Mpumelelo Buthelezi
#bitresMpumelelo

In Ukuzihlukanisa, Mpumelelo explores ideas of self-reflection, identity, and spirituality through black and white digital photographs. Through a series of self-portraits and portraits, he has produced a new body of work that takes inspiration from the isolation experienced during the national lockdown. In the initial stages he used his bedroom as a studio to make the self-portraits, seen in the choice of props used by the artist: bubble wrap, tin foil, lace fabric, bed sheets, and other materials found in a home. The images attempt to depict the meditative state of the artist when he started to wonder about the biblical concept of an angel and how he could elevate himself spiritually to attain the level of divinity and purity described in the holy book. As the process developed, Mpumelelo invited his friends to participate in the act of image-making, reflecting a need for companionship drawn from his inclusion of others in this introspective work.

This body of work asks us to consider a time when man (human) as described in the bible was holy and without sin. Could this be Mpumeleloʼs way of coping with the isolation and the global pandemic that exposed the true nature of man? In essence, this work is about what it means to be human. An existential question that most people grapple with, even more so during the isolation of quarantine implemented during the first national lockdown. Mpumelelo came face to face with the precariousness of (Black) life and in turn sought aid from what he perceived as an entity beyond the self.

Instagram: @icreateimageseveryday

Links:  https://artcabbage.com/digital/mpumelelo-buthelezi-visualizing-spirituality-in-quarantine/

https://notrealart.com/mpumelo-buthelezi/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zULBlx-utkg

https://www.everard-read-capetown.co.za/artists

https://www.facebook.com/Buthelezi.mpumi

https://twitter.com/Buthelezi1Mpumi

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mpumelelo-buthelezi-1228a3214/

About #bitres:
As a means of expanding Co-Lab Project's programming into the digital realm, artist/curator Vladimir Mejia selects artists to participate in an Instagram hosted month-long residency. Artists are given full control of the @colabprojectsbitres Instagram account, and all images posted by the artist are categorized by hashtags representing the artist name in residency. Original concept by Sean Ripple.

Epiphany
Featuring Michelle Marchesseault, Diana Welch, Kate Csillagi, and Mimi Bowman
Curated by Alyssa Taylor Wendt

September 14 - October 26, 2024 | Open Hours: Saturdays 12-6pm
Members Preview: Saturday, September 14th, 6-7pm (Become a Member!)
Public Reception: Saturday, September 14th, 7-11pm (Please RSVP)
Closing Reception & Halloween Party: Saturday, October 26th, 7-11pm
Events Sponsored by Austin Beerworks

@The Culvert Gallery, 5419 Glissman Road, Austin, TX 78702

The history of humankind is riddled with points of divergence, moments in our evolution that shake the core of our comfort levels and introduce change whether we like it or not. More often, these harbingers are met with skepticism, fear, shock, and dismissal but withstand the test of time, ultimately adding to our human sophistication. When this happens, there is a moment before the outrage, a pause in our interpretation, a moment of blank rapture that defies categorization. In this blind bliss, we are free. Disruption at its finest returns us to a pure state of infantile openness, our senses in a purgatorial free fall and words fail to serve us.

Epiphany. How do we interpret a revelation? What quantifies blown expectations? The divine nature of art lies in the lack of a singular measure of meaning. No standard of beauty, trash, value, or brilliance exists, so why not push beyond what is safe or easily digested? 

As a curator, maker, and seeker of art, I live to have my mind turned inside out. The most memorable moments for us all reside in a void of expectation. This precious moment of emptiness is a treasure, that sacred place where we have no answer, no response, no explanation, no doubt. That girl by my locker put her Walkman headphones on my head and I heard the Sex Pistols for the first time. I accidentally wandered into a screening of Cremaster 2 by Matthew Barney in the 1990s and showed me how artists use film as a medium of abstraction. I was the only one who sat through the whole thing. Stravinsky caused a riot by premiering his Rites of Spring in 1913. Shannon Funchess continues to upend traditional dark wave with her operatic feral performances in the band Light Asylum.

I trust in these formative moments, both my own and historical, to help culture evolve. To believe in the exceptional, the dangerous, the potentially offensive with a risk of failure, estrangement, alienation. Challenging our expected interpretation and giving ourselves over to the unknown is the chance we take for growth. Stasis and silence are death. In a transcribed conversation with Seán O’Hagan, the musician Nick Cave states “that the vitalizing element in art is the one that baffles or challenges our outrages. I believe art should be confronting and discomfiting and do more than just affirm your point of view.” I chose the four women for this exhibition and asked them to make new work with this concept in mind, not an easy assignment. Rather than choose works from their oeuvre that have already sparked my neurons, I asked them to undertake visions that risk, push, confound, anger or confuse us.

And here are the results of such an experiment. Working in the heat of Texas swelter, shown in a converted cement culvert, in the outskirts of a town sick with overdevelopment, using raw materials at hand and the depth of their visceral intuitions, Co-Lab Projects and I present Epiphany, a group show with Diana Welch, Kate Csillagi, Michelle Marchesseault, and Mimi Bowman.

- Alyssa Taylor Wendt


Diana Welch is a multidisciplinary artist based in Austin, TX, whose body of work spans sculpture, music, and writing. A self-taught ceramicist, she has exhibited in the US and Europe as one-half of the collaborative Mother of God. Her vessels reference classical ancient clay forms imbued with unexpected flare and subversion through interaction, collaboration, and functionality. As a musician, she has released several recordings, both solo and as a member of the band Stormshelter. A reporter, editor, and author, her extensive writing has been reviewed in Vanity Fair and elsewhere.

Kate Csillagi is an interdisciplinary artist hailing from Austin, TX. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Evergreen State College where she studied fiber art, printmaking,  and bookmaking. Her work has evolved over the years to include drawing, mural work, fabric tapestry, and installation. She was also a founding member of ICOSA, an artist-run collective and gallery in East Austin. Csillagi’s work is disruptive and whimsical, constructing unexpected narratives that star her anthropomorphic characters within supernatural scenes. Her work dismantles reality through watery dreamscapes and colorful illustrations, providing refuge from the monotony of modernity.  

Michelle Marchesseault splits time between Austin, TX, where she paints, and New York City, where she designs art and interiors for restaurants, television, movies, and the stage. She attended Herron School of Art in Indianapolis for painting and has been creating visuals and environments for over 20 years. The majority of Marchessault’s work fluctuates between studies of color and design that she called “twist” paintings and lush mannerist landscapes where nature is simultaneously gushing with beauty and brutality.

Mimi Bowman was born in Texas in 1989. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2022 with a degree in archaeology and Middle Eastern studies. Bowman is currently abroad pursuing an MA in archaeology at the University College of London, hoping to work in Karez rehabilitation in northern Iraq. In 2023, she curated Oshay Green and Isabel Legate’s dual exhibition Holometabolism at Martha’s Contemporary, and her collaborative video work with Jonny Negron was included in Electricity · Shadow at Château Shatto.

Alyssa Taylor Wendt is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and curator working in Detroit and Austin, Texas. Her recent projects address mysticism, the architecture of memory, and the decodified strata of history using video, ceramics, sculpture, painting, and installation. Earning her MFA from Bard, she has shown and performed internationally since 2004. She recently completed a second master’s degree in museum studies from Harvard and plans to open a small non-profit museum of cultural artifacts in 2026.

