Centraltrak Artists' Residency Set for Debut

Deep Ellum gallery and artists’ residency Centraltrak, part of The University of Texas at Dallas School of Arts and Humanities, is launching its first show Saturday, April 19, from 7 to 9 p.m. Admission is free.

Inspired by the media-scape in J.G. Ballard’s 1969 novel, Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A, the show, “False Space and Time of the Apartment,” will exhibit forms that are interactive, spatially bold and ambiguous. Neither purely art nor purely architecture, the works fall somewhere in between.

Charissa Terranova, Centraltrak’s director and curator, called Ballard one of the greatest chroniclers of the urban imagination.

“False Space and Time of the Apartment” runs April through June 3. Admission to the Deep Ellum gallery is free.

“Ballard gives voice to Centraltrak’s ambitious momentum and its investment in the vast and diverse urban culture of Dallas-Fort Worth,” said Terranova.

Nine artists and architects from the Europe and the U.S. will show their work in the inaugural exhibition:

• “Checkpoint Dreamyourtopia” by Amsterdam graphic designer and sculptor Daniel Rozenberg is a model of a much bigger piece that the artist plans to unveil at this year’s “Burning Man” festival, an annual eight-day celebration of surreal art and self-expression in the Nevada desert.

• Dallas sculptor and installation artist Lily Hanson will show work that mirrors real interior spaces in an uncanny fashion.  Hanson makes small, felt-covered objects in bright pastels that are influenced by organic form from different eras: a combination of artists Jean Arp’s surrealist three-dimensional collages and Joep van Lieshout’s bulbous architectural objects. 

• Dallas sculptor Tim Stokes makes large-scale objects that seem like readymade cuts from domestic interiors. Bringing to mind the sculpture of Robert Gober and the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Stokes’ work features quasi-hygienic spaces that center on the shower drain.

• Houston natives Dean Ruck and Dan Havel make sculpture out of abandoned real estate.  Ruck and Havel bring carefully cut portions of an abandoned house in Houston into the gallery space. 

• French architect Nathalie Wolberg will install a large representation of her work “Sens dessus dessous,” a series of undulating modular floor plates that brings the curving irregularities of the outdoor landscape indoors. 

• Stefan Eberstadt, a German sculptor and installation artist, will install “Loop,” a space within a space within a space inside the gallery and an alternative three-dimensional arrangement of the same work in the Centraltrak parking lot.

• “Lifebean,” a 1.82 m x 2.14 m x 7.62 m [width-height-length] collapsible disaster shelter shaped like a bean pod, will be shipped from the San Francisco architecture firm Anderson and Anderson and placed outside on the open patio, the former loading dock of the old post office that is the basis of the Central Track logo.

About Centraltrak

Named Centraltrak for the railroad tracks that once stretched along the area’s streets, this artists’ residency is the first in Texas tied directly to a research university. Terranova says one of the important goals of Centraltrak is to provide a space where international artists can come to Dallas and interact with UT Dallas students and faculty.

The former Fair Park Post Office building, which was remodeled by developer David Gibson with public and private funds, houses a gallery, studio and living space for four artists and four UT Dallas graduate students in the fine arts and arts and technology. The multi-purpose art building offers a full calendar of events that include bimonthly gallery exhibitions, lectures, poetry readings, happenings and performances, and musical concerts.

Centraltrak is open to applications from artists working in new media, performance, installation art, sound art, theory, criticism and creative writing, architecture, urbanism, painting, drawing and sculpture. As the only university-backed artists’ residency in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, it creates an ongoing and robust intellectual infrastructure to support the region’s diverse arts institutions.

Centraltrak is located at 800 Exposition Ave. Admission is free. For more information, call (972) 883-2476 or email info@centraltrak.org or go the web site www.centraltrak.org.

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