“Blame and Shame” by Chad Rea
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.