Turner Carroll Gallery at the Hotel ZaZa Art House and Social Gallery

Turner Carroll Gallery at the Hotel ZaZa Art House and Social Gallery

At the beginning of 2011, Turner Carroll Gallery of Santa Fe NM announced that they would be opening a project space in Dallas in cooperation with Hotel ZaZa.  Stay ZaZa is the hotel's
 arts and events space where Turner Carroll is curating exhibits of nationally and internationally known artists.  We have visited the gallery in Santa Fe a number of times over the years, but we actually first met Michael Carroll and his wife Tanya Turner Carroll at the Miami art fairs.  It has been a pleasure to visit with them as they bring their outstanding programming to Dallas.

It is almost as if Turner Carroll Gallery at Hotel ZaZa has been staging their own version of Pacific Standard Time since they opened at the beginning of this year.  However, many of the the artists presented are currently living and working in the Bay Area rather than SoCal.  First up was Ashley Collins, an artist from Venice, CA.  Next, Turner Carroll brought us selected works by Hung Liu.  Hung Liu lives and works in the Bay Area, but her first job in the US after emigrating from China was at the University of Texas.  The Dallas Museum of Art was the first American museum to add her work to their permanent collection.  Their third exhibition featured Eric Zener, Conrad Kern and Gino Miles.  Eric Zenner also lives in the Bay Area.  His studio happens to be near Hung Liu's studio and they utilize the same shop to have resin applied to their canvases.

This brings us to the current exhibit West Coast Women.  Three women artists from San Francisco - Inez Storer, Jenny Honnert Abell, and Deborah Oropallo.

Inez Storer, The Ordinary Life of Natalia Ortiz, oil and collage on panel

The letters collaged in at the bottom of this painting were being discarded after Storer's neighbor, Natalia Ortiz, passed away and her apartment was being cleaned out.

Inez Storer, Land of the Free, oil and collage on panel

Storer is married to Andrew Romanoff, who is also represented by Turner Carroll Gallery.  Interestingly, Romanoff is the grandnephew of Russia's last reigning Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II.

Jenny Honnert Abell, Just Another Day, mixed media, sewing, collage and painting on panel

From Abell's statement we learn that her "...collage work began in 1995 when I could no longer fight off the oppressive urge I felt to make pictures out of the harvest of my years of scavenging."  Her surfaces are rich with textures of paper, cloth, fine mesh, stitched threads and paint.

Jenny Honnert Abell, Book Cover No. 59, mixed media

At 9 3/4" x 12", this small framed work is presented on a wall of other small Book Cover works.  Abell's birds with human heads began after a difficult time in her life.  She states that these provide an escape into a fictional world where she can observe life from a safe vantage point.

Deborah Oropallo, Gladiatrix, cotton Jacquard tapestry

Oropallo's gender-bending imagery combines classic male portraits with contemporary women's fashion shoots to address the two universal themes of sex and power.  She matches the eyes and layers the two images together, usually choosing figures that stand in similar poses.  Costumes, especially sexy fetish costumes, figure prominently in her work.

Deborah Oropallo, Colt, pigment print on aluminum

This exhibition will be up through October 17.  Currently, Turner Carroll Gallery at Hotel ZaZa is opened only on Friday and Saturday.  However, the Dallas gallery director, Lizzie Herbert, told me that they plan to start having hours of operation from Tuesday through Saturday soon.