Epiphany
Featuring Michelle Marchesseault, Diana Welch, Kate Csillagi, and Mimi Bowman
Curated by Alyssa Taylor Wendt

September 14 - October 26, 2024 | Open Hours: Saturdays 12-6pm
Members Preview: Saturday, September 14th, 6-7pm (Become a Member!)
Public Reception: Saturday, September 14th, 7-11pm (Please RSVP)
Closing Reception & Halloween Party: Saturday, October 26th, 7-11pm
Events Sponsored by Austin Beerworks

@The Culvert Gallery, 5419 Glissman Road, Austin, TX 78702

The history of humankind is riddled with points of divergence, moments in our evolution that shake the core of our comfort levels and introduce change whether we like it or not. More often, these harbingers are met with skepticism, fear, shock, and dismissal but withstand the test of time, ultimately adding to our human sophistication. When this happens, there is a moment before the outrage, a pause in our interpretation, a moment of blank rapture that defies categorization. In this blind bliss, we are free. Disruption at its finest returns us to a pure state of infantile openness, our senses in a purgatorial free fall and words fail to serve us.

Epiphany. How do we interpret a revelation? What quantifies blown expectations? The divine nature of art lies in the lack of a singular measure of meaning. No standard of beauty, trash, value, or brilliance exists, so why not push beyond what is safe or easily digested? 

As a curator, maker, and seeker of art, I live to have my mind turned inside out. The most memorable moments for us all reside in a void of expectation. This precious moment of emptiness is a treasure, that sacred place where we have no answer, no response, no explanation, no doubt. That girl by my locker put her Walkman headphones on my head and I heard the Sex Pistols for the first time. I accidentally wandered into a screening of Cremaster 2 by Matthew Barney in the 1990s and showed me how artists use film as a medium of abstraction. I was the only one who sat through the whole thing. Stravinsky caused a riot by premiering his Rites of Spring in 1913. Shannon Funchess continues to upend traditional dark wave with her operatic feral performances in the band Light Asylum.

I trust in these formative moments, both my own and historical, to help culture evolve. To believe in the exceptional, the dangerous, the potentially offensive with a risk of failure, estrangement, alienation. Challenging our expected interpretation and giving ourselves over to the unknown is the chance we take for growth. Stasis and silence are death. In a transcribed conversation with Seán O’Hagan, the musician Nick Cave states “that the vitalizing element in art is the one that baffles or challenges our outrages. I believe art should be confronting and discomfiting and do more than just affirm your point of view.” I chose the four women for this exhibition and asked them to make new work with this concept in mind, not an easy assignment. Rather than choose works from their oeuvre that have already sparked my neurons, I asked them to undertake visions that risk, push, confound, anger or confuse us.

And here are the results of such an experiment. Working in the heat of Texas swelter, shown in a converted cement culvert, in the outskirts of a town sick with overdevelopment, using raw materials at hand and the depth of their visceral intuitions, Co-Lab Projects and I present Epiphany, a group show with Diana Welch, Kate Csillagi, Michelle Marchesseault, and Mimi Bowman.

- Alyssa Taylor Wendt


Diana Welch is a multidisciplinary artist based in Austin, TX, whose body of work spans sculpture, music, and writing. A self-taught ceramicist, she has exhibited in the US and Europe as one-half of the collaborative Mother of God. Her vessels reference classical ancient clay forms imbued with unexpected flare and subversion through interaction, collaboration, and functionality. As a musician, she has released several recordings, both solo and as a member of the band Stormshelter. A reporter, editor, and author, her extensive writing has been reviewed in Vanity Fair and elsewhere.

Kate Csillagi is an interdisciplinary artist hailing from Austin, TX. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Evergreen State College where she studied fiber art, printmaking,  and bookmaking. Her work has evolved over the years to include drawing, mural work, fabric tapestry, and installation. She was also a founding member of ICOSA, an artist-run collective and gallery in East Austin. Csillagi’s work is disruptive and whimsical, constructing unexpected narratives that star her anthropomorphic characters within supernatural scenes. Her work dismantles reality through watery dreamscapes and colorful illustrations, providing refuge from the monotony of modernity.  

Michelle Marchesseault splits time between Austin, TX, where she paints, and New York City, where she designs art and interiors for restaurants, television, movies, and the stage. She attended Herron School of Art in Indianapolis for painting and has been creating visuals and environments for over 20 years. The majority of Marchessault’s work fluctuates between studies of color and design that she called “twist” paintings and lush mannerist landscapes where nature is simultaneously gushing with beauty and brutality.

