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OBSESSIONS. DECORATION. SALIENT FACTS. 12 ART NOTES F ort Works Art is the site for meditations on place by Laura Wilson and Byrd Williams IV. Wilson will forever be linked with Richard Avedon, as she collaborated as his assistant on In the American West, one of the late master's most acclaimed bodies of work. More than 20 images from Wilson's own seminal "Photographs in the West" series are mounted throughout FWA's expansive first floor; standouts are 1990s portraits of a Hutterite community from Montana, depicting a beautiful but vanishing way of life. Visitors to the second-floor galleries are in for something darker with Williams. He's the fourth in a dynasty of Texas photographers; his family's photo-studio images are presented in the 2016 book Proof. At FWA, he contemplates the aging process, with prints that offer a disturbing glint of violence. Opening Friday, January 5, 6 to 9 pm; Wilson and Williams will sign copies of their volumes That Day: Pictures in the American West and Proof: Photographs from Four Generations of a Texas Family, respectively ($40 each); exhibitions through February 3; fortworksart.com. Catherine D. Anspon S hort of owning a plane with your personal pilot on standby, the easiest route to flying private is by using a jet card or a charter broker. No single choice is right for every flight — and the wrong choice can financially ding you. Only fly a few times a year? Brokered charter is the way to go. Brokers have access to a network of planes and will source the right plane for the flight profile, after filtering for safety factors and cost. If your flights are long- hauls with extended stay- overs, a jet card could be the way to go. There are operational nuances between the two, but all things being equal, flight times and the number of overnight stays are the main metrics that determine the economic efficiencies. You can hop on an eight-seat jet — think Citation XLS or Lear 45 — from Dallas to Aspen for a four-day weekend and pay $27K through a broker or $32K using a jet card. That same trip, for a weeklong stay, could cost $40K with a broker but only $32K with a jet card. Day trip to New Orleans? Jet card for $16K, but only $9K with a broker. Jet cards typically require you to spend a bunch of money upfront, and that also has to be baked into the equation. Thought that was it? Not quite. Brokers have a trick up their sleeves: finding empty planes that are crisscrossing the country, exacting a discount from the operator that can leave both traditional charter and jet-card pricing in the dust. They're hit or miss, but when they hit, they're magic on the checkbook. www.thecompanyplane.com. The Sun Also Rises: Enter the New Year with buoyant, optimistic abstractions by SMU MFA grad Bret Slater. Now painting from New York, Slater returns to Texas for his debut with Liliana Bloch Gallery, showcasing deft color- field works that seem to be inhabited by a disarming presence. What's new now is Slater's scale; these works are super-sized up to 46 by 46 inches. Slater was one of the darlings of the Dallas Art Fair several years ago, and he has already entered the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art (January 6 – February 10) … A painter who remains in Texas is David Ayslworth. A past Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Core Fellow, Aylsworth brings his A-game with recent abstractions defined by wit and a loopy beauty at Holly Johnson Gallery (January 6 – March 24). A Date with the Past: Celebrated Texas artist Lance Letscher is widely exhibited, with shows in New York and internationally. The collage king is also one of the most brilliant preservers and recyclers of ephemera: book pages lovingly reclaimed, scraps of cardboard bearing text fragments, old board games, all manner of vintage signage. Catch Letscher at long-time dealer Conduit Gallery. During the run of the exhibition (January 13 - February 17), watch for the screening of the 2016 film The Secret Life of Lance Letscher, time and place to be announced soon … We're enamored of Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery's "John Albok: Revisited," curated by Burt Finger from the late artist's archive, which is located in Dallas, where his late daughter lived. Albok, a Hungarian émigré, arrived in the U.S. in 1921, and documented his adopted city, Manhattan, in the ensuing decades with sympathy and an unerring eye while maintaining his day job as the owner of a tailor shop on the Upper East Side. At his passing in 1982, the Museum of the City of New York was days away from opening his retrospective; the Met, Guggenheim, Getty, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, all own works. Acquire a vintage print at PDNB and revisit an America long gone (through February 10). Power of Ten: It's 14 weeks and counting until Dallas Art Fair, wrapping its first decade and final year at Fashion Industry Gallery. Watch these pages and papercitymag. com for updates in the weeks ahead. Catherine D. Anspon Bret Slater's Harvest, 2017, at Liliana Bloch Gallery COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LILIANA BLOCH GALLERY COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PDNB GALLERY John Albok's May Day (Fight Fascism), 1937, at Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery THE WEST Laura Wilson's Hutterite Girls during Haymaking Season Hutterite Colony, Montana, 1991, at Fort Works Art COURTESY THE ARTIST AND FORT WORKS ART Sponsored