Stripped of context, dissolved in gray — Bardin Gallery opens its first season on dislocation

When a gallery changes its name after 34 years, the program it puts its name to first becomes a kind of statement. William Bardin, who acquired the Dallas institution formerly known as Craighead Green in 2025, chose to open under the Bardin Gallery banner with a pairing of solo exhibitions whose common subject is, in the broadest sense, what it feels like to not quite belong. The transition, Bardin has said, is not a departure from the gallery’s history but an extension of it — and the programming reflects that continuity: two artists working at a serious remove from the obvious, in the same building where serious work has been shown for three decades.

Thom Jackson’s contribution, titled Out of Context, draws from a body of photographs that have circulated in neither his fine art nor his commercial work. That they appear here unreleased — retrieved from assignments and sessions where they were first made but never shown — is the point. Jackson positions each image after the defining moment has passed: his subjects, captured in spontaneous or carefully constructed frames, appear somewhere between the center of the scene and its edge. The figures feel neither fully settled in the image nor displaced from it. Belonging, in Jackson’s photographs, is something that slips, quietly, without spectacle.

Anders Moseholm, Reflection and Destruction (2012), oil on canvas — blurred urban forms in black and white — Image: Anders Moseholm

Anders Moseholm takes the opposite approach and arrives at the same territory. Fenestrations is a body of urban paintings — large-format works in which the city, its facades, its windows, its surfaces of glass and stone — is not absent so much as drained. Working in a palette of blacks, whites, and muted grays, the Danish artist renders architecture the way a long exposure renders movement: the building is there, its certainty is not. A street or a window that Moseholm paints feels simultaneously inhabited and evacuated, intimate and irretrievable.

Presented together under the title The Art of Being Out of Place, the exhibitions make a more precise argument than either would make alone. Jackson photographs subjects who are present but unmoored; Moseholm paints cities that are legible but unstable. The pairing proposes that alienation is not a condition that befalls people in places, but a structural disposition in how we see — and that art’s job is not to resolve it but to make it visible.

The gallery is hosting a series of events around the exhibitions. The Dallas Design District Gallery Night, on September 19 from 5 to 8 p.m., includes a conversation with collector and arts figure Cathryn McClellan on the practice of collecting — what draws a collector to a work, and the relationships that form around a collection. On September 27, from 3 to 5 p.m., the CADD MFA Showcase brings eleven finalists from nine regional graduate programs to the gallery, with the public invited to vote for the winning artist.

Out of Context and Fenestrations are on view at Bardin Gallery, 167 Parkhouse Street in Dallas’ Design District, through September 26.

Tags: contemporary art exhibitions, Anders Moseholm, Bardin Gallery, Cathryn McClellan, Dallas Design District, Thom Jackson