Co-Lab’s Super Sweet 16
A summer membership drive and FUNdraiser

Sponsored by Paul and Ilene Barr, Sheehy Fine Art Services, Sergio and Carolina Alcocer, JD DiFabbio, Nomad Sound, Misc Rentals, Saucehaus, Clay Pigeon, Austin Beerworks, LALO Tequila, and Richard’s Rainwater

Saturday, July 13th, 8pm-midnight
Members get in free, sliding scale tickets available for non-members starting at $10

On July 13th we are celebrating Co-Lab’s Sweet 16th by throwing ourselves a fierce birthday party in the form of a membership drive and fundraiser benefiting our fall programming. Featuring our summer group exhibition “Inter Being”, live music by Pinkstar and Tropicana Joe, a ‘Super Sweet 16’ themed Karaoke stage, water balloon fights, tiaras, food by Clay Pigeon, and a spoiled rotten bar sponsored by Austin Beerworks, LALO Tequilla, and Richard's Rainwater.

Similar to our past fundraisers, all funds raised — whether from new memberships, tickets to the event, bar donations, or food sales — will be matched by one of our generous donors, community business partners, or event sponsors! It’s all the fun of a birthday party while doubling your donations and impact, which means the more you give the more we are able to support artists in our community and continue delivering the programming y’all know and love.

Over the past 16 years, Co-Lab has produced over 400 exhibitions and performances showcasing hundreds of local, national, and international artists. In addition to its primary programming, Co-Lab is an established and revered gathering space for community building through its free programs, events, collaborations, and participation in regional and international fairs and festivals.

We look forward to continuing this work with your support! Help us help artists by coming out to the event on July 13th! To get involved, donate, or contribute to this summer fundraiser please write us at hello@co-labprojects.org!

Cheers,
The Co-Lab Team

Inter Being

A group exhibition featuring Chad Rea, Eli Decker, Grayson Hunt, Jacqueline Overby, Miles Matis-Uzzo, Nathan Anthony, Patrick Diaz, Renee Lai, Sonya Berg, and Tuck Rayl

June 15th - July 20th, 2024
Open Hours: Saturdays 12-6pm
5419 Glissman Road, Austin, TX 78742



A tension of boundaries that both defy and define one another, 
of an existence somewhere between right and wrong. 

Of similarities and differences that exist at-once and within-both. 

A cacophony of repetition and connecting, 
anthropomorphizing human hands into branches, 
arms to trunks, 
fingers to flowers, 
flora that make both memories and metaphors. 

Ephemeral summers of sun and stitching and connecting links between the diminishing distance of our ecosystems.
Of summers of searching for order in the fibers of an ever-expanding

internal landscape

The above text was collaboratively written by Leslie Moody Castro and Sean Gaulager
inspired by applicant statements and the teachings of Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh.

Chad Rea’s paintings, sculptures, and digital works are a raw, authentic expression of the messy, complicated, and often ridiculously ironic beauty of the human experience. Blending themes of social commentary with transformative personal truths, his art invites the viewer into a space of presence and perspective of a world beyond right and wrong; one that connects us through our similarities instead of our differences.

Eli Decker is a painter who earned a BA in Studio Art and Computer Science from Colby College. Decker's paintings evoke a dreamlike quality, emphasizing the surreal aspects of modern isolation. Through his work, he transforms ordinary moments, such as gazing through a window at a sunset, into profound meditations on solitude and the ephemeral nature of beauty. Decker subtly hints at the pervasive influence of technology on our perception of the world, blending the organic with the artificial.

Grayson Hunt is the founding member of the Transgender Feminisms Reading Group, which has been meeting in Austin, (notably at Book Woman, one of the last remaining feminist book stores in the U.S.) since 2018, and the creator of the first transgender swim night at Barton Springs. In the summer of 2023, he became a collective member at MASS Gallery and has been helping develop more LGBTQ+ focused programming and mission. Just this past fall he curated the MASS Gallery exhibit Hard Served Soft, a queer and trans textile show with 12 artists from Austin and Houston.

Jacqueline Overby began expanding her practice in 2018 with her abstracted soft sculpture and needle-felted forms. In this work, Overby takes inspiration from childhood cartoon aesthetic, pop cultural standards and her experiences with body dysmorphia. A large portion of her visual art practice serves as a way to process her emotions in relation to mental health, self-image, sexual desires and trauma.

Miles Matis-Uzzo is a Texas-based artist and superorganism who communicates through sculpture, poetry, video, perfume, performance, and installation. With these mediums, they excavate the products of gendered power structures, queer ecology, and the ritualistic distancing of our diminishing ecosystem.

Nathan Anthony utilises sculpture, print and moving-image to hotwire, hijack and redirect the conventional associations of everyday objects and materials for poetic reconsideration.

”Patrick Diaz’ imagery suggests the possibility of the identifiable amid the rush of hyperactive formal elements. Randomly scattered visual lures continue to elude the identifications that we carry with us; maybe they are the dreams that we can’t quite catch upon awakening.” - Nancy Moyer

Renee Lai’s latest body of work explores the self in relation to boundaries in the landscape. Figures are placed in bodies of water, deep, dark, and threatening. They reference rivers and oceans, things that we use to mark the edge of a state or a country.

Sonya Berg’s recent work is inspired by her collection of imagery of plants in interior spaces, gathered as casual snapshots over years of traumatic life events, and translated into textural paintings. She creates new images through a series of removals and physical reframing, much like the work necessary to process parts of one’s story in order to find order and healing.

Tuck Rayl is a fiber artist whose work consists chiefly of 2D tufted fiber artworks created using a tufting machine. Tuck is self-taught in this medium, having first picked up the machine in December 2020. Exploring ideas of anthropomorphism and the interplay between the manmade and natural worlds, Tuck's artworks are recognizable for their colorful figures, existing somewhere on the spectrum between goofy and eerie.

Bruised Buildings
Jeff Williams

May 4th - June 1st, 2024
Open Hours: Saturdays 12-6pm
5419 Glissman Rd, Austin, TX 78702

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4th, 7-11pm

"Our neighbor was built in 2008, a 6-story, Styrofoam and stucco colossal residential complex that fills three city lots and refers to itself as a Castle. It’s shaped like the letter U with 2BR/1BA wrapped on all sides, each room marked by a decorative balcony. The Castle provides its residents with a gym, woodshop, screening room, recording studio, and rooftop events. When the Castle was built, a century’s long view of the city skyline was obstructed. Our building is an all-brick 3-story from the 1900s, named Nine Arches for the decorative stones adorning the top. The Arches provides its tenants with a lived history, once serving as a stable for the fire department, home to Superfly Auto Repair, and more recently as concrete cisterns for aquaculture. The rooftop of Nine Arches was covered in a large tarp, weighed down with plywood, 2x4s, and loose urban effects. On September 16th, 2010, at 4:45 pm, a tornado swept through the area, knocking down trees and transferring garbage from one street to the next. Extreme winds from the tornado carried under the tarp and launched weaponized construction materials into the foam stucco facade of the Castle. On the east side of the building, 4 stories up, an 18-inch span of the exterior corner was gouged, like the Nine Arches repeatedly took a cleaver to its edge. That damage is there to this day, 14 years later. So is an imprint of a wood plank, smashed flat, just missing the windows above and below. And there is the unmistakable dent of our skylight, which traveled 50ft on the wind before colliding with the penthouse wall. In defiance, the Castle poorly dressed its wounds with more foam, which does not age well in the sun. Now, when we look toward the city all we see are bruises from the attack that never healed.”

Co-Lab Projects is pleased to present Bruised Buildings, an exhibition of new sculpture and photography by Jeff Williams. The exhibition brings together three different series of artworks to form an installation in the Culvert Gallery. The first is a suite of photographs and accompanying text that documents an actual event where the building Williams lives in inadvertently attacked its neighbor during the fall of 2010. The photographs document significant damage to the facade of a colossal residential complex.

Adjacent to these photographs are a series of sculptural jackets. Each jacket is made from a rubber mold of an architectural structure and is detailed with imprints that include welded seams, structural rungs, access panels, dents, and accreted dirt. New versions will be made on-site with fresh architectural casts of the culvert. The pattern for each jacket is taken from thrift stores that serve the tenants of the Castle, where there is a variety of styles from sleeveless denim to fur collar coats. Williams has used casting rubber in his sculptures since 1999, following a brief stint working as a practical effects fabricator for haunted houses and B movies.

