On Jefferson Boulevard, the new gallery Tureen, the brainchild of Cody Fitzsimmons and Chris Scott, inhabits a building with tin ceilings and the original 1912 tile floor. The couple, previously based in Houston, opened the space over the summer with an ambitious exhibition that encapsulated their programming. The group show, entitled Eugenics in the Garden, criticized imperializing Western aesthetic tradition, seeing it as a dead-end.
Now, Mark (on view until Oct. 14) introduces the work of Alaska Native artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs, of Iñupiaq, Athabascan, German, Irish, Scottish, and Danish descent. Enter to find a red slash, a length of found wood coated in automotive paint that curves and tapers to a point. It looks like a wound, a gash. It could be a tusk, the relic of something animal. The artist prods the ambiguity. The supreme tactility of the materials is intrinsic to what makes this exhibition evocative. It takes on the porous boundaries between Western and Indigenous cultures, but first and foremost, in its delicate marriage of beauty and latent violence, it makes you think and feel.
Both Eugenics and Mark clinch Tureen’s spot as an important gallery in the local constellation, a serious and conceptually rigorous trailblazer off the beaten path—neither in the Design District nor the Riverfront area—gloriously fringe.
“We’re very interested in underrepresented artists and underrepresented histories,” Fitzsimmons says. “Artists who ask questions about those things.”
On the walls for the current show, the “Secrets” and “Pink Slips” series offer pouch-like shapes: reworkings of the walrus-tusk form imbued with community meaning as a shape used in parkas. In Credible Secrets, the intricate, sewn repositories blend U.S. Geological Survey maps, thread, and human hair. Others add beading techniques to walrus stomach, seal intestine, or reindeer hide. Referencing the 35 abuse claims brought against the Catholic Church by Alaska Native communities (a too-small reported number, the artist points out), the pouches walk a line between beauty and repulsion.
“A lot of times I use recycled items, found garments that I give new life to, and sometimes content,” Kelliher-Combs says.
“I’m interested in ideas of Western consumption,” she says, and “Western definitions of things from the land, including Indigenous people and ways. Categorizing and quantifying.” Also of interest is the very idea of a collection, “because a lot of our material history, for Indigenous people, minority populations, is housed away in these huge collections far, far away from us, without access.” In her recent “New Artifacts” series, she’s playing with ideas of definitions, “And who has the power to define what things like artifacts are.”
This is not the first time Kelliher-Combs’s work has broached abuse, marginalization, and violence. Her pieces in a 2018 group show entitled The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S.—phallic shapes fashioned from sheep rawhide and stuck with porcupine quills—drew critical acclaim and slipped into a New Yorker musing by Jia Tolentino that spoke to the #MeToo movement.
It’s also noteworthy that she is currently being exhibited in four locations: at Tureen in Dallas; at STARS gallery in Los Angeles, which is co-presenting Mark; at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, in a show that touches on “gut knowledge,” exploring its resonance as a vehicle for Indigenous voice and highlighting Kelliher-Combs as one of the only artists working with marine mammal gut; and in the New York group exhibition Young Elder, a tongue-in-cheek presentation of the very relevant tension and synchrony possible between old and new.
Such dialogue is exactly what Fitzsimmons wanted. Fitzimmons began with a career in fashion branding. But drawn to the art world, he soon moved from New York back to Houston, where he held a job at high-caliber gallery Hiram Butler. Then he decided to open a gallery where he could hone his distinctive vision.
During the pandemic, Fitzsimmons pivoted to art advising, and in those long months, he and Scott, who is an attorney, plotted their move to Dallas. The duo have been avid art collectors, and their taste preceded them. Their Houston townhouse was featured in that city’s Paper City magazine in a feature whose photos bear witnessing.
“They’ve amassed an audacious array of paintings, photographs, and sculptures . . . often provocative, sometimes startling, and occasionally disturbing,” the author writes. Their aesthetic for the gallery, Fitzsimmons is quick to point out to me, is no different.
