con·spec·tus noun kən-ˈspek-təs
1: a usually brief survey or summary (as of an extensive subject) often providing an overall view
2: outline, synopsis

A comprehensive look back at our 2013 programming year. Each artist or group of artists had the opportunity to transform our space, utilizing it to express their ideas. Now smaller components from each of these projects will be shown together illustrating the breadth and diversity of art we witnessed this year.

2013 Artists:
Ink Tank Collective, Chad Hopper, Jeff Williams, Chris Culver, Chris Holloway, Joseph Reeves, Barry Stone, Beverly Penn, Carlos Rosales-Silva, Phil LaDeau, James Scheuren, Janaye Brown, Erik Swanson, Sara Madandar, Lily Brooks, Adriana Corral, Jieun Beth Kim, Olaniyi Rasheed Akindiya, Brooke Gassiot, Tamara Rodrigez, Nathan Green, Cody Ledvina, Blair Bogin, Frederick Follmer, Sam Sanford, Thomas Jack Hilton, Joshua Wade Smith, Christie Blizard, Kyle Evans, Claude van Lingen, and Jennifer Chenoweth

The artist will collect public input on locations in Austin where people have had meaningful experiences. On each map point, people can record references to the emotions felt in that place, as graphed in Plutchik’s wheel of emotions. Jennifer Chenoweth will use this information to create a 3-d map of Austin noting the highs and lows of our collective experience.

Two Venue Exhibition:

October 9, 2013 - March 1, 2014
N Space (905 Congress)

October 26, 2013 - November 2, 2013
Project Space (613 Allen)

Claude van Lingen has been exploring the concept 1000 Years From Now since 1978. This concept has been explored using dates, lists of names, figurative and non-figurative painting combined with TV sets and slivers of mirror that record and reflect the passing of time, well into the future.

The paintings, drawings, and mixed media constructions consider not only the linear concepts of space and time, but the layering of the physical, conscious, and subconscious experiences we might have as individuals or as a global collective. In other words, these works encapsulate the events, emotions, and conditions that link the past, the ever changing present, and the unknown/anticipated future into an inextricable whole.

The cathode ray tube television has become a useless technology in this era of binary bits. It acts as the quintessential representation of the rise and fall of technology in our rapidly progressing society. As a child outgrows a toy, we have collectively abandoned the CRT, casting it aside to be scavenged for valued metals in the proverbial wastebaskets of our cities. In its modern character, seen as a combination of both archaic and nostalgic, the CRT is granted its greatest potential for experimentation and techno-resurrection. By way of building, bending and mutilating, de/Rastra shows the effects of altering the anatomical makeup of a CRT television, revealing the hidden potentials of the technology through the repurposing and restructuring of its own ability.

de/Rastra re-mediates a technology whose history is based in a one dimensional form of communication between broadcast material and receiver. The technology becomes repurposed as an expressive interface, breaking down the device’s ‘consumption only’ nature, accenting the materiality of the technology over its general use as a transparent communication medium.

de/Rastra: Performance and Installation confronts the cultural atrophy of these devices in two parts; a realtime audio/video performance, which has been actively performed under the title de/Rastra since 2012, and a new installation in which the artist brings the performance concepts into a meditative sound and light environment.

This project is an exploration of movement in space at particular times, represented by color-coded day-glow paint and lines of varying thickness and edge quality that also respond to changes of time. 

It will begin with the year, month, day, hours, and finally minutes of the time each line is started and move from the left side of the mural to the right side and from bottom to top. Once each layer is completed, a new layer will begin at the bottom until I run out of paint.

Performance Artist and Sculptor Joshua Wade Smiths will create a “work out” studio in the spirit of 19th century gymnasium with 21st century DIY materials. With an emphasis on  re-purposed materials and labor, Smith’s gymnasium will be a site of rejuvenation and repose, where the visitor will be invited to contemplate, interact, and test their own balance.  Balance, muscular and bodily tension, and flexibility will help each visitor center themselves while navigating the minimalist sculpture course. 

