New chapters are important. Every six weeks, a haircut. A medium chapter break. Every week, the laundry. A small chapter break. Every day, for sanity's sake, there are the dishes, making the bed, coffee, breakfast. Tiny chapter breaks. Leaving Texas behind to move out West. A very big chapter break. It has been nearly two years, though, and self-imposed obligations call out. And so, a return to Texas. A return to Austin.

By the time this exhibition opens, we will know who the next president is. And, no matter how it turns out, we will absolutely be entering a new chapter. Voters from every generation maintain that this is the oddest election year they’ve ever seen. Definitely the lewdest, the cruelest. The one that really pulls back the curtain on the true state of our country. Look around. Humans are moving into a new time. We’ve crossed over. And it is painful. No one knows what they are doing. Not even the people who insist that they do.

Congratulations, by the way, on making it this far. Do you remember what it was supposed to feel like? Conceiving two-thousand-sixteen was something for daydreaming teenagers sitting in the back row of the classroom, doodling in the margins of unfinished homework, fidgeting, listening to loud bands on crummy home-dubbed cassettes waiting for one bell or another to ring. Figuring out how you could possibly make it to this then-imaginary world that surely could and would hold unknown pleasure, chaos, and the steep uphill climb toward something resembling middle age.

There is hope that you can still find, in that indiscernible web you might refer to as “your network”, people willing to take risks and meander towards the unknown. To really take it day by day. To collaborate on something like music, art, publishing, or printing. “Dying” mediums eking out an existence that lives outside the forms we’ve allowed into our lives, albeit truly grating against our true selves.

A teenage punk wonders, “Will this ethos, a feeling only a handful hold onto, still determine decisions down the line?” The answer, much to your (usually financial) detriment, is “yes, yes, yes.” So, here we are. Still doing things for reasons other than making money. For reasons that elude most proper capitalists. For reasons that keep many people alive. If for nothing else but that sentimental “community” concept. The one that tends falls apart under the microscope.

It has taken a collaborative community that not one of us could have predetermined. A job leads you to a person, and then another person, and another, until, finally, many years later an exhibition rears its head from the pond and makes for land. And here we are. Land. An exhibition proposed over half a decade ago by Tim Kerr, and only now coming together in a form very different than imagined.

For two weeks, the six artists involved will start at a point that looks like the dot at the end of a question mark. From there, they will work on their own and together to produce an exhibition inside a massive one-hundred-year-old building in downtown Austin, three blocks from the capital of Texas where, you imagine, a lot of really intense energy is currently going down. Where everyone is preparing themselves for the next chapter. For the next era. For the next “future.” – Russell Etchen

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Artist BIOS:


A former resident of both Portland, OR and San Francisco, CA, Johanna Jackson currently lives in Los Angeles, CA. Jackson has exhibited her work widely throughout the United States and abroad since 1999. Her works are part of the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Henry Art Gallery and the Portland Art Museum.

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Chris Johanson

multi media artist that tries to fill up time positively, not interested in one medium unless that medium is what some call living. Up for selfish expression as well as collaborative living. Often spends time considering food as the most beautiful sculpture, using color texture and taste as important to an important ritual of creating and sharing food. Seeks out bent life and glitching poetry in people and places. Looks for places where things can grow and believes that we make this or that happen collectively.

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Dana Dart-McLean

I am an artist, art therapist (MFTi), and art teacher interested in

what paintings tell us
about mapping
what is seen.

I care for the quantum leap--do you? Let's talk.