“Freedom is very important to me,” Fitzsimmons says—hence his decision, unlike many gallerists, not to represent a stable of artists. Instead, he prefers a model in which he is not in competition with galleries from New York, Los Angeles, or elsewhere. If he wants to show their artist, he can more easily do so. “The gallery doesn’t have to see me as a threat,” he says. This, he hopes, will allow him to be nimble, original, and ambitious in his programming.
Scott grew up in Oklahoma and has Cherokee heritage, making Tureen the only Indigenous-owned gallery in Dallas. And certainly, this underlies the connection with Kelliher-Combs. “But also, they’re sensitive human beings, who are looking at the whole picture of our country and the world and who are offering an opportunity for voice and for dialogue that’s not always front and center. So that’s beautiful,” she says. “These are people who are doing the work to create the dialogue and the opportunities.”
In many ways, this historic space that used to be Oak Cliff’s first pharmacy—with its chipped tile and tin ceiling—is aesthetically suited to its mission to create space for unspoken, neglected, or buried narratives. “Yeah, they didn’t whitewash it,” Kelliher-Combs says when I point this out. Neither the space nor the stories.
It’s an interesting and rich time in Kelliher-Combs’s career; but in Dallas’ art scene as well.
“And all this is the result of [Scott] Googling me,” she says. Of the duo, in her eyes, taking a chance.
I should also note that Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith’s retrospective exhibition, recently at the Whitney Museum of American Art, opens at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth one day after Tureen’s exhibit closes. And so the relay of a double narrative unfolds. Kelliher-Combs is the one to bring it up, this overlap. “Why has it taken so long?” she asks me of Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith’s solo as we end our conversation.
Indeed, why?
Eve Hill-Agnus was D Magazine’s dining critic from 2014-2021. She has roots in France and California and during her time at D wrote…
On Jefferson Boulevard, the new gallery Tureen, the brainchild of Cody Fitzsimmons and Chris Scott, inhabits a building with tin ceilings and the original 1912 tile floor. The couple, previously based in Houston, opened the space over the summer with an ambitious exhibition that encapsulated their programming. The group show, entitled Eugenics in the Garden, criticized imperializing Western aesthetic tradition, seeing it as a dead-end.
Now, Mark (on view until Oct. 14) introduces the work of Alaska Native artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs, of Iñupiaq, Athabascan, German, Irish, Scottish, and Danish descent. Enter to find a red slash, a length of found wood coated in automotive paint that curves and tapers to a point. It looks like a wound, a gash. It could be a tusk, the relic of something animal. The artist prods the ambiguity. The supreme tactility of the materials is intrinsic to what makes this exhibition evocative. It takes on the porous boundaries between Western and Indigenous cultures, but first and foremost, in its delicate marriage of beauty and latent violence, it makes you think and feel.
Both Eugenics and Mark clinch Tureen’s spot as an important gallery in the local constellation, a serious and conceptually rigorous trailblazer off the beaten path—neither in the Design District nor the Riverfront area—gloriously fringe.
“We’re very interested in underrepresented artists and underrepresented histories,” Fitzsimmons says. “Artists who ask questions about those things.”
On the walls for the current show, the “Secrets” and “Pink Slips” series offer pouch-like shapes: reworkings of the walrus-tusk form imbued with community meaning as a shape used in parkas. In Credible Secrets, the intricate, sewn repositories blend U.S. Geological Survey maps, thread, and human hair. Others add beading techniques to walrus stomach, seal intestine, or reindeer hide. Referencing the 35 abuse claims brought against the Catholic Church by Alaska Native communities (a too-small reported number, the artist points out), the pouches walk a line between beauty and repulsion.
“A lot of times I use recycled items, found garments that I give new life to, and sometimes content,” Kelliher-Combs says.
“I’m interested in ideas of Western consumption,” she says, and “Western definitions of things from the land, including Indigenous people and ways. Categorizing and quantifying.” Also of interest is the very idea of a collection, “because a lot of our material history, for Indigenous people, minority populations, is housed away in these huge collections far, far away from us, without access.” In her recent “New Artifacts” series, she’s playing with ideas of definitions, “And who has the power to define what things like artifacts are.”
