Despite news of mega-inflation, global wars and the ghost recession that supposedly looms over 2024, Dallas’ Exposition Park shows signs of a flourishing new year. With staples like Las Almas Rotas, Sandaga 813 and Whiskey’s catering to the hip and affluent Dallas art set this past holiday season, the ever-changing area is due for yet another makeover in the coming year. Historically, Exposition Park has been home to some of the most progressive and important art galleries Dallas has had to offer, including Angstrom Gallery, Beefhaus and Oliver Francoise Galerie.

Fort Worth artist and musician James Talambas will be adding to that tradition with a new gallery. With open loft spaces, a killer coffee shop (Coyote Roasters) and several empty buildings currently for lease, New Media Contemporary will open in the heart of the neighborhood this month at 830 Exposition Ave. Just as the name suggests, the space will focus on new media projects, with a strong emphasis on projections, performance art, experimental music and collaboration of all kinds.

“The whole thing is about collaboration to build organic art and culture,” Talambas says. “I want to focus on group shows that are intersectional, where music and art have different types of people doing different types of things adjacent to each other that you wouldn’t be able to show somewhere else.”

Talambas accredits his decision to open New Media Contemporary to fellow experimental Dallas artists Eric Trich and Taylor Cleveland. Both Trich and Cleveland have worked successfully in art, each independently blurring the lines of technology and physical mediums to create fully immersive experiences through various platforms. Trich also founded IIII Studio Gallery on Dragon Street in the late 2000s, ushering in the newest group of young experimental artists of the time, including Alfredo Salazar-Caro and the musical group HOYOTOHO.

“Eric and Taylor are important and influential collaborators and confidantes without whom none of this would be possible,” Talambas says. “I’m very much about partnering with people. My name is on the lease, but it’s boring if it’s just me and a lot more fun with friends around.”

Talambas graduated with a degree in music composition from the University of Texas at Arlington and currently holds a chair position with the Fort Worth Art Commission. As a trained composer and artist, navigating the intersection of commerce and art has been a thought-provoking ordeal. The New Media Contemporary is experimental in that most of the art in the space is performative, and not really for sale.

“I think that there is a place for commercial work and the Design District aesthetic, but I think art needs to have a little danger to it to be relevant,” Talambas says. “I feel the ultra-capitalization of art, catering to the whims and tax breaks of the rich, strips it of expression and only is used as a financial tool for the rich to move money around.”

Some would say that in the Western world, art is valued as a kind of classist commodity rather than a daily part of cultural practice. According to Talambas, art should be free of commodity and 100% subsidized in order to produce the purest forms of expression. His new experimental gallery will put this thought model and its patrons to the test in a historically hyper-commercialized city.

“I think that there is no place for commerce in art,” Talambas says. “It’s a public good and should be subsidized. To think that the free market is going to produce good art is an understatement and just wrong. You don’t ask an arborist to make a cake, just like you don’t ask a free market to make art.”

Talambas often ponders the role of public art in communities, especially in impoverished areas, and asks himself what value becoming an artist holds in a world full of inequalities.

“I think about it a lot, what the hell am I doing making art all day when there are people living on the streets?” Talambas says. “When I had a residency at the Cedars, I’m was making art and seeing people sleeping on the streets every morning when I would show up. I realized I don’t live in a bubble and neither do they. It’s just all politics and the days of artists living in a bubble needs to be over.”

Talambas hopes that through his gallery, artists and work will help transcend the often perceived but unspoken class barriers that exist in the Dallas art world. For him, the practice of making art should be open to all and not be limited to those with advanced degrees from prestigious coastal schools. As a classically trained musician, he has a heightened visual sense matched by an immense love of sounds of all kinds. This is something he learned while studying composers John Cage and Pauline Oliveros and took to heart.

“I think that there is no place for commerce in art. It’s a public good and should be subsidized.” – James Talambas

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“Deep listening is about taking in everything, the leaves, the cars, the train,” Talambas says. “All of these things are part of the conversation. All of this is art. Life is art.”

Talambas is disrupting the status quo for Dallas art by insisting that New Media Contemporary will subsist on donations from local patrons, grass roots culture and visiting art curators looking for off-the-beaten-path spaces to show. The upcoming year may prove promising for the gallery, as the inaugural soft opening packed the space from wall to wall.

“The gallery is artist-run,” Talambas says. “There is an implication in that and an important implication, or a line in the sand to draw.”

Half of the space is currently occupied by a 65-foot stringed acoustic musical instrument called “the long string instrument,” designed by Ellen Fullman, which Talambas assembled in the gallery and played from the gallery’s opening in mid-December. The soft opening also featured projections from Trich, Taylor and a performance art interpretative dance piece set to live music.

Talambas is excited for the future of New Media Contemporary, and though he resides in Fort Worth he believes Dallas is primed for a new art gallery in Exposition Park.

“I think that there is a Texas spirit that is alive and well in Dallas,” Talambas says. “I will say that there’s been a lot of experimental music come out of this area. I think that the Texas and experimental spirit are synonymous, as we never shy away on advancement and a growth mentality. I’m not doing anything here that doesn’t take risks, so if you want this in your neighborhood, donate.”