Julia Hart:
A LORY & AN EAGLET
February 1 - March 6, 2020
Opening reception: 5:00pm-8:00pm, Saturday, February 1
Gallery hours: 11am-6pm Fridays and by appointment
A LORY & AN EAGLET is Julia Hart’s personal attempt to make sense of a world that makes very little sense to the artist. Inspired above all by what we cannot immediately see—those dreamlike spaces that exist just outside of our vision—Hart looks to nature and abstract forms to express wonderment at the conundrum of reality through photographic and painterly, digital and analog processes informed by the subject matter of each image. Whether it be an abstract or a portrait, each image Hart composes empowers viewers to see the world around them just a little differently, making the everyday exotic and the familiar enigmatic.
Julia Hart lives in Austin with her husband, two children, one step daughter, one dog, two cats, and a handful of chickens. As well as a creator of art, Hart is also a collector and admirer of art, advocating for fellow artists through Tin Whistle Gallery on Bolm Road in East Austin.
Laura Caffrey and Dave McClinton:
CARRY THE REMAINDER
October 11 - November 17, 2019
Opening reception: 7:00pm-10:00pm, Friday, October 11
Gallery hours: 11am-6pm, Thursdays and Fridays, by appointment on other days and evenings
Meet the artists during the first weekend of East Austin Studio Tour: 11am-6pm, Saturday and Sunday, November 16-17
Carry the Remainder features the mixed-media work of Laura Caffrey and the digital collage work of Dave McClinton.
Laura Caffrey finds beauty in the intentionally discarded and the inadvertently abandoned, the crumpled and cracked, and the back sides of things. Caffrey is drawn to the varying effects time has on different materials. She gets great joy from calling attention through carefully assembly the curious bits and pieces people may not have had the opportunity, or taken the time, to notice. With Caffrey’s lifelong fascination with art, architecture, history, sustainability and travel, she has been producing art while learning and working in these related fields. Avidly pursuing her interests has allowed her access to people, places and materials which others do not have, and in most cases, yields the very materials with which she works. She finds amazing things on the ground wherever she goes.
Dave McClinton combines his love of photography, art and graphic design to create works that speak to the viewer by communicating something specific and obvious but also harboring subtexts that require repeated viewing or discussion. McClinton creates free-standing crumpled paper still lifes, then photographs them and manipulates the images until he has created something that straddles reality and fantasy. McClinton wants to show you something familiar and then alter your perspective. These shapes and “views” are familiar, but McClinton wants to you conjure up places you have been and seen—not simply reproduce a vista for its own sake.
Cindy Stapper:
CROSSINGS
August 9 - 30, 2019
Opening reception: 5:30pm-8:30pm, Friday, August 9
Saturday with artist Cindy Stapper: 11am-4pm, Saturday, August 17
Artist talk: 7-8pm, Tuesday, August 20
Cindy Stapper’s contemporary landscape paintings reflect her fascination with elemental forces, and the unexpected associations and subtle contrasts present in nature. Stapper slowly builds paintings using oil, cold wax, powdered pigments and natural materials that are layered and excavated to reveal hidden depths of color and texture.
Stapper was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, where she attended college at Trinity University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in fine art. Since 2007, Stapper has divided her time between Texas and her mountain home of Northern New Mexico, whose vast rugged beauty honed her development as a professional artist.
“Crossings is a metaphor, not only for travel, but also for shape shifting between the viewer and that which is viewed. This is a body of work I began four years ago, when I was searching for new ways to express a more personal and sensory experience of the elements we call landscape. In my crossing to Ireland, I also learned to travel between realism and abstraction, and discovered the unforeseen ways in which a powerful place can shape and call forth new work. I’ve returned nearly every year to the same stretch of coast in County Mayo in northwestern Ireland. My fascination with this landscape is in its mutability, where elements shift and transform in unexpected ways. Water seeps and pools up through a rich tapestry of bog. Ancient stone rings rise up through the surfaces of fields. Sky, sea and land seem to layer over and under each other endlessly to the horizon. Orderly fields sweep out onto cliffs where surf pounds and pummels beneath. Fog hangs in discernible curtains along a sunlit road. A mist rises from a brook, gathers itself into lifelike form, then evaporates. The fluidity of these constantly shifting elements is an invitation to try and catch an image between states. In working with the riddle of this Irish imagery, I am also working with larger concepts of presence and absence, and presence that is felt even if unseen. Most of this work was created from memory and is therefore an inner landscape of my own devising. I invite you to step out of time with me and into this rare and special place, as I resurrect the essence of its elements using paint, wax, dried pigments, Irish sand and peat ash from a homely hearth far away.”