This is not the first time Kelliher-Combs’s work has broached abuse, marginalization, and violence. Her pieces in a 2018 group show entitled The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S.—phallic shapes fashioned from sheep rawhide and stuck with porcupine quills—drew critical acclaim and slipped into a New Yorker musing by Jia Tolentino that spoke to the #MeToo movement.
It’s also noteworthy that she is currently being exhibited in four locations: at Tureen in Dallas; at STARS gallery in Los Angeles, which is co-presenting Mark; at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, in a show that touches on “gut knowledge,” exploring its resonance as a vehicle for Indigenous voice and highlighting Kelliher-Combs as one of the only artists working with marine mammal gut; and in the New York group exhibition Young Elder, a tongue-in-cheek presentation of the very relevant tension and synchrony possible between old and new.
Such dialogue is exactly what Fitzsimmons wanted. Fitzimmons began with a career in fashion branding. But drawn to the art world, he soon moved from New York back to Houston, where he held a job at high-caliber gallery Hiram Butler. Then he decided to open a gallery where he could hone his distinctive vision.
During the pandemic, Fitzsimmons pivoted to art advising, and in those long months, he and Scott, who is an attorney, plotted their move to Dallas. The duo have been avid art collectors, and their taste preceded them. Their Houston townhouse was featured in that city’s Paper City magazine in a feature whose photos bear witnessing.
“They’ve amassed an audacious array of paintings, photographs, and sculptures . . . often provocative, sometimes startling, and occasionally disturbing,” the author writes. Their aesthetic for the gallery, Fitzsimmons is quick to point out to me, is no different.
“Freedom is very important to me,” Fitzsimmons says—hence his decision, unlike many gallerists, not to represent a stable of artists. Instead, he prefers a model in which he is not in competition with galleries from New York, Los Angeles, or elsewhere. If he wants to show their artist, he can more easily do so. “The gallery doesn’t have to see me as a threat,” he says. This, he hopes, will allow him to be nimble, original, and ambitious in his programming.
Scott grew up in Oklahoma and has Cherokee heritage, making Tureen the only Indigenous-owned gallery in Dallas. And certainly, this underlies the connection with Kelliher-Combs. “But also, they’re sensitive human beings, who are looking at the whole picture of our country and the world and who are offering an opportunity for voice and for dialogue that’s not always front and center. So that’s beautiful,” she says. “These are people who are doing the work to create the dialogue and the opportunities.”
In many ways, this historic space that used to be Oak Cliff’s first pharmacy—with its chipped tile and tin ceiling—is aesthetically suited to its mission to create space for unspoken, neglected, or buried narratives. “Yeah, they didn’t whitewash it,” Kelliher-Combs says when I point this out. Neither the space nor the stories.
It’s an interesting and rich time in Kelliher-Combs’s career; but in Dallas’ art scene as well.
“And all this is the result of [Scott] Googling me,” she says. Of the duo, in her eyes, taking a chance.
I should also note that Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith’s retrospective exhibition, recently at the Whitney Museum of American Art, opens at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth one day after Tureen’s exhibit closes. And so the relay of a double narrative unfolds. Kelliher-Combs is the one to bring it up, this overlap. “Why has it taken so long?” she asks me of Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith’s solo as we end our conversation.
Indeed, why?
Eve Hill-Agnus was D Magazine’s dining critic from 2014-2021. She has roots in France and California and during her time at D wrote…
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Bereavement photography can help families grieving the loss of infants, advocates of the service say.
The World Health Organization estimates that one in four pregnancies around the world are cut short by a miscarriage. Many women report that losing a baby is an isolating experience shrouded in stigma, shame and silence. A 2019 study published in the journal “Global Pediatric Health” found that bereavement photography helps parents navigate the cycle of grief by helping them share their experience, giving them something to hold onto, helping them move forward with their lives and reinforcing that they are still parents – even though their baby is gone.
