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This show brings together the stunning works of Julon Pinkston and Sarah Williams, graduate student classmates from the College of Visual Arts and Design of the University of North Texas. Though the subject matter of the two bodies of work is quite different - Pinkston's drawings and wall sculptures isolate reassembled refuse while Williams' paintings are exclusively landscapes - both demonstrate uniquely transformative visions and impeccable craft.
Pinkston's work originates in a lament over the degraded landscape of roadside refuse and dedicates itself to the task of aesthetic elevation. Shredded carcasses of blown out truck tires are transformed into exquisitely elegant charcoal drawings that reminds me of the kind of sublime beauty found in Chinese painting or in the more reductive Zen-inspired of works of Franz Kline. A large part of these drawings' power lies in their masterful craftsmanship. Pinkston has invented a way of drawing with charcoal that results in an immaculate image, as if it were breathed into the fabric of the paper.
Pinkston's newer pictures take a different path to aesthetic reclamation, reassembling his refuse into quasi-characters. These often humorous beings of reassembled trash are both sly and strange; as if in their very reanimation they mirror and mock the world that has so carelessly cast them off.
Williams' landscape paintings also present a uniquely focused view of the world.
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Her pictures do not depict picturesque views; rather they create scenes cinematic in their mood, setting, and sense of impending drama. Her paintings often depict lonely places, the air thick with isolation and dread, like an image by Hopper crossed with a scene from a Cohen brothers' movie. In her night paintings, the ramshackle buildings and storage sheds, battered signs and water towers, glow with an ominously mysterious life under the nighttime illumination. What isn't seen is as important as what is and points to the real subject of these paintings: the heavy presence of the impenetrable night.
Williams' snow paintings may seem at first like the complete opposite from her magnificent night pictures, and yet, these too reject the picturesque in favor of something more subtle and enigmatic. The evocation of bodily sensation in these scenes is remarkable - the warmth of the sun and the cold of the snow, the crispness of the air and the quiet of the earth. Buildings and cars are foils that set up the true subject of these paintings: the snow itself. In these paintings, the snow lies heavily on the earth, its surface scarred by the deep and difficult tracks of struggling tires. The snow dominates and rules these worlds, much as the blackness dominates the night paintings.
-Robert Jessup
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 Interactive Exhibition
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