Lastly, a series of welded aluminum thrift store sculptures, mainly cookware, is included in the mix. Pizza pans are held in formation with one continuous welded line. Due to the thin gauge of the metal, the welding process oscillates between fusing the metal and cutting it apart. In Bruised Buildings, the exhibition shifts from exterior to interior, from photographs of a facade to the cookware found within. Every construction contains a record of the time it was built, projecting a lasting message of its design. Williams is interested in these messages for their direct relationship with the larger fractures and shifts of governmental, economic, and cultural powers, as they often erode faster than the buildings that house them.

Williams has been awarded residencies at the Dora Maar House, Menerbes, France; Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, Recess in New York, NY; Galería Perdida, Chilchota, Michoacán, Mexico; and the Core Program in Houston, TX. He was the 2009 Leonore Annenberg Fellow in the Arts at the American Academy in Rome. Williams is a recent recipient of an NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship for Environmental Structures and a Santo Foundation Award. Solo projects and exhibitions include Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY; RAIR in Philadelphia, PA; 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA; AMOA/Arthouse in Austin, TX, and Artpace, San Antonio, TX. Group exhibitions include International Objects, Brooklyn, NY; Et al Gallery, San Francisco, CA; NADA on Governors Island, NY; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; and Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin, TX. Articles and reviews include The New York Times, Art in America, Art Papers, Blouin Modern Painters, Shifter Magazine, and Hyperallergic.

Materials for the exhibition are funded in part by a Special Research Grant, The University of Texas at Austin, where Williams is an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Extended Media.

This project is supported in part by grants from the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, Texas Commission on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

I WANT TO KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER II
An open call for new artists

Open call dates: April 25th - May 25th, 2024
Application review and notification: End of May
Exhibition dates: June 15th - July 20th, 2024

Co-Lab Projects invites all Austin area artists who have NOT physically exhibited with Co-Lab in the past to apply for this open call exhibition. The application is open to individual artists, curators, collectives, or other groups who fit this description.

Submitted/proposed works may be in any medium including but not limited to: installation, video/film, performance, 2D and 3D static works, social practice, etc. Please consider the installation logistics and limitations of the culvert gallery, for example the space is not temperature or humidity controlled which means it is not necessarily an ideal environment for works on paper or photography. If you have specific concerns we’re happy to answer any questions before you submit.

Artworks do not have to be from any specific time frame. The open call title is tongue in cheek, however we do encourage applying with semi-recent work and/or new proposed work.

Works will be reviewed and selected by the Board of Directors and the format of the exhibition will be determined by these selections. For example we may decide to pair two artists who submitted separately, or build a multiple artist exhibition from several applicants, or a large group exhibition may take shape. The format will depend largely on what we receive from applicants.

Please following the link below to apply. What are you waiting for huh?!

g/re/p
Jess Johnson aka flesh_dozer

March 9th - April 20th, 2024
Open Hours: Saturdays 12-6pm
5419 Glissman Rd, Austin, TX 78702

Friday, April 19th, 7-11pm:
Closing Reception & Screening of Everything is Terrible's The Great Satan. In partnership with Everything Is Terrible, We Luv Video, and Hyperreal Film Club. Co-Lab brings you a raucous celebration of art, film, and plants that will blow your mind! Free for Members and general public admission available soon!

Jess Johnson brings to life a complex fictional world through hand-drawn images that are inspired by her interests in science fiction, comic books, technology, architecture, and theories of consciousness. For her exhibition in the culvert, Johnson has collaborated with her Mother, Cynthia Johnson, on a new series of quilts. They appear suspended in the culvert, as doorways offering glimpses into different realms.

The concept of world-building lies at the heart of Johnson’s densely layered artworks. She formulates worlds within worlds through self-replicating geometric patterns, temple-like structures, and obscure symbology. The worlds depicted are inhabited by a variety of humanoid figures, alien creatures, worms, prehistoric bugs, and deities entangled into the patterning and internal architecture of this realm.

The exhibition “g/re/p” hints at a world on the brink of collapse under the weight of its own inherent structure. Johnson alludes to numerous literary references that forewarn of god complexes, such as: the novelette Sandkings (1979) by George R. R. Martin, where a man who controls a set of creatures in an aquarium goes from being worshiped by their sand effigies to being punished by them for the cruelty he inflicts; the Greek myths of Icarus, flying too close to the sun; and the biblical story, The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) where the Babylonians presumptuously build a tower from earth to heaven only to be cursed by God. Johnson’s work provides a timely reminder that self-replicating civilizations can flourish when left to their own devices but can also crumble in familiar patterns of exhausted natural resources and rebellion against parasitic elites, gods or their creator.

Jess Johnson (b. 1979 in New Zealand) is a contemporary artist who lives and works between the USA and New Zealand. Her artworks reflect ideologies of technology and flesh, both ancient and futuristic. Her drawing practice feeds into installations and collaborations in animation, music, fashion, virtual reality, and textile art. Johnson’s work has been exhibited extensively including at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York; Art Basel, Hong Kong; Nanzuka Gallery, Tokyo; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, UK; Centre Clark, Montreal; the National Gallery of Australia; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand. Jess Johnson is represented by Jack Hanley Gallery, New York; Darren Knight Gallery, Australia; Ivan Anthony Gallery, New Zealand; and Nanzuka Gallery, Tokyo.

This project is supported in part by grants from the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, Texas Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and H-E-B.

Porch Swing Orchestra and Co-Lab Projects Present:
VAST IS THE SEA

January 20th through February 24th, 2024

All presentations are maximally 45 minutes long
There will be a 15-20-minute intermission between presentations
Each presentation is ticketed separately except for the opening night which is one combined ticket

February 17 - Sliding Scale Tickets
7pm Ariana Gomez
8pm Gavin Watts / The Reformers

February 23 - Members Only (become a member and get invited today!)
7pm A Night with Barry Stone and Friends

February 24 - Sliding Scale Tickets
7pm Jessica Mallios
8pm Thomas Hooper / Skloss


“Vast is the sea of hearing around the raft of vision.”
― Michel Chion, La Toile Trouee (Cahiers Du Cinema. Essays Collection)

Vast is the Sea is a series of presentations from eight artists whose diverse works are united by their explorations of images and sound. The title comes from a translation of the composer and film theorist Michel Chion's analysis of the relationship between sound and image in cinema. In their presentations, each artist constructs new oceans through live performances, video, and sound processing. Viewers are invited to gaze at visions projected on the ceiling and swim among the sounds in real time.

Porch Swing Orchestra is an art project begun by Barry Stone that explores the interplay between site-specific images, musical improvisation/chance operation, and field recordings. Pictures taken on-site accompany fleeting melodies recorded among conversations of passersby, the rattle of air conditioners, birdsong, sirens of cicadas, and all matter of environmental sonic phenomena. 

Most recordings take place on Stone’s front porch in Austin, Texas, but PSO has traveled to Spiral Jetty in Utah, the border town of Del Rio, Texas, Maine, the San Juan Islands, and performed live in the James Turrell Skyspace, The Color Inside as a part of The Univerity of Texas Landmarks Songs in the Skyspace Program. Since 2018, PSO has collaborated with dozens of musicians, artists, poets, writers, and activists to publish over 200 pieces.

All things PSO can be found at https://porchswingorchestra.org/

This project is supported in part by grants from the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, Texas Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and H-E-B.

