Visual Arts

Jack Kilby at Meadows Museum

Part of the Kilby archive bequeathed to Southern Methodist University's DeGolyer Library in 2005, the black-and-white photographs by Jack Kilby bear a workaday beauty. Untitled close-ups of beaches with curdling sands are hung next to sublime shots of freeway construction. The mannequins in the photographs from 1969 taken in front of Honest Joe's Pawn Shop in Deep Ellum are wacky but nonetheless a familiar style of still photography.

There is nothing terribly unique or new about any of these photographs, as works like these were done, and often better, by Henri Cartier Bresson, Ansel Adams and Minor White. What's interesting about this small exhibition in the foyer of the Meadows Museum is the story behind the man whose hobby was photography.

DeGolyer Library

Overpass Construction by Jack Kilby

Kilby worked for Texas Instruments and invented the integrated circuit, or the microchip, in 1958, catalyzing a thundering revolution in technology that continues to reverberate. The vitrines filled with silicon wafers, Kilby's notebooks with drawings, circuit boards and early calculators are more interesting than the pictures.

Charissa N. Terranova

"Jack Kilby: The Eye of Genius, Photographs by the Inventor of the Microchip" is on view through Sept. 21 at the Meadows Museum at SMU.

'Group Hug' at Marty Walker

If spring is time for cleaning, then the dog days of summer is the time for group shows. As curators rummage through storage, shows can end up so motley that they confuse or manage just the right play of formal juxtaposition as to refresh viewers' eyes. With "Group Hug," Marty Walker Gallery strikes a cool balance of the abstract and figural in work by Tom Orr, Matthew Porter, Ted Kincaid, William Lamson, Jay Shinn, Marc Lüders, Susie Rosmarin, Pard Morrison, Frances Bagley and Douglas Leon Cartmel.

Mr. Orr's 2709 62nd Street is sculpture that suggests the flatness of 1960s painter Jules Olitski's post-painterly abstraction. Plastic boards covered in printed black and white stripes lean against the wall amid silver metal frames, black planks and translucent plexiglass boards. A shiny swatch of satin cloth in chartreuse hangs over the edge of the top layer, creating a billowy surface.

Marty Walker Gallery

The Triumph of Love by Pard Morrison

Mr. Lüders' two small mixed-media pieces, Untitled (Berlin Wall) , smash the authentic painterly brushstroke into the reproduced image. In each, Mr. Lüders has brushed a glob of green and black paint on top of a photograph of the Berlin Wall. Anonymous graffiti on the wall in the photo competes for attention with Mr. Lüders' thick smudges of paint.

Mr. Morrison's The Triumph of Love hangs at the back of the front hallway. It is a midsize diptych in bright fruity pinstripes. Mr. Morrison uses a process of patinated aluminum in which he applies and bakes on finishes over and over. Each colored stripe is meticulously wrapped around the edges, creating tight surfaces that, like Mr. Orr's piece, are somewhere between sculpture and painting.

C.N.T.

"Group Hug" is on view through Aug. 30 at Marty Walker Gallery.

Tim Noble, Sue Webster at Goss-Michael

The English artists and lovers Tim Noble and Sue Webster adore the brashness of Las Vegas and the bawdiness of being human.

Goss-Michael

Excessive Sensual Indulgence by Tim Noble and Sue Webster

Gallerists at the Goss-Michael Foundation have blacked out the front door in order to heighten the shift from outside to inside and instill the disorienting feeling of being in a casino rather than a gallery. Walk in the door and directly in front of you are the blinking red, yellow, blue and white lights of Excessive Sensual Indulgence, a neon sign of a fountain that's more than 6 feet tall.

Two of the artists' signature shadow sculptures are on view in the main gallery. With trompe l'oeil effect, each appears to be one thing in three dimensions while casting a distinct shadow on the wall in two dimensions. There is a provocative irony here in that the sculptural object has the appearance and feel of bad student work while it projects itself in shadow as something else: the humorous subconscious of bad student work.

Lithographs of the couple at work and at sexual play are on display in the office, cordoned off from the public. These are from their 2005 republication of The Joy of Sex, an illustrated sex manual that came out in 1972. Like the first edition, the drawings look as though they were rendered by a court reporter. The prints bear a hilarious deadpan frankness rooted in nostalgia for the original.

C.N.T.

"Tim Noble and Sue Webster" continues through Sept. 30 at the Goss-Michael Foundation.