The paintings were culled from hundreds of small ink drawings. These drawings were created during countless meetings I have attended over the course of many years. Early on, it became clear to me that I was a much better listener while drawing. Many meetings, many drawings!

With hundreds of these small intimate drawings, I recently began to wonder what they might look like if they were scaled up into large canvasses. The results were surprisingly “operatic.” New connotations emerged as the paintings began to reveal what verbal dialogue might look like if it were captured in bold and heroic abstract form.

The new paintings seem to contain similar complexities that are exhibited in most institutional dialogues whether social, political, or academic. Gnarly, unruly forms, struggling to reconcile each other punctuate spatial moments of harmony and equilibrium. The intuitive nature of the paintings reinforce these qualities and allow the viewer direct contact with the visual and musical pulse of language. 

Our current culture has certainly borne out that this struggle remains constant and applicable. Chaos gives sway to glimpses of calmness and the discourse begins in earnest!

A comprehensive look back at our 2014 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 exhibited this year.

2014 Artists:
Erica Botkin, Leslie Moody Castro & Miguel Monroy, Emily Cayton, Ryan Cronk, Dave Culpepper, Nate Ellefson, Stephen Fishman, Scott Gelber, Jonathan Gruchawka & Mark Leavens, Hector Hernandez & Joseph Phillips, IDOKCFR/Alyssa Taylor Wendt, Lucy Kerr & Erin Miller, Sara Madandar, Kevin McNamee-Tweed, Michael Mogavero, Casey Polacheck, Scott Proctor, Andy Rihn, Sean Ripple, Joshua Saunders, Melissa Wilkinson, and Matthew Winters

It has been brought to our attention that since the 1970 discovery of the film fragment showing the half-blonde woman, half-ape creature we call I, Daughter of Kong, a number of cults, religious sects and fringe groups have appeared, around the figure of Her. Primum Movens or “unmoved mover” is the term Aristotle used to describe a being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: itself contemplating. IDOKCFR found this to be a common departure point for these disparate groups: I, Daughter of Kong as first or final cause, literally or figuratively the next Messiah, a thought-poem from the collective unconscious, a cosmology mapping gravitational forces and light—a central sphere around which all celestial bodies revolve. IDOKCFR found willing disciples, former-practitioners & citizen scientists to assist with the collection of information about these groups and their practices. This exhibit features the results of these efforts.

The I, Daughter Of Kong Center For Research (IDOKCFR) was founded in Rio Vista, California in 1978. At IDOKCFR we are devoted to active education and research pertaining to the existence and life of I, Daughter Of Kong. IDOKCFR has informed the public through traveling exhibits and screenings around the globe including Galerija Miroslav Kraljević, Zagreb, Croatia; ACRE_TV live stream, Mana Contemporary, Chicago, IL; Recitation Gallery, University of Delaware, Newark, DE; Pixilerations [v.9], New Media Fringe Festival @ First Works & Brown University, Providence, RI; Big Muddy Film Festival 34, Carbondale, IL; Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA; Inquiry Toward the Practice of Secular Magic, Co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum and the Disembodied Theater Corporation, Los Angeles, CA; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, NY and The Lab, San Francisco, CA.

Contributors: Lara Allen, Skye Ashbrook, Marian Barber, Jeffrey Beebe, Emily Cayton, Wendy Farina, Colette Gaiter, Sarah Glanville, Wayne Grim, Billy Beasty, Katelena Hernandez, Amy Hicks, Steve Jones, Alexis Karl, Kurt Keppler, Abigail King, Kristin Lucas, Colin McIntyre, Cynthia Mitchell, Moira Murdock, Robyn O’Neil, Jamie Panzer, Sandi Petrie, Marijana Riminic, Jovi Schnell, Carrie Mae Smith, Phoebe Tooke, Anjali Sundaram, Alyssa Taylor Wendt, Jade Walker, Bruce Lee Webb, Caroline Wright
Come tell us what you know.

1 bed/1 bath. tastefully redone in '11. 
cncrt flrs, parking, club house,
controlled access, shipping container,
and MORE!