Boy’s Ranch
Ana Segovia

November 11th - December 16th, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 11th, 7-11pm (please RSVP)
On view Saturdays 12-6pm through December 16th
Also on view during the Austin Studio Tour, November 11th, 12th 18th, & 19th, 12-6pm

In Boy’s Ranch, Ana Segovia presents an installation composed of pieces in very different formats, dissecting his creative process and allowing us to penetrate—in a pedagogical sense—into the reflections that he seeks for himself, and the processes that he carries out for the purposes of creation. Painting has been the central part of Ana Segovia’s artistic practice, and through painting Ana has almost always reinterpreted preexisting archives. In a large part of his work, he has extracted audiovisual frames featuring male protagonists in order to generate another reading of what they represent. 

Segovia has developed an exhibition format in which his paintings form parts of installations, incorporating other elements, and thus constituting narratives that help to clarify his discourse. This is how he has built a career that stands out not only for the technical aspects of his work but also for the depth of his tender, fun, sour, and nostalgic parody of masculinity. This arises from the process that Ana has lived through since his mother showed him films from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. At a young age he developed an admiration for the characters played by Mauricio Garcés, Jorge Negrete, and Pedro Infante—wishing, as he grew up, to be a charro—a Mexican cowboy—just like them. 

This was one of the first revelations of his conflict with gender stereotypes, leading him to deepen his research into the devices through which what we now recognize as hegemonic masculinity is imposed. 

Through his practice Ana began to address the most perverse aspects of those ways in which the film industry has participated in creating an artificial masculinity, one that maintains the context of machista violence that cruelly damages our humanity even to the present day. During a residency at Unlisted Projects in Austin, Texas — and after several years of addressing representations of the charro in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema—Ana came across the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. At the archive was a compilation of audiovisual materials created in or about Texas, where he found a promotional film from 1953 of Carl Farley ́s Boys Ranch, a philanthropic institution created during the U.S.’s Great Depression, and meant to provide homes and education for orphaned children and adolescents. 

Boys Ranch proposed a model of reintegration that consisted of training boys to be “cowboys,” an identity promoted in those years with the aim of unifying a political and nationalist identity in the U.S. At the same time in Mexico, the identity of the charro was being constructed as a national symbol in order to promote the idea of mestizo “Mexicanness.” Both archetypes arise from shared elements and both were spread through film, albeit responding to different nationalist interests. The “cowboy,” however, was formed out of the hegemonic values that the U.S. sought to promote: a land of white, strong, brave, free, and honorable men. 

In this promotional film it is boasted that these young orphans will become good citizens who will maintain the roughness they have known throughout their lives, with the goal of showing the kindness of the philanthropist toward orphaned children, positioning themselves as well-recognized social benefactor. Nevertheless, 67 years later, Ana recognizes the way in which innocence was removed from these minors, converting them into the archetype of ideal masculinity. Considering that the hegemony of racist and misogynist ideas are both problematic and still very present, we can see how these archetypes still exist at the center of our most pertinent political discussions. Using this promotional film as raw material, Ana develops a series of pieces that allow us to see this archive from another point of view: for example, when editing parts of the film’s audio he creates 7 haibun pose, a Japanese literary form that uses prose texts to describe some space or natural situation in detail. Ana considers this editing game a synthetic act of resistance, taking place within Carl Farley’s Boys Ranch’s duration of 13 minutes and 14 seconds. 

Segovia also dissects the scene from the film in which one of the inhabitants of the Boys Ranch is thrown into water by his peers. Ana intervenes in the 230 frames that compose it, coloring in the swim trunk of the boys with watercolor.

With this, he seeks to emphasize the everyday violence that this education encourages: this action presented in the film as a healthy game for these young people’s development, nevertheless exposing an action characteristic of machista violence, one that annuls the consent of another person with the aim of showing strength. 

-Andrés Treviño 
(translated by Byron Davies)

Segovia earned his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He has had individual exhibitions in the United States and Mexico, and his works are part of institutions including The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and Alumnos 47 in Mexico City. Ana Segovia currently lives and works in Mexico City.

Thank you to Rocio Fernandez de Angulo for all your magic and for keeping us together. Thank you Andrés Treviño for your beautiful text, and to Sarah Kahloun for your work on getting us books, and to everyone who participated in our book club. Thank you to Zac Traeger and Unlisted Projects for the foundation through which this project could come to life, and to PAOS Guadalajara for showing it first. Special thanks to Stacey Hill and Susan Oliver Heard, and to HEB for your generosity that made this project a reality. Most importantly, thank you to Ana Segovia for every single time you said “yes” unwaveringly.

This project is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, Texas Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and H-E-B.

Co-Lab Book Club
Led by Leslie Moody Castro in conjunction with Ana Segovia’s exhibition Boy’s Ranch

October 13th — November 13th, 2023
This and all future Book Club editions are FREE for Members

Book Club members will discuss via Discord and will be invited to an in-person conversation with Leslie Moody Castro and Ana Segovia on November 13th.

We will be reading both of the following books, Cartucho is very short and will not take long to finish.


- Book 1 -

Cartucho by Nellie Campobello
55 pages
Buy the book here

Cartucho: Tales of the Struggle in Northern Mexico (Cartucho: Relatos de la lucha en el Norte de México) is a semi-autobiographical short novel, or novella set in the Mexican Revolution and originally published in 1931. It consists of a series of vignettes that draw on Campobello's memories of her childhood and adolescence (and the stories her mother told her) in Northern Mexico during the war. Though long overlooked, it is now celebrated, among other reasons because it is, as Mexican critic Elena Poniatowska points out, "the only real vision of the Mexican revolution written by a woman."

About the Author:
Nellie (or Nelly) Francisca Ernestina Campobello Luna (November 7, 1900 – July 9, 1986) was a Mexican writer, notable for having written one of the few chronicles of the Mexican Revolution from a woman's perspective: Cartucho, which chronicles her experience as a young girl in Northern Mexico at the height of the struggle between forces loyal to Pancho Villa and those who followed Venustiano Carranza. She moved to Mexico City in 1923, where she spent the rest of her life and associated with many of the most famous Mexican intellectuals and artists of the epoch. Like her half-sister Gloria, a well-known ballet dancer, she was also known as a dancer and choreographer. She was the director of the Mexican National School of Dance.


- Book 2 -

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
302 pages
Buy the book here

All the Pretty Horses is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. It was a bestseller, winning both the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is the first of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy".

About the Author:
Cormac McCarthy (born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr.; July 20, 1933 – June 13, 2023) was an American writer who authored twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western and post-apocalyptic genres. He was known for his graphic depictions of violence and his unique writing style, recognizable by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. McCarthy is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists. McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, although he was raised primarily in Tennessee. In 1951, he enrolled in the University of Tennessee, but dropped out to join the U.S. Air Force. His debut novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965. Awarded literary grants, McCarthy was able to travel to southern Europe, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark (1968). Suttree (1979), like his other early novels, received generally positive reviews, but was not a commercial success. A MacArthur Fellowship enabled him to travel to the American Southwest, where he researched and wrote his fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985). Although it initially garnered a lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since been regarded as his magnum opus, with some labeling it the Great American Novel.

This Mother’s Cave
Gabrielle Constantine and Rowan Howe

October 7th - 28th, 2023
On View Saturdays 12-6pm through October 28th

This Mother’s Cave is an exhibition of new, collaborative work from Gabrielle Constantine and Rowan Howe. Utilizing the culvert's architecture, the artists transform the cement space into a womb like atmosphere. Continuously swaying from internal to external, the walls layer domestic motifs, thrifted objects, found photographs, wheat pasted paintings and sculptures to create a sticky facade of childhood space, memories, maternal wisdoms and signals of generational traumas. Quilting and collaging materials become a sounding ground or wallpaper for the artists to build upon, creating isolated moments of material and contextual density. This is a sensory installation that employs light, sound, texture, and smell to create a spirituality of sorts, perhaps achieving the same sensibility as catching the scent of someone once known in a new place, transporting you to an embedded memory, if only for a moment.