Mimi Bowman was born in Texas in 1989. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2022 with a degree in archaeology and Middle Eastern studies. Bowman is currently abroad pursuing an MA in archaeology at the University College of London, hoping to work in Karez rehabilitation in northern Iraq. In 2023, she curated Oshay Green and Isabel Legate’s dual exhibition Holometabolism at Martha’s Contemporary, and her collaborative video work with Jonny Negron was included in Electricity · Shadow at Château Shatto.

Alyssa Taylor Wendt is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and curator working in Detroit and Austin, Texas. Her recent projects address mysticism, the architecture of memory, and the decodified strata of history using video, ceramics, sculpture, painting, and installation. Earning her MFA from Bard, she has shown and performed internationally since 2004. She recently completed a second master’s degree in museum studies from Harvard and plans to open a small non-profit museum of cultural artifacts in 2026.

Inter Being

A group exhibition featuring Chad Rea, Eli Decker, Grayson Hunt, Jacqueline Overby, Miles Matis-Uzzo, Nathan Anthony, Patrick Diaz, Renee Lai, Sonya Berg, and Tuck Rayl

June 15th - July 20th, 2024
Open Hours: Saturdays 12-6pm
5419 Glissman Road, Austin, TX 78742



A tension of boundaries that both defy and define one another, 
of an existence somewhere between right and wrong. 

Of similarities and differences that exist at-once and within-both. 

A cacophony of repetition and connecting, 
anthropomorphizing human hands into branches, 
arms to trunks, 
fingers to flowers, 
flora that make both memories and metaphors. 

Ephemeral summers of sun and stitching and connecting links between the diminishing distance of our ecosystems.
Of summers of searching for order in the fibers of an ever-expanding

internal landscape

The above text was collaboratively written by Leslie Moody Castro and Sean Gaulager
inspired by applicant statements and the teachings of Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh.

Chad Rea’s paintings, sculptures, and digital works are a raw, authentic expression of the messy, complicated, and often ridiculously ironic beauty of the human experience. Blending themes of social commentary with transformative personal truths, his art invites the viewer into a space of presence and perspective of a world beyond right and wrong; one that connects us through our similarities instead of our differences.

Eli Decker is a painter who earned a BA in Studio Art and Computer Science from Colby College. Decker's paintings evoke a dreamlike quality, emphasizing the surreal aspects of modern isolation. Through his work, he transforms ordinary moments, such as gazing through a window at a sunset, into profound meditations on solitude and the ephemeral nature of beauty. Decker subtly hints at the pervasive influence of technology on our perception of the world, blending the organic with the artificial.

Grayson Hunt is the founding member of the Transgender Feminisms Reading Group, which has been meeting in Austin, (notably at Book Woman, one of the last remaining feminist book stores in the U.S.) since 2018, and the creator of the first transgender swim night at Barton Springs. In the summer of 2023, he became a collective member at MASS Gallery and has been helping develop more LGBTQ+ focused programming and mission. Just this past fall he curated the MASS Gallery exhibit Hard Served Soft, a queer and trans textile show with 12 artists from Austin and Houston.

Jacqueline Overby began expanding her practice in 2018 with her abstracted soft sculpture and needle-felted forms. In this work, Overby takes inspiration from childhood cartoon aesthetic, pop cultural standards and her experiences with body dysmorphia. A large portion of her visual art practice serves as a way to process her emotions in relation to mental health, self-image, sexual desires and trauma.

Miles Matis-Uzzo is a Texas-based artist and superorganism who communicates through sculpture, poetry, video, perfume, performance, and installation. With these mediums, they excavate the products of gendered power structures, queer ecology, and the ritualistic distancing of our diminishing ecosystem.

Nathan Anthony utilises sculpture, print and moving-image to hotwire, hijack and redirect the conventional associations of everyday objects and materials for poetic reconsideration.

”Patrick Diaz’ imagery suggests the possibility of the identifiable amid the rush of hyperactive formal elements. Randomly scattered visual lures continue to elude the identifications that we carry with us; maybe they are the dreams that we can’t quite catch upon awakening.” - Nancy Moyer

Renee Lai’s latest body of work explores the self in relation to boundaries in the landscape. Figures are placed in bodies of water, deep, dark, and threatening. They reference rivers and oceans, things that we use to mark the edge of a state or a country.

Sonya Berg’s recent work is inspired by her collection of imagery of plants in interior spaces, gathered as casual snapshots over years of traumatic life events, and translated into textural paintings. She creates new images through a series of removals and physical reframing, much like the work necessary to process parts of one’s story in order to find order and healing.

