VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Anya Tish Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Disgruntled Developments, featuring the work of Kevin Curry, Baseera Khan, and Jeff Mueller. Curated by Garland Fielder. Artists opening, Friday, July 10, 6–9pm. ArtHouston Open House, Saturday, July 11, 11 am – 5 pm. On view through August 8.

Anya Tish Gallery is delighted to present Disgruntled Developments, a three person show curated by Houston based artist and critic Garland Fielder, bringing together three emerging artists whose work explores the conspiring yet complex nature between urban dissatisfaction and current events.

The international dialogue between the richly layered multi-media works by Indian-American, New York based Baseera Khan, the homegrown graffiti and publicly sprawled works of Chicago based Jeff Mueller, and the locally sourced assemblages of abandoned Hurricane Ike signage by Houston artist Kevin Curry, produce an excitingly global and visual frenzy of fantastical and political sensibilities. Together they question the fundamental need for the personal versus the homogenized public, alongside a desire for Constructivist aesthetics over consumerist pathologies.

Baseera Khan’s delicate works on paper explore a cultural hybridization interpolated between experiences of growing up in a Dallas suburb along with embodying her inherently Muslim Indian heritage. Her works indulge several ambiguous landscapes that magnify themes of alienation and integration, appropriated from both her native and immigrant perspectives.

Jeff Mueller’s textual based works candidly reflect and interpret the uncensored scrawling found in the everyday American bathroom. Mueller re-interprets the complex messages as the true voice of America, an important personal proclamation which, through a sense of playful physicality, allows the viewer to engage the usually inaccessible. The works act as a didactic filter straining the truth from the satire, and ultimately offer a rich engaging visual and cultural conversation.

Kevin Curry’s sculptural works explore complex themes of a multidisciplinary language and culture through the recycling of forgotten societal detritus discarded after Hurricane Ike hit Houston in September 2008. Curry often works intuitively with his surrounding environment and since moving to Houston as an artist-in-residence at Lawndale Art Center, has continued to extend his topographical sensibilities between contemporary landscapes and traditional object and mark-making, as a means of chronicling our cultures looked-over history.

Disgruntled Developments conspire through the complex merging of a personal utopia and a societal depression, to describe and identify a more relevant zeitgeist for today’s anxiety driven and kitsch fuelled culture. The works of Baseera Khan, Jeff Mueller and Kevin Curry all aim to create a contemporary codification which both challenges and chronicles the ever increasing monopoly of language and cultural information that dwindles and flows throughout our lives.

Pictured:   detail Roadside Attraction by Kevin Curry,  mixed media.  (full image depicted below).