With-in this mind, nest, womb, shelter, home, cave, Constantine and Howe intertwine a spectrum of what typifies mother, in order to reflect on the multiplicities that arise within this complicated role and namesake.

Gabrielle Constantine (1994) was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she received her double BFA in Sculpture and Fibers and Material studies at the Tyler School of Art (2017). She’s currently living and working in Austin, TX and holds an MFA from The University of Texas of Austin. Growing up in an Armenian community and the restaurant industry has heavily influenced her linguistic, material, and performative decisions surrounding her sculptures, installations, and gatherings.

Rowan Howe (b. 1997) grew up in Chicago, IL with her single mother. Through painting and collage her work speaks to performance and the continuous alteration of memories through the collaging of landscape, found imagery, and the female body. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recently completed her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Texas at Austin.

Show Me a Dawn
Featuring Anahita Bradberry, Hayley Morrison, Jamal Hussain, Jay Jones, Justo Cisneros, Kira Matica, and Noelle Fitzsimmons

September 9th - 23rd, 2023
Opening Reception: September 9th, 7-11pm
Open Hours: Saturday, September 16th & 23rd, 12-6pm
Closing Reception: September 23rd, 7-11pm

Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars,
Orion's Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.
- Homer's Iliad

Show me a dawn like a rising star that becomes visible before sunrise. 

Gift me a star after the earth orbits the sun, one heralded by dawn and granted by Sirius. Take me to the genesis of the pattern, before the fall, before the emergence of recursive time. 

Show me a dawn before technological accomplishment defined our ecological collapse.  

Gift me a moment devoid of natural disasters, madness, and the dog days of summer heat steeped in Luciferian ritual. Take me to that moment of dawn like a rising star. 

Show me a dawn before the fall when the garden still existed within us, before the rising star, before the serpent and the apple, before the patterns and the quantified human soul. Show me the dawn of now, a dawn for every morning of seven days and seven stars, a dawn we carry and that carries us.

Collaborative text by Leslie Moody Castro and Sean Gaulager

I (WANT TO) KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
An open call for new artists

Open call dates: June 20th - July 31st, 2023
Application review: first week of August
Notification: second week of August
Exhibition dates: September 9th - 23rd, 2023

Co-Lab Projects invites all Austin area artists who have not physically exhibited with us in the past to apply for this open call exhibition. The application is open to individual artists, curators, collectives, or other groups who fit this description.

Submitted/proposed works may be in any medium including but not limited to: installation, video/film, performance, 2D and 3D static works, social practice, etc. Please consider the installation logistics and limitations of the culvert gallery, for example the space is not temperature or humidity controlled which means it is not necessarily an ideal environment for works on paper or photography. If you have specific concerns we’re happy to answer any questions before you submit.

Artworks do not have to be from any specific time frame. The open call title is tongue in cheek, however we do encourage applying with semi-recent work and/or new proposed work.

Works will be reviewed and selected by the Board of Directors and the format of the exhibition will be determined by these selections. For example we may decide to pair two artists who submitted separately, or build a multiple artist exhibition from several applicants, or a large group exhibition may take shape. The format will depend largely on what we receive from applicants.

View the application here and submit your ideas! What are you waiting for huh?!

Railrodeo
Mick Burson

May 13th - July 8th, 2023
5419 Glissman Road
On view Saturdays 12-6pm

I drove East chasing trains and hanging on to sobriety, and I landed in a gravel lot in an industrial area in Arkansas. I stayed parked there for two months, making work about horses and matches. Immediately outside the window of my RV were meeting halls, and beyond that was a train yard, and I began to paint horses on the freight trains while simultaneously making matchbook collages through which I could grow my pieces within a constrained living space. 

The matchbook collections were obtained from strangers, and I began to make up narratives about the person behind each collection and the nightlife they lived. The matchbooks with only one singular match left in them were always curious to me and gave me anxiety—each book really only has 20 chances to accomplish something. 

On a random Tuesday, my dog and I left Arkansas with the matchbook collages and we drove to Texas to visit a friend in a metal shop where I began making objects from steel, including horses, which mimicked the horses I had painted on the side of the steel trains. Each sheet of steel is cut freehand like a style of drawing, then painted with even less thought. 

I take my dog on multiple walks daily—a guarantee that I give her—and while on our walks I impulsively collect trash and detritus whenever I feel an attraction to them. I take my objects and findings home and incessantly arrange, paint, attach, and reattach the objects until I find either a balance or a moment of acceptance with the finished object. Each found object sculpture holds a very specific geographical location, date, and time for me, though ultimately they are made in a mindless manner which gives them a voice of their own. I made these objects with the freedom of creativity, with the freedom that they would not necessarily be shown to the public. 

Mick Burson (b. 1990) is a multimedia artist who combines painting, sculpture, print and installation to create playful abstract works. He has created public art murals all over the world including the United States, Portugal, England, Spain, and Israel. In 2018, Burson executed the largest mural in New Mexico to date on Keshet Dance Center. His work is in the permanent collections of the Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, Facebook Private Collection, We-work Collection, City of Albuquerque Public Art Collection, Polsinelli Corporate Art Collection, and others. He is currently represented by Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

Info sheet and prices

Sonic Meditation for Solo Performer
Steve Parker

April 13th - May 6th
Open Hours: Saturdays, 12-6pm (no tickets or reservations required)
Closing Performance with Pamela Martinez: Saturday, May 6th, 7-9pm (tickets required)

Sonic Meditation for Solo Performer reimagines the college marching band as a tool for sonic meditation. The project examines themes of healing, injury, and labor in NCAA football, drawing from legacies of sonic therapy, including 12th c. abbess Hildegard von Bingen’s liturgical songs, Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practice, Anthony Braxton’s radical marching bands, and Guadalupe Maravilla’s Disease Thrower sculptures.

The installation works as an immersive musical composition featuring an ecosystem of automated sonic sculptures made from salvaged marching band instruments. The installation is activated by a viewer or performer wearing an EEG headset. As the participant realizes the text score, the EEG device measures and transmits electrical brain activity. The data generated by the participants' brain waves are translated in real-time to realize a multi-channel composition played by the instruments.

Steve Parker is an artist that works with salvaged musical instruments, amateur choirs, marching bands, urban bat colonies, flocks of grackles, and pedicab fleets to investigate systems of control, interspecies behavior, and forgotten histories. He is the recipient of the Rome Prize, the Tito’s Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Parker’s projects include elaborate civic rituals for humans, animals, and machines; listening sculptures modeled after obsolete surveillance tools; and cathartic transportation symphonies for operators of cars, pedicabs, and bicycles. Exhibition and performance highlights include the American Academy in Rome (Italy), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arkansas), CUE Art Foundation (NY), the Fusebox Festival (Austin), Gwangju Media Art Festival (Korea), the Guggenheim Museum (NY), the Lincoln Center Festival (NY), Los Angeles Philharmonic inSIGHT (LA), the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), the McNay Art Museum (San Antonio), Rich Mix (London), SXSW, and Tanglewood. As a soloist and as an artist of NYC-based "new music dream team" Ensemble Signal, he has premiered 200+ new works.

Parker has been awarded support from the National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA, the Copland Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, and the Mid America Arts Alliance. He is curator of SoundSpace at the Blanton Museum of Art, Executive Director of Collide Arts, and a faculty member at UTSA. He holds degrees in Math and Music from Oberlin, Rice, and UT Austin.

This project was generously supported by the Music Academy of the West Alumni Enterprise Award, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and the Art League Houston.

Join us in Mexico City for the Material Art Fair! We will be presenting some special selections in collaboration with Beverly’s NYC including work from Yeni Mao, Adrian Aguilera / Betehem Makonnen, and CC Calloway.

