Daily Times

A red universe appears to be exploding in Ambreen Butt’s “I Am My Lost Diamond,” one of the works composed of a gazillion small parts in “Site Lines – Artists Working across Texas.” Dazzling from a distance, Butt’s piece delivers a shock up close: Each of the little blood-red forms bursting out from the centre is a resin-cast finger or toe. The artist created the installation in 2011, after a friend narrowly escaped a bombing in Pakistan. Stand back again after that and even if you don’t see the flying digits, you might think you’re seeing a monumental gunshot wound. Prince Varughese Thomas’s “Body Count” also eloquently treads political ground. Composed of 194,000 pennies painted white and placed in stacks of 25 across a platform, his sculpture makes me think of the ordered rows of graves in a national cemetery. Each penny represents a life lost during the ongoing conflict in Iraq.