CRIS WORLEY FINE ARTS

Alan Govenar
Always Beginning. Never Ending.

January 11 – February 15, 2025

Cris Worley Fine Arts is proud to present our first solo exhibition of photographs by Alan Govenar. The exhibition entitled, Always Beginning. Never Ending., opens Saturday, January 11th, and will be on view through February 15th. The gallery will hold an Opening Reception for the artist, Saturday, January 11th, from 5-7pm. The artist will be in attendance.

In Always Beginning. Never Ending., Alan Govenar’s photographs detail the East Texas landscape. Using nine photographs, Govenar sees the landscape as holding both the past and present. The images carry multitudes – as a quiet road retains more horror than it seems, as James Byrd Jr. was dragged behind a pickup truck and murdered on June 7, 1998. Contrasting landscapes across East Texas, Govenar depicts how history can be made invisible, as this horrific road is equated with the quite beauty of the lotus pond. Yet, the land never forgets, carrying these horrors even today. The history of the land never ends, yet, it is also always beginning, as the landscape’s present growth holds its past.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Govenar’s Artist Statement takes the form of a poem:

Always beginning.
Never ending.

Photographs remember.

Images define experience. Imperfections and all.

Seeing the ordinary, with an eye to make what is, something more.

Nine prints. One video.

East Texas. Disparate places. 228 miles apart.

Animating the clouds with emotions difficult to reconcile.

A lotus pond in a drainage ditch in Ferris.

A quiet road on the outskirts of Jasper.

The horrors of the past invisible.

Knowing what happened
on June 7, 1998
changes everything.

What appears peaceful
may not be.

Lotus flowers blooming.

Timothy Harding
Collapsed Spaces

January 11 – February 15, 2025

Cris Worley Fine Arts is proud to present our fifth solo exhibition of works by Timothy Harding. The exhibition entitled, Collapsed Spaces, opens Saturday, January 11th, and will be on view through February 15th. The gallery will hold an Opening Reception for the artist, Saturday, January 11th, from 5-7pm. The artist will be in attendance.

In Harding’s new show, we see a return to his grid-like structures. Unlike his past works, Harding does not manipulate the actual canvas. Instead, the work manipulates the viewer, as the grids seem to collapse in on themselves, creating a three-dimensional depth to the two-dimensional painting. Harding’s new work layers grid upon grid – pushing the viewer into these new spatial illusions.

Harding creates gestural marks on his computer, which can be seen layered across the grid-like structures. This act adds another set of dimensions, offsetting the clear outline of the grid with sporadic markings that almost look like writing. The gestures are made subject in Harding’s sculpture hung on the wall, as his marks collapse the boundaries between mediums. The marks, though made on the computer, are completely dependent on the artist’s hand – creating a work entirely reflective of Harding’s creative technique.

Color plays an important role in Collapsed Spaces, as we see colors interact boldly against one another, seeming to fight for dominance on the panel. Harding’s use of the colors in this grid-like system creates a variety of collapsed spaces and uncertain depths, that both pull the viewer in and pushes them right back out – as the viewer undulates with the painting. Looking at Harding’s new work, he does not collapse the canvas as in past series but instead collapses space, through his illusionistic use of gesture, grid, and color.

Timothy Harding (b. 1983) makes sculptural paintings and installations that meld traditional painting and drawing practices with technology. Harding draws his piece on the computer to create vinyl stencils of the individual lines, squiggles, and shapes. He then utilizes these stencils while translating his digitally created drawing onto a canvas, applying layer upon layer of paint until a fully realized pattern emerges.

Harding’s works merge the gestural nature of Abstract Expressionism with the flatness of Minimalist painting to explore how a traditionally two-dimensional object can visually and physically occupy a three-dimensional space. He purposefully stretches his finished paintings across ill-fitting supports or builds a substructure under the canvas to make the surface fold, buckle, or protrude, “sculpting” the painting into a unique shape. Harding disrupts our understanding of painting – as he makes the once two-dimensional canvas into a three-dimensional object. In this way, Harding creates a new type of medium, as he combines sculpture with painting.

Timothy Harding lives and works in Fort Worth, Texas. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Tarleton State University. Harding received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Texas Christian University (2010), and his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Texas Woman’s University (2008). In 2018 Harding was a visiting artist at the Center for Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art. In 2016 he received a Nasher Sculpture Center Artist Grant. Harding has exhibited nationally and held residencies at 77Art, the Wassaic Project, and the Vermont Studio Center.

Cris Worley Fine Arts is dedicated to promoting innovative work by contemporary artists at various stages of their careers. The gallery’s dynamic approach to fostering artistic growth includes the presentation of compelling exhibitions, and collaborations with public institutions, professional art organizations, and collectors, both locally and internationally.

For nearly two decades, Cris Worley has contributed to national art dialogues as a gallery director participating in art fairs, as a guest juror for numerous exhibitions, and as an esteemed art advisor. As a charter member of the Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas, Cris Worley has played a vital role in the vigorous growth of the Dallas arts community, encouraging the evolution of contemporary art collections.

Cris Worley Fine Arts

1845 E Levee St. Suite 110
Dallas, TX 75207

214.745.1415

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday, 11 to 5

crisworley.com