Joshua Wade Smith is an object-based performer and sculptor and completed an MFA from the Mt. Royal School at MICA in 2010. Smith currently teaches foundation sculpture and art history courses at MICA as well teaching art courses at American University. Smith recently completed a month long social-practice residency in the Netherlands as a door-to-door handy man. 

Since graduate school Smith’s work has referenced the artist’s labor, endurance sports, and transcendence through (tedious) spectacle. Recent exhibitions include: Obstructions II at the American University Art Museum at the Katzen Center (DC) “Here Nor THere” at Hamiltonian Artists (DC), “Cataracts” at Gallery Four (Baltimore),”Tropical Obstructions” at Hamiltonian Artists (DC) “Liste 2011” at the Contemporary Museum-Baltimore, amongst others.

Smith was a Finalist for the 2012 Trawick Awards and conclude a two-year fellowship at the Hamiltonian Artists Gallery (Washington DC) this Summer.

Lame Lane Hagood plus lewd, crude and offensive Mike Mark Lood Peterwebb whatever-his-name-is Flood plus Depressed (and Depressing) Jeremy DePrez… trouble in threes, three tarnished coins in life’s luckless fountain of liquid shit, three rancid jumping-beans rattling around in the tossed and wilted scum-salad at the bottom of the art-dumpster, coming to an end-of-the-world Austin exhibit all too near you.

What the fuck, why the fuck, and who the fuck cares?

Lame Lane Hagood…Once he was the legendary SARS, unidentified tagger with a difference, mopping giant monster murals along the concrete embankments of the Houston Bayou, wheat pasting cutout Batman ghosts on the abandoned doors of Montrose, inscribing SARS LOVES YOU across H-town’s loveless corporate surfaces… Now fully domesticated, a purring, career-ambitious house-cat, he creates grotesque yet cartoony canvases channeling the ghost of Guston, in large, medium and museum-size formats. A student of Nietzsche, Rimbaud and Nicanor Parra, he disguises his formidable intellectual powers so well that his paintings are often mistaken for the cry-for-help doodles of a mentally defective child.

Mike/Mark Lood/Flood… no one really cares what name this dynamic sell-out is going by today. Like a carny dazzling the crowd at a stripcenter mini-amusement park, this charlatan has somehow bamboozled the NYC art world into believing in his pathetic excuses for painting and performance, the same schtick Texas audiences unanimously and wisely rejected decades ago, with much spitting on the ground. Like all good tricks, it will probably be obvious once we figure out how Flood did it. It seems to have something to do with forging an appearance of rare and valuable Artistic Integrity, using only a punk rock pedigree as tired as it was preposterous. Anyway, expect the whore’s delight lace paintings, the strident I-am -your-conscience text paintings, and maybe even some of those I-was-doing-this-before-Photoshop-made-it-easy collages… all three rings of his famous traveling circus.

Sigh… Jeremy DePrez, a depressing miscreant living in a hole dug out by his own neurosis. Recently deprived of the academic medications that might have straightened him out once and for all, he has carried on his quest for aesthetic absolutes no further than the most unassuming articles of his own existence. DePrez painstakingly renders the nuances and subtleties of the unassumed with paint, canvas and carved up stretcher bars that make sure his images have a strange, wavering edge instead of the usual rectilinear perfection. The resulting paintings are triumphant large-scale abstractions; big, bold and haunted by questions of meaning, as in “What the fuck is this supposed to mean?”, and of purpose beyond that of decorating art shows, corporate boardrooms and collector’s guesthouses. Perhaps as a result of some fine print, which they didn’t notice when they signed their contracts with Satan to give themselves upwardly mobile art careers, all three of these inexplicably successful shitheads will soon be in a show at an abandoned warehouse posing as a gallery, right here in sweet unspoiled Austin, the Houston of the hill country.

It happens Friday, September 6th from 5-10PM at 721 Congress in Austin, Texas.

Armed security will be present.

