Partial Shade, Co-Lab Projects, and Friends present: Transmission One day only: December 14th, 2019, 3-8pm Co-Lab Projects @ Glissman Road 5419 Glissman Road, Austin, TX 78702
Can an object become a place? In the spirit of nomadic space-making, Transmission offers new ways to think about the car. Cars have come to define our visual landscape and the ways we move through space. They operate as a second skin, metallic and seemingly impenetrable. From inside a car, passengers witness the visual world condensed and poured across the windshield at a constant rate, all from the comfort of a hyper-ergonomic chair with a pine-scented breeze. A car at rest feels like a platform that leads to no building. Reframing what it means for an object to be active, we propose a gathering of cars at rest in an empty lot. Each car is an intimate art gallery showing one exhibit per vehicle. As immobile entities, these vehicles transform into giant media players, architectonic structures, performance platforms or cavernous interiors. Transmission uses the inherent transience of a subject navigating a city as an artistic tool rather than a civic hinderance. Infrastructural circumstance morphs into a poetic reimagining of accessible art spaces. These oddly-shaped galleries necessitate material collaborations between artist, car, and context. During a drive home from the event one considers the array of potential spaces accessible to them in a city with a tight grip on local real estate and a surplus of cars stuck in traffic.
Featuring work and writing by: Zoe Berg, Itamar Benitez, Jacob Bruner, Sean J. Patrick Carney, Rossie Dustin, Lesser Gonzalez Alverez, Francisco Gonzalez Castro, Lilia Taboada, Celeste Laster, Emmy Laursen, Logan Larsen, Maggie Mitts, Katy McCarthy, Walter Nichols and Wooba curated by Merideth Hillbrand and Steve Kado ft. Ellen Schafer, Nathan Azhderian, Lisa Radon, and Nicolas G. Miller & Lakshmi Luthra.
To accompany the exhibition, Flatpack Publications is proud to collaborate with Partial Shade and all exhibiting artists on the creation and production of a limited edition loose-leaf collated publication.
Transmission is organized in collaboration with Emily Lee and Henry Smith.
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Emily Lee is an artist whose practice investigates form as a social apparatus. Her sculptures study the poetics of infrastructure in the relationship between systems and subjects. Here, sculpting takes place in both material and immaterial ways—as objects, writings, or gatherings. This practice envisions physicality as a malleable condition.
Henry Smith is a multi-media artist and designer. Working primarily in print, sculpture, and social practice, Smith explores channels and venues of community-building and information exchange. Many of the same rhetorical vehicles are utilized across his practice of commercial design and his personal art practice.
Together, Emily Lee and Henry Smith operate Crit Club. Founded in 2017, this project aims to foster intentional critical dialogue for works-in-progress for all mediums and practices. As a method of experimental community building, each critique operates as an opportunity to exhibit works without a reliance upon gallery availability. These events occur in places such as parking lots, back yards, and living rooms, and kitchens.
Flatpack Publications is a small, independent press, operated by Connor Frew, built around lightness, flexibility, and political consciousness. One of the foundational principles of Flatpack is the open-plan: a specific flexibility that only defines its outermost parameters; non-hierarchical, non-heroic. A community forum. A tiny public. As such, the first piece of Flatpack is its blueprint, a starting strain, one rewrite of many. It will grow and change as the project does, and it will always be added to, reworked, and edited. The evolving mission document can be accessed through bit.ly/fpmission.
Partial Shade is a nomadic curatorial project focused on organizing visual art exhibitions in non-traditional spaces, with work that is responsive to, considerate of, and affected by its environment. Untethered to one specific piece of real estate, Partial Shade operates as a model for a sustainable, alternative exhibition platform, and offers artists the opportunity to experiment with work that wouldn’t otherwise fit comfortably in a conventional gallery space. Partial Shade is organized by Rachael Starbuck, Michael Muelhaupt, and Jesse Cline.
Co-Lab Projects is an artist-run nonprofit organization dedicated to providing resources, education, and exhibition space to artists that produce contemporary works of art, installation, and performance. Through collaboration and engagement, Co-Lab Projects encourages artistic exploration and dialogue within the community.
A Platform is a series of events and art installations organized by Partial Shade and Co-Lab Projects, centered around a physical platform built on Co-Lab’s property in East Austin. A Platform will provide a literal and conceptual space for emerging artists to share work and experiences and will provide artists and visitors an opportunity to experiment with new modes of relating to each other and their surroundings.
