An intimate installation in which the viewer both strolls by and floats over a gathering of ancient and contemporary art forms. Abelman’s pieces are both astral roadmaps and geomantic altars that dig into our collective intuitions that lie buried under the modern psyche.

In this show Abelman takes his popular map paintings and turns them on their side, puts them on a pedestal and invites us into the narrative and formal processes of his two and a half dimensional work presented in a format that is both atelier and oracle site.

All of existence can be understood as a relationship. Alan Watts posited that our physical world is a system of inseparable things where everything exists with everything else. In this system of metasystems, each relationship aggregates with many, giving form to the universe. And within this pattern, even the most seemingly disparate of elements ultimately reveal themselves to be conjoined and interwoven. Is it coincidence that the world is made up of undividable opposites? I seek to examine how this relates to that. 

In a life-sized Rorschach-esque diorama. I’ve collaged together mirror images of basketball players in motion, illustrating that when we accept that the universe runs off a blind energy, this can cause a very insular worldview. We form teams and then we form opponents. The opponents occasionally rise to meet each other in pursuit of the same goal, bifurcating and mirroring one another, each existing because of and for the other. 

In layering these images/pieces in a space, I aim to work towards total awareness of connectedness and order, while demystifying the idea of the cosmic fluke. I have chosen to identify and explore sites of mirroring and convergence to highlight the relationship points that bind us, and the universe, together.

Can you occupy two scales at once? 

Scale acts as a mediator to the viewer, controlling the point of view as well as the personal relationship of the viewer to his or her surroundings. However, perceptions and perspectives constantly shift. Therefore, changing your perspective interrupts yet compliments the world in which you exist, and this adjustment allows for both inward and outward reflection. Future: Diorama! is an opportunity to explore the struggle of myriad possibilities, scenarios and outcomes that intrude on one another’s space, vying for attention. It will be difficult for these realities to coexist. 

Ink Tank is an evolving artist collective with the expressed purpose of executing creative ideas in all media. Through collaboration and experimentation, the flux of members in the collective creates a space for projects that compliment each other’s abilities and motivations. The individual parts discover a whole within the unity of sharing ideas and offering support.

MARFITA is the Spanish diminution of the name of Marfa, a town in far west TX, population aprox. 2,200. Founded in the late 1800’s, the town has served as a social center for the many ranches in the area, as home base for generations of migrant farmworkers moving seasonally between Texas and California, as the site of the US Army’s Fort D.A. Russell, and most popularly today as home to canonical American artist Donald Judd’s permanent installation of his works and select others, under the dual guardianship of the Chinati Foundation and the Judd Foundation. The Chinati alone draws over 10,000 visitors a year to what has become a pilgrimage site of sorts for Minimalist, post-modern, and contemporary art lovers from around the globe. Marfa has yet one more attraction however, a pilgrimage site proper, in all the religious and sacred implications that come with the use of the term ‘pilgrimage.’ 

In 1994, the Virgin Mary appeared to Hector Sanchez, in the backyard of the last residential home one passes before entering the long driveway up to the Chinati’s main office. Less than half a mile from Judd’s famous cement blocks, Sanchez erected an altar to honor the apparition. Complete with hand painted statue of the Virgin overlooking a shallow cement grotto, and housed within an upturned bathtub, this installation is positioned so that Chinati is always in her sights, were she to ever look up from her worshipful gesture. She too draws pilgrims, and these are accounted for in the log kept by Ester Sanchez, the late Hector’s wife. These two groups are largely unknown to one another, though their itinerant paths surely cross frequently at the auspicious, gravelly roundabout that leads one to one or the other. 

The installation MARFITA seeks to trouble this relationship, to draw it out and question the dynamics that are shaping perceptions of the town. The four artists involved each have coordinated a main component of the project, interweaving their respective practices into an open conversation to which they will invite the community to join. Alison Kuo will present video made from footage shot during a group “double pilgrimage” to Marfa, motivated by an active interest in both the altar and the artworks by Judd and his associates. In the sequences, the art pilgrims encounter inspirational architectural elements in the West Texas landscape and respond to them with acts of playfulness. They move things, touch objects: sometimes invoking the spirit of Richard Serra’s 1968 filmwork “Hand Catching Lead,” while alternately piecing together their own rasquache altar pieces. Josh T Franco has crafted miniature (approx. 1:12 scale) reproductions of the artillery sheds of Fort D.A. Russell renovated by Judd’s own hand and direction. These will be laid out on the outdoor grounds of Co-Lab according to their siting in Marfa. They will contain miniatures of the 100 untitled works in milled aluminum. Also included will be miniature versions of the iconic cement block groupings arranged by Judd on Chinati’s grounds. The interior of Co-Lab will be transformed by Joshua Saunders into a loose reproduction of the interior of the Sanchez home where altar builder Hector Sanchez lived prior to his untimely death a month after the altar’s completion. Some film and original collaborative works by the artists will be incorporated as well as Saunders’ “live looped” reenactment of Hector’s walk from inside to backyard, beer in hand, on that auspicious night. 