I am enchanted by memories and this work is the embodiment of that; they haunt me.…and they fascinate me. I become perturbed by the way they swirl around in my head, fading and mixing with other occurrences. Did I experience that? Perhaps I heard it or saw it on TV twenty years ago. In a way it’s gone. The memory no longer belongs only to me but has become a part of the collective energy. It cannot be insulated from anything else and all things must be affected by everything. This work seeks to tidy that up in my own way, which may confound the casual observer.  It’s ultimately about control. The white space is my laboratory where time does not exist on its own but must be added. Like time, I work creating and destroying and re-creating from that which was destroyed.  An echo runs throughout the process and images may re-appear in other forms. I want to keep the feeling of tenuousness because that is one of the most interesting things about a memory; it’s what makes them so precious or turns them into apparitions. In the end it will be packaged down to a final photograph, a memory, frozen in time.

"We must bring about a music which is like furniture, a music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as a melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall between friends dining together. It would spare them the trouble of paying attention to their own banal remarks. And at the same time it would neutralize the street noises which so indiscreetly enter into the play of conversation. To make such a noise would respond to need." - Erik Satie

The paintings in this show are made to neutralize the noise of the default, design-by-committee built environment. They are like furniture, like the ambient music of Brian Eno - they are not meant to provoke or challenge; they are meant to be used to increase peacefulness and harmony in inhabited spaces. They do not have to be looked at to be effective.

Although these paintings are visually quite different from the artist’s previous photo-based process-color paintings, both bodies of work employ a physical reiteration of the mechanics of industrial technical processes - in the present case, the processes of textile manufacture.

In my work I am exploring time in relation to, space, systems and orders, and the ethos of what it is being human, having dreams that are connected externally to something greater than that of the self. My work is about understanding the complexity of life through self discovery and an inventive process. An internal self vs external ideal, the birth of inspiration.

"Passing Baby Cousin With Four-rail Fence", is a compilation of work investigating ego and personhood in its transformation from the singular to the plural. Through photography, video and performance this exhibit seeks to explore identity in negotiation with materiality, interpersonal relationships and sacrificial acts of community. 

Blair Bogin is an artist who works across media. Abstract documentation and collaboration is central to her process.

My work can best be described as a search for the ecstatic. Generally my practice is extremely intuitive, as I often freely shift between different modes of painting and building. I always attempt to approach my work with a sense of playfulness, experimentation, and, above all, curiosity.

Formally, I am interested in the interaction that occurs when the tropes of modern abstraction are combined with contemporary craft techniques, and common construction and building methods.

I have become extremely interested in skewing and subverting traditional exhibition techniques, and by extension, the expectations that they hold. By using completed singular works as raw materials for larger conglomerates, I now think of each finished work simply as a module for another form. I have been treating my body of work as a cast of characters that have the potential to interact with one another in countless ways.

An exploration on preciousness and the perimeters that define it. 

Through venerated satire of classical and cultural images, the work examines the quest for beauty and associated consequences.

In The Stories Our Neurons Tell, artist Brooke Gassiot uses video, ready-made objects and sculpture to explore perception and memory as they relate to the idea of ‘who we are’. Gassiot’s installations reflect on the relationships between the body and the stimulus surrounding it. While a sensory experience may feel immediate, in reality there are nanoseconds that pass while information from the senses travels to, and is decoded by, the brain. The concept of ‘who we are’ is shaped by this soup of neurological hardware – neurons and their connections are the primary set of tools with which we perceive the world and these tools change, thriving and deteriorating as we grow and age.

Gassiot is continually intrigued by the idea that our physical bodies hold their own specific sensory memories. The constant interaction of our neural connections in relation to stimuli of the outside world affects personal, physiological self-perception and the broader perception of the “self” as it fits into the framework of the exterior world. In The Stories Our Neurons Tell each work encourages viewers to recall mind-body connections created by their own experiences.

Scar Party, opening night: May 18th, 2-6 pm: As part of this focus on how memories are held in the physical body, Gassiot invites visitors,  from 2-6PM, to tell the story of their scars. The artist will make a drawing of the scar using various media such as vellum, felt, thread and ink. Each drawing will be added to a wall hanging installation to become part of a ‘Scar Party’.