A fresh approach to selling lunar landscape.
* see desk for details

Dave Culpepper graduated with a BFA in painting and printmaking from VCU. He currently resides in Austin TX and is a member of Ink Tank. David Culpeppper is a future recipient of an honorary P.H.D. www.daveculpepper.com

"The Frontiers Series” are investigations of man's interaction with the unexplored sublime, a landscape that is boundless yet terrifying.  They are not specific in their description of place or time, however they depict our interaction with an otherworldly landscape, one that is influenced by prophetic cinema, science fiction and survivalist grit.  I seek to investigate the sense of awe coupled with immense anxiety about the unknown, not through a fear of dying but through a fear of surviving.  The subplots of an otherwise master narrative consider the everyday; what would we harvest?, where would we live?, what would our ruins look like?  It is through manipulating the images digitally, through data bending and digital collage that I fracture the images, as a way to create a type of picture puzzle of limited information one might receive from a very distant location.  It is through painting them that I meditate on my own struggles with global conflict, strained economies, environmental uncertainty and political strife.

Melissa Wilkinson received her BFA in painting from Western Illinois University in 2002.  She then went on to receive her MFA in painting from Southern Illinois University in 2006.  Her work has been featured in wide reaching publications throughout the country including two editions of New American Paintings.  She has shown in various galleries nationally and internationally including South Korea, Canada and India and has won numerous awards throughout her career.  She has won several fellowships and grants including the Arkansas Arts Council Fellowship in Painting in 2012.  Her work is amongst private collections throughout the country and abroad.  She serves as Assistant Professor of Art-Painting at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro.  She lives in Bono Arkansas where she lives with her beloved husband and three dogs. www.melissawilkinson.net

Unmentionables...... Work initially inspired by my favorite pair of Juicy Couture sweats; they leave much to the imagination while at the same time not quite so subtly alluding to what we are all thinking about..... butts, balls, boobs, blobs, and sweat stains..... right? Or is it just me? right?

Scott Proctor is an artist living in Austin TX.  Scott received his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. Scott has shown his work extensively throughout Texas as well as the United States, including Austin's "20 To Watch" exhibition in 2009. Proctor is one of the founding members of MASS Gallery in Austin and continues his position there.  Scott is the head of the Ceramics and Sculpture Department at Temple College, Temple, TX. He continues to maintain a studio in east Austin.

Waters of sorrow and tranquility. Havoc, movement, and finally suspension. Layers of sediment from a lake, from dry riverbeds, from buildings under construction, from dust settling on the paper in my studio. These aren’t creationist works. Well, they might be. Tsunamis, lichen sent to Mars to check for water, walleye and bass my granddad caught in Arkansas, the same granddad who served in Okinawa. B-29 overhead. Black rain. What does radiation feel like underwater?

These works are culled from personal narratives that reflect on universal narratives of disaster and transformation. This work is curious and foolhardy. It’s a reaction, a question, an archive, and a collection of reinterpretations that consider an uncertain present and future. Orderly and absurd, these works reflect on our existence in this floating world.
 
Ryan Cronk was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, but grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He received his BFA from the School of The Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 2000. He received his MFA in printmaking from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010. He currently lives and works in Austin, TX.

In this exhibition, we study the nature of man-made structures and their journeys. We choose to personify and romanticize man-made objects and spaces that are composed of common building materials by instilling in them a history and future of their relationships to the living. These objects include frameworks for housing, “bones” of monuments, and two-dimensional depictions of their various states. The work weaves in and out of its own timeline, capturing single moments as well as broad swathes of its own experience, making physical evidence of what is normally passing and intangible. It is intended that through traversing from one temporally isolated work to another, a viewer can construct their own loose narrative around the pieces based on their physical, aural, and visual engagement. In this process of experience and analysis, real objects become entangled with romantic imagination, and through a phenomenological approach there is born a physical union between the warmth of possibility and the weight of past certainty.

With these ideas in mind, one might ask themselves some larger questions: Is divorcing one’s self from the past and building a new future as simple as rebuilding a house, or tearing down a monument? What do the things we manipulate, occupy, and leave behind really say about us?

Jonathan Gruchawka is an artist currently studying at the University of Texas at Austin. He was born in New Jersey in 1987 and has since resided in other states across the American south and east coast such as Georgia, Connecticut, and Tennessee. In these experiences Gruchawka has gathered many perspectives in his approach to art-making and strives to find some of the roots and common bonds that command universal understanding, emphasizing the importance of experience, interaction, and personal reflection. Jonathan has participated in several group exhibitions at the former Xue gallery in Dallas, featured work in DCCCD’s League of Innovation, and was a finalist for the Dallas Art Dealer’s Association’s (DADA) Edith Baker scholarship, featuring work at Irving Arts Center.

