Upcoming Exhibitions:
Group show to be announced soon
Past Exhibitions:
Short Summer Student Show Opening July 16
Featuring work by:
Francisco Alvarez – Texas State University
Kate Balmos – Texas State University
Elise Davis – University of Texas Arlington
Victor De Luna – Texas State University
Emily Fule – Texas State University
Jacob M. Garza Jr. – Texas State University
Mikey Hernandez – University of Dallas
Kylie Nash – Texas State University
Eunice Quiroz – Texas State University
Hannah Rodriguez – Texas State University
Diana Sexton – Austin Community College
Mercy Silva – University of Texas San Antonio
Jae-Eun Suh – University of North Texas
Delany Terrero Salazar – Texas State University
Kahsandra Williams – University of the Incarnate Word
Past Exhibitions:
Building Dreams featured on Glasstire Top 5 Art Events in TX, week of Feb. 17 2022
BUILDING DREAMS
on view January 22 2022 – March 5 2022
Building Dreams, a group exhibition, highlights the works of seven contemporary Texas artists including Christopher Paul Dean, Joshua Duttweiler, Thomas Flynn II, Shelley Hampe, Aaron Hollingsworth, Elvia Perrin, and Dallas Smith. The show presents a variety of media including painting, sculpture, prints, and installation.
The dynamics between the artists’ various approaches provoke ideas found in relationship between the built and natural environments and in human reaction to societal constructs. Architectural references from urban to domestic scales can be found whether it be through the subject matter, materials used, formal characteristics, or how the work engages with the gallery space. Allusions to identity, experience, and narratives from the personal to collective are imbued in varying degrees of abstraction.
Building Dreams offers a glimpse of these artists’ insightful perspectives.
Christopher Paul Dean investigates the relationships between humans and objects, drawing from universally utilized signs associated with standardized accident prevention. Employing various surface textures, bold colors and repeated patterns as a means to demarcate zones, create order, assist in navigation, and alert us to potential hazards, Dean’s work appropriates a visual lexicon of readymade safety markers including caution stripes, barricade patterns, floor signs, safety chains and safety cones. The formal characteristics of these safety-based Readymades are deconstructed and abstracted to create objects that promote discovery at close proximity and expand our experiences with these familiar objects.
Joshua Duttweiler encompasses personal, collaborative, and client-based projects focused on social justice and community building in his multi-disciplinary practice. The work is a critical exploration of societal systems and constructs that makes way for new voices to be heard through interactive design, curation, and installations. Duttweiler’s “Concrete” photographs depict urban built elements with an overlay of brilliant color.
Thomas Flynn II’s practice is informed by the perceived relationship between plants, celestial bodies, and human bodies. The work seeks to further delve into the ancient relationship that humans have with their environment and how that informs our current lives. Relationships between colors, between seemingly unconnected things, and between sleep and waking life are evoked in silhouettes of mythical night blooming flowers amongst depictions of comets and stars inspired by portrayal in medieval manuscripts. The work balances figurative representation and color blocked fields referencing a half-remembered walking daydream among the stars. Bright contrasting colors are informed by ocular color theory, or how the eyes perceive color when information is lacking. Think of when you stand up too fast or rub your eyes for too long – it is those star colors locked in the eyes that find their way into Flynn’s work.
Shelley Hampe creates new narratives that question female identity and place in society. Inspired by a variety of sources such as news, social media, advertisements, and literature, the narratives are open-ended and require the viewer to create a resolution if they choose.Displacing the heroic painting with found objects of lesser stature, the denounced narrative in contemporary painting is questioned in the series Failure of Fairytale.
Aaron Hollingsworth is intrigued by how major life circumstances ultimately begin to build the person we are and affect those around us. People, personalities, and oddities drive the aesthetics of the work. Each piece is created with an intent, story, and purpose, like a person. Intricate forms are grown together through found and purchased materials, alongside traditional painting and drawing media. Materials are often lacking or minimal color, yet create a new palette through their existence together. Through the use of wire, sewing, and gluing the sculptural personalities hold loosely together. Cloth is often stretched, glued, or stitched over a wire form and other materials are attached. Through these humbling elements, a language of meekness intertwined with pride evokes emotions of seriousness, humor, and intrigue.
