.jpeg)
Yours, bubble mechanisms for locating the center* from your center to your center to your center to yours, begins with a proposition from six queer artists: that objects are teachers whose functionality lies in our capacity to pay attention to them. The exhibition space is a present moment materialized—not a hypothetical conceptualization—which hosts our collective attempt at this type of attention. The installation follows the architectural logics of both the home and the institution; works furnish the interior and relate to one another across the space, yet at the same time, try to penetrate through the space and involve its infrastructural mechanics, as if the walls, ceiling, and floor, of the gallery itself were a porous membrane. This specific network of relationships between objects and site has the potential to recalibrate dynamics between the human and the non-human forces we call architecture.
Ariel Wood (b. 1994, Pasadena, CA) is a Texas-based artist by way of California and Wisconsin. They received a BFA in printmaking and drawing from The University of Wisconsin, Madison 2016, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from Santa Reparata International School Of Art, in Florence 2016, and their MFA in Sculpture from The University of Texas at Austin 2022, where they were the recipient of the Lomis Slaughter, Jr. Endowment Scholarship In Sculpture and the Continuing College Fellowship. Ariel is a sculpture artist interested in the way plumbing and drainage can elicit notions of interconnectedness, liminality, and queerness. Wood picks and parses out those aspects of the larger system that appear strange, silly, or sentimental. They have exhibited their work nationally and internationally in Wisconsin, Illinois, Texas, New York, and Florence, Italy.
Brendan Shea (b.1995 Massachusetts) Is an artist whose work explores popular sentiment, affect and mechanisms of painting. Brendan received his BFA in painting from Maine College of Art in 2018. Currently, he is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a recipient of the David Bruton Jr. Endowment Graduate Fellowship. Brendan has attended residencies at the Pace House and Hewnoaks. He has exhibited work across the U.S., including Ortega Y Gasset Projects (NYC), Visual Arts Center (Austin, TX.), Grant Wahlquist Gallery (Portland, Me.), B.U. Gallery (Boston, MA.), Good Luck Have Fun (Austin, TX.), SaveArtSpace (Los Angeles, CA.), Able Baker Contemporary (Portland, Me.), SOIL Gallery (Seattle, Washington), and SPACE Gallery (Portland ME.).
On January 10th, 1901, after drilling into the ground at a depth of over 1,000 feet, into earth material not yet exposed since the Jurassic period, a Spindletop gusher blew a plume of black petroleum 150 feet into the air. This gusher would continue spewing at a rate of 100,000 barrels per day for the next nine days, single handedly leading the entire United States into the oil age. Almost exactly 95 years later, Emily Lee would be born in the same place along the Texas Gulf Coast.
Emily Lee is a chinese-american artist. For Lee, sculpture is only the first step in their iterative, place-based methodology whose progression includes both critical writing and communal organizing. They are haunted by a vague awareness of their profound dislocation from deep time and ecological connectedness, and how that dislocation has been established in the physical and linguistic forms around them—the property’s barbed-wire fence, the museum’s line of sight, the gallery’s hidden extension chord, the animal’s name. Lee insists that the exhibition is the ideal social setting in which to experimentally recalibrate these relationships between language, form, and experience. The work itself often takes the form of installations that change with time and are comprised of materials local to the site like aluminum, wood, clay, photographs, drawings, video, and performance.
Gabrielle Constantine (1994) was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she received her double BFA in Sculpture and Fibers + Material studies at the Tyler School of Art. She’s currently living and working in Austin, TX pursuing an MFA at The University of Texas of Austin. Giving fake Tiffany, bought from the trunk of a Cadillac, to Rachel Cohen for her Bat Mitzvah. Microwaving lavash and string cheese for an after-school snack. Tending to a mustache and beard since 5th grade. Going to the AC Tropicana for weekend “getaways”. Watching Cher in Moonstruck every night before bed. Drinking milk from a martini glass. This is Constantine’s DNA. Growing up in an Armenian community and the restaurant industry, her linguistic and material decisions are heavily influenced by these two settings. Through a nonhierarchical style of research her work orbits around investigating identity performance and how and who gets to determine authenticity.
Hannah Spector is an interdisciplinary artist and poet working out of Austin, TX. Spector thinks of language as a solid object—a concrete and spatial expression that can overturn limiting perceptions of the everyday. Spector has exhibited work at The San Antonio Museum of Art, Blue Star Contemporary (SATX), MASS Gallery (ATX), The Visual Arts Center (ATX), Colab Projects (ATX), Transformer Gallery (DC), and Pyramid Atlantic (DC). She received her MFA from UT Austin and currently holds a Lecturer position at Texas State University and UT Austin. She also works as a community printmaking instructor at Flatbed Press, and is a member of MASS Gallery.
Joy Scanlon (born 1992, Long Island, New York) lives and works in Austin, TX. Scanlon is a painter who employs organic, experimental hand-papermaking processes to translate, distort, and reproduce patterns—both visual and behavioral. Scanlon has participated in group exhibitions nationally. She is a three-time Kossak Painting Fellowship recipient and has been an artist-in-residence at Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild and Lacawac Artists’ Residency. Scanlon received her MFA from UT Austin (2022) and her BFA from Hunter College, CUNY (2016). Devotions is her first solo exhibition.
