It’s a warm Saturday afternoon in late September. Joel Murray and Clint Bargers have curated their annual Chateau Chateau show with the work of twenty artists at the Aldredge House, a Gilded Age mansion on Swiss Avenue, here in Dallas Texas. The home is stuffed with period furniture and antique décor—it’s a museum. What happens when contemporary artists are invited in?
Good, unsettling things, it turns out. As I explored the show, I often couldn’t be sure where a piece belonged—was it part of the house or part of the show? Long felted pillows atop a Queen Anne’s table on the second floor were the right size for the surface, making me question if someone set them down for just a moment, on their way to fluff cushions in the next room. Turns out they were inserted by Jesse Morgan Barnett, and too well to be an accident. Marjorie Norman Schwarz’s gauzy painting of peony-pink chairs, propped against a mirror behind the chairs themselves, was not at all out of place. It is the nearly seamless engagement of these works with their surroundings that made their discovery so rewarding. Jess Baldivieso’s soft, tactile prints were so in tune with nearby furnishing that their twenty-first-century material took a moment to register. So too did Angel Faz’s watery hand, projected on the first-floor staircase landing. The rope work by Krista Chalkley and terra-cotta sol by Daniel Rios Rodriguez, in the solarium, alluded to exclusion by introducing subjects (and artists) ideal for the site but unlikely to have ever found a home in a 1920s manse of a Dallas enclave. Bravo to the artists and curators for elucidating this history.
When I wasn’t standing still, studying to see what appeared, the show became a scavenger hunt, letting me roam the warren of rooms to find paintings, drawings, and sculptures. No doubt I wouldn’t have visited the house for this long or looked this closely had I not come to see the art. I had questions as I found each piece. Has this always been here? Who put it there? Should this be here? .....