http://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2013-03-29/sonya-berg/

The Austin Chronicle Review

In her show at Tiny Park Gallery, Berg’s painted-over photographic collages vividly, beautifully, redefine art

Reviewed by Wayne Alan Brenner, Fri., March 29, 2013

Exit, by Sonya Berg

‘Sonya Berg’

Tiny Park Gallery, 1101 Navasota
www.tinyparkgallery.com
Through March 30
“You have confused the true and the real” is the epigraph at the beginning of Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, the novel that Annabelle Sanders is reading as she sits eating fresh oysters on the patio of Hillside Farmacy near the triple intersection of East 11th, Rosewood, and Navasota. Just across from her sits Tiny Park Gallery, and Annabelle, squinting, can almost discern the small, bright-red Christmas tree that is the venue’s logo.

Tiny Park is next on her agenda, after the oysters, after another dozen pages of Dhalgren. The gallery’s interior walls are complicated by a show of works by Sonya Berg, in which the artist has intentionally confused the true and the real. The works are of various sizes: some as small as beer coasters, a few the size of computer screens, one that might challenge the silhouette of a Smart Car. They’re paintings, these works. Or, no, they’re photographs. Actually, they’re both, as Berg commits simple collages of photographic prints and then paints over parts of them, precisely reproducing what she’s painting over. Or, perhaps, obscuring what now lies beneath. Or maybe fabricating new patterns or components upon the photographs, so that the exterior of a mountain cabin, say, suddenly blossoms a section more redolent of impressionism than of modern image-capture. It’s hard to tell, sometimes. And sometimes, we’re thinking, that’s the point.

Annabelle navigates a raw, lemon-spiked oyster down her throat, turns a page, and considers what her friend Brenner has told her about Exit, one of the bigger and more complex renderings by Berg at Tiny Park. It’s a conflation of views of a window hatch and a ladder, it seems, with swaths of painterly, oil-based mimicry standing in for much of the original photo-emulsion, forming the planes and lines and angles of gray, white, black, and blue.

“I think Exit kind of speaks for Berg’s whole process,” Brenner said. “It describes the way out that she’s found – out of the traps of art, the pigeonholes that people try to put an artist in. And, especially now, with so much of the world being replicated in the Net, if art is going to imitate life at all, it’s also got to imitate the universal abstractions – those realistic representations in cyberspace, and the ways that photographs are manipulated for commercial purposes – that are often more immediate for so many of us these days. It makes more and more sense to confuse the true and the real – as George Stanley said, in that quote at the beginning of Dhalgren.”

“Well,” said Annabelle, “but then, eventually, maybe those words will have to be redefined.”

And maybe they’re already being redefined – vividly, beautifully – on the walls of Tiny Park.

On March 17th All Saints said farewell to the McReynolds, blessing them in the work they are doing in Madagascar. Though an ocean apart we continue our support through prayer. Bryan shares some thoughts with us as asks us to join in prayers for the ministry they have a head of them.  If people want to stay connected to the ministry, they can sign up for the website.  It is www.mcreynoldstribe.com

“Rebe and I had the opportunity to attend a concert at Gruene Hall, an establishment near New Braunfels, Texas, that bills itself as “Texas’ oldest dancehall.” And as Gruene Hall was on our Texas “bucket list,” we were pumped. The bands were great, I got to dance with my wife, and we tried to sing along to every word of “London Homesick Blues.” It was an excellent night… but it was also tinged with the realization that I would be leading my family to Madagascar; the feeling that everything is temporary, everything is in transition. This is an intensified version of the way Rebe and I feel most of the time since we have become missionaries. The sense that we are “temporary” is easy to fall into. It can feel disconnected from the current culture that we are living in, lonely, isolated. We made conscious decisions to not fall far into this mindset during our past year and a half in Austin. We put down roots, even though we knew they would be ripped up soon.

We reconnected with friends and pushed our way into their lives (and let them into our messy ones as well). We joined some small groups, and made several new lasting friendships. Rebe joined the church staff for a season and connected with many parents and their children. And now we have to transition away from these relationships… and it is a loss. 

Anytime I let moving to Africa, and the loss that goes with it, get me down, I remember Christ. He also lived a transitional and temporary life, but without all the self-pity and stress (I am half glad I will miss the “Do not be anxious” section of Tim’s current sermon series). Instead, Christ lived life to the fullest wherever he happened to be, diving into relationships and loving people with his whole heart. He knew he would always be leaving, but he also knew there would be a glorious reunion.

I was asked to share how you can pray for us as we move to Madagascar.

• You can pray that we would be bold like Christ in how we transition. That we would have “good” good-byes with our friends and family in America. 
• That the new relationships we will have with our team would be full of grace and compassion.
• That the relationships we form with the Sakalava people of our village would lead to a realization of “Christ in our midst.” 

We would also ask, like Paul at the end of second Thessalonians, “Finally, brothers, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may speed ahead and be honored, as happened among you, and that we may be delivered from wicked and evil men.”

~ Bryan and Rebe McReynolds