On View
3 Women
Gail Blank
Gretta Johnson
Helen Burkhart Mayfield
Gretta Johnson
Helen Burkhart Mayfield
September 27 - November 22, 2025
203 S. Haskell Ave. Dallas, TX 75226 (Ephemeral Space)
Gallery Hours: Friday - Sunday, 12-6pm & by appointment
Installation Images
Exhibition Text
Individual Works
Artist Bios
203 S. Haskell Ave. Dallas, TX 75226 (Ephemeral Space)
Gallery Hours: Friday - Sunday, 12-6pm & by appointment
Installation Images
Exhibition Text
Individual Works
Artist Bios
Upcoming
Exquisite Corp: Texas Edition!
Eve Essex
Z Pinson Hopgood
Garrett McClure
TeeDee Simons
Andrew Weathers
Saturday, November 22, 2025
7-9:30pm
Buy Tickets Here
Exhibition Text
Nature of Things is pleased to present the exhibition, 3 Women, featuring ceramics by Gail Blank, oil paintings by Gretta Johnson, and fine ink drawings by Helen Burkhart Mayfield.
“It is my thousand years of womanhood I am recording, a thousand women.” - Anaïs Nin
Crone welcomes you with her yellow eyes, her expectant nose, her ruddy cheeks.
The cycle begins at the end, the point where the tail has entered the mouth of the dragon.
A storm descends upon the landscape in cylindrical motions, penetrated by a resistant cattail. Death also remains; an animal skull mocks you.
The storm clears, spring arrives miraculously once again. The tree and its fingers grasping upwards, heaven-facing daisies, roots steadied in the earth. A lone cloud awaits on the horizon. Hush the winds.
The wheel of creation bursts forth, thrusting primordial stillness into cyclical motion. Tonal primaries (red, blue, yellow): the prima materia of creation.
Mother Earth! Bounteous spring brings forth nodal growth. Blood veins extend like root systems, pulsing with life.
Three more blossoms: erect, bristled, alert.
An echo pours out of the fallen vessel in shallow water, encircling her nakedness. She has awoken in the womb from a sleep that lasted 309 years. The light-body guides her to the entrance of the cave, the transformation complete, where for 309 years the sun has passed with the moon.
The floating head, hair aflame, converses with the lost highway – the entrance to the abyss. The fallen glass alembic awaits spiritual imbibement.
The siren’s wail ascends softly on the lonesome hunter: Come, come! I miss you, I miss you! Come, come! My nest is near, my nest is near! He wades into the cold river, and she, transformed into her true form, extends feathered wings, and flies off. Eros, nay, owl.
The dream-day light scorches the desert yellow earth. A combustive head falls through the sky, aflame, disturbing the bleached, still climate, and a singular topaz-eyed cloud.
Crone returns, dancing, grasping upwards towards her youthful maiden visage. The spiteful gravity of time descends, snapping at our tail.
The limp bouquet sheds two petals, the devil laughs. Only moments before, the bird, his beautiful bride. Trickster departs with the coveted branch.
A dream last night. I was on stage awash with warm light, and the velvet red curtains parted around me. My limbs were fragmented, suspended around me like a string puppet, and my body became a second stage, within it opened an emerald, green forest, with a cabin in the middle. The door was arched, and a singular light emanated from its outline. The image was held between my feet, and shaped like my head, a sleeping vessel. I awoke.
A nightmare. A face with wilted pink skin and white large lips. Her black tongue hungrily licked me like a dog. The mask falls loose,
I dissolve into vibrating pink atoms with two headlights nearing.
Ribbon-like layers without end, spiraling upwards, spiraling downwards, unraveling time. Energy, as we know it, is eternal delight.
Artist Bios
Gail Blank, née Gail Perrin (1940-2005) was ceramicist and printmaker living and working most of her life in New Orleans, LA. Gail Blank received a BA in Philosophy from Tulane University, where she met fellow student, Les Blank, and in 1960 they married and moved to Los Angeles. Gail starred in Les Blank’s earliest films while he studied at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. In the early 1970’s, Gail Blank separated from Les and moved to the San Fernando Valley, where she raised her two children, Harrod and Beau, and studied ceramics at Pierce College. In the 1980’s, she returned to New Orleans, remarried, and continued to make ceramics and later, printmaking, until the end of her life. Gail’s legacy is continued by her son, Harrod, who manages her estate and plans to open the Gail Perrin Blank Gallery in 2026 in Douglas, AZ, adjacent to his art car museum, Art Car World.
Gretta Johnson (b. 1985, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and events curator. Her practice is infused with the interconnectedness of nature, psychology, symbolism, patterns and language. She holds a BFA in animation from Rhode Island School of Design, has participated in numerous film festivals, published comic books, and shown paintings in exhibitions throughout the country. For the past 13 years, she has been the artist-in-chief for Grimm Artisanal Ales, producing all the artwork for the award-winning brewery, based in Brooklyn, New York. On the rooftop at Grimm, she curates a monthly performance series called Exquisite Corp.
Helen Burkhart Mayfield (1939-1997) was born in Houston and raised in Blanco, Texas. Helen attended Texas State University in San Marcos, where she met her future husband, also an artist, Martin Mayfield. They left Texas for Greenwich Village in the early 1960’s by car with a pet skunk in tow. In New York, Mayfield was an early devotee of interpretive dance at a school following in the tradition of Isadora Duncan, and it is thought that she also participated in the avant-garde Fluxus movement. New York is where she first began staging street performances, involving dance, poetry, and costume. Helen and Martin returned to Texas in the later 1960’s, where Mayfield would go on to form the first interpretive dance troupe in Austin (NOSO). The ink drawings in this exhibition are thought to be from the beginning of a psychologically troubling period, perhaps undiagnosed schizophrenia, that Mayfield entered in the 1970’s, and it was around this time that she left her husband, Martin. The drawings reflect her confident hand, a dancer’s relationship and sensitivity to the body, and a deep psychological haunting. The last twenty years of her life she spent living on the streets of Austin. She passed away too soon at the age of 58 in the county jail in 1997. Helen is survived by her daughter, Mariah. Her artwork estate is held with the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie and Fort Davis, Texas.