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Post-Now
at Marty Walker Gallery, Dallas, Texas
Recommendation by Charissa Terranova



Continuing through July 17, 2010

Wildlife in a world bereft of human presence unites three otherwise disparate sets of photographic images in "Post-Now." A semantic distinction is in order: though almost identical, wildlife is not the same as wild life. If Buster Graybill's black and white stills and video depict wildlife in the form of feral pigs and long-horned rams, then Jesse Morgan Barnett's and Anna Krachey's pictures show traces of the destructive wild life of people.  

After the apocalypse, animals will still forage, while the only vestiges of humans are tire marks on concrete highway dividers and the worn-down pixels of an old photograph of a disco ball. In a series of black and white photographic stills taken from his video "Ramtastic," Graybill documents rams and wild pigs eating the feed that spills from openings in a silver dodecahedron that tips, topples and rolls over with each hard hit from the head of a wild ram. Sitting in the gallery in a small pile of yellow corn feed, the polygons look like giant everlasting gobsters in shiny silver metal. Barnett's three photographs of tire grease on concrete dividers on highways devoid of cars can be read both formally and in terms of time.  "To Accident and Abandon (B)" offers the most poignant formal reading of the three, with the sky above the concrete macadam creating a band of blue that contrasts the white of the concrete divider and the gray of the road. With gray smoky skies above similar dividers and highways, "To Accident and Abandon (D)" and "To Accident and Abandon (A)" read like anamorphic registers of a machine in motion. Anna Krachey offers two views onto a world recently absent of people. "Cosmos" is a vividly focused close-up of a steel patio table painted in white. It sits next to a stone parapet. "Galaxycrop" is a blurry photograph of a disco ball. Heightening the kitsch, Krachey has framed both in simple honey-colored wooden frames recalling the wood paneling of a ranch house den circa 1972.

With the theoretically suggestive title of "Post-Now," this is a tight exhibition that brings home what it promises in a small dose. It is a pithy exposé of work by young artists providing glimpses into a would-be world left behind, yes, by fanatical Christians as well as by a vast array of technology whores, everyone from hot-rodding highway speed demons to lovers of Euro-trash disco.


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