—Cindy Stapper
cindystapper.com
Meena Matocha:
WE SHAKE WITH JOY, WE SHAKE WITH GRIEF
June 1 - August 4, 2019
"We shake with joy, we shake with grief" features the life-size and large-scale charcoal paintings created by Meena Matocha in spring 2019.
Matocha uses charcoal, ashes, soil, acrylic and wax to create paintings that combine abstraction and figuration, exploring the space between grief and joy, the place where heaven and earth converge. Meditation, Scripture and contemplation play large parts in her creative process. Her current body of work combines her love of the portrait and figure with the dramatic expression of abstraction. Matocha's curiosity about how material contributes to the meaning and emotion of an art work has caused her to explore the use of charcoal as a prominent medium, the ash symbolizing humanity's finitude.
Matocha was born to Indian immigrant parents in 1977 in the suburbs of Austin, Texas. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art, focus on painting and drawing from The University of Texas at Austin in 2000. After a long break during which time she lived overseas serving with a non-profit organization, Matocha returned to her native home of Central Texas where she lives with her husband and seven year old son, and now makes art full time.
Kiley Grantges and Jennifer Schroeder:
PAPER FIELDS
February 16 - April 28, 2019
Fields of paper material unite the work of Austin-area art educators and artists Kiley Grantges and Jennifer Schroeder. Grantges gently elevates humble drinking straws and office copy paper into quietly confident bas-relief arrays casting soft shadows while Schroeder reconstitutes the exuberant mess resulting from her young students’ art explorations into paper mosaics vibrating in her thoughtful arrangement of edges to let each color shine its brightest.
Kiley Grantges began her professional career as an interior designer in Fort Worth, Texas. Her interest in human development and the psychology of how people learn and grow through creative engagement proved to be a strong internal pull which eventually lead to the exploration of a renewed career path in education. She has been teaching art for over fifteen years while also further cultivating her own artistic voice. Grantges’s artwork is deeply influenced by her background in interior design. She has been making small-scale illustrations for the past ten years wherein she finds her deepest aesthetic inspiration within the work of interior and textile designers. Over the last several years, she has broadened and developed her portfolio to include large-scale mixed-media pieces. She works almost exclusively in white palettes that highlight the structure of her work in a way that allows texture and shadow to play off the canvas and create form within form, shape within shape.
Jennifer Schroeder graduated summa cum laude from Texas State University with a BFA in studio art with an emphasis in sculpture. Soon into her studies she chose to also get her post baccalaureate and acquire her teaching certification. She has been teaching art at the elementary level for twelve years. Although Schroeder’s focus was in sculpture during college, her body of work encompasses a wide variety of media and studios including drawing, painting, printmaking, ceramics, and jewelry. Texture and patterns found in nature are what spark inspiration for Schroeder’s work. She is drawn to organic and earthy imagery, and her work reflects nature’s way of creating the world around us. Consequently, she uses the medium that will best reveal her vision, often varying greatly from piece to piece. The series included in Paper Fields is constructed with scraps of leftover paper from elementary school projects reflects the vulnerability and deconstruction of time.
Erika Huddleston, Amy Scofield, and Tammy West:
POST-APOCALYPTIC HARVEST
November 16, 2018 - January 27, 2019
Erika Huddleston is an oil painter based in Dallas. Huddleston is particularly interested in better understanding how perceiving changing natural processes in an urban park setting can affect human psychology. Painting for long hours in park “urban wilderness” settings in cities around the world provides the means to stay onsite for longer periods of time for analysis and observation beyond a brief site walk. Painting outdoors without an image or photograph is a welcome face-to-face interaction amidst her habits of texting and other digital interfaces.
Amy Scofield grew up barefoot in the mountains of Colorado inventing new worlds with rocks, sticks and bugs. As an adult today, Scofield hasn’t changed much except now she is allowed to use power tools. Using hundreds of dead trees, thousands of bike tubes, zillions of strips of mylar rescued from used bubble envelopes, Scofield makes large-scale installations and small works from leftover materials. Scofield explores their properties until a design emerges, which is typically minimal, incongruous, and whimsical. The work ends up exposing our unconscious relationship to nature or subconscious relationship to society.
