Darkening Warmth
Elizabeth Schwaiger

Check out the exhibition review from Sightlines.

Elizabeth Schwaiger’s research-based practice exists at the confluence of luxury and disaster. In Darkening Warmth, stand-ins for the accumulated worth of human existence — purpose-driven societies and summits, artwork in the studio or in a collection, focused laborers at their crafts, decadent interior trappings, and other more subtle depictions — all these are brought in Schwaiger’s paintings in raucous collision with their potential demise: flooding, decrepitude, overgrowth, and abandonment. Each of the artist’s works present our best attempts at permanence, at immortality, or even simple long lasting value, in stark contrast to cataclysmic and indifferent powers beyond anyone’s individual influence. Her work brings into appropriate scale our own strivings, and the looming ends to which they might succumb. They are a call to action to a great reprioritization of our aims as individuals and as a society with the chance yet of holding back the tide.

Elizabeth Schwaiger is an Austin Expat now based in Brooklyn. She earned her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2011. Recent projects include Expo Chicago and Untitled San Francisco with Jane Lombard Gallery; Kairos, a solo exhibition at Wild Project in Manhattan’s East Village; and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency Program at Rauschenberg’s studio complex in Captiva Florida. Her work and words have been featured in The Catlin Guide, fields magazine, Floorr, Fusebox Written & Spoken, Newfound, Conflict of Interest, Sightlines, The Austin Chronicle, and several other notable publications. Schwaiger is represented by Jane Lombard Gallery in Chelsea, NYC. Her first solo exhibition with the gallery will be on view this coming January.

Circular Score
CC Calloway, Maia Snow, Hannah Spector, and Anika Todd

February 1st - 29th, 2020
Open Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 12-6pm

Closing performances by Myf Mars and Bella Cheng, plus readings by Leah Dawson, Kristen Steenbeeke, Tim O'Brien, and Max Seifert: Saturday, February 29th, 5-7pm, BYOB or drinks available at Medici

Circular Score is a collaborative exhibition with video and performance works by CC Calloway, Maia Snow, Hannah Spector, and Anika Todd. The show centers upon a rotating stage -- each artist translating the stage through the lens of their own practice. The culmination of these explorations is a multichannel sound and video piece within Co-Lab Projects, with the stage at the center. The videos portray each artist’s exploration of the stage outside the context of the gallery. What accumulates is the imprint of the object in action and the potentiality of a moving platform. One object becomes many expressions. The multichannel video moves throughout the space, engaging the viewer's body within each performative or digitalized action.

Utilizing the rotating stage as a platform, CC Calloway animates static images, technology, voice, and found objects. Using her hands as an actor and performative tool to weave together a narrative remixing disparate source material.

Maia Snow uses the stage as a space to discuss gender. Through the circular action of binding, Snow moves deeper into their relationship with masculinity and the female body. Snow's piece serves as a personal meditation.

In creating collaborative performances, Hannah Spector uses the stage as a reason for experimental movement and storytelling. Through poetic action, Spector focuses on circular imagery, language, and sound to sculpt disruptive visual poems. Each video is based on her verbal and visual relationship with the other performer.

Anika Todd surveys the circularity of the stage within the digital realm. Using photogrammetry and narrative, she asks what it means to be able to fully see the dimensionality of a person or object. 

Circular Score is conceptually based on the happening Three Evenings on a Revolving Stage, which took place in January 1976 at Judson Memorial Church. Artists Julia Hayward, Nam June Paik, Jean Dupuy, Phillip Glass, Simone Forti, and numerous others created live performances atop a small rotating stage. With this as a launching point, Circular Score explores what happens when a common object is translated through personal tongues in fragmented space.

CC CALLOWAY is an artist and writer based in Austin, Texas. She was born and raised in Augusta, Georgia. CC has exhibited widely across the US, most notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia and Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. She has participated in residencies, having most recently finished a fellowship at Oxbow School of Art in the summer of 2019. Recently moving to Austin from Atlanta in 2018, CC was a resident at Atlanta Printmaker’s Studio and a 2017-2018 WonderRoot Hughley Fellow. CC is also an arts writer, contributing to BURNAWAY, Number Inc, and other publications. She has a BFA in printmaking and book arts from the University of Georgia, and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. She graduates in spring 2020.