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Andy Coolquitt is perhaps most widely known for a house, a performance/studio/domestic space that began as his master's thesis project at the University of Texas at Austin in 1994, and continues to the present day. He has recently completed a four month residency/exhibition at Artpace in San Antonio, TX, titled Studio Art……………Period Room. In 2014, Coolquitt was artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, which culminated with an exhibition, Multi-Marfa Room, at the Locker Plant in Marfa. Recent solo exhibitions include somebody place at Lisa Cooley, in New York, This Much at Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna, Austria, and no I didn't go to any museums here I hate museums museums are just stores that charge you to come in there are lots of free museums here but they have names like real stores at Maryam Nassir Zadeh in New York. In 2013, Coolquitt was an artist-in-residence at 21er Haus in Vienna, Austria, and opened an exhibition there that July. In Fall 2012, he presented a major solo exhibition titled attainable excellence at AMOA-Arthouse in Austin, Texas. This exhibition was organized by the Blaffer Museum in Houston, and opened there in May 2013. A full-color monograph published by the University of Texas Press accompanied the exhibition and features contributions from Dan Fox, Matthew Higgs, Jan Tumlir, and Rachel Hooper.

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Tamar Ettun (b.1982, Jerusalem) is a Brooklyn-based sculptor and performance artist, she is the founding director of The Moving Company. Ettun received her MFA from Yale University in 2010 where she was awarded the Alice English Kimball Fellowship. She studied at the Cooper Union in 2007, while earning her BFA from Bezalel Academy.

Her numerous exhibitions and performances include: Uppsala Museum of Art, Bryant Park, Sculpture Center, Diana Lowenstein Gallery, Fridman Gallery, The Knockdown Center, Zurcher Gallery, The Watermill Center, Madison Square Park, e-flux, Transformer, The Queens Museum, Braverman Gallery, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Herzelia Museum, The Jewish Museum, Andrea Meislin Gallery, PERFORMA 13, PERFORMA 11, PERFORMA 09.

Ettun has been honored by several organizations including Iaspis, Franklin Furnace, The Pollock Krasner, Fountainhead Residency, The Watermill Center, MacDowell Fellowship, Abron's Art Center, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Art Production Fund, Socrates Sculpture Park, Artis, RECESS, and Triangle.

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If self-expression has no boundaries, why do people keep putting labels on it?

For those of you with scorecards, Tim Kerr's first art award was winning a fire prevention poster contest in elementary school. Like any self-respecting artistic outcast in Texas, he moved to Austin after high school graduation where he has lived ever since with his wife Beth. He earned a degree in painting and photography at the University of Texas at Austin and studied the latter with Garry Winogrand. Tim was awarded a Ford Foundation Grant while at UT. He won a slot two years in a row for the new songwriter's contest at the Kerrville Folk Festival during this time as well.

After college graduation, Tim became involved musically and artistically with the early stages of the DIY punk/hardcore/self-expression movement. The idea that anyone could and should participate in self-expression burst every door and window inside of him wide open. He was a key member of bands that have made recordings for such labels as Touch & Go, Estrus, Sympathy For The Record Industry, In The Red, Sub Pop, and Kill Rock Stars. Tim also produced and recorded bands for all the labels above and more, both in the US and overseas. Journalists and critics have cited bands that Tim was a member of as having been a major factor in starting everything from punkfunk, skaterock, grunge, and garage; and all have played an important role in what is known, for better or worse, as the US indie scene today. The Big Boys, Poison 13, Bad Mutha Goose, Lord High Fixers, and Monkey Wrench are just some of the bands Tim was a founding member of. Some of Tim's art from then is now in books depicting that period. He shared bills with the likes of Grace Jones, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Fugazi, Black Flag, Africa Bambaataa, and X to name a few. He has toured in the States and abroad. Here is an extensive website that a fan from Portugal of all things Tim Kerr.

Tim is now being asked to show his artwork in the US and abroad from galleries including PS1 in New York, 96 Gillespie in London, Slowboy Gallery in Germany, and Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. He was honored to have been selected as the first artist for the Arlington Transit's Art On The Bus program in 2010. He has also been involved in painting murals in Texas, Nashville, New York and California. The summer of 2015, Tim will have a solo show at the Rosa Parks Museum. He was also given a residency through Void Gallery in Derry, Northern Ireland, AS220 in Providence, and I.A.M. in Berlin. Tim was also asked by artist Matt Stokes to help with his pieces The Gainsborough Packet (The Baltic & 176 Gallery), These Are The Days (AMOA), and Catata Profana.

