Event Details
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This group exhibition brings together a dynamic group of 11 artists, including three based in Austin, who challenge traditional hierarchies of material and meaning. Each reimagines the familiar through processes rooted in transformation, tactility and critique.
From Al Freeman's soft, deflated sculptures of domestic objects that humorously subvert masculine iconography, to Jessie Henson's meditative threadwork that turns paper into a topographic abstraction, the works on view collapse the boundaries between fine art and craft, utility and ornament. Several works elevate everyday materials into poetic and conceptual expressions, like Robert Janitz's embroidered surfaces that evolve over time, Amanda Witucki's folded paper geometries and Montrel Beverly's whimsical interpretations of famous paintings made from pipe cleaners. Witucki and Beverly are based in Austin.
Erick Medel brings this ethos into sharp cultural focus, using colorful thread on heavyweight denim to depict the vibrant daily life of Los Angeles' Boyle Heights Latino community. Austin-based John Conroy also captures the poetics of the everyday, taking photographs of pencil shavings—mundane studio residue—as moments suspended between stillness and movement, abstraction and representation.
Other artists engage with cycles of consumption, memory, and reinvention, like Mathias Kessler and Ahmet Civelek through their woven plastic waste tapestries, Jean Shin's wall sculptures made from salvaged mother-of-pearl buttons and Ted Riederer's sculptural mandalas made from salvaged piano keys. Together, these artists offer a shared language of material ingenuity, social commentary and visual surprise.