Composed of a renovated arbor, film, and found objects, an 8-10 foot enlarged reproduction of Sanchez’s altar will be situated behind the Co-Lab building beneath a tree, as it is arranged in Marfa. During the first night of its installation at Co-Lab, Natalie Goodnow will lead an interactive procession through the East Austin neighborhood where the space exists, culminating in a ceremonial, participatory prayer at the altar itself. 


Artist Bios

Alison Kuo is an installation artist living in Brooklyn, New York. Her current projects include a culture blog called Accidental Chinese Hipsters and a sometimes gallery show space in her apartment, dubbed the Darling House. In March of 2010 she had her first solo show, Nesting, at SOFA gallery in Austin, TX, and later that year she made an installation and collaborative video featured in the group show Dadarrhea at OHWOW in Miami. Dadarrhea made its second stop at Canada Gallery in New York in 2011. Links: www.kuospace.com, www.flickr.com/kuoskies. 

Josh T Franco is a PhD student and Clifford D. Clark Fellow in the Art History department at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. His writing on MARFITA and the “Toltec methodology” behind it will be published in Spring 2012 as part of an anthology edited by members of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldua. His past performance/fotoescultura work has been shown at the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center in San Antonio, TX and images published last year in the collection, El Mundo Zurdo. His dissertation’s aim is the “decoloniality of vision”. He has contributed to La Voz de Esperanza, The Thing Itself, zingmagazine, and is currently writing the preface for an upcoming book of poetry by Paul DeJong (of the Books). He is also co-editor of 7STOPS, an online monthly magazine. 

Joshua Saunders currently lives in Austin and attends the University of Texas where he is completing his BFA. He keeps a studio at Monofonus, but continues to hoard, tinker, cut and paste in his home as well. One finds him on any given day with Exact-o knife in hand, bent over a way professional magnifying device. Saunders has exhibited solo shows at BiRDHOUSE, Big Medium, Domy, Co-Lab, and elsewhere in Austin. His work was shown in alongside Fahama Pecou and Stephen Lapthisophon at Conduit Gallery in Dallas earlier this year. 

Natalie Goodnow is a teatrista, teaching artist, and cultural activist from Austin, Texas. She is an Artistic Associate of Theatre Action Project and a member of The Austin Project as well as a recipient of the 2011 Jane Chambers Playwriting Contest, a national competition. Goodnow writes, performs, and directs; she’s been practicing some combination of those forms for seventeen years, and started teaching about and through them 8 years ago. Her favorite thing to do is create original works for the stage, as a solo performer and in collaboration with other performers and playwrights, both youth and adults. Goodnow explores the relationships between people and places, in terms of relationships to community, to the Earth, and to our own bodies. She’s got a crush on performance art. Links: http://www.nataliegoodnow.com, http://makinggoodnow.blogspot.com. 

Chronotope is a literary term used to describe the link between time and space in language. In my cut-paper installation by the same name, I explore the interconnection between time and space in memory. Chronotope looks to my own memory – to some of the most poignant moments in my past, to memories that reside at a preverbal level, retrieved only as fleeting glimpses. Without verbal recall, corroboration by others, or a place in the linear narrative of my life, these memories appear unpredictably in my consciousness. Powerful yet elusive, they seem to fuse past and present, time and space. 

To organize marks and construct space in the hanging paper sheets of Chronotope, I turn to these memories. I seek to evoke the emotion and psychological state associated with them and the lucid yet dreamlike awareness that marked the moments in which they were born. Through the progression, repetition, and layering of passages of cut marks, I create spaces that appear to crystallize on the verge of dissolving, suggesting the persistent yet slippery quality of memory. 

Jennifer Caine received a BA cum laude in Studio Art and Mathematics from Dartmouth College in 2000 and an MFA in Painting from Boston University in 2005. Her work includes paintings, prints, drawings, and artist books and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Soprafina Gallery, Boston, MA, The Strauss Gallery, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, and Guerilla Arts, Dallas, TX. Other recent exhibition venues include the National Academy Museum, New York, NY; The Painting Center, New York, NY; The Hunstville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL; 808 Gallery, Boston University, Boston, MA; FPAC Gallery, Boston, MA; Ice Cube Gallery, Denver, CO; Jewett Gallery, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; The Carillon Gallery, Tarrant County College, Fort Worth, TX; and ArtSpace, Maynard, MA. 