Gassiot has noted that in her part-time profession as a massage therapist, people are often compelled to tell stories about their ailments and health histories. They seem to feel relieved when they relate their experiences of living in this human body to an understanding witness. By gathering scar stories from many participants and displaying them together, each personal scar becomes part of a greater congregation of ‘kindred healed wounds’.

Brooke Gassiot received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of Texas in 2006. During her time in university she studied in Italy on a full scholarship and created her first large-scale installation, funded by a UT fellowship. Her current work, a series of sculptural light boxes and room-sized installations incorporating sculpture and video, has been displayed at museums and galleries in Austin, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio.

This exhibition is a part of “Frame”, a day of special artist talks, performances, and receptions presented by East Austin Arts

As an interdisciplinary artist, my work looks at moments, time, place, and people within their environment. In this exhibition I look at an issue which has become untouchable. We react to it the moment it happens, but in 2, or 3, or 7 days we forget it again. It returns again and again in massive disasters, but we never take action about it. How can we build a life out of fear? Every day on the radio, on the television, in the newspapers, someone somewhere receives the call of last breath without notice. When parents drop their kids to school, they don’t know if that goodbye kiss is the last one. When husbands, wives, dads, and mums say bye in the morning, who knows if that is the last time you will set your eyes on and feel the heart beat of your loved ones again. We are all living in fear when our loved ones do not return at the usual time he/ she gets back from work. The statistics say 30,000 souls die and 60,000 are injured from guns every year in our America. How many have heard the last call through a gun shot in the world, and yet we continue to say GUNS DON’T KILL!!! Should we say it is the BULLETS that kill? Or is it people? Are we ourselves our own enemy? We invent these weapons of destruction. Some of us have the power to stop it, but we do not because this is the source of our wealth. The authorities we give our votes to in order to protect us refuse to enforce law on the spreading of GUNS in every corner of our nation and world.

Join me as I explore the side effects of GUNS in this solo exhibition installation and performance, and sign the petition with me.

Olaniyi Rasheed Akindiya a.k.a. Akirash was born in Lagos- Nigeria. He now lives in Austin TX. Olaniyi has received several Awards, fellowships, grants and residencies including the Commonwealth Foundation Award UK, Pollock K. Foundation grants, Triangle Art Association NY, Vytlacil Campus of the Art Student League NY, Vermont Studio Center, Nafasi Art Space Tanzania, Thami Mnyele Foundation Netherlands, Bluesky Project Chicago. Olaniyi exhibits his work nationally and internationally. www.artwithakirash.com

A group show curated by Phil LaDeau

Derived from the commonalities between several M.F.A. candidates at the University of Texas at Austin, Something Lost exposes the trend of loss and longing that informs and drives their studio practices. Whether a conceptual, personal, or process-based investigation, the works elicit an awareness of our incompleteness and shared state of perpetual want. They suggest that states of loss or longing are worth savoring as they reveal bittersweet truths that help us better understand ourselves and the world around us.

James Scheuren photographs the impotent and pathetic byproducts of the unwatched. These manifest as variations of residue and mark-making. 

Phil LaDeau’s drawings capture melancholy as light casts through blinds and illuminates an empty corner, making an absence known and tangible.

Janaye Brown extends seemingly vapid moments to reveal undercurrents of sexual tension and longing.

Erik Swanson mars his molds with plasticine clay and powdered pigment, achieving a positive plaster form that has the pockmarks and gritty surface of an object in decay.

Christopher Culver rigorously prepares his linen surfaces then quickly applies spray paint, making coolly romantic vignettes of nightlife and lost inhibitions.

Sara Madandar deconstructs the fabric of her canvases to evoke her own cultural displacement and the corporality of her hijab, the headscarf worn by Muslim women.

Lily Brooks  captures a loss of sensation, place, and time as her subjects bend to the elements.

Adriana Corral memorializes the women victims of Juarez by layering text from related court documents, making it incomprehensible and senseless - much like the violence.

Jieun Beth Kim’s carefully rendered watercolors of natural objects capture the fragility and transience of life by presenting its opposite: death.