February 9-12
Expro Reforma, CDMX

About Material Art Fair https://material-fair.com
About Beverly’s NYC http://beverlys.nyc

To Have and to Hold
Virginia Colwell
Curated by Leslie Moody Castro

January 28th - April 1st, 2023 (extended dates)
On view Saturdays 12-6pm

Read the conversation between Virginia Colwell and Glasstire Editor Leslie Moody Castro here:
Part One, Part Two, & Part Three

Read the review from Sightlines here

To Have and to Hold is an exhibition of new work by Virginia Colwell (Mexico City, born Nebraska, 1980), whose work operates in the ambiguity of truth and fiction in history and archives. By looking at the similarities of the landscape, and particularly that of the Southern United States and its similarities with the state of Veracruz, Mexico, Colwell uses the romanization of the South to examine the deliberate obfuscation of the deep history of enslavement and racism.

To Have and to Hold exposes the profound history of perpetuated erasure, of a racialized past, and our own present state of denial. Sited at Co-Lab Projects, the exhibition refers to and is relevant to Austin, Texas through a shared connection of the ball moss and vegetation that exists naturally in the city. This landscape ties us to the roots of historical subjugation, and is evidenced in the history of the city of Austin and the State of Texas. 

Virginia Colwell’s work examines the space between official and unofficial histories and the poetic ambiguities of truth and fiction in historical narratives. Often, her artworks begin in archives: her father’s FBI archive with its Caribbean case files, the archives of clandestine Puerto Rican revolutionaries from the Cold War, the US embassy archives analyzing the El Salvadorian Marxist insurgency, and archives about Mexican political corruption of the 1970s. Her drawings, sculptures, and videos reinvestigate these pasts through site visits, interviews, research, and requests for declassified documents.

Colwell’s works have been exhibited at the Center for Contemporary Art in Lithuania, the Hirschorn Museum in the United States, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, and the Centro Cultural Félix Varela during the 12th Havana Biennial. She has been an artist in residence with Beta-Local’s La Prática program in Puerto Rico, Kiosko in Bolivia, Untitled Art Fair’s Fountainhead Residency program in Miami, and the multimedia art center Hangar in Barcelona, Spain. Colwell has received numerous awards including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Award, a Pollock Krasner Foundation Fellowship, and a Jumex Foundation Grant. Her work is part of various private and public collections including the Alumnos Foundation, the Axa Collection, the Benetton Foundation, and the collection of the Museo Reina Sofia.

This project is the recipient of a Jumex Foundation Grant to support production and research. This is the first in an ongoing series exploring the relationship between the landscape and history. 

The Permian Recordings
Phil Peters

LAST DAY TO SEE AND HEAR: SATURDAY, JANUARY 14TH
Open Hours 12-6pm and Closing Reception 7-11pm
5419 Glissman Road, Austin, TX 78702

The Permian Recordings are a series of durational subterranean field recordings that capture the low-frequency vibrations of the Permian Basin in West Texas. This site-specific installation brings the recordings back to Texas for the very first time. Exploiting Co-Lab’s unique concrete culvert, the piece turns the gallery into an enormous infra-sonic subwoofer, a speaker at the scale of architecture. As in previous installations, the work brings into proximity two scales of time: the geologic and the biologic, expressing them not as irreconcilable measures of change, but as part of a continuum. In this specific installation, I imagine architecture as a bridge between the human and the geologic via the symbolic threshold at which foundation touches earth. Architecture is designed to be experienced in human time as the space we pass through and live within, and yet it endures, as in the ruins of our earliest structures, buried in dirt, a ligature to a distant past that simultaneously projects out into an uncertain future. Within this context, the concrete structure becomes a tuning fork on the surface of the earth, resonating with the frequencies of an industrialized landscape. 

The Permian Basin is home to one of the world largest oil and gas extraction industries, while at the same time it is named for a geologic epoch whose end demarcates a period of catastrophic climate change and the largest mass extinction in the history of the earth. The frequencies in these recordings are both document and phenomenon: an aggregate of the hum of generators, the hammer of sand trucks down private roads, and the drone of drill bits churning invisible below the surface. How does one conceptualize a system so large in scope and consequence that it has passed over into the geologic? Standing in a field we hear the trucks and can count the towers and flares, but it’s only when we look down from satellites that we see the perfect grid of exhausted wells stretching for miles in all directions. But what of all we cannot see? The subterranean network of pipes and reservoirs, or the export of these mining technologies around the world, and of course the supply chain of oil whose thick black pipes that snake along roadsides throughout the permian eventually divide into a delicate vasculature that feeds every aspect of our individual lives? There is an anxiety in the infra-sonic, a sound that is felt but unheard. These recordings extend from ancient rocks, passing through the structures we’ve built, and on into our bodies. Entering the speaker actualizes this connection, this linking of stone to flesh through the reverberations of architecture. Listening to these recordings from within the culvert, one is invited to sift through the acoustic strata and reflect on our connection to and participation in these larger terrestrial and climatic systems of which we are a constituent part spanning vast periods of time.

A transdisciplinary art practice exploring the evolving relationship between the built and natural world through video, audio, and sculptural installations. Speculative architectural histories, contemporary ecology, and slippages between the biologic and geologic all inform this work. Phil Peters received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL and a BA from Carleton College in Northfield, MN. In 2014-15 he co-founded and curated an artist-run project space LODGE (In Service of the Dark Arts), Chicago, IL. Recent exhibitions of his work include “Build Carry” at The Arts Club of Chicago's Drawing Room, Chicago, IL; “Volcanic Drift,” at the Galveston Artist Residency, Galveston, TX; “Outside/In” at LAXART, Los Angeles, CA; and “The Port of Long Beach Recordings,” at Canary Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Phil lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

How Soon Is Now??
Adrian Aguilera

September 17th - October 29th, 2022
Gallery hours: Saturdays, 12-6pm
5419 Glissman Rd, Austin, TX 78702

“The shape of tentative futures is the cone /
La forma de los futuros tentativos es el cono.”

How Soon Is Now?? consists of found videos exploring occurrences of a single year, 1997, projected on a cone-shaped screen, along with an assemblage of playlists, light-based work, human-scale text, and print works. Together, these pieces might function as non-explicit information retrieval systems.

Devising an invitation to interrogate a rigid, limited window of one year of phenomena is an intimate quest: any research found in the work is about the subject of 1997 and the investigator himself. Stressing cultural artifacts and remnants of late 90s production show us where and to what the artist was anchored at the moment. Viewers will simultaneously locate themselves in the timeline and do their own calculations of relatability.

No form factor is more favored by present-day uncertainty planners, futurists, and forecasters than the cone. Meteorologists, as an example, rely on cone overlays to graphically convey possible paths of hurricanes. A melting ice cream cone is near-perfect hand-held technology demonstrating phase change. The cone might be our best present-day temporal sequencer. 

But the cone presented in How Soon Is Now?? explicitly contains audio and images of a tentative past. Dealing with appallingly complex and appealingly simple nostalgia, the artist constructs a departure point for the future in a different way. Even if we're familiar with the references or spend hours with the installation's music and projection, we can only ever be detached from 1997 as it is arranged in the work.

What happens, always happens now. Presenting evidence of the twenty-fifth anniversary of now requires "screening out" a mass of substantial spectacles. In this single-channel video installation, the screen is not only a visual pun, It is also a supplemental, uneasy device for relationship building: the viewer becomes a factor in the selective interpretive journey. Confronting overlapping, spliced sociological and psychological propositions is to move through heavier material than the light the videos are projected through. An unintentionally weird (it can't not be weird) audio-visual reconstruction of a 365-day moment presented with no obvious hierarchies evolves into a medium and a manipulation --1997 as a nostalgic metric.