Caine is the recipient of many awards, including the Constantin Alajalov Award at Boston University, the 2008 Dartmouth Alumni Lecture Award, and the Helen Figge Moss Memorial Award. She has been selected for inclusion in the forthcoming book, 100 Boston Painters published by Schiffer Publishing. Caine currently teaches at Dartmouth College where she is the Area Head of Painting and Drawing. Prior to joining the faculty at Dartmouth she taught at Boston University from 2005-2010, and she has been a visiting artist at many colleges including: Providence College, Providence, RI, Lyme Academy College of Art, Old Lyme, CT, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA.

This installation is an exploration of how curiosity, discovery, reflection and play are necessary elements of our survival in and understanding of the world. Hank Waddell’s work uses these processes to reimagine what is known by manipulating the delicate relationship between nature and industry.

Throughout his life the woods provided strength, comfort and mystery for Waddell - yet the power and possibility of industry, despite its destructive capabilities, has continued to be a seductive force. In this installation materials and processes are coupled in curious ways, transformed through reinvention. Waddell’s work awakens the instinctual process that leads to cooperation and compromise between people and materials - an interactivity that comes through the open-ended process of play.

Paper Girl is a show, an urban action (the distribution of the roles of art), a bicycle workshop and a party. The show originated in Berlin with artist Aisha Ronniger and has been done in numerous other places (www.papergirl-berlin.de). It is a way to surprise and delight the city by giving out free art. With the amazing bike culture and rad art being made here in Austin, it’s about time we put to action this project. 

There are no guidelines to who can submit and no required medium, as long as it can be rolled up! The art should be dropped off at Co-Lab the week before the show, June 11-18. We will then have an opening on the 18th where there will be tables set up to create even more works of art. Then on the 25th we will hit the town on our bikes, of course, and distribute the pieces in a newspaper like fashion to anyone and everyone. 

So… get to work yall! 

Two Collage Artists Meet

Aryn Glazier:

Out of the bafflement of the life I was given I developed an interest in magic early. When I was a child, mixing “magic potions” with everyday items and reading books on the occult I was convinced that the right combination of symbols and words could open the door to the supernatural.

Isn’t there magic in the world? I search for bits and pieces in what I see and read, vacuuming them up from other’s cast off tomes. These sources that have already had their life contain in them, sometimes, gems that are gently winking and shimmering among their brethren.

Philip Trussell:

Out of heaps of black and white photographs printed on a HP card printer, shots made in and around Austin with a small digital camera, I have cut and transposed sections and details using scissors and glue stick composing sets and backgrounds somewhere between theater and reality. To these I have introduced pictures of friends who have individually collaborated as actors for camera. Over time they have become an ensemble or troupe within a range of work numbering more than twelve hundred compositions. Most of these pictures are five by seven inches and horizontal, as they are printed for this exhibition.

They might be stills retrieved from a film that went down with the Titanic. The narrative cannot be reconstructed. Each frame seems a tableau vivant; nude actors arrayed for a suspended moment on a set made of pieces recontexted from diverse places. A makeshift space for an obscure allegory supports a poetics of gestures and postures floated together in a dream. Cut and paste process sidesteps the certainties of waking life.

One set of these photomontages is unpeopled. The setting itself invites exploration. An imaginary architecture entered through a complex point of view would include you. As occupant, inhabitant, or guest you remain invisible while exploring or exploiting perceived opportunities.

The ruins of the future can be yours today. William Blake told us what is now proved was once only imagined. We live in the wreckage of intentions our ancestors manifested. The camera’s most arcane trick is to lift locale from itself, and us with it. We become ghosts having existence independent of impactedness in personal history, including proper identification and home address. If we are not already ghosts in our lives in the twenty-first century, we certainly long to be. Electronic media make it so whether we know it or not.

Bardo means literally “intermediate state” - also translated as “transitional state” or “in-between state” or “liminal state”.

Entropy: The concept of entropy is defined by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of a closed system always increases or remains constant. Thus, entropy is also a measure of the tendency of a process, such as a chemical reaction

Embryo: An unborn or unhatched offspring in the process of development.

Come be a part of an experience at Co-Lab. A cause and effect happening in time, a living sculpture with multi media including video, audio and sculpture.

"Comfort Sessions" are an offgrowth from my larger Lullaby Project, in which I am invited to homes to sing: for crying babies, for those who have insomnia, for those who are sick, for those who are dying, for those who are lonely, for those who are perverts, for those who are frightened, for those who need something but don’t know what.

We all have needs, deep needs, barely met, or not met at all. Warmth, intimacy, sharing, protection. The artist, too.  This work came out of my early years as a mother to two children, in which the daily grind of motherhood wore away the edges of my own identity. I found myself again at night, by the sides of their beds: I sang songs my mother sang, I sang songs from Disney movies, I sang songs I learned from Muppets.  I sang Prince and Madonna and Cake, I sang Broadway, I sang 40s love songs and 60s pop songs and hymns and sea shanties and cowboy ballads and early American folk songs and songs in other languages.  Some nights were themed, some nights I had requests. Unlike most of my day’s activities, those were moments when my own pleasure in giving was equal to the pleasure they had in receiving.