Tim was inducted into the Texas Music Hall of Fame by popular vote in 1996 which he says he is still honored, humbled, and confused by. The Experience Music Project Museum in Seattle asked to record an oral history with him in 2000 and he has donated a lot of his personal archives to the Austin History Library. He composes and records music for several choreographers who work in Austin. These pieces have been performed in Austin, New York, and California. He created soundtrack work for films such as Bill Daniel's documentary, “Bozo Texino”, and Jan Krawitz documentary, “Drive-In Blues”. Tim's art is on album covers, posters, skateboard graphics, and advertisements and a book devoted to Tim's art has been reissued through Monofonus Press. From 1990 to 2000, along with his library job, he also worked in a stained glass studio building windows, fusing, and sandblasting glass.

There are many interviews with Tim in a variety of magazines, web zines, and books. He has been asked to speak on panels and also gave a talk at the college in Ljubljana, Slovenia about himself and his involvement then and now. The approach of an upcoming documentary being made about him, and also one about his first band the Big Boys, has Tim honored and surprised.

Through all of his life, he has never felt comfortable with labels and their restrictions. When someone confines him to one label, they do themselves and Tim a disservice. He is painting more than ever and is also now playing Irish and Old Time music with friends in Austin and wherever his travels take him. In Tim’s own words, “I'm not dead yet. I am still active and as proud as I am of all that has happened before, I hope I have not seen the best thing yet.”

In the words of his friend Dan Higgs, “Keep Breathing til you stop, because there’s a whole lot of todays before tomorrow.”

Artists: Kate Barbee, Gingi Statman, John Welsh, Seth Murchison, Rowan Summers, Yamin Li, Joshua Orsburn, and p1nkstar

SUMMERSCOOL 2016 culminates in a group show featuring eight exciting young artists exploring the past, present and the desire for a better future through a variety of lenses. Fond memories are decaying, hope is balanced by loss and longing. A star is born but the light it exudes is likely only a mirrored surface. Voices echo from the past and are swallowed up by the constant buzz and background noise of contemporary life. The most private moments are made public and put on display for objective scrutiny and personal reflection. This communal space created is contemplative and reverent yet peppered with dark humor and an unironic playfulness that invites the viewer to explore and participate. The works serve individually as vignettes of personal struggles, transitions and intimate histories providing multiple takes on identity and the complications of personal relationships. Together, they weave a larger narrative mining personal tragedy, childhood, family and fantasy for material. The extremely personal nature of each artist’s work renders them all the more relatable as they raise questions and present problems that are fundamental to the human condition.

SUMMERSCOOL is an intensive program that prepares dedicated artists to propose, refine, and execute an exhibition concept in a professional and supportive environment. These selected artists have spent the last several months participating in our post-art-school curriculum which includes professional development in gallery preparation, art handling and installation, artist statements, bios, and talks, application preparation, grant writing, and community networking. The 2016 program is sponsored in part by Metropolitan Gallery.

I continually trace between the language of urban densities and peripheral spaces of dissolve—each condition becoming recognized in the other, the results are photographs, sculptures, and installations referencing uncanny instances of time and place. In these conditions my works formulate place as vestige where a vernacular is gathered through distance, as from the passing train in the landscape or from a bird’s-eye view overhead. Recently I have been mining roadways and streetscapes for signs in varying states of obsolescence. I produce facsimiles of these structures as sculpture and I also work with these signs in-situ, converting them into large cameras from which I make photographs from their position and point of view.
 
Rebecca Solnit discusses America’s “amnesiac landscape” as one of erasure, razing the structures of our history as means of escape and control. I use my work as a tool to investigate the American ruin, an endangered species as Solnit describes. In a nation of erasures it is necessary to detect emerging conditions of the ruin as structures that are calibrated with America’s amnesiac tendencies. The lights that still glow in an otherwise sign of nothingness seem to state, in a very distinct way, the ironies undergirding a nation of erasures.
 