Tammy West’s art is influenced by her experiences growing up backpacking, connecting to the earth in her travels, planting trees, and helping the land heal and flourish. The work includes traditional film photography, encaustic pieces often incorporating materials found in the wild, and site-specific environmental art. Driven by the agency of protecting the planet, West creates art that connects to the emotion of the viewer, inviting them to aid in stewardship and conservation. Several ongoing series of works address various concepts of environmental responsibility, such as the need to protect water quality and restore the riparian ecology of rivers and creeks. West’s professional and personal life sits at the intersection between art, science and natural history—her artwork is a refection of her background and the lens through which she sees the world.
Beck Seitsinger, B. Shawn Cox, Richard Ashby, and Scott Rolfe:
UNCANNY NOCTURNES
October 13 - November 11, 2018
Eleven-year-old artist Beck Seitsinger debuts his art in a gallery setting, joined by grown-up Austin artists B. Shawn Cox, Richard Ashby, and Scott Rolfe. Uncanny Nocturnes is a colorful exploration of the night, a time and a state of being that provokes peculiar creativity in its ominous mystery, the occasion for behavior shunned by the sunlight, and the challenges imposed by the cover of darkness.
Beck Seitsinger’s parents have nurtured his uncanny ability to hyper-focus on whatever he loves at the moment since he was diagnosed with Aspergers at an early age. His current spooky passion began around age six, when he visited a haunted house. Every week for the past couple of years, art teacher Carol Lee has been working one-on-one with Beck to develop his skills in acrylic painting. Painting has given his visions depth and his voice the platform to begin conversing with artists of yesterday and today, like Basquiat, with whose work he shares much affinity.
B. Shawn Cox works primarily in oil paint and collage from personal or found vintage photographs, attempting to capture, reinterpret, and share a moment in time, inspired by vintage images, advertising, architecture, magazines, 80’s pop music, and literature. He is drawn to narratives, humor, cliché, irony, color, texture, layered meanings, and shiny things.
Richard Ashby received his BFA from the University of Texas at Tyler. When not creating shimmering and detailed mosaics of color and imagery in acrylic paint, he picks the banjo under the moonlight of Terlingua and the neon lights of Austin honky tonks, having played for years in the funky bluegrass jug band, Clyde and Clem’s Whiskey Business.
Scott Rolfe is a Maine-born artist who has lived in Austin for over twenty years. He primarily works in assemblage, collage, and mixed media. His eyes are always open for art possibilities in the discarded: broken household appliances, rusty metal, and forgotten toys. These unwanted objects come to life in his art with unique personalities, from eccentric animals to dilapidated machines. An old gun rack becomes the wild hair of a demented clown funhouse, while a spice rack serves as the background for a knife-throwing act gone awry. He takes these unrelated pieces, which all come together to tell their own narrative.
Cade Bradshaw, Charles Heppner, and Madeline Irvine:
WITHIN THE STAND - UNDER THE HABIT
September 8 - October 7, 2018
Within the Stand, Under the Habit is an exhibition focusing on trees, with works by Cade Bradshaw, Charles Heppner and Madeline Irvine. The title suggests the relationship of people to the physical form of trees. Within the Stand sets viewers in the protection of a stand of trees: a contiguous community of trees. Under the Habit places the viewer under the habit of the tree, or characteristic form in which a species of trees grows. Each artist transforms their experience with trees and forests, creating new ways of seeing the familiar. Within the Stand, Under the Habit asks us to include ourselves as part of the dialogue between the built environment, nature, and environmental change.
Cade Bradshaw approaches his work from the standpoint of an ecologist, studying the links between constituent elements in complex systems. His work asks us to consider our frame of reference in time and space. The tree presents an essential case study to this practice. As one of our environment’s most aged populations, the trees’ influence on ecological communities is significant. Examined across vast time spans, the tree can help frame our personal experience. Bradshaw’s other interests include big data, the built environment, the world wide web, community art, robots and factory assembly lines.