Fade Grid is Carlos Rosales-Silva’s first Texas exhibition of new work since relocating to New York City. Spanning several mediums, Rosales-Silva’s brightly colored, darkly humorous work is representative of the larger cultural and social structures Americans occupy in both the physical and digital realm.  Different art historical modes are leveraged and instilled with new relevancy when filtered through the exchanges, histories, and visual cues of urban communities.

Carlos Rosales-Silva is an artist living and working in New York, NY. Rosales-Silva attended the University of Texas at Austin where he received his BFA in Studio Art in 2010. In 2008 he became a member of the Okay Mountain Collective and Gallery. Most recently he mounted a year long solo project at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. His favorite activity is watching the sunset. His favorite biome is the desert. www.carlosrosalessilva.tumblr.com

Beverly Penn and Barry Stone examine how we picture nature. Through digital and mechanical manipulations, Penn and Stone alter otherwise faithful representations of the natural world. Reprocessing their works either by rearranging the digital code in Stone’s photographs or performing a type of reverse-engineering to Penn’s sculptural works via 3-D modeling or casting, the traditional schema of what we perceive as natural or artificial is put into question. 

Beverly Penn was born in Baltimore and now lives and works in Austin.  She is the recipient of numerous fellowships including a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy; a Connemara Conservancy Artist Grant; grants from the Texas Commission on the Arts and a Fulbright Fellowship in Barcelona. Her work is represented in many private, corporate and public collections, most notably the Cooper Hewitt in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Racine Art Museum, and the Austin Museum of Art.

Barry Stone was born in Lubbock, Texas, and earned an MFA in Photography from the University of Texas at Austin (2001) and founded the lens based artists collective, Lakes Were Rivers. His work is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York and Art Palace Gallery in Houston. Stone lives in Austin, with his wife and two daughters and is an Assistant Professor and the Coordinator of the Department of Photography in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University-San Marcos.

The Cell Phone Photo Gallery is a conceptually focused exhibition which aims to utilize cell phone photography as a means to playfully undermine the officious value systems that judge what art is, by confronting viewers with the shameless suppositions of what art typically is not.

In broader context, The CPPG project means to document, explore, and question the rising sense of sociocultural awareness that is occurring in part from the universal accessibility of simple technological mediums such as the Camera Phone. Not since the advent of pens and pencils has an entire generation suddenly had almost universal access to such a simple and effective new tool for documenting their experiences and expressing their thoughts at any given moment. The CPPG means not to champion or challenge the debatable worth of this technological shift, as much as it does to instigate a dynamic new conversation about its implications. 

Because the camera phone has become so readily accessible to so many people, the cell phone photograph in itself tends to be dismissed artistically as a shoddy comment upon “real” photography. The CPPG refutes this notion ardently by organizing and assembling large scale, city-specific, cell phone photo exhibitions that call upon the every day citizen for their own unique interpretation of art, photography, and meaning. The massive collection of cell phone photos are gathered through direct, alternative, and above all, creatively-focused submission strategies, and are then anonymously displayed in a spectacular arrangement within the space.

The final product amounts to a gallery space transformed by several hundred cell phone photos that when viewed as a whole, compellingly reveal a truly magnanimous image.

Over the course of 2013, The Sketchbook Project Tour will visit 8 cities on a cross-country journey that begins in New York at the Brooklyn Art Library, our storefront exhibition space and home to our permanent collection of more than 22,000 sketchbooks. This exhibition is the start of a unique, interactive installation that draws thousands of participants. We invite people of all backgrounds to explore and participate in the world’s largest library of sketchbooks, generating a groundswell of creative energy in communities around the world and among more than a million visitors online.

The Sketchbook Project is an interactive mobile library of artist’s sketchbooks contributed by creative people from across the globe. We encourage artists from diverse backgrounds, whether they are working artists, full-time parents, busy professionals, children or students to share their process with each other and our creative community. Participants sign up in person or online to receive a blank sketchbook, then fill it with their most amazing, inspired ideas and mail it back. The books are then cataloged in the Brooklyn Art Library’s permanent collection and exhibited at venues around the country in our Mobile Library, a custom fitted art exhibition on wheels.