During that same period, I stopped being able to sleep myself. Following a brain injury, I developed insomnia that eroded my hours of sleep to the point that I was sleeping almost not at all. Sometimes watching my children fall asleep to my voice was as close to sleep as I could get. So, it’s not too hard to see why I would relish my role as a sandman.

When I started my work based on lullabies, I wondered if I could let myself make work that is so sincere, so utterly uncynical, if anyone would take it seriously. But I find it’s transgressive to actually sing by someone’s side; it’s not the same as singing a concert. It’s an act much closer to the work of a courtesan or prostitute: there’s a line to the level of intimacy one is supposed to have with strangers, and to sing in this way is to cross it.

The Comfort Sessions add a layer of object and setting to this endeavor, to mitigate the awkwardness of being in a group while this intimate encounter is happening. The textures are important; it’s a cliché to say that a bed is a womb, the soft flesh of our mother, but it is, and we all know it, so there must be softness beneath, and warmth above, and a structure around that gives seclusion and safety.  I love the blurring that happens of clothing and object, of object and performer, of gallery space and personal space. At a formal level, the soft polyester drape of fleece is the contemporary update to that heavy wool felt used by Joseph Beuys and Robert Morris.

Katelena Hernandez lives and works in Austin. She has a degree in Studio Art from Yale University and has been involved in the arts in Austin for more than a decade. Information on her projects can be found at www.katelenahernandez.net.

This performance is a part of “Low Lives 3”, Worldwide Networked Performance Art Event
International performances will be projected onsite at Co-Lab at the following times: April 29: 7:00pm – 10:00pm (CST) & April 30: 2:00pm – 5:00pm (CST). For more information on Low Lives 3 visit www.lowlives.net

This performance is a part of Fusebox Festival an annual contemporary art and performance festival that takes place in Austin, TX each April. This year’s dates are April 20 - May 1. More information and tickets are available at www.fuseboxfestival.com

In celebration of contemporary visual art in Texas, Co-Lab is participating in the 2011 Texas Biennial project by joining in with over 60 arts organizations across the state with this exhibition. The list of all participating organizations and further information on the 2011 Texas Biennial, including the exhibition on view in Austin, Houston and San Antonio from April 9 - May 14, is available at www.texasbiennial.org.

"The thing in nothing" is a show which explores the beautiful contradiction in all there is, has been and never was. Life and death, sorrow and joy, unity and chaos, creation/destruction. This will be Chantelle’s first solo show, with new multi-media collage-based work.

www.crobjective.wordpress.com

Comprised of a four week cycle of installation vignettes, Palatial Hemorrhages is an investigation of incidental personal topographies; an earnest grandiosity amassed in the nature of cigarettes and hairspray used up but never thrown out, or Wilt Chamberlain’s Hollywood home after a forty year carpet moth infestation.

After completing her BA in studio art in 2006 from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, Sarah Stevens kept the space at 613 Allen Street as a studio for twenty months, producing Co Lab’s inaugural exhibition in July 2008. www.sarahelizabethstevens.com

"Obituaries 1913" is a three-man, multi-genre art exhibition commemorating the lives of 22 individuals who died in 1913. The project is the brainchild of New Orleans musician Tom McLaughlin, who enlisted painter Joel Kelly and poet Mark Yakich as collaborators. Each of the 22 artworks in the exhibit includes a charcoal portrait, an obituary, and a song. Over the course of a year, the project evolved so organically that in most cases none of the collaborators now knows which part (text, image, sound) came first. Obituaries 1913 debuted in May 2010 in New Orleans, and has begun traveling to other cities; details at obituaries1913.com.

The Tremendous Family is happy to announce a collective show highlighting accessibility in the digital age.

The Tremendous Family is a collection of collections; a platform to create a unique dialogue through visual works from emerging artists.

Obtaining free, intimately sized prints by way of various print on-demand promotional offers has given us the opportunity to present our website’s current collection of works.

The show is comprised of sixteen artists work, chosen by a visual criteria less bound by location, economic status, or other factors that often rule the presentation of a various number of works.

In order for society to adjust to the changing ideologies of its peoples it must be demountable, reusable, and changeable over time. I am interested in the next phase of our civilization, and how we will adjust and recollect as the world changes. This is one in a series of pieces in which I have challenged myself to learn basic survival skills that had been perfected over thousands of years, and have now been all but lost. In this way, my experience will act as an archive of fading knowledge.