VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

DiverseWorks’ Co-director Diane Barber joins forces with Eva Buttacavoli (Austin Museum of Art), Bill FitzGibbons (Blue Star Contemporary Art Center) and Dennis Kois (The Grace Museum) to select artists for New Art in Austin: 20 to Watch, opening with a reception May 1 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., and on view through June 13, 2009.

The triennial’s third exhibition since its 2002 inception showcases emerging Central Texas artists testing the boundaries of contemporary art. The resulting energetic multimedia exhibition comes to the DiverseWorks Main Gallery, with each new artist creating bold new takes on classic themes: exploring issues of identity and displacement, manipulating found objects, subverting authority, and glancing from the mechanical or digital world back to the natural world. Materials and media are as varied as industrial equipment, karaoke machines, inner tubes, toy dolls and vinyl tape.

New Art features a colorful line-up: Yoon Cho, Maggie Chou, Ali Fitzgerald, Alyson Fox, Buster Graybill, Jules Buck Jones, Baseera Khan, Andrew Long, Kurt Mueller, Jen Hirt, Jill Pangallo, Scott Proctor, Matthew Rodriguez, Shawn Smith, Xochi Solis, Sarah Sudhoff, Raymond Uhlir, Stephanie Wagner, Rebecca Ward, Scott Webel and Eric Zimmerman.

“Austin’s visual arts community has been growing significantly in size and reputation in recent years and the artists represented in New Art in Austin illustrate why this is the case. 20 to Watch underscores the range and depth of work being produced in the state’s capital and I am truly excited to be presenting this exhibition to Houston audiences.” – Diane Barber

New Art Artists:
Yoon Cho Through her video installations, Cho illustrates the process of creating identity. In Haircut (2007), Cho reaffirms her marital vows via the adoption of the same haircut as her husband’s. In How to Spell My Name, Cho interviews 12 subjects with diverse backgrounds about their names. Despite their cultural differences, they share a common collective experience.

Meggie Chou Incorporating mass-produced materials including an industrial water transporting bag, plastic tubing, fluorescent lights, stainless steel pipes and IV drip bags, Chou evokes the clinical feel of a laboratory of hospital ward with her sculpture “No. 2.3.,” which functions as a metaphor for the human body. The “Incubation” suggests the full range of medical and biological associations.

Ali Fitzgerald A massive floor-to-ceiling canvas painted in a three-dimensional thrust serves as a theatrical backdrop for Fitzgerald’s “Sad Little White Girl Goes to Boarding School.” The installation features shadowboxed vignettes depicting the struggles of a shark-girl banished to a boarding school following a taboo bout of crying. Viewers are invited to peer into the windows as voyeurs of Fitzgerald’s narrative world.

Alyson Fox Composed upon a vintage thrift store book of the same title, Fox’s The Death and Rebirth of Psychology depicts three women engaged in push-ups amidst the printed names of Freud, Adler, Jung and Rank. As a figure dressed in a band uniform and holding a trumpet looks on, the drawing and its textbook canvas suggest a muddled high school coursework nightmare, while serving as a commentary on women’s position within the discipline of psychology.

Buster Graybill An upended Jon boat suspended to the ceiling with straps and stuffed with knotted and near-bursting inner-tubes creates a physical metaphor for displacement with Graybill’s sculpture “Come Along Johnny”. The uprooted materials and relocated air of the boat and tubes embody the tension of reluctant capitulation to meet the demands of a foreign context.

Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata ( Jen Hirt and Scott Webel) The Museum of Artificial & Natural Ephemerata (MNAE), may be seen as a recycling of the idea of the museum or even a recycling of the idea of the death of the museum. The East Austin-based MNAE echoes everything from the Victorian private collection to the scientific or natural history museum to the American Dime Museum. Its aesthetic can be seen as a combination of refined taste and cheap amusement, within the purview of the curatorial scholar and the sideshow huckster. For New Art in Austin, MNAE was given access to AMOA’s permanent collection as inspiration and then tracked down common objects related to the art. The works shown here make-up their installation, Museum of Natural & Artificial Ephemerata Presents Novelties & Banalities of the Art World on Loan from Esteemed Collections (2008). Their carefully-worded labels and audio guide commentary both imbue and subvert meaning into each of their thoughtful pairings.

Jules Buck Jones A crocodile is presented almost as another artist might present a landscape in Jones’ drawing “Saltwater Crocodile #1.” Through sustained engagements with a limited range of subject matters, Jones has attuned himself to diverse ways of understanding his motifs, and transforms the crocodile—a carnivore, quadruped, swamp dweller—into a biological abstraction realizing energy, warfare, fire and wildness.

Baseera Khan Living between two cultures is a thematic thread in Khan’s work, which intertwines found images and semi-autobiographical scenes to become composite biographical paintings wherein images oscillate between spatial orientations. As in her Thumbnails Expeditions series, images appear and then disappear as figures alternate, taking the foreground before fading into the background as another image takes hold.

Andrew Long Histories of pigment over multiple working sessions accrue in Long’s instinctual yet time-intensive paintings. His use of truncated and overlapping forms create a rich visual environment. These vibrant works depict worlds within worlds; the viewer navigates and rides the waves of his creative tides from large panel paintings to small framed work to a work made solely of paint.