Further tour stops: Atlanta, Toronto, Chicago, Portland (OR), San Francisco, and Los Angeles. See more details here: www.sketchbookproject.com

The Sketchbook Project is open for submissions. Please visit us online for details:http://www.sketchbookproject.com.

About Art House Co-op
Art House is an independent, Brooklyn-based company that organizes global, collaborative art projects. Our flagship endeavor is the Sketchbook Project: an evolving library that features more than 22,000 artists’ books contributed by creative people from over 130 countries. We operate the Brooklyn Art Library, our storefront exhibition space in the heart of Williamsburg, as a home for all of our projects.

Art House began in 2006 in Atlanta, GA and moved to New York City in 2009. Since that time, our small organization has grown into a worldwide community of more than 70,000 artists. By focusing on the intersection of hands-on art making and new technology, Art House nurtures community- supported art projects that harness the power of the virtual world to share inspiration in the real world.

Hand Painting hair creates lines to form something new.  Holloway uses collage elements to paint something not seen in nature.

Optical illusion, double imagery, pattern, surrealism, and hair are major influences Holloway uses in this series of collage and the hand painted mural at Co-Lab.

About Chris Holloway:
Chris Holloway received his fine arts degree from Texas State University, San Marcos.  Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas,  he has been a proud resident of Austin since 1998 and has been an active member of the artistic community.   His work has been shown in numerous local galleries and featured in the annual East Austin Studio Tour for the past 7 years.  Working under Muralist/Artist Doug Jaques in the year 2000 encouraged Holloway to keep painting large scale murals.  Starting while in college in 2003, Holloway worked for a special events company (painting scenic backdrops, faux finishing and fabricating props) and continued working there until 2009.  Between 2006 and 2011 Holloway has been creating art and showing in galleries in Austin. Also in 2011 Holloway created Fuzzy Popsycle- a hand made media company specializing in hand painted murals, signs, ads, screen printing and custom furnishings. Fuzzy Popsycle is the Samsung Beautification Winner of 2012 presented by Keep Austin Beautiful. 

Etymology—Wikipedia
The term heresy is from Greek Œ±·ºµœÅŒµœÉŒπœÇ originally meant “choice” or “thing chosen”[5], but it came to mean the “party or school of a man’s choice”[6] and also referred to that process whereby a young person would examine various philosophies to determine how to live. The word “heresy” is usually used within a Christian, Jewish, or Islamic context, and implies slightly different meanings in each. The founder or leader of a heretical movement is called a heresiarch, while individuals who espouse heresy or commit heresy are known as heretics. Heresiology is the study of heresy.

An exhibition in two parts:

February 16, 2013 - February 23, 2013
Project Space (613 Allen)

February 24, 2013 - April 19, 2013
N Space (905 Congress) 

In presenting “for an abstraction,” Culver and Williams are interested in positioning their work within the same space to alter its meaning. The exhibition itself will function as a generative act, taking the separate practices and pairing them into a new work. Both artists investigate the relationships between materiality, abstraction and their relationship to language. Culver and Williams incorporate similar dialectics within their work, between structure and experience, distance and proximity, form and formlessness, all connected through underlying structures, whether the physical support for a canvas or the gallery architecture itself. In addition, there is a correlation in their work in regards to time and memory where the familiar becomes obscured.

Culver was born in Miami, Florida 1985; he received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is an MFA candidate at The University of Texas at Austin. He has exhibited at the Night Club in Miami, Queens Nails Annex in San Francisco, and Yautepec Gallery in Mexico City, among others. This will be his first show in Texas.

Williams was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1976. He now splits his time between Austin, TX and Brooklyn, NY. Williams has received several fellowships and residencies including The American Academy in Rome, The Core Program, Artpace, and currently at Socrates Sculpture Park. Williams exhibits his work nationally and internationally.

Come one. Come all. We are opening up the gates to a zoo filled with wild metaphors and white collar crime. Prepare yourself for this once in a lifetime opportunity to have an up close and personal visit with the animals that feed on greed. They know what you had for breakfast and they will sell it to you for dinner. What a wonderful way to spend Groundhog’s Day… pointing and laughing at creatures who lurk in the shadows of giant buildings.