When signs lose their subjects, their information panels, they become infrastructural relics. Instead of signifying points of commerce through sign as metaphor, they signify—through metonymy—the very antithesis of a functioning capitalist economy, summed up in terms of stagnation, ends, lack, and ultimately, the ruin. There is an untethering of the literal sign structures from the commercial buildings on which they were previously attached. They become individually autonomous within a post-commercial taxonomy.
 
My photographs come out of an ethos of photography as ritual as opposed to reflex. I make each camera that I use and generally I make two types of photographs. One type emerges directly from my appropriation and conversion of empty signs or otherwise underutilized spaces into cameras while the other type is of open water conditions in South Louisiana. I find that the first type is anchored in logic, in a set of rules that determine all variables involved while the second type is open, floating at the water’s edge.
 
The sign structure photographs are typically composed of a strict grid of individual images, resulting in many slightly shifted perspectives of streets, parking lots, and strip malls; they have a complicated or ambivalent relationship to place while the waterscapes are saturated in a specific and poetic connection to place. The open water photographs are made at the infrastructural ends where blacktop or gravel meets water at land’s edge. I have been focusing these efforts in the South Louisiana landscape, where land’s edge is swiftly losing ground. These open water photographs have larger image diameters that overlap; the photographs are large in scale, opening the viewer to the sublime sense of the landscape that I experience beyond the levees.
 
The two ways in which I make photographs seem to be anchors along my own gamut of how I experience conditions of place. By working both centrifugally and centripetally, moving from the urban-out and the rural-in, my work remains in flux, continually disassembling notions of boundary and threshold.

Adam Crosson was born in Arkansas in 1982. He holds an MFA from The University of Texas at Austin and a BARCH from the Fay Jones School of Architecture. Crosson was recently awarded a Core artist-in-residence fellowship through the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for the 2016-17 term. In 2014, Crosson was awarded the inaugural Dean's Royal College Exchange Fellowship allowing him to spend a term at the Royal College of Art, London where he participated in two group exhibitions. In 2014, Crosson was also awarded the Umlauf Prize and a fellowship to attend the Vermont Studio Center residency program. Recent solo exhibitions include Soft Wax at Pump Project, and Intermodal at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and museum, both in Austin. In 2015, Crosson was included in group exhibitions in Providence, RI and Houston, TX. He has organized exhibitions in Texas, London, and Vermont. www.adamcrosson.com

YOUNGSONS is the collaborative painting duo of Drew Liverman and Michael Ricioppo. Rather than work alongside one another and impose two contrasting sensibilities onto one canvas, the artists trade turns at every stroke, at every idea point and counterpoint from detail to composition. There is a visual rhyming here, a syncopation, perhaps even a punning. You can catch a stroke as assured as the most calligraphic graffito right next to, or even obliterated by, the blind scratchings of a caveman squatting with primeval lamp of animal fat and head swimming with lust. The results are accumulative, energetic, omnivorous, and almost always organized into images that flirt with but never want to wholly emerge from the zest of the painting process itself. www.youngsons.org

For "Live Free with Guys" Drew Liverman and Mike Ricioppo have created a giant mural on the corner of Congress & East 8th Street as well as mounted an exhibition of artwork in the storefront windows and interior of DEMO GALLERY.

Michael Ricioppo is a fabricator and artist currently living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He splits his time between cultures and disciplines, with one foot in the rough-neck world of high-end finish construction, and the other in the “no rules, no plan, no matter” art world. Michael has experimented with most things craft, and all things art, from video to theatre, printmaking to ceramics, stone carving to poetry, and pop music to art furniture; everything is of interest. Making is what’s most central to his varied practice, and if there is any plan at all, it is to be unafraid and open. www.apartmanstudio.com

Drew Liverman is an artist and designer living in Austin, TX. Since receiving his BFA in painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2002, Drew’s drawing, painting and installation work has been featured in Beautiful Decay Magazine and shown in The Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, Scotland; Big Medium in Austin, Texas; and the Lawndale Art Center in Houston, Texas. In addition to his personal work, Drew contributes to the Austin, TX based art collective, Boozefox and has been on the staff of MASS Gallery in Austin, TX since 2007. www.drewliverman.org