CC’s art practice is interdisciplinary, ranging from traditional printmaking processes, sculpture, and installation, to new media, sound, video, and web-based work. In her work and research, she considers technology’s impact on human communication, relationships, and spirituality. CC has written and self-published four books of poetry, including one book of photography entitled My Favorite Word is Nothing. Find out more at cccalloway.com

MAIA SNOW is a painter. Snow was born in Perm, Russia and moved to America at the age of 13. Currently, they are living in Austin, Texas where they are pursuing an MFA at the University of Texas. Snow’s work celebrates the complexities of queer sexuality, gender, and the non-binary body. They deeply care about language and its ability to shape time, physicality, and openness.  Snow has shown their paintings throughout New England, mostly Maine, and various parts of the Midwest. You can find more at maiasnow.com 

HANNAH SPECTOR is an interdisciplinary video and performance artist, poet, and curator currently residing in Austin, Texas. Spector's work is concerned with confounding our usual ways of seeing and speaking, and in doing so, opening up new possibilities of interaction. Spector has shown at Transformer Gallery (DC), Bunker 2 (Toronto), Gallery at Avalon Island (Orlando), The Museum of Human Achievement (Austin), Crescent (Austin)  among other various and informal venues along the way. She is a current MFA Candidate at The University of Texas at Austin. Spector has a multitude of self-published chapbooks available for electronic perusal at hannahspector.com. 

ANIKA TODD is a sculptor, experience-based researcher, and conservation activist. Her process begins with understanding the specifics of her site; she investigates the hard and soft history of a place, drawing from geology, archeology, and sociology. She then translates this content into work that articulates how the culture and landscape of the space interact. Her current work explores Texas’s culture and policy around land ownership and how such constructs relate to the human longing for wild. 

Todd has created site-specific installations in the US and abroad and exhibited in galleries in Vermont, Boston, Maryland, and Austin. She completed her B.F.A. at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design ‘15. She was the 2015 recipient of the prestigious Godine Travel Award to support a two-month material research trip in Mexico. She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Salem Art Works, Monson Arts Center and Haystack School of Craft and Design, and Arquetopia in Puebla MX. Cartterfield has worked extensively as a leader in conservation nonprofits and as a resident coordinator at Salem Art Works. She is currently making work in Austin TX as an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Find out more at anikatodd.com 

Topology of a Cloud
Jerónimo Reyes-Retana

January 4th - 25th, 2020
Open Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 12-6pm

Google’s dictionary defines a cloud as a visible mass of condensed water vapor floating in the atmosphere, typically high above the ground, but also as a state or cause of gloom, suspicion, trouble, or worry. The recent development in cloud computing has triggered the ongoing acceleration of information flows, altering previous regimes of visibility and control, bringing omnipresent frameworks of data transmission and storage—such as the cloud— to the front. The complexity of the cloud topology and the secrecy in which its operations remain key for shaping a state of surveillance capitalism in which notions of data ownership, privacy, and visibility are called into question. While distribution infrastructures always have been designed to be transparent, transparency, as immaterialized in the cloud, has turned into an all-purpose political metaphor. 

Topology of a Cloud is an immersive 16-track sound installation materializing the imperceptible electric charges, radio waves, and light pulses that constitute data traveling. The vibrations emitted by transducers (a device that converts variations in a physical quantity into sound) travel through the metal bars emulating a kinetic force scribing a generic language, bringing up notions of information permanence, encryption, and accessibility. A parallel network composed of tape interwinds with the steel axes to create a multi-vectorial volume. A symbiotical and juxtapositional relation between the steel axes and the adherent tape renders a model of the cloud that frames it as a subjective figure of speech often thought of as an attractive, seductive, seemingly ephemeral abstraction.

Jerónimo Reyes-Retana (Mexico City, b.1984). As an artist primarily working in the field of sound installation, Reyes-Retana utilizes multi-track audio settings as a medium to create atmospheres of multiple associations that point out the ways we imagine, organize, and interact with digital information. Reyes-Retana recently presented a solo project at OMR, Mexico City (2019), and Salón Acme, Mexico City (2015). His work has been featured in group exhibitions with Efraín López Gallery, Chicago (2019), Masa, Mexico City (2019), and Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York (2018). Jerónimo is an MFA (Sculpture and Extended Media) candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.