The gallery’s September exhibit brings together the artwork of long-time, Las Cruces artists Raul Dorn and Tauna Cole. Raul Dorn’s work has been featured many times since the gallery’s inception and Cole’s work has hung in "special event" exhibits such as those featuring the Border Artists, of which she is a member. The exhibit Cole & Dorn: We Should Have Told You All Of This Before opens with a reception on Saturday, September 10 from 4 to 6 pm.
El Pato; 12” x 9”; Oil On Panel
© Tauna Cole
Tauna Cole finds artistic inspiration in the space she inhabits. Elements included in her work, often expressed in metaphor and symbolism (with a growing interest in abstraction), are drawn from three spaces: her immediate surroundings, the relationship with self and family or objects and nature. She says she has always been pulled to the work of “Matisse and Diebenkorn for their ability to describe a space in their artwork with color, light and shapes.” As a viewer of this work she is left thinking more about these relationships than the details within the subject.
Cole has exhibited her work in collaboration with the Praxis Collective in Indra's Nest at the Las Cruces Art Museum and Casting Indra's Nest, a reconfiguration of Indra's Nest at the Moses Lake Museum and Art Center, Moses Lake, Washington. (Read more about Casting Indra's Nest by following this link: Columbia Basin Herald Web Page.) Coles work can be found in regional and national collections.
In her spare time, Cole has taught two-dimensional foundation courses as an art professor at NMSU where the importance of drawing to those pursing an art career reinforced for her. The drawing foundation, promoting discovery and "learning how to see", are three bedrock concepts she embraces and passes their importance on to her college students as well as in her work with youth in classes at the Las Cruces Museum School, private lessons, and classes and camps through her own business Art Paper Scissors Studio.
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The Secret; 2' x 4'; Mixed Media On Wood Panels (Diptych)
© Raul Dorn
Raul Dorn’s latest work pushes texture beyond his more familiar acrylic and collage on paper and mixed media artworks incorporating acetone transfers and found objects among other materials. In abandoning his normal tidiness in his studio and refinement in the finished artwork, he has brought a rawness to this later work by seriously abusing the artworks’ substrate and the use of materials with more mass such as burlap, cassette tapes and tile grout. He retains, in the work, his long held belief that his goal is to capture the essence of things—that is the object’s reality—versus imitating its exterior surface.
Performance art, in addition to visual art, has been an important part of Dorn's artistic journey beginning with his undergraduate studies at the University of New Mexico where he studied poetry with David Johnson and Robert Creely. Later he completed his BFA in Studio Arts with a focus on drawing and performance art at New Mexico State University. As part of his BFA work, he presented five major public performance pieces incorporating elements of theater, music, dance, sound collages and visual imagery. He began writing music during his stint at KRUX Radio and has performed in several local bands including the seminal local punk band Anxiety of Silence. Dorn continues to write and perform poetry. His visual artwork is exhibited widely and is found in national and regional collections.
Dorn has taught art in the Las Cruces Public Schools. During a twenty-six-year career as an art educator at Mayfield High School and Alma d'arte Charter High School, Dorn taught drawing, painting, printmaking and ceramics. He continues to teach studio art to elementary and middle school students at the Holy Cross Catholic Schools.
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