Charles Heppner’s work concerns the spiritual connection to the experiential response to beauty, especially in nature. His Sanctum Boxes: Arboribus Sacris (Sacred Trees) speak to his unwavering humility and love of the arboreal. They are intimate wooden box constructions filled with carefully arranged photographs, glass or painted wood which invoke in him a state peaceful reverence to the tree. He is inspired by these words of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring: “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” Heppner hopes to inspire others to consider their roles in nurturing our environment.
Working with a hypersaturated sea salt solution on paper, Madeline Irvine creates mural-scale installations focusing on tangled and expressive mangrove forest root systems. These tropical trees are primeval forests and able adapters–they are the only tree species that survive with their roots submerged in salt water for two tides a day. The root systems are a bridge between the ocean and the shores, creating a fertile ecosystem for marine life. A small but vital part of these massive forest ecosystems, these Walking Trees serve to emulate a human scale in relation to the oceans’ seemingly infinite scope.
Rebecca Bennett, Lucy MacQueen, and Travis Seeger:
AUGUSTNESS
August 11 - Sept 2, 2018
Using the sensual qualities of oil, Rebecca Bennett creates layered abstractions which explore the dynamics of color, line, and texture. The viewer is encouraged by their abstraction to interpret their experience of the work rather than the work itself. Her work is born of a manipulation of oil paint while the canvas lies on a flat, horizontal surface. She uses brushes, palette knife, and/or mineral spirits to move the color. The paint and oil create jewels of sensual, layered, vibrant, color which move on the canvas. Using viscous liquid mediums allows her to explore this movement and fluidity. Recently, she has enjoyed incorporating the horizon line. What emerges is a piece that is abstract but recalls the landscape. Her process is one in which the artist and the paint are equal partners negotiating the surface of the canvas as if the paint had animate qualities.
Lucy MacQueen’s paintings have movement. Her unique process gives her work depth beyond the static image. Lucy specializes in water and landscapes, using hand-etched plexiglass suspended over her work as an additional dimension. The etching adds depth and shadow to the scene. As you move, the image shifts, creating the illusion of motion.
Illustrating the balance between nature and architecture in a contemporary minimalist fashion, Travis Seeger is strongly influenced by the connotation of shapes and textures. He often represents metals in a manner incongruous with their nature, transforming rusted earthen metal into a precise geometric shape or weaving stainless steel strips into an organic formation.
Claire Bresette and Jennifer Hill:
FIGURE, FLORA, FAUNA
July 14 - August 5, 2018
Claire Bresette explores discordant imagery within patterns as a way of intertwining the harmonious nature of pattern with internal images to create curiosity. She uses our relation to certain imagery and our trust in recognizing its perceived inherent beauty through the predisposed definition. The partnership between the viewer and the content seeks to play with that transient moment between initial perceptions and the understanding that develops through exploration. Claire grew up in a small town outside of Austin, Texas and in 2006 entered the BFA program at Alfred University School of Art and Design, in Alfred, New York. During her time at Alfred she pressed, molded and developed her love for ceramics. In 2010 Claire was nominated for the Bergren Student Innovation Award and served in the Cohen Foundation Intern Program in New York City. Since returning to her warmer roots to Austin Texas, in 2014, she has been a yearly participant in Big Medium’s “EAST”, as well as several shows across the country.
Jennifer Hill is a studio artist in Austin TX. Previously she lived on The Garden Isle of Kauai, inspired by the luscious flora and textures of the sea. Her artwork has appeared in numerous exhibitions throughout the country, including the notable Hawaii’s Modern Masters in Waikiki. Jennifer earned an MFA in ceramics from Utah State University, Logan, and a BFA from Southern Methodist University in her home city of Dallas. Between degree programs she attended the University of Florida, Gainesville for a post-baccalaureate study. Following graduate school she became the artist-in-residence at Chester Springs Studio in Pennsylvania, later moving to Oregon to teach at Portland Community College and Multnomah Art Center. An opportunity to live in Hawaii convinced her to leave the mainland for several years. Jennifer and her husband now live back in Texas closer to family. Currently she maintains a busy studio practice in Austin and teaches at area art centers including The Contemporary Austin’s Art School at Laguna Gloria.