Mark Leavens was born in 1991 in Houston, Texas. In 2014 he graduated with a BA in studio art from The University of Texas at Austin, where he first studied architectural design and public relations before moving on to the study of painting and other visual arts that include photography and sculpture. His geometrically abstract style investigates perspective and his interest in formal elements of interior structures. He has exhibited at the Visual Arts Center in Austin and is currently keeping up with an avid studio practice in the city of Austin as well.

SUMMERSCOOL is a bridge between studio practice and exhibition production for young artists between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. This mentorship based program provides training and insight as artists prepare for their exhibitions coupled with a hands on experience of managing an art space. Selected artists receive two months of personal access to Co-Lab Project's administrators, curators, artists and assistants to learn practical professional development skills required in the visual arts industry. 

“The World of Wrestling” is a recent collaboration between visual artist Erin Miller and dance/performance artist Lucy Kerr. Miller and Kerr applied to SUMMERSCOOL separately and were introduced to one another by the Co-Lab committee. They became interested in working together and combining their different mediums and conceptual approaches to art. Miller works mostly in two dimensional mediums, creating abstract shapes and colors to embody her unfamiliar feelings when being in various familiar environments. Kerr works primarily with the body and avant-garde dance, and her content is inspired by the wonder, tragedy, and difficulty of being a human in the world. "The World of Wrestling" blends both artists' styles and perspectives in a beautiful and haunting installation that immerses the audience and suspends familiar perceptions of time. In a repainting of the natural world, Miller's large scale drawings of an abstract sky are overlapped with time-lapse sky videos, while the gallery ground is transformed by an all encompassing floor sculpture. On opening night, a slow, solo performance will fill the space, juxtaposing what we consider "nature" with the existence of human consciousness and the social symbols ingrained in the everyday. Miller will also take up the outside mural space with abstract drawing, blurring the lines between the indoor gallery art space and the outside world that serves as direct inspiration for the gallery space. "The World of Wrestling" is ultimately an epic and honest reflection upon the absurd; upon the act of navigating the every day and the sudden moments of anxiety, nausea, sadness, amazement, and confusion that may strike at any moment, perhaps when we look above at the sky.

Lucy Kerr received a B.A. in Theater and Dance and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to being an emerging scholar of Philosophy and Dance Studies, Lucy is a creator of avant-garde and post-modern dance and video as well as being a choreographer of contemporary dance for social change. Lucy was the most recent grand prize winner of the George H. Mitchell/Co-op Awards for her work with her thesis, Recognizing Possibility: Intersections of Disability, Contemporary Dance, and Social Philosophy and her mixed-ability dance-theater project, The Way You Move Your Body, which was presented as part of the 2013 Cohen New Works Festival. Lucy’s work has also been presented at the 2014 Frontera Festival, the 2014 Lab Series at UT, and the 2011 Cohen New Works Festival. Lucy is looking forward to training and performing with world renowned Butoh artist Ko Murobushi at Impulstanz in Vienna this coming August. She is very excited to be able to present her first gallery exhibition as part of Co-Lab’s SUMMERSCOOL and for the new possibilities this opportunity has opened up for her. 

Erin Miller is a senior at the University of Texas pursuing a BFA in Visual Art Studies. Mainly working in two dimensional mediums, her work can often be identified through her repeated use of abstract colors and shapes to reimagine the environment around her. Erin’s work has previously been shown at Richmond University’s Art Space in Florence, Italy and has also been published in Analecta 40 Literary and Arts Journal. Participation in Co-Lab’s SUMMERSCOOL program has given Erin the opportunity to work on a larger scale for the first time.

SUMMERSCOOL is a bridge between studio practice and exhibition production for young artists between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. This mentorship based program provides training and insight as artists prepare for their exhibitions coupled with a hands on experience of managing an art space. Selected artists receive two months of personal access to Co-Lab Project's administrators, curators, artists and assistants to learn practical professional development skills required in the visual arts industry.

Peruse over 20 or 100 books. Talk to the bookshop clerk for a few minutes. Go outside and smoke pot behind the shed with your friends.  