Elvia Perrin takes an approach that is pragmatic, tying abstract imagery, geometric lines and clean-cut shapes to balance the femininity and masculinity of process and print. Through printmaking, the redundancy of the matrix is exploited and the repetitiveness of making is explored. Perrin’s practice convergences reorder of material with revealing and veiling of surfaces through overlaying ink and the contradictions of formalism with sectioning of the shape. There is a balance of making, collage, and structured form using the female approach to construct work that exhibits the banal of formalism, finds order in the layering textures and traces of patterns with a quiet minimalist approach.
Dallas Smith has always considered the creation of art to be an intimate process. Smith’s artistic practice is a reflection of the ethereal realm that the process of creating art brings us all to. Illustration, mixed media painting, and new media digital experiences create metaphorical windows into these other worlds that we all generate within ourselves. Inspiration is drawn from an amalgamation of the natural world and the unnatural rigidity of our societal structures. Smith considers his place living in the natural world, how we have altered it, and how it has altered him. The work strives to convey personal metamorphosis through the use of intense familiar imagery, complex and energetic forms, and bold uses of color.
We hope to meet you at the opening Jan 22, during our gallery hours on Saturdays from 1-5, or Contact us to make an appointment to view the show at another time.
Past Exhibitions:
Welcome featured on Glasstire’s Top 5 Texas Art Events for the week of Nov. 4
on view September 25 – November 6 2021
Welcome, b-space art house’s inaugural exhibit, will highlight the works of thirteen compelling contemporary artists including Lane Banks, Veronica Ceci & Hunter LV Elliott, Andrew Decaen, Abigail Edwards, Brent Fogt, Maria Haag, Megan Hildebrandt, Theresa Newsome, Ken O’Toole, Nathan Porterfield, Madelline Vicencio, and Michael Villareal.
Watch video of the artist talks here
This show displays a range of approaches tied together through a loosely modern and fresh aesthetic. A common thread is an experimental yet particular and refined attitude towards the various mediums exhibited. A prevalent theme is the transformation of everyday materials, objects and forms, while some works translate ideas with abstract composition and surface as the driving element.
Several of the works offer a take on the dynamics of a home environment. These works are particularly relevant in the gallery as a space located in a residential mixed-use neighborhood. They are timely, as events of the past year have left many with a different understanding of what homes mean in relationship to safety, work, and identity.
Andrew DeCaen’s print from his series The Little Kitchen Situation documents a couple interacting in a 2/3 scale model kitchen, exploring the intimacy and awkwardness of familiar experiences.
Theresa Newsome’s photographs “Brittany’s Kitchen” and “Tatiana Jefferson” show crisp images of familiar spaces that are steeped in complexity through the lens of the artist’s own thoughts regarding racial identity and place in society.
Megan Hildebrandt’s “During The Freeze” depicting a family in bed is an example of her current work capturing growth and evolution through the immediacy of ink on paper drawings.
Michael Villareal‘s sculptural works turn materials such as spray paint, joint compound, and insulation foam into visually familiar components that refer to a household environment. The re-contextualized forms evoke memory, time, place, and self, fostering new narratives.
The Upsweep series, a collaboration by Veronica Ceci and Hunter LV Elliott features handcrafted brooms treated with a red and gold color scheme borrowed from traditional gilding techniques.
Nathan Porterfield’s works are composed of numerous screws that mimic domestic interior patterns, setting up a contrast between the aggressive and comfortable.
Abigail Edward’s “House Plant” is a hand beaded philodendron leaf that has a temporal element – the fresh leaf ages and decays over the course of the exhibition.
Brent Fogt’s sculpture “The First One Taken” is composed of found furniture, cardboard, vintage catalogs and magazines-objects with a specific history-held together with wood glue, acrylic paint and varnish.
Lane Banks’ geometric painting “Untitled2021.10” is characteristic of his abstract, mathematical, conceptual works in acrylic on canvas that illustrate the variety and ambiguity possible within a structure.
Ken O’Toole’s Inkling “GardenER” is a folded form contained inside an acrylic box, capturing light and shadow in the limited space.
Madelline Vicencio’s mixed media works on cloth and cardboard are colorful, expressive and inspired by a desire for safety, affection, and identity connection.
Maria Haag’s drawing “The Death Bed” is influenced by the fragility of things and persons, illustrated with sweeping lines and crusted layers of paper, charcoal, paint and collage.
We hope to meet you at the opening Sept 25, during our gallery hours on Saturdays from 1-5, or Contact us to make an appointment to view the show at another time.
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