Ann Smith, the director of women’s and children’s health at Novant Forsyth Medical Center, said allowing couples to talk about their loss helps many families through the grief process.
“I’m hoping the more we talk about it, the more we share about the importance of… perinatal grieving and bereavement, that we can get past that. So that… will make it more open for families to talk about it, because some people never get past that and they struggle,” Smith said.
Smith said couples who are not allowed the space to grieve and cope can have a higher chance of getting a divorce, being affected by stress-related diseases and suffering from poor mental health. Her team works to support families who’ve lost a child, from grief counseling to providing infant bereavement photography services.
Bereavement educator and professional photographer Deneen Bryan runs a nonprofit called Capturing Hopes, which focuses on taking professional quality photos of babies in the NICU. She also created its sister program – Little Lights at Novant Forsyth Medical Center, which takes pictures of babies who’ve passed on.
“There’s nothing we can do to take away the pain that they’re going through, but we can at least comfort them some, with them being able to have professional photos. Rather than just, like, a Polaroid photo that could fade or a cellphone photo that’s dark and grainy,” Bryan said.
Through the years, she’s helped many families realize their dream of a beautiful newborn photoshoot, even as their hearts are breaking. She takes traditional posed photos, but she also uses a newer technique that was piloted at Novant. It’s called neonatal immersion photography.
Bryan fills a clear tub with saline water, which she says mimics the mother’s womb, places the infant inside, and photographs through the top or the side of the tub.
“It will clear up their skin and make their color a little better. It also delays decomposition. It just creates a beautiful photo that people love,” Bryan said.
Bryan lost her daughter, Christina, in 1998 when she was six months old. She knows the path these families walk, and that time can fade even the strongest of memories. She wants to help them remember every detail of their time with their child.
Cassie Gregory, a registered nurse and Little Lights co-coordinator at Novant Forsyth Medical Center, also takes photos as part of the program. She hopes every family realizes how much their nurses and photographers genuinely care and grieve along with them.
“This is a volunteer-based service that we offer. So no one is forced to do this. This isn’t just, oh, that’s part of my job role, let me get it done. If we are coming in your room to do these photos for your family and take care of you… we’re grieving with you. We are so sad for the loss of your baby, as well, and we’re honored that we got to help you get this beautiful, tangible thing that you can hold on to forever to remember your sweet baby’s life by,” Gregory said.
Michelle and Stephen Linkous lost their son, James, in 2013. Bryan took pictures of him in the NICU and after he passed away. They said the pictures helped them navigate one of the darkest periods of their lives.
“The photos have just given us so much that have allowed us to carry him with us. And I don’t know how we would have done that… without those. So I think the grieving process would have been much harder for us without the photos,” Michelle Linkous said.
They said friends and family can support someone who has lost a child by communicating their love, giving them space to talk about their child, taking them food, offering to care for their other children, sitting with them and checking in on their baby’s birthday to share that they remember the little one.
“I think people almost become fearful or shy away from that family in a way. They want to support them, friends, family want to support them, but they don’t know how,” Michelle Linkous said. “I didn’t forget that my baby died. You know, it’s going to go a lot further for me by saying you remember.”
Stephen and Michelle Linkous both said to not tell a grieving family that they can always have more children later, this too shall pass, at least you have other children at home, heaven needed another angel or this will pass.
They encourage other families to consider taking these pictures, even if they’re not ready to look at them until years later.
“We want every family that experiences what we experienced to be able to have those,” Stephen Linkous said.
More information about Capturing Hopes and Little Lights is available here.
Detail of “When Flowers Dream” (2022). All images © Pip & Pop, shared with permission
“I’m fascinated by fictional geographies and paradise mythologies, places where we can escape our earthly realities,” says artist Tanya Schultz, also known as Pip & Pop, whose large-scale candied cacophonies explode with sugary pastels and delicious textures (previously). “These places may or may not exist, are often found by chance, and are impossible to locate again once you leave. I think they can be seen as illusory places where we project our dreams and desires.”