Tuck Rayl is a fiber artist whose work consists chiefly of 2D tufted fiber artworks created using a tufting machine. Tuck is self-taught in this medium, having first picked up the machine in December 2020. Exploring ideas of anthropomorphism and the interplay between the manmade and natural worlds, Tuck's artworks are recognizable for their colorful figures, existing somewhere on the spectrum between goofy and eerie.

Bruised Buildings
Jeff Williams

May 4th - June 1st, 2024
Open Hours: Saturdays 12-6pm
5419 Glissman Rd, Austin, TX 78702

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4th, 7-11pm

"Our neighbor was built in 2008, a 6-story, Styrofoam and stucco colossal residential complex that fills three city lots and refers to itself as a Castle. It’s shaped like the letter U with 2BR/1BA wrapped on all sides, each room marked by a decorative balcony. The Castle provides its residents with a gym, woodshop, screening room, recording studio, and rooftop events. When the Castle was built, a century’s long view of the city skyline was obstructed. Our building is an all-brick 3-story from the 1900s, named Nine Arches for the decorative stones adorning the top. The Arches provides its tenants with a lived history, once serving as a stable for the fire department, home to Superfly Auto Repair, and more recently as concrete cisterns for aquaculture. The rooftop of Nine Arches was covered in a large tarp, weighed down with plywood, 2x4s, and loose urban effects. On September 16th, 2010, at 4:45 pm, a tornado swept through the area, knocking down trees and transferring garbage from one street to the next. Extreme winds from the tornado carried under the tarp and launched weaponized construction materials into the foam stucco facade of the Castle. On the east side of the building, 4 stories up, an 18-inch span of the exterior corner was gouged, like the Nine Arches repeatedly took a cleaver to its edge. That damage is there to this day, 14 years later. So is an imprint of a wood plank, smashed flat, just missing the windows above and below. And there is the unmistakable dent of our skylight, which traveled 50ft on the wind before colliding with the penthouse wall. In defiance, the Castle poorly dressed its wounds with more foam, which does not age well in the sun. Now, when we look toward the city all we see are bruises from the attack that never healed.”

Co-Lab Projects is pleased to present Bruised Buildings, an exhibition of new sculpture and photography by Jeff Williams. The exhibition brings together three different series of artworks to form an installation in the Culvert Gallery. The first is a suite of photographs and accompanying text that documents an actual event where the building Williams lives in inadvertently attacked its neighbor during the fall of 2010. The photographs document significant damage to the facade of a colossal residential complex.

Adjacent to these photographs are a series of sculptural jackets. Each jacket is made from a rubber mold of an architectural structure and is detailed with imprints that include welded seams, structural rungs, access panels, dents, and accreted dirt. New versions will be made on-site with fresh architectural casts of the culvert. The pattern for each jacket is taken from thrift stores that serve the tenants of the Castle, where there is a variety of styles from sleeveless denim to fur collar coats. Williams has used casting rubber in his sculptures since 1999, following a brief stint working as a practical effects fabricator for haunted houses and B movies.

Lastly, a series of welded aluminum thrift store sculptures, mainly cookware, is included in the mix. Pizza pans are held in formation with one continuous welded line. Due to the thin gauge of the metal, the welding process oscillates between fusing the metal and cutting it apart. In Bruised Buildings, the exhibition shifts from exterior to interior, from photographs of a facade to the cookware found within. Every construction contains a record of the time it was built, projecting a lasting message of its design. Williams is interested in these messages for their direct relationship with the larger fractures and shifts of governmental, economic, and cultural powers, as they often erode faster than the buildings that house them.

Williams has been awarded residencies at the Dora Maar House, Menerbes, France; Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, Recess in New York, NY; Galería Perdida, Chilchota, Michoacán, Mexico; and the Core Program in Houston, TX. He was the 2009 Leonore Annenberg Fellow in the Arts at the American Academy in Rome. Williams is a recent recipient of an NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship for Environmental Structures and a Santo Foundation Award. Solo projects and exhibitions include Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY; RAIR in Philadelphia, PA; 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA; AMOA/Arthouse in Austin, TX, and Artpace, San Antonio, TX. Group exhibitions include International Objects, Brooklyn, NY; Et al Gallery, San Francisco, CA; NADA on Governors Island, NY; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; and Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin, TX. Articles and reviews include The New York Times, Art in America, Art Papers, Blouin Modern Painters, Shifter Magazine, and Hyperallergic.

Materials for the exhibition are funded in part by a Special Research Grant, The University of Texas at Austin, where Williams is an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Extended Media.

