Update:
This article has been updated for clarity.
Frances Bagley’s dialogues, and tensions, at the Nasher Sculpture Center
The Dallas artist’s “Shangri-La” is on display through Jan. 12.
The street-facing space that used to be the Nasher Sculpture Center’s gift shop has become the setting for some of the museum’s most arresting installations.
Currently on display is Dallas artist Frances Bagley’s Shangri-La, a complex of dialogues — and tensions — originally presented four years ago at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. Within skeletal metal outlines of a house, unfinished female torsos are rendered in cast and carved spray foam.
The installation make much of contrasts, between the Cartesian abstraction of the house and the sensuous curves of the torsos, and between the torsos’ finely finished surfaces and the gnarly textures beneath. There’s a suggestion of entrapment in a large photo of a woman crawling away and a more abstracted female figure with an upright piece of driftwood in a suspended miniature semi-enclosure.
Although the photographs including male faces stacked on a two dimensional totem pole are of Bagley’s friends and family, in this context they feel almost voyeuristic. Male-female tensions are natural expressions for a distinguished artist with a longstanding commitment to social issues, especially feminist causes.
Details: Continues through Jan. 12. 2001 Flora St. nashersculpturecenter.org.
