + Barry Whistler Gallery details + Eric Trich 1111 Dragon Street Studio details + Dunn + Brown Contemporary Show details + “Coastlines: Images of Land and Sea” a focus on Frank Welch and Douglas Cartmel details + Decorazon Gallery in the historic Bishop Arts District in Oak Cliff details + Harmony Padgett details + Ludwig Schwarz details + Terry Falke // details + Ellen Berman // details + MADI Museum// details + CENTRALTRAK // details + Erin Hinz // details + Celesta T. Segerstrom details + Aaron Parazette details + "Small Abstract Painting" Barry Whistler's details + Joshua Goode // details + Rhyder Richards // details + Billy Zinser // details |
| The Hill I |
| The Hill III |
| Jed Morse, the Nasher’s erudite curator of Revelation, previews Magee’s compelling body of studio work: “Working with an array of found and castoff materials such as bits of iron, glass, concrete, wax, enamel, lead, wire mesh, linoleum, grease, brake fluid, shellac, car parts, ceramic tiles, roof panels, even hibiscus, honey and paprika, Magee creates powerful, sensuous sculptural reliefs that are at once uncannily familiar and completely alien.” An addition to this artist’s credibility and importance is the co-publishing of the scholarly, well researched monograph “James Magee: The Hill” by the Nasher and Prestel, and written by Richard Brettel. The Hill refers to Magee’s immense ongoing outdoor earth and architectural project secretly set on 2,000 acres in vast open plains 70 miles east of El Paso under construction for close to three decades. |
| The Hill sits on gently rolling plains with unforgettable sights of snow-capped mountains and limitless West Texas skies, one of the most glorious parts of the world I contest to have personally climbed in the Davis Mountains, hiked in Big Bend and watched unbelievably starry night skies at the McDonald Observatory. Earth art or “earthworks” names a conceptual movement dating back to the mid-60s mainly represented by the Americans Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria and Robert Smithson. Heizer and Smithson moved tons of earth and rock in the deserts of the American West to create massive earth sculptures often reminiscent of ancient burial mounds. Smithson’s spectacular Spiral Jetty, a 1,500-foot long rock and crystal jetty in the Great Salt Lake aggressively assaults the landscape and contrasts with more ecologically sensitive works like Richard Long’s (British) excursions through the landscape we know as artistic arrangements of rocks recorded on site in elegantly composed photographs. Profoundly original earth or land-related artworks such as Magee’s, Heizer’s Double Negative and de Maria’s Lightning Field, both geographically inaccessible and the short-lived environmental spectaculars like Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence only become known through documentation in the form of visuals and/or written material. When records are created by the artist as MaGee is doing in Revelation, it becomes accessible art as well as historical documentation like Christo’s stunning screenprints of his projects accomplish. As such this art can be exhibited in museums unlike the artwork’s origins. |
| Magee has expertly designed and crafted for the The Hill four buildings of irregularly cut shale rock, 40 feet long, 20 feet wide and 17 feet high. Nearly 250 eight-ton truckloads of rock were brought to the site. “Each building is entered through a majestic portal eight feet wide and the full height of the building, portals that turn easily on their hinges, testament to the remarkable engineering acumen Magee has brought to the project as a whole…a product of one man’s infinite patience and unimaginable labor. ..each of the three completed buildings house enormous metal installations… On occasion, while visitors take the considerable time required to study the works, Magee will recite their ‘titles’ – in effect, lengthy poetic texts…The installations themselves are large, metal-framed and glazed, hinged together in metal boxes…Fashioned in a great variety of materials such as cinnamon, paprika, flower petals, oil, wood, metal, rust, paint, textiles and more – the boxes resonate with the harsh beauty of their site. As these large panels are opened and moved to reveal yet other large boxes, they evoke a sense of endless complexity, belying their creation by one man. Shifting and moving with the scale and power of the natural, they are utterly artificial, completely abstract creations, analogs of the uneasy coexistence of the natural and the human in these remote plains…. The Hill is like a chapel filled with inexplicable altars belonging to some unknown religion.” |
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| The Hill II |
| Exhibit: September 4 - November 28 Nasher Sculpture Center 2001 Flora Street Dallas, TX 75201 214.242.5100 nashersculpturecenter.org |