Kurt Mueller Imitation insinuating itself into action is the crux of Mueller’s installation “American Dream,” wherein a karaoke setup transforms the experience of singing a favorite song into a restatement of a world-altering speech. As the text of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech courses across the monitor much like a pop song, the viewer as performer finds that an everyday voice can be as effective as any other.

Jill Pangallo In her video and installation work "Note to Self," Pangallo records her improvised interactions with a 23” poseable doll, “Jill,” customized by a specialty doll company to look “just-like-her.” The video juxtaposes banal scenarios of domestic life with more abstract (and occasionally charged) instances of physical interaction, while her installation provides clues to her character through a series of brochures, photographs and items of clothing made from the same materials for woman and doll. In this work, there is a purposeful blurring of roles – is “Jill” her child, her doll or herself?

Scott Proctor Entire labyrinthine neighborhoods and structures within the narrow confines of gallery walls are exposed in Proctor’s site-specific work “Reveal: 14o Rise,” causing one to suspect equally complex civilizations may be hiding anywhere or everywhere inside the building. The installation suggests that behind every mundane and blank siding, a multitude of worlds could be brimming inside.

Matthew Rodriguez Through his installation “Goon Gone Green Grass Was On Its Way,” Rodriguez draws out and celebrates the character of overlooked spaces, asking viewers to recognize the potential in the world around them. A face carefully arranged on a large mound of rubble looks askance at a crying child through painted concrete eyes to illustrate the cost of urban development.

Shawn Smith A natural world is created at a double remove in Smith’s work: nature to image file, image file to sculpture. In his sculpture “Re-kindling,” Smith produces a tall bonfire with flames reaching upwards, a continually shifting relationship captured in pixilated simplicity.

Xochi Solis Sequenced planes of vibrantly painted wood panels and acetate act as representations of mood in Solis’ work, of which the subjects are specifically traced to moments from the artist’s life. Solis’s process of sanding down her wooden surfaces after painting them hides customary indication of expression, while spunky titles, such as “If you come back, come back with a heart attack,” introduce her spirited compositions.

Sarah Sudhoff Large-scale photographs present an unflinching, firsthand account of illness with Sudhoff’s Exam 2 and Clean 2. Following her surgery for cervical cancer in 2004, Sudhoff immediately began researching the disease and its affect on individuals, and soon turned to self-portraits to make public the private experience of coping with illness while revealing the relationships among medicine, ritual and magical thinking.

Raymond Uhlir The modes of storytelling enacted through media narrative logic rooted in video games, cartoons, 19th Century paintings and epic mythological tales have not only shaped Uhlir’s art but the worldview of an entire generation—history painting for Generation Y. His series of six paintings on paper investigate the infiltration of gory violence into his nightmares.

Stephanie Wagner With Divinity Series, Wagner embraces both meanings of “baroque”: alluding to a specific art historical period, and bizarre and highly exaggerated in style. The artist displays her sculptures on custom-built pedestals inspired by mid-century furniture design, encouraging viewers to move around the work and fully inhabit a space that constantly unfolds and evolves.
Rebecca Ward Appreciating tape’s broad spectrum of colors and its bright plastic textural quality, Ward capitalizes on the versatility of vinyl adhesive as a medium through its use within the gallery and through the use of projected video. In “Phantastic Magoria,” Ward creates an environment based on various video games with tape that serves as the bedrock for moving images which shift and interact with static ones.

Eric Zimmerman By carefully juxtaposing modes of representation, Zimmerman invents fluid spaces in his sculptures, as familiar as they are foreign, where an imagined future might be apprehended. In “Observatory Projector (Trouvelot’s Dream)” a sculptural pedestal and architectural models are built around an outdated overhead projector, and a metaphysical image is generated from the sculpture itself.

ABOUT New Art This project represents common goals both the Austin Museum of Modern Art and DiverseWorks do for their communities: it strengthens the local art infrastructure by providing curatorial review, critical dialogue and public exhibition in Austin, Houston and two other major Texas cities. The common goal of the program’s co-curators is that the featured artists will come to be better known, appreciated and supported, not only within local art circles, but also by the broad general public and the national arts scene.

Focusing on emerging and lesser-known artists who reside within a 50-mile radius of Austin, New Art in Austin: 20 to Watch celebrates the innovations and explorations of visual artists in the forefront of their fields. Between each triennial event, a statewide team consisting of contemporary curators with some of the sharpest eyes in the country, including Eva Buttacavoli, Director of Exhibitions and Education at Austin Museum of Art; Diane Barber, Co-Director and Visual Arts Curator at DiverseWorks; Bill FitzGibbons of Blue Star Contemporary Arts Center in San Antonio; and Dennis Kois, Director of The Grace Museum in Abilene. These participants reviewed more than 250 artists’ submissions and visited with 35 artists to make the final selection of whose work would tour statewide, and be presented in Austin, Abilene and Houston.

ABOUT DIVERSEWORKS Known for its groundbreaking artistic and education programs, DiverseWorks is one of the premiere contemporary arts centers in the United States. DiverseWorks has been a hub for the presentation of daring and innovative work, a commissioner of major artistic projects in all disciplines, and an advocate for artists worldwide. Founded by artists for artists, DiverseWorks continues its commitment to bold artistic exploration, creative risk-taking and building audiences for contemporary art.

Special Event:
May 1 - Opening Reception
6:00p - 8:00p