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Michael Bise Please join us Saturday, January 21 from 6-8 pm for the opening reception. Fort Worth Contemporary Arts announces the opening of the solo exhibition Epilogues by the young Houston-based artist Michael Bise. These large-scale, meticulous drawings circle the hard truths of Bise's (and our) geographical realities of growing up or living in a bible-belted, suburban sprawl of hypocrisy and identity crisis. They are epic, beautiful, and disturbing; underlying the whole is Bise's more autobiographical confrontation with his odd family history, and his lifelong and life-threatening heart condition, for which he is, as I write this, on the short list for an urgent heart transplant. In his work the hyper-real of physical and emotional texture meets the most darkly satirical portrayals of faith, punishment, and alienation that we might all recognize as being common rifts between one generation and the next, and between the dogmatic oppression of religion and conformity and the ironic curiosity of a younger and freer mind. And with the recent launch of his comic-book style series, Life on the List, for the art website Glasstire, we come face to face in Chapter One (featured in this show) with the raw facts of Bise's critical predicament. There's nothing easy about it, though with incredible deftness Bise handles the content with levity and grace.
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