Recent Events:




The Paper Sculpture Show
(January 17 - March 16, 2004)

Ballroom Marfa invited visitors to create three-dimensional paper projects designed by twenty-nine artists. The exhibition consists only of sculptures assembled by the audience-collaboratorsmultiple copies of each artists idea, each unique in that it was fabricated by an individual visitor.

See Photos of the the opening and artwork created by visitors...

Artists included in the exhibition and book: Janine Antoni, The Art Guys, David Brody, Luca Buvoli, Francis Cape, Minerva Cuevas, Seong Chun, E.V. Day, Nicole Eisenman, Spencer Finch, Charles Goldman, Rachel Harrison, Stephen Hendee, Patrick Killoran, Glenn Ligon, Cildo Meireles, Helen Mirra, Ric Obrosey, Ester Partegàs, Liza Phillips, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Akiko Sakaizumi, David Shrigley, Eve Sussman, Sarah Sze, Fred Tomaselli, Pablo Vargas-Lugo, Chris Ware, Olav Westphalen, Allan Wexler

Music Performance by Julian Mock. Julian Mock grew up in Alpine Texas, 26 miles east of Marfa. In his early years, he was a member of a classical guitar quintet that toured the US & Europe. Later, he picked up electric guitar & played with several different bands, ranging from "speed-metal" to "jazz-fusion". His most recent endeavors find him working on different finger-picking techniques as well as writing solos for an acoustic steel string guitar. Listening to his works, you will hear echoes of Bach, Tarrega and Villalobos... along with influences of rock, jazz, latin and eastern music. He is currently living in West Texas and only occasionally performs in public. Listen...





Rivers and Tides:
Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time (link)
(Presented Thanksgiving Weekend, November 27-30, 2003)

"....see something you never saw before, that was always there
but you were blind to it."
-- Richard Peterson

"A Sculpture of Sea and Prairie, of Water, Fire and Stone"
-- Ann Wilson Lloyd, New York Times Arts & Leisure





Maria Jose Arjona
See Photos of the Performance and Installation...
(Friday, October 10th, 2003)

Maria Jose Arjona was born in Bogota, Columbia, July 15th, 1972. She graduated from the Higher Academy of Art in Bogota with a Masters in Plastic Arts and an emphasis on performance and installation. Maria has participated in solo and group shows in Bogota, Miami and New York City. She is currently living in Miami, Florida. Ballroom Marfa is excited to have Maria as our first emerging international performance artist.

"Vault" is a space transformed by the motion of a body. It is a process of meditation where drawing is the basic tool to address evolution, simplicity and life. The piece contemplates the cycles of matter and its deconstruction in order to create again." -Maria Jose Arjona





Spoon
Music performance. Friday, October 10th, 10:00PM

These Guys Just Might Be Your New Favorite Band.

Music being the most abstract of the popular arts, it is hard to know exactly why some bands succeed and others fail. This much we do know: Spoon was once a band teetering toward failure. It was the late 90's, and Spoon was playing competent post-punk in the tradition of Wire and the Pixies. And in the post-punk tradition, the group was widely ignored. After a two-month affiliation with a major label, Spoon had its contract revoked. The band was deemed not only hopelessly uncommercial but also hopelessly uninteresting.

Lead singer-songwriter Britt Daniel had a degree in radio, TV and film from the University of Texas to fall back on, but as he says now, "What was I gonna do with that?" Instead of sending out resumes, he wrote two hysterically cathartic songs about Ron Laffitte, the A.-and-R. guy who signed and then abandoned Spoon - The Agony of Laffitte and Laffitte Don't Fail Me Now. Daniel kept on writing and shuffled the lineup a bit, and in one of those moments that make up for all the Limp Bizkits in the world, Spoon stumbled onto a sound of its own. Girls Can Tell, the 2001 reanimation of Spoon, was a brilliantly minimalistic rock album about love (or the lack of it). It was hardened but not ironic, tense but not jagged, smart but not so smart that Daniel couldn't shout "Aw-right!" to get his point across. The songs were about small things - girlfriends, dads, girlfriends - but they contained a multitude of emotions, and the music was so melodic that listeners were reminded just how great rock could be. Word spread, and 2002's equally good Kill The Moonlight enlarged the cult.

As with R.E.M. in the late 80's, one senses that Spoon could be not just adistinctive band but the rare distinctive band that is also popular. Daniel is sequestered at home in Austin, Texas, adhering to a strict writing regimen in order to get a new album, Captured to Be Cooked, out by spring 2004. "I try to get up early, have some cereal, have a run and then don't talk to anybody for eight hours," he says. "It's really hard." Daniel haswritten 40 songs, but thinks only four of them will make the album. "There's too much going on in a lot of them. My favorite songs are minimal - We Will Rock You, Back in Black, Kiss by Prince. Those songs take on the world, but they do it with just a few instruments. I can't explain why," he says, "but that's really all you need."

- Josh Tyrangiel (TIME Magazine)



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