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Tabletop Sculpture
Art Palace Gallery Austin, TX July 14 - August 22, 2007 Curated by Amanda Douberley Exhibition Design by Erin Curtis Artists: Richie Budd Hunter Cross Bill Davenport Katalin Hausel Mark Schatz Jared Steffensen |
It seems the simplest way to introduce “Tabletop Sculpture” is by way of a photograph, of mid-century architect Gordon Bunshaft’s living room. I cannot reproduce it here, so I will try to describe it for you: On one side of the frame, there is a low white sofa. In the back, right-hand corner, an Eames lounge chair. At the center of the image hangs a large tapestry by Pablo Picasso, which is flanked by a couple of small, late Surrealist paintings. But outnumbering all of these things, covering nearly every available surface, the room brims with a type of object one wouldn’t necessarily expect to encounter in such profusion, at least not in a collector’s home today: Bunshaft’s living room is full of sculpture.
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Interchange: An Exhibition in Three Parts
Creative Research Laboratory Austin, TX Part I: June 30 - July 14, 2007 "The Eternal Moment" Curated by Amanda Douberley "The Burden of History" Curated by Deborah Spivak Artists: Alec Appl Peter Johansen Anna Krachey Kurt Mueller Cecelia Philips Laura Turner Joshua Welker Joseph Winchester Virginia Yount |
From its modern inception in the late nineteenth-century, binary concepts have been central to art history. The so-called “father” of the discipline, Heinrich Wölfflin, is most famous for his binary distinctions between the formal characteristics of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, appropriately accompanied by his innovative double-slide lectures. The plurality of postmodern methodologies—not to mention PowerPoint presentations—have done much to change our ways of looking at objects. But, it would seem that even in the twenty-first-century, if you give a group of art history graduate students two back-to-back exhibitions to curate from a group of MFA studio art students, it almost goes without saying that a binary distinction will separate the two shows.
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Object / Type / Transform
Work by undergraduate students in Design at UT-Austin. Gallery 3 at the Co-op Austin, TX March 29 - April 21, 2007 Designers: Ben Hasson Caspar Lam Allison Lura Marti Manship Robin Peeples Rachel Tepper |
Object. Type. Transform. Looking over my notes from meetings with the six Design students whose work is featured in this exhibition, I found these three words repeated over and over again. They interweave and overlap between the projects included here, sometimes describing an action, sometimes a product, and at other times a method of approach.
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Outside Area
Recent work by UT-Austin MFA students in Studio Art. Gallery 3 at the Co-op Austin, TX August 31 - September 30, 2006 Artists: Jarrod Beck Erin Curtis Aron Johnston |
Studio art graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin each choose an area of concentration as a focus for their studies in one of seven fields: ceramics, metals, painting and drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and transmedia (time-based art). On an administrative level, these divisions establish the makeup of students’ advisory committees and the location of their studios. Within artistic practice, however, the boundaries between areas can be quite fluid. Outside Area engages three MFA students who work outside their academic area of concentration, combining disparate media and modes of production to create hybrid forms that resist easy categorization.
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No Place Like Home
Gallery 3 at the Co-op Austin, TX September 8 - October 1, 2005 Artists: Ali Fitzgerald Erick Michaud Jared Steffensen David Woody |
Where is home? Is it the place you live, the town where you were born, or the house you grew up in? How does a new environment become home, or at least like home? Is home even a place at all, or is it no place, more a memory or illusion than an actual location? We typically think of home as a stable place, fixed in one location, embedded in our everyday lives as a source of comfort and ease. Being at home is a physical state as well as a psychological condition, however, and just as where you’re living now may not feel quite like home, where you’re from may eventually end up being a place you can only visit in your memories. These competing interpretations of home are examined in No Place Like Home through paintings, photographs, sculptures, and videos inspired by the places where these artists live and work.
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Katherine Bash: Tracing the Wind
Upstairs Project Room Glassell School of Art Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX March 31 - May 10, 2005 |
Katherine Bash’s video installation, Abrisamento, captures a natural phenomenon that, for all its visual interest and beauty, is so common as to be unremarkable: images produced by the sun filtered through tiny gaps in a tree’s canopy. These beams of light pierce the shadows beneath the tree, and create abstract patterns, sometimes called “sun-pictures,” that change according to the movement of the tree as it sways in the wind. Bash chose to project her video from the ceiling onto elliptical supports that seem to hover in mid-air, mimicking the projection of the sun’s light down through the leaves of a tree and onto the ground, and perforating the space of the gallery with an event from the outside, or “natural,” world.
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