Kevin McNamee-Tweed is an artist and curator based in Austin, Texas. www.kevinmcnameetweed.com

uring a relay race, members of a team work together by take turns performing for prescribed portion of a race. One person performs and then “passes the baton” for the other person to take over. In our case, Joseph and I decided to work towards our shared artistic goals by relaying throughout the creation process. We accomplished this by taking turns in leading the creation of pieces, one person making a creative decision and then passing the metaphorical baton to the other to continue in the next creative step. In this way, we were each able to make decisions that were wholly from our own perspectives and aesthetics, yet still explore new directions and end up in unexpected places. Both Joseph and I believe that it is very important to share information and ideas throughout the creative process. Creating Relay has developed a strong sense of mutual trust and respect between us.

Hector Hernandez was born in Laredo, Texas. His practices involve Photography, Sculpture and Installation. He is founding member of Los Outsiders art collective, recipient of the 2012 Austin Critics Award for best group show curation. He currently lives and works in Austin, Texas. http://www.hernandezarts.com

Joseph Phillips is an artist based in Austin, Texas. After receiving a degree in Art and Art History from Skidmore College in 2000, Phillips returned to Austin where he was a founding partner of the non-profit gallery and studio complex Big Medium, the East Austin Studio Tour, Sodalitas Collaborative Art Group, and The Texas Biennial. He has exhibited his work throughout the U.S., with shows in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Kansas City. His work has been included in numerous collections and museum shows, and has been published in multiple national publications. http://www.josephphillipsart.com

More is more. 
Heavy on content, light on meaning, Entertainment System takes a look at contemporary imagination and how nothing seems worthy of our sustained attention.

PART 1: TIGHT BOXES
Passive media consumption and light interactivity: key ingredients of perpetual distraction. 

PART 2: EPICUREAN ALIEN
Now that everyone is the executive chef of their own planet, how will you fare when faced with the task of decorating the ultimate surrealist dessert?

PART 3: HELL. YEAH, SCIENCE?
Our species is doomed. Observe this simple bacteria evolve into our new planetary overlord right before your eyes. Next time, clean the tank.

Stephen Hal Fishman is a designer and video artist, creating experimental animated films, music videos, interactive installations and live visual accompaniment for music and dance under the monikers Fresh Fuckerman and Mac&Cheez. He also comprises the visual component of the multimedia performance group, Total Unicorn. His video and animation work has been featured in the Boston Underground Film Festival, Silverlake Film Festival, Citrus Cel Animation Festival, Experience Music Project and Sci-fi Museum Film Festival, Lumen Eclipse, Austin Museum of Digital Art Digital Showcase, Visual Art Center at UT Austin Shorts Program, Dallas Video Fest, Trans-Pecos Festival, Teleportal Readings, New Media Art and Sound Summit and the Fusebox Festival. Stephen was born in New York City, but raised in Central California. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Southern California Cinema-Television program in 1995. He has lived and worked in Austin, TX since 2005.

A warped, nostalgic Jimmy Buffett experience. 
An absurdist celebration of Buffett’s 1970’s musical output and his undeniable influence on culture. The show will be a carnival-like approach to the Cult of the Island Lifestyle.

Who Likes Hammocks?????!!!!!!?!?!!?

Andy Rihn was born in 1975 in San Antonio, Texas and raised in South Texas. In the last 15 years he has founded and starred in a performance art group, recorded with a U.S. touring French rock band, carried on an annual postering campaign, hosted an interview show for Volcom Ent., and released a book with Monofonus Press titled ‘The Tiger’s Last Tooth’. In addition, his installations, performances, sculptures, and drawings have shown at El Cosmico, MASS, Okay Mountain, Gallery Lombardi, Common House, The LMNL, and other Texas galleries. He has also had solo shows at MASS, Highwire Arts, Monofonus Compound and Yellow Jacket Social Club, as well as creating and curating shows for Darkroom Gallery, Frontera Fest, and Fusebox @ Okay Mountatain. In 2011 Rihn was the recipient of a grant from The Idea Fund, through The Andy Warhol Foundation and created and directed ‘Texas’ Longest Hammer Choir’, a soundscape, art happening and film shoot. Also an active member of MASS Gallery, he currently lives and works in Austin, Texas with his wife and two children.

