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September 10, 2005

Pigeon-Stone Project co-founders Sarah Jane Semrad and Nyddia Hannah featured in Dallas Observer Arts

full story here.

There's an up-and-up ending to this chapter of pared-down art life in the city. And it comes in the form of the Pigeon-Stone Project and the newly reopened Plush Gallery. Run by the girl-power twosome of Sarah Jane Semrad and Nyddia Hannah, Pigeon-Stone Project is a consortium of "do-it-yourself" galleries. The Project collectively manages seven spaces: Continental Gallery and Elbow Room in Deep Ellum, Magnolia Bar in West Village, Sozo Salon on Knox-Henderson, Zeo Salon in Travis Walk, Two Sisters Catering in Deep Ellum and Counter Culture at Mockingbird Station. In many ways, they have realized in three dimensions what's been going on for years in the Internet world. Semrad and Hannah have wisely taken advantage of surplus corners of the overall marketplace, spinning money and offering opportunities for young artists, mostly from Texas, through the interstitial spaces of capital. Offering their curatorial services in the corridors, stairwells and on the surrounding walls of hip coffee shops, rehabbed loft buildings and trendy cinemas, they promise to provide publicity and a constant stream of cool people to proprietors in exchange for little or no rent.

Object, a small exhibition of photographs by Kevin Todora, is showing at Continental Gallery, located in the ground-level hallway of the Continental Loft building. Equal parts neo-appropriationist à la Sherrie Levine and sheer voyeurism, Todora's re-photographs show the faces of women in the buff and men from liquor and cigarette advertisements from old porn magazines. Shown in groups of four, the photographs offer a quiet standoff of luridly askew and piercingly mannish gazes. "Amy," "Sarah," "Angela" and "Amanda" all show willowy, impressionistic views of rouge-faced women in ecstasy. While all of the women look out to the sides with eyes rolled back in the middle of apoplectic pleasure, the male eyes of "Michael," "Christopher," "Jason" and "David" glare grinningly straight at you. For Todora, these images are also an investigation into porn-world demographics, in that the salacious eyes of the men we see are but the idealized version of those who purchased the mags at the get-go. Horny is as horny does.

Posted by Daniel at September 10, 2005 03:41 PM