Schultz draws inspiration from mythological utopias of luxury and plenty, like the medieval Pays de Cockaigne, also known as Luilekkerland or Schlaraffenland. In a place characterized by idleness and comfort, “the streets are paved with pastries, houses are built from cakes, mountains made of pudding, and cheese rains from the sky,” the artist says. She continues:
Throughout history, tales of food utopias became popular in times of food deprivation, especially during medieval times. People created stories, songs, and maps of these places as a way to escape reality and imagine a better future, where there would be abundant food. At other times, these lands of plenty were seen not as escapist fantasies but rather cautionary tales of gluttony.
Over time, Pip & Pop’s installations have grown in size and complexity. Schultz and her studio team incorporate sugar in various forms, “from soft, fragile piles to hard, candy-like substances,” the artist tells Colossal. “But it all starts with hand-dyeing sugar in hundreds of shades of pastel and neon colours.” The large-scale, psychedelic installations also employ modeling clay, rhinestones, beads, papier-mâché, rainbow string, pompoms, and tiny polymer cakes and fruits.
If you’re in Santa Fe, Pip & Pop has a permanent work on view at Meow Wolf. You can also find more on the studio’s website, and keep an eye on updates on Instagram.
“When Flowers Dream” (2022), installed at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, London
“In a place I could not find” (2023), installed at Corey Helford Gallery, Los Angeles
Details of “In a place I could not find”
Detail of “When Flowers Dream”
Detail of “When Flowers Dream”
“Where the Sun Shines Every Day” (2021), installed at Burlington City Arts, Vermont. Photo by Sam Simon
Detail of “Where the Sun Shines Every Day.” Photo by Sam Simon
Detail of “Where the Sun Shines Every Day.” Photo by Sam Simon
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Swelling With Sugary Pastels, Pip & Pop’s Psychedelic Installations Revel in Food Utopias appeared first on Colossal.
HASTINGS, Fla. – SnapJAX Stories is back and this week we were blown away by one of our snapper’s pictures. Turns out he’s a nature photographer and he’s been capturing images for almost 50 years.
Joe Myers, better known as “Long Hair Guy” on SnapJAX, truly lives up to his nickname. He has a mane of beautiful blonde hair.
“So it’s natural, all-natural. No plans on cutting it. People ask me about it. I tell them I need what little I got. They go silent every time,” Myers said.
Myers’ pictures might also leave you speechless. The best sunsets, extraordinary cloud formations and dramatic lightning all caught on camera — mostly in Hastings. (Photo gallery above of some of Myers’ shares on SnapJAX)
Myers moved from Ohio some years ago and fell in love with what he calls “the real Florida.” He’s a self-described nature photographer and storm spotter.
“(I like) to show people the cool stuff that’s out here so they can enjoy it and say, ‘Hey, this is a Florida we don’t see.’ You go to Florida, you see Disney, you see all the flying and bling, but you come out here: This to me is the real Florida,” Myers said.
One of his talents is capturing time-lapse video, and he’s not afraid to put himself in the middle of a storm to get amazing footage.
“I actually had a good scare back in April where I had a supercell just explode right on top of me,” Myers said. “Normally when I’m out in a storm, it’s like, ‘Bring it on. Bring it on.’ But this one is like, ‘Am I gonna make it through?’”
But it’s the calm after the storm, the sun setting after a hectic day, birds in flight and spectacular butterflies taking a rest on flowers that have shaped Myers’ life and given him a point of view that only a detailed person with true patience can appreciate.
I asked him what his life motto or mission statement would be.
“I would say, ‘Trust the Creator’ because this is all here for our enjoyment. It’s put here for us not to abuse or destroy it but to enjoy it. Have fun with it because that’s what it’s put here for,” Myers said.
One thing we didn’t see when I met Myers was “the big one.” Myers said there’s a 10-foot gator that lives in a nearby lake and travels over to a smaller body of water every night right around dinner time.
On that note, we left, but not without Myers leaving a lasting impression about his love of nature.