Peppermint Doorstop is document to events that happen out of the public eye. A collection of stolen moments that can only be attained by certain levels of access and timing. The exhibition consists of photography, video, sculpture and mixed media. After viewing Peppermint Doorstop you will be affected. So much so that you will scream out "i cannot believe that Matthew John Winters willed this show into existence!"

Matthew John Winters was born in St. Louis, schooled in Chicago, and resides in Austin, TX. www.matthewjohnwinters.com

“Teetering with metaphor, iconically depicted, and touching subjects of mass consumption, complex designography, the stupid, and the sublime. It was at this point that I basically told y'all to buy [Matthew John Winters'] artwork because he is dedicated and you would be happy with the investment.” – art writer J. Haley

Joshua Saunders shows new work (collages, sculpture, images). Josh T Franco often writes his artist statements (an Austin art worlds secret no one cares about). The process begins when Joshua sends Josh a rambling email with images and some punctuation. Josh writes back with flourish and craftiness. This new work starts from found flashcards (shit, did he just tell a secret?). It is terrifying to respond to vocabulary cards with more word [sic]. So I am done. In flashcard spirit, the following (and title) are sampled from Joshua’s rambling email. (Is Josh lazy or just feeling blue?) Read these. See the show.

3 - 6 of these
40 x 60 ish
confusing object to image relationship
perfect / content-less / same time
blue implications
human emotional experience
question intent
upscaled / less benign / more cunning
who the fuck took these pictures
all my love.

Josh T Franco

Joshua Saunders is an Austin-based artist who works largely with the paper detritus of everyday life from today and recent decades. He also creates poignant assemblage sculptures from everyday ephemera. www.joshuasaunders.net

The collaborative project with Miguel Monroy and Leslie Moody Castro is a site-specific video exploring the dynamics that exist within Co-Lab as a project space, as a space for exhibiting, and as a space for viewing. The collaborative nature of the project also means that any outcome is possible. While Monroy has explored the dynamics that exist in museums and commercial galleries, he has yet to isolate the various dynamics at play within such a small grassroots organization. Additionally, his voice offers one of objectivity, as he is unfamiliar with the role that Co-Lab Projects plays within the greater Austin area arts community. For Monroy the project would be one that illustrates the various cast of characters that define the various communities in a silent interaction with the space as a point of intersection. For Co-Lab Projects this would be an example of the multiple players at hand that make the art ecosystem of Austin function within the microcosm that is the physical project space.

Miguel Monroy, Mexico City, 1975
His practice involves sculpture, installation, video, photographic series and some other formats where organized systems are in conflict with themselves, reducing to absurdity everyday situations. Has been fellow of Young Creators FONCA program to suppor his artistic practice in 2003, 2007 and 2011, and received an editorial support grant from La Colección/Fundación Jumex to make Transporte transportado book. Has been invited to develop artist residencies in Switzerland and Canada. His work has been presented individually and collectively in Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, NGBK + Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin Germany, Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels Belgium, Taka Ishii Gallery in Kyoto Japan, Leme Gallery in Sao Paulo Brazil, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, El Museo de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid Spain among others.

Leslie Moody Castro, Austin, 1982
Leslie Moody Castro lives between Mexico City and Austin, Texas. Moody Castro earned a Master’s degree in 2010 at the University of Texas at Austin in Museum Education and Museum Studies. During her time in Austin she co-found Co-Lab projects, curated independently and worked at the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Lora Reynolds Gallery, and Artpace San Antonio, and her most recent independent curatorial projects have been collaborative and international in scope. Moody Castro remains committed to expanding the visual arts world in Austin by creating moments of international connections and conversations.

Botkin is in the middle of on-going documentary project featuring Moon Trees. Initially, these trees were kept secret. The Forest Service and NASA did not make detailed records of their locations after their Apollo 14 mission (as seeds). As time passed and the Space Race came to an end, the trees became unimportant and forgotten. Today, many of the known surviving trees are here because they were marked with a plaque, but a majority of these trees have “slipped through the cracks of history” and are only locatable by memory and word of mouth.

Currently, Botkin has seen and photographed 45 trees. During her photographic pilgrimages she tries to gather as much information as possible, this includes maps, pamphlets, tree seeds and other paraphernalia that the host location may offer. Upon the completion of the project, she hopes to have a published book of images and collected materials for the Moon Trees’ 50th birthday in 2021.