This project is supported in part by grants from the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, Texas Commission on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

g/re/p
Jess Johnson aka flesh_dozer

March 9th - April 20th, 2024
Open Hours: Saturdays 12-6pm
5419 Glissman Rd, Austin, TX 78702

Friday, April 19th, 7-11pm:
Closing Reception & Screening of Everything is Terrible's The Great Satan. In partnership with Everything Is Terrible, We Luv Video, and Hyperreal Film Club. Co-Lab brings you a raucous celebration of art, film, and plants that will blow your mind! Free for Members and general public admission available soon!

Jess Johnson brings to life a complex fictional world through hand-drawn images that are inspired by her interests in science fiction, comic books, technology, architecture, and theories of consciousness. For her exhibition in the culvert, Johnson has collaborated with her Mother, Cynthia Johnson, on a new series of quilts. They appear suspended in the culvert, as doorways offering glimpses into different realms.

The concept of world-building lies at the heart of Johnson’s densely layered artworks. She formulates worlds within worlds through self-replicating geometric patterns, temple-like structures, and obscure symbology. The worlds depicted are inhabited by a variety of humanoid figures, alien creatures, worms, prehistoric bugs, and deities entangled into the patterning and internal architecture of this realm.

The exhibition “g/re/p” hints at a world on the brink of collapse under the weight of its own inherent structure. Johnson alludes to numerous literary references that forewarn of god complexes, such as: the novelette Sandkings (1979) by George R. R. Martin, where a man who controls a set of creatures in an aquarium goes from being worshiped by their sand effigies to being punished by them for the cruelty he inflicts; the Greek myths of Icarus, flying too close to the sun; and the biblical story, The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) where the Babylonians presumptuously build a tower from earth to heaven only to be cursed by God. Johnson’s work provides a timely reminder that self-replicating civilizations can flourish when left to their own devices but can also crumble in familiar patterns of exhausted natural resources and rebellion against parasitic elites, gods or their creator.

Jess Johnson (b. 1979 in New Zealand) is a contemporary artist who lives and works between the USA and New Zealand. Her artworks reflect ideologies of technology and flesh, both ancient and futuristic. Her drawing practice feeds into installations and collaborations in animation, music, fashion, virtual reality, and textile art. Johnson’s work has been exhibited extensively including at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York; Art Basel, Hong Kong; Nanzuka Gallery, Tokyo; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, UK; Centre Clark, Montreal; the National Gallery of Australia; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand. Jess Johnson is represented by Jack Hanley Gallery, New York; Darren Knight Gallery, Australia; Ivan Anthony Gallery, New Zealand; and Nanzuka Gallery, Tokyo.

This project is supported in part by grants from the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, Texas Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and H-E-B.

Porch Swing Orchestra and Co-Lab Projects Present:
VAST IS THE SEA

January 20th through February 24th, 2024

All presentations are maximally 45 minutes long
There will be a 15-20-minute intermission between presentations
Each presentation is ticketed separately except for the opening night which is one combined ticket

February 17 - Sliding Scale Tickets
7pm Ariana Gomez
8pm Gavin Watts / The Reformers

February 23 - Members Only (become a member and get invited today!)
7pm A Night with Barry Stone and Friends

February 24 - Sliding Scale Tickets
7pm Jessica Mallios
8pm Thomas Hooper / Skloss


“Vast is the sea of hearing around the raft of vision.”
― Michel Chion, La Toile Trouee (Cahiers Du Cinema. Essays Collection)

Vast is the Sea is a series of presentations from eight artists whose diverse works are united by their explorations of images and sound. The title comes from a translation of the composer and film theorist Michel Chion's analysis of the relationship between sound and image in cinema. In their presentations, each artist constructs new oceans through live performances, video, and sound processing. Viewers are invited to gaze at visions projected on the ceiling and swim among the sounds in real time.

Porch Swing Orchestra is an art project begun by Barry Stone that explores the interplay between site-specific images, musical improvisation/chance operation, and field recordings. Pictures taken on-site accompany fleeting melodies recorded among conversations of passersby, the rattle of air conditioners, birdsong, sirens of cicadas, and all matter of environmental sonic phenomena. 

Most recordings take place on Stone’s front porch in Austin, Texas, but PSO has traveled to Spiral Jetty in Utah, the border town of Del Rio, Texas, Maine, the San Juan Islands, and performed live in the James Turrell Skyspace, The Color Inside as a part of The Univerity of Texas Landmarks Songs in the Skyspace Program. Since 2018, PSO has collaborated with dozens of musicians, artists, poets, writers, and activists to publish over 200 pieces.

All things PSO can be found at https://porchswingorchestra.org/

This project is supported in part by grants from the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, Texas Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and H-E-B.