How Soon Is Now?? organizes historical records with unashamed sentimentality. The title is on loan from The Smiths but transmits added urgency with double-barrelled punctuation. Reworking a portion of the past, Aguilera encounters his sixteen-year-old self in 2022, extracts some sense of the "historic," and possibly feels the clock ticking. Behind the pop-culture moments are hints of some of 1997's political atmospheres and abundance of generative global accords. Social statements of encouragement felt by all our younger selves.

A dual purpose emerges from a cone's convex lens shape. Typically we look forward through a lens. Engaging with this work, Aguilera invites us to reverse focus from 2022 to 1997 -- crossing invisible lines marking Y2K and the turn of the century. In doing so, we focus retroactively and on contracted shared paths. There's no denying the effect of inverted possibility -- or, like The Smith’s song says, nothing in particular.

Born in Mexico's industrial capital of Monterrey. Aguilera immigrated as a young adult to the U.S., where he settled in Austin, Texas, in the late 2000s. He received his BFA (2004) from The Autonomous University of Nuevo León, México. Working with a variety of mediums that include sculpture, text-based work, print media, public art, video and installations, he researches the intrinsical essence that resides in objects. With interest in scientific observation, cultural history, and social issues, Aguilera's work aboard our relationship with the physical and cultural spaces in which we (co)exist. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Alfred University, The Philbrook Museum, The Contemporary Austin, Artpace San Antonio, the Fusebox Festival, The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, The George Washington Carver Museum, and The Instituto Cultural de México in Paris, France. In addition to his practice, he is an active member of the Austin-based contemporary arts collaborative Black Mountain Project. He currently lives and works in Austin, Texas. @rarospeinadosnuevos www.adrianaguilera.com


Image: Adrian Aguilera and Vania Chew, former co-worker and wife. View of the art department at a Bilingual School, Monterrey, Mexico, August 1997. Courtesy of the artist.

poolboy: I WANT TO LISTEN
Sam Mayer

July 18th - 23rd
Open Rehearsal: Monday, July 18th - Friday, July 22nd, 9-10pm (daily, free)
drop in and out, observe, participate, and get drunk with poolboy while he works
Performance: Saturday, July 23rd, 8:30-10:30pm (one night only, free, please RSVP)
performance, installation, vibes, tunes, karaoke, swimming pool, IRL chaos

poolboy: I WANT TO LISTEN is a weeklong residency in which artistic and personal feedback become the raw material for an immersive IRL performance and party. poolboy00 is artist Sam Mayer’s online alter ego and the subject of poolboy00 (2020-present): an ongoing, durational reality show/interactive memoir/talk show for the streaming platform Twitch. In I WANT TO LISTEN poolboy00 engages in a series of ever-escalating feedback sessions with collaborators, spectators, and archival material at daily open studios. At the end of the week poolboy00 and momgrab (artist Julia Mounsey) are putting on a performance and throwing a big party at the Glissman culvert gallery. There will be a pool to swim in. poolboy: I WANT TO LISTEN is part installation, part interactive performance, and all vibes. 

Sam Mayer is a playwright and performance maker from Houston, TX. Full-length works include THE CUCK (Intramural Theater), POOLBOY2: MAXIMUM CLOSURE (Crashbox), POOLBOY00 (UTNT), CHET'S SUMMER VACATION (Kennedy Center; Intramural Theater; Rec Room Arts), SPITSHOW (Collective48), THE SIN EATER (Frontera Fest), and THE YOLO PLAYS Pt. 1 & 2 (The Silent Barn; Collective 48). His work has been developed with The Orchard Project, The Workshop Theater, The Mastheads, and SPACE on Ryder Farm. He is the recipient of the Chesley/Bumbalo Foundation Prize and a fellowship from the Michener Center for Writers. MFA: UT Austin. 

Julia Mounsey is a director and writer. Her work has been presented at Under the Radar at the Public Theater, Soho Rep, JACK, Dixon Place, the Radikal Jung Festival at the München Volkstheater in Munich and the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. Along with her creative partner Peter Mills Weiss, she was a member of the 2017-2018 Devised Theater Working Group at the Public Theater, the 2017-2019 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, and was a Baryshnikov Arts Center Resident Artist in 2019. 

Doom and Bloom
Alex Boeschenstein, Anthony Rundblade, and Emma Rossoff

May 7th - 28th, 2022
Opening Reception: May 7th, 7-11pm
On view Saturdays 12-6pm

Doom and Bloom is an exhibition of prints, sculptures, and sound by Alex Boeschenstein, Anthony Rundblade, and Emma Rossoff. As our world teeters on the precipice of runaway global warming, with pandemic mutations and Satanic Panic revivals curdling inside capitalist cycles of crisis and collapse, these three artists ask the question: how does one make art about and within this in-real-life apocalyptic stream? With a mixture of hope, humor, and horror, their vision invokes the absurdity of being suspended within the bog-water monotony of an unevenly collapsing system, of dangling helplessly by a string, watching on as the outmoded refuse to die. 

Each artist develops their own reflections but with collaborative leakages across works. There is a shared focus on the vehicle and the confined space, alluding to the (im)possibility of escape. Modes of transportation fall apart as the way forward inverts, twists, and coils like a mobius strip. Moving through the culverts, gravity and scale intensify as the familiar becomes estranged. Creatures, avatars, everyday objects, and schematic systems emerge from the rubble weirder than before. 

Emma Rossoff builds constellations of found and crafted objects. For Doom and Bloom, Rossoff has mummified and metamorphosed a collection of forgotten, gifted, and stolen debris into her own nocturnal playpen. Anthony Rundblade is a printmaker and sculptor interested in the residue and reverberation of the found image and object, often framing his artwork in the principles of the Grotesque. In Doom and Bloom, Anthony recalls contemporary media images of unruly passengers duct-taped to airline seats, bound to uncontrollable destinations by future promises and delusions. Alex Boeschenstein is fixated on history, how it haunts the present and how it failed the future. For the exhibition, he materializes rhetorical devices from the homiletics of American religious revivals and subsumes hyper-rational engineering documents he salvaged from an abandoned sulphur mine into realms of eerie illegibility. 

If we are trapped in this sclerotic system’s labyrinth of tunnels, then Doom and Bloom is a playful attempt by three artists to drill a keyhole view with inadequate machinery into the reinforced concrete confining us.

Co-Lab Projects presents:
VOLUMES
Ezra Masch

Featuring: Adam Jackson, Chris Cogburn, Alton Jenkins, Julia Hungerford, Thor Harris, Lesley Mok, Forest Cazayoux, Lunar Rae, Brannen Temple, Line Upon Line, Sean Ripple, Milo Tamez, Michael Davila, Toto Miranda, Gerry Gibbs, and Greg Fox

Last chance to experience VOLUMES!
April 23rd: Closing Performances by Toto Miranda (8pm), Gerry Gibbs (9pm), Greg Fox (10pm), and special return guests for an after-hours jam
GET TICKETS HERE
Sponsored by Ranch Rider Spirits, Tequila 512, Tito’s Handmade Vodka, and Austin Beer Works

Photosensitive warning: this exhibition contains bright flashing lights that could trigger seizures for people with visual sensitivities

VOLUMES is a project by multidisciplinary artist Ezra Masch: an audio-visual instrument that uses a drum set to activate a site-specific grid of lights. The volume of the sound corresponds to the volume of the exhibition space. The system translates sound into a visual language, allowing percussionists to express their ideas 3-dimensionally. It is an immersive, multi-sensory experience that is part instrument, part sculpture, and part performance. Participating drummers explore the relationship between temporal space and physical space, as well as the connection between sound and moving image. The connection between light and sound has fascinated artists, musicians, and scientists for centuries, Masch’s installation is inspired by audio-visual instruments dating back to the early 1700s. His exploration of sound and moving image touches on an array of interests including synesthesia, architecture, technology, and experimental film.