Carl Smith and Donna Starnes:
THICK AND THIN
June 9 - July 8, 2018
Liberated from representational narrative and mechanical precision, the abstract paintings of Carl Smith and Donna Starnes both bring to the foreground the beauty and dynamism of the frozen real-time interaction of pigments on spatially defined two-dimensional surfaces. Together, Smith and Starnes highlight in each other’s work physical qualities of painting that are lost in the virtuality of boundless digital reproduction limited by today’s technology: the thickness resulting from Smith’s use of a fat 4” brush to push opaque acrylic paint on toothy canvas and the thinness of Starnes’s transparent alcohol inks blown around on smooth surfaces by the breath of an air brush.
Carl Smith has been making art since he was very young, taking all the public school art classes available to him. Growing up in poverty made it all but impossible for him to pursue a direct course of study. Leaving the rough inner city of 1980s Houston for Austin, he pursued a career as a jazz musician before dedicating himself fully to visual art. He studied painting and drawing at the Dougherty Art Center and Laguna Gloria while also studying privately with Philip Trussell. In his studies, he experimented with many different styles of painting before focusing on abstract landscapes. He feels abstraction places emphasis on emotion and direct creative decision-making resulting in unique, expressive paintings that allow for improvisation and action-oriented execution through which he can engage as many facets of his creativity as possible.
Donna Starnes loves a strong use of color and the chemistry that happens when colors mingle and blend. Her creative process is as organic as her abstract work, as she allows it to unfold in its own way. Sometimes she dances with the art, and other times she just waits to see what will emerge next. Curiosity and a passion for exploring the unknown and seeing what emerges are the main drivers for her creativity. There is an energetic spark to her work that varies with each piece. After getting a degree in art, she spent several years as a graphic designer in a university setting where she was able to continually develop her creative eye and learn new technology. Currently, she is a full time visual artist continuing to explore creativity in new ways.
David Lamplugh, Jeffrey Primeaux, and Valérie Chaussonnet:
JAPONISME À TROIS
March 24 - June 3, 2018
David Lamplugh, Jeffrey Primeaux, and Valérie Chaussonnet are three Austin artists inspired by Japonism, the historical French art movement itself inspired by the æsthetics of Ukiyo-e.
Lamplugh juxtaposes expressive and detailed portraits of animals with the intricacies and flat planes of the Ukiyo-e prints replete with kimonos, sword fight dynamics, and the noh seriousness of Kogyo Tsukioka. These chimera are rendered on backgrounds featuring bold, ultra-modern stencils. The Ukiyo-e pieces began a trio of series positing a fantastical means of defense for the animal kingdom after environmental collapse has brought an end to humanity, a crux the artist attempts to approach in the lightest way possible.
Primeaux’s work reflects a near-lifelong exposure to and study of Japanese art, design, and the art of other artists strongly influenced by Japanese art. Though the influences have usually been more subtly integrated into his work, a couple recent sets of work reference Japanese art more directly. The Sharaku Series of paintings take their inspiration from the silvery-ground prints of the Ukiyo-e artist Sharaku, presenting figures isolated from a narrative context. Arising from a fascination with the lines of Ukiyo-e prints and manga illustration, the lines of the abstract drawings, rather than being reproduced into the forms in which they are viewed, are instead made of composite pencil strokes to create lines of various types and expressions.
Chaussonnet’s steel sculptures draw on the typically flat and stylized rendition of geishas and samurais’ faces in Ukiyo-e, especially in Utamaro’s prints. She turns ephemeral paper into heavy but elegant three-dimensional welded busts, somewhat flattened, but complete with extravagant hairdos, buns and combs, and layers of kimonos and forged weaponry. Chaussonnet envisions this grouping as actors in some Liaisons Dangereuses set in Old Japan, where the universal sentiments of love, desire, betrayal, seduction, but also friendship and sisterhood, are at play. The life-size format gives these Edo figures a human presence which hopefully invites the viewer into a conversation. Love letters and misty landscapes for lovers to stroll in complete the set.
Inaugural Group Exhibition
February 11 - March 4, 2018
Seventeen Austin artists exhibit multiple works to inaugurate the Gallery at Atelier 1205:
Richard Ashby, Valérie Chaussonnet, Thomas Cook, Elizabeth Decker, Jennifer Hill, Soña Holman, Madeline Irvine, David Lamplugh, Jeffrey Primeaux, Lucian Richards, Saul Jerome San Juan, Pamela Sanchez, Shakti Sarkin, Amy Scofield, Carl Smith, Jordan Spennato, Donna Starnes