Arts Fort Worth



FORT WORTH GALLERY


Like Water from a Rock

Fort Worth Gallery - Like Water from a Rock

On view October 6 November 18, 2023 | Works by Donna Zarbin-Byrne

Recently, my focus has shifted from the intimate space of my backyard garden to a larger landscape view, specifically the West Maui Mountains and the Chihuahuan desert in Texas. These places are personally significant to me and have become a source of reflection and comfort during a time of environmental and cultural crisis.

For this exhibition, I collaborated with writers in Hawaii and Texas* including Sasha Pimentel, who wrote poetry specifically for this project. Our works respond to the dualities of nature, encapsulating harshness and beauty. Her writing and my sculpture were created in reciprocity, intertwining language and form.

Like Water from a Rock celebrates the landscape as a living force, connecting material and exterior sites with an internal process. While creating this work, extreme weather conditions and wildfires in Texas and Maui impacted me deeply. Maui was burning and its most historic city, Lahaina was destroyed. As a result, the work has intertwined beauty with destruction and grief with hope. As natural cycles of life and death have accelerated into human tragedy, creating this work has become a physical expression of lament.

The title, Like Water from a Rock, references the biblical account of the Israelites miraculously receiving water from a rock in the wilderness. Water serves as a poetic parenthesis around the two landscapes, imagining the ocean over time and space in geologic history, and quenching the thirst of the land and people.

Working en plein air, I make gestural drawings with wire, take molds of mountain surfaces, and collect natural materials. Paper and fabric are stretched like skin over wire skeletons, transmuting pictorial views into new material stories.

My process follows ecosystems and patterns found in nature. I apply patinas to dry plants to re-articulate death into life. Rusting steel releases earth tones of iron and orange, while I use fire and water to coax verdigris out of bronze and copper. Molten bronze spills into water-like patterns. Direct castings of organic materials turn fragile plants into the strength of bronze.

Through my work, I imagine against grief, even as the parched desert can bloom overnight.

ARTIST BIO

Donna Zarbin-Byrne is an interdisciplinary artist based in Dallas, TX, and Maui, HI. Originally from Chicago, she earned her BFA and MFA from The University of Texas, San Antonio with a concentration in ceramic sculpture and pre-Columbian art history. She had a recent solo exhibition at Hawaii Pacific University, O’ahu, HI. She has exhibited her work nationally from The Jewish Museum, New York, NY to The Schaefer International Art Gallery, Maui, HI. Collections include the City of Houston Civic Arts Collection, and public art has been commissioned for the City of Evanston, IL, and San Antonio, TX. She has been honored to receive an Individual Artist Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Art through the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and has been awarded grants and exhibitions through the Artist in Education program, Illinois Arts Council. Zarbin-Byrne co-founded Artisan Restoration International, which provides custom restoration and design services across the globe.

*Special thanks to Sasha Pimentel, author of For Want of Water and Other Poems, NEA fellow in poetry, Brandy Nalani McDougal, state poet laureate, Hawai’i for the use of the poem Po, Emily Thiroux Threatt for contributions of Haiku poetry, and Carl Yoshihara for aerial photographs.

 

ENRICHING THE COMMUNITY THROUGH ART

Part of the mission of Arts Fort Worth is to provide a quality event, visual and performing arts venue for all of the community. This historic and dynamic arts complex boasts seven indoor galleries, an outdoor gallery, artist and performance studios, and office suites for nonprofit arts organizations and is managed by Arts Fort Worth on behalf of the City of Fort Worth.

Arts Fort Worth also provides educational programming, promotes experienced and emerging artists. The three theater spaces hosts a wide-range of performances by local and nationally known artists and organizations- the Hardy and Betty Sanders black box theater, the traditional William Edrington Scott Theatre, and The Vault, which hosts Fort Worth Fringe acts.

HISTORY

Located at 1300 Gendy Street, Fort Worth Community Arts Center is part of the most architecturally significant museum districts in the United States. The striking modern Herbert Bayer building (with a later O'Neil Ford addition) opened to the public in 1954 as home to one of the most prestigious and oldest collecting organizations in the state of Texas, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. When, in 2002, the Modern moved down the street, the Fort Worth Community Arts Center opened. The building continues to exhibit world class art and support the performing arts for more than half a century.

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