VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Archway Gallery presents Pretense, featuring artist Trudy Askew. The exhibition will be on view May 5 – 31, 2012. The artist will be on hand to visit with guests during the exhibition opening reception on Saturday, May 5, 2012 from 5 – 8 pm at the gallery.

The paintings featured in "Pretense" portray the surreal human circus. The actors Askew creates identify themselves one mask at a time, by concealing their identities and by establishing new ones. These performers invite the audience into the big top with them, barely pulling back the curtain to reveal the artifice behind the show. As observers, our response is bittersweet. The play casts the “brave face” we wear in public under a new spotlight, revealing the fragility of this mask that conceals and protects our true personae.

“We all populate this vast theater, this house of mirrors, where things are not always as they seem,” explains Askew.

These narratives are revealed through a blend of portraiture and contemporary realism. Depicting scenes between the obvious and the hidden, Askew places her subjects at a temporal distance. Just as foreign travel heightens the way we perceive our familiar environs, vintage images sharpen the viewer’s perception and receptivity to meaning. Askew employs a color palette reminiscent of Renaissance paintings to further imply this backward glance in time.

Among her favorite subjects, children and animals are the stars in “Pretense.” They wear their costumes with innocence and blind trust, made all the more poignant by the masks and roles we assume as adults.

Born and raised in San Diego, CA, Askew states that she has always been an artist and as such pursued an extensive education in fine arts. She attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, but left because of the distraction of student riots over the Vietnam War. She received her B.F.A. from the University of Texas, and fell in love with the state, particularly Austin. Other stops along the way include magical summers spent in Guadalajara, Mexico at the Universidad de Artes Plasticas; adventures in Valencia, Spain at the Universidad de Valencia and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.

Askew moved to Houston in 1975 and found an open and welcoming atmosphere for her work. Her art received recognition: she won competitions; received positive media coverage and became an active member of the Houston art community. She fell in love, married and raised a family. Over the course of her career, she has been a teacher and educator for more than 25 years and describes her classrooms as exciting, crazy and experimental. Her students were passionate about art and she learned as much as they did.

Living in Sugar Land, Askew paints full time and is still in love with Texas.