Recent iterations of VOLUMES have been presented at the Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia, PA, and at The Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, FL. This Spring, Masch will bring VOLUMES to Co-Lab Projects by activating the interior of a 40-ft long concrete culvert situated on the organization's property. This site-specific audio-visual installation will feature performances by musicians from the Austin area and abroad. Masch sees the work as an opportunity to experiment with the process and perception of sonic performance: “Every performance is unique because individuals bring their own distinct approach and sensibilities to the table when interpreting this audio-visual interaction.” In curating the performances we have selected participants that represent a broad spectrum of musical cultures and philosophies, as each will approach the audio-visual interaction in their own distinct way.

Ezra Masch is a visual artist and musician from Philadelphia. He creates immersive and interactive installations that break down barriers between sonic and visual artforms. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at The Mattress Factory, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Icebox Project Space, MASS Gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia, TSA NY, IPCNY, Whitebox (NYC), The Visual Art Center (Austin, TX), and Galleria L’Acquario (Rome, Italy). He received a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (2004) and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin (2012). Masch also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2011). He currently lives and works in Austin, TX.

VOLUMES at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, FL:

will you meet me by the river’s edge
Yeni Mao
Artist in residence exhibition

The sculptural practice of Yeni Mao engages in issues of fragmentation, exploring equations of the body and architecture through restraint, domination and absence. Working with the agency of materials, objects and building systems, his works emphasize the tension between both their embedded and perceived significance. Mao layers his own personal histories over the expansiveness of these concerns. In his new installation at Co-Lab, Mao will engage concepts of animism and ancestral knowledge through ceramic, steel and leather sculptural elements. The installation will pursue ties between the personal, contemporary, and prescient natures of the multivalent symbol of the serpent. 

Yeni Mao was born in Canada, and spent his developmental years in the United States. He received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and subsequently trained in foundry work in California, and the architectural industries of New York. In 2016 Mao relocated to Mexico City. Yeni Mao’s work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions. Most recently, Mao opened a public sculpture with Brooke Benington in London, presented the solo exhibitions "I desire the strength of nine tigers" at Fierman Gallery in New York, and “vol. 2: cabal” at PAOS in Guadalajara, Mexico. Among the many group exhibitions he has participated in are “Otrxs Mundxs“ at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, “Transnational” at Proxyco and “The Waste Land” at Nicelle Beauchene in New York; and The IX Bienal De Artes Visuales Nicaraguenses in Nicaragua. Mao is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2021, and has been awarded multiple residencies including Casa Wabi in Mexico, The Lijiang Studio and Red Gate Gallery in China, The Fountainhead Residency in Miami, OAZO-AIR in Amsterdam, and Flash Atöyle in Turkey. Mao’s work has been written about in The New York Times, Time Out New York, The Advocate, The Village Voice, and the Bangkok Post. In February 2022 he will open his next solo exhibition at Campeche in Mexico City.


Special thank you to Armadillo Clay, East Side Pot Shop, Genna Williams, and Habitable Spaces for their assistance and generosity.

9/11 Memorial: The 20 Year Anniversary
Claude van Lingen

September 11th - 18th, 2021
Viewable during hours and by appointment
Open hours and closing: Saturday, September 18th, 12-6pm

Co-Lab Projects @ Glissman Road
5419 Glissman Road, Austin, TX 78702

Claude van Lingen’s 9/11 Memorial honors those who died on September 11, 2001 in the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and Pennsylvania tragedies and pays homage to those who died in the ensuing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The exhibition centers around two large drawings in which the names of the 2,753 victims of the World Trade Center were written one over the other, in Claude’s signature style, causing the paper to shed and tear. Extending from this focal point are several other drawings memorializing those who died in the Pentagon attack (125), the Pennsylvania crash (39), as well as works commemorating those who died in the wars since October 7, 2001 in Afghanistan (about 2,500) and Iraq (over 4,000). The names of the latest deaths are regularly updated and written in performance at the openings of 9/11 commemorative exhibitions.

During this memorial exhibition, visitors will be asked to collaboratively create an artwork by writing the names of the victims killed in the 9/11 attacks on a large piece of paper then sign and date their action on another. The signatures will be attached to the back of the artwork and framed.

“I want to thank Sean Gaulager, Austin Nelsen, Leslie Moody Castro, Vladimir Mejia, Chris Burch and the whole team at Co-Lab Projects for presenting this memorial exhibition as well as Dr. Cynthia Playfair and Sherry Keller for lending these works for exhibition commemorating the horrific event that we witnessed personally.” - Claude van Lingen

Claude van Lingen was born in 1931 in Vereeniging, South Africa. He studied at the Johannesburg College of Art and, in 1952, was awarded the National Teacher’s Diploma in Art. After teaching high school for 12 years Claude was appointed Chairman of the Teacher Training Department at the Johannesburg College of Art, and in 1975, Chairman of the Fine Art Department. His application of the principles of the highly successful Perceptual Studies course he designed to his own work led to his winning the prestigious Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Award and representing South Africa at the 1975 São Paulo Biennial.

In 1978 Claude left South Africa and settled in New York. He regularly exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, most notably, in 1991, being invited to show at the prestigious John Weber Gallery. During the 1990s he was represented by the Vera Engelhorn Gallery. In 2005 Claude moved to Austin, TX where he has exhibited regularly, most notably with Co-Lab Projects, has received awards from The Chronicle and had a work acquired by the Blanton Museum of Art.

Since 1980 various incarnations of his 1000 Years From Now theme have been shown in galleries in the USA,Canada, and in the Johannesburg Art Museum. His work is in the permanent collections of the Musée des Art Decoratiefs de la Ville de Lausanne, Switzerland, The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, and in the Johannesburg, Durban, and Hester Rupert Art Museums, South Africa.

NI DE AQUI, NI DE ALLA
Analuz Guerra
Curated by Rebecca Marino

July 3rd - 24th, 2021
On view Saturdays from 12-6 pm and by appointment
Opening Reception and Co-Lab’s 13th Birthday Party: July 3rd, 4-10 pm
(See event guidelines below)

Co-Lab Projects @ Glissman Road
5419 Glissman Road, Austin, TX 78702

In the Aztec language Nahuatl, Nepantla means “in the middle” or “in-between-ness” often referring to individuals or groups in cultural conflict. As a Mexican American woman, Guerra embraces herself as Nepantlera and digs deeply to deconstruct her identity and upbringing on both sides of the border. In her first solo exhibition, Guerra unearths materials and techniques in thoughtful conversation with her maternal ancestry, both before and after the colonization of Mexico. Harvesting the seemingly small pieces (a puncture, clay, thread, a kernel of corn, etc.) that ultimately connect to a much larger existence, Guerra reignites and reexamines the value of tradition, the inherent mysticism of our roots, and her own physical body as a bridge between cultural realms.

Analuz Guerra is a Mexican American mixed media artist working out of San Marcos. Her work is autobiographical, focusing on the activities of her Mexican family and how they evolved through generations and as they crossed the border. Guerra uses mediums like clay, film, and fibers to explore the storytelling of her family and its connection to the sustainable lifetime our mother’s mothers led. By exploring these activities Guerra comments on the sensory activities that have been lost in her family and her want to relearn her own survival magic.

Click here for exhibition list

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Please observe the following COVID precautions:

• Wear a mask while at the check-in desk/bar and inside the gallery

• No more than 4 individuals inside the gallery at a time

• Social distance while outside and be conscious of others level of comfort regarding proximity and masks

• Come early if you wish to be around less people and come later if you’re comfortable around more people

• We encourage COVID testing before and after the event, testing is available for free through the City of Austin, CVS, and other locations around Austin. www.austintexas.gov/covid-testinfo