Botkin gravitates toward the absurd and her practice fluctuates between bodies of work where she examines her place in society, interactions with other people, and cultural or societal concerns of the environment in which she lives. Both shows (at Project Space and N Space) examine the fleeting fame society assigns to people or objects.

Botkin was born and raised in Northern California. She received her BA from Humboldt State University and MFA from The University of Texas at Austin. Botkin has recently relocated back to northern California where she lives and teaches.

Botkin is endlessly fascinated with pop culture and the average person’s desire to achieve celebrity status. Through her participation as the subject, she has created Valentine cards and a range of customizable objects including blankets, key chains clocks and photo slates. This work aims to reveal the absurdity of the value system surrounding what is “cool” and who decides.

Botkin gravitates toward the absurd and her practice fluctuates between bodies of work where she examines her place in society, interactions with other people, and cultural or societal concerns of the environment in which she lives. Both shows (at Project Space and N Space) examine the fleeting fame society assigns to people or objects.

Botkin was born and raised in Northern California. She received her BA from Humboldt State University and MFA from The University of Texas at Austin. Botkin has recently relocated back to northern California where she lives and teaches.

Cody Ledvina will create a mind puzzle on the side of the Co-Lab exhibition space. It will be white and black. It will be functional. Only your eyes are allowed to wonder through this fabulous design world.

Delta opens windows into worlds beyond; two nested installations exploring six possible afterworlds based in myth, internet, & reality. Using ancient iconography & new technology New Media Artist Noah Spidermen exhibits “ΓGamma” an immersive video projection experience & “∆Delta” a virtual reality journey through— Heaven, Hell, & Purgatory.

“Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift— Google it.” 
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

Noah Spidermen is a New Media Artist schooled in traditional Animation & Film. He currently lives/works in Austin, TX & The Internet.

written with billy fatzinger
music & sound design by zac traeger

As an artist, I am most concerned with existence and not being. In any given moment, I’m in a specific place, and in the next moment, I feel like I exist somewhere else. Time shapes my existence. My attempts to untangle and make sense of time originate in my emigration from IRAN to the UNITED STATES, a set of experiences I have deemed “Lost in Space and Time.” Without MY body to constitute physical existence, time would be meaningless. When I decide to go to a point on the other side of the world known as Iran, I pay no mind to my body and go. However when I return and open my eyes, I have no memory of my journey to Iran because my body has remained in another point on Earth known as the United States.

Sara Madandar was born in Iran. She is getting her MFA at UT Austin. She currently works in painting, sculpture, video and performance. She materializes the issues of existing in an in-between space through construction and deconstruction of the canvas. Her work evokes a sensation out of destruction and touches on the cultural displacements of corporality. www.saramadandar.com

Titles of works to be presented in Nathan Ellefson’s upcoming exhibition Soft Chop are embedded throughout five hypothetical situations:

1. Rice Nude Purchasing Assistant shows you this trick: the tuna can may be tested on the ankle for freshness.

2. An XL calamine bread bowl is presented behind the couch.

3. For the crude shortstop there are clear-headed lunch ideas, e.g. chew at the pastille toenail/tapioca fanzine becomes wet in the bathtub/ salt cod dream weaver is here to stay.

4. At home the strawberry sandpiper is turning out bark songs:
The long road leads
(and the winding road
and the road
filled with rocks) 
to the spider’s anus.

5. In the testing area at the cold-cut festival a question is posed: is there room for backseat ideas? Ideas like: there is bread and there are standards. I had the lamb face salad. And on the way back I got out of the car at the grey colored hill area to perform a self-reflexive meadowlarking ritual.

Nathan Ellefson was born in 1988 in Seattle, WA. He received his MFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2013 and now lives/works in Austin.

Instagram: colabprojectstx
#bitresrip
#cleancache

For the month of February, Sean Ripple will take the reigns of Co-Lab’s Instagram feed. Each work uploaded can be thought of as a gift (if you choose to screengrab) or simply streaming content to keep the lint in your pocket/the compact mirror in your purse company. Experiments, requests, secrets, car rides, bathrooms, bookstores, narratives, confessions, drawings, interventions, performances, patterns, back alleys, trash bins, #zzzzzzzzz, and stuff….

Sean Ripple is an artist living in Austin, TX. www.seanripple.net