Friday, Jan. 13, 2017 – Friday, Jan. 13, 2017

06:00 PM – 08:00 PM
US/Central

Artist talks at 6 PM

Pulltight, Texas • Glenn Downing
John M. O’Quinn Gallery

Artist Statement
Glenn Downing sat on the back porch with Bud Powers and they talked about old times. Bud worked with and for Glenn’s dad in the fifties and sixties. Bud was dying of cancer so he could only smoke one cigarette a day. He kept a pellet gun by his chair to keep the squirrels away from his bird feeder. He was glad Glenn stopped by. Bud talked about how he and Glenn’s dad worked hard; sometimes getting pissed off and getting into arguments, which happened on a regular basis. Bud would just stand up and tell everyone he was “going to the house.” A few days later he would come back and start working again. Bud Powers was known for being contrary. Bud bought a place with some acres outside of Oglesby. He made a sign and put it up at the gate. It said Welcome to Pulltight, Texas.

This exhibition is about people like Bud Powers. Everything in it makes up a place inside Glenn. His Pulltight, Texas.

Artist Bio
Glenn Downing was born and raised in a rural area outside of Waco, Texas. He taught at McLennan Community College for 16 years. Has a BFA from UT and a MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Glenn's background is in sculpture and drawing. He lived in Austin, Los Angeles, and New York City. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in the island nation of Tuvalu. He worked for 15 years for the video artists, Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kubota. He makes art and ride mountain bikes. Even though Glenn has traveled all over the world he returned to Waco to live close to where he was bought up.

Glenn's father was a farmer who started a street paving business so he began his life doing all sorts of manual labor. He worked alongside men with little or no formal education; men who grew up using their hands and got where they were in life by just working themselves to death. These men were a little bit crazy; they approached life on their own terms. They were individuals; not always correct in their talk or their manners but willing to get the job done and get on with life. As Glenn got older he became one of those men.

A Routine in Parts, 2016 • Eric McMaster

Stills from 2-channel HD video documenting competitive dancers performing their routine without their partner.
Horton Gallery

Artist Statement
Assuming sports as a microcosm of society, my works use the rituals of sport to focus on situations of vulnerability, power, obedience, and resistance.

An athlete strives for perfect. They practice routines and drills hundreds, if not thousands of times to achieve an act without clumsiness, muscular fatigue, or a lapse in focus. In the end, a perfect routine can never be. Perfection can never be. Perfect is something that many pursue but would have no value if fully achieved.

The displayed works put athletes in situations where their routines are hindered. A competitive dance couple performs a routine without each other. The resulting performance consists of miscues and gestures of more graceful acts. A gymnast struggles with thicker atmospheric conditions, the awkwardness of breathing, and buoyancy rather than gravity. The result is a 40-second routine extended to over 8 minutes.

We see the awkward gap between potential and perfection. We Laugh.

Also displayed are objects related to the recorded actions. A pommel horse exists as a sculptural prop; custom built to accommodate its environment while also adhering to sport regulations. Floor segments from a famed Texas dance hall, complete with scuffs and wear that create compositions of circumstance, are hung as framed images. The pommel horse and the floor segments are displayed as relics; objects with a treasured context greater than their material or formal qualities. Every mark is not a flaw, rather it references something larger. The relics achieve an as-is perfect, a state ironically elusive to the featured athletes’ routines.

Artist Bio
Eric R. McMaster works involve fabricated objects, athletes, actions and images exploring themes or order, resistance, and vulnerability. His works have been exhibited in New York, Paris, Hiroshima, New Delhi, Miami, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Phoenix among others. He is the recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship, the Ted Decker Catalyst Fund, and numerous scholastic grants and scholarships. R Eric McMaster currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Mon Frère • Irene Reece
Project Space

Artist Statement
Mon Frère is an installation that confronts the viewer with Irene Reece’s brother Froncell in his day-to- day. Irene Reece is attempting to render a double consciousness of sorts; how the world sees Froncell and how he sees the world. The bigger issue within this body of work concerns the caregivers of this population. The parents, siblings, relatives and friends of children and adults with special needs face daily challenges. The inevitably they willhave to face of who will take care of their children when they areno longer here.

Artist Bio
Irene Antonia Diane Reece is Houston, TX based artist working primarily in photography, documentary style film and painting. The issues that inform my work revolve around racial identity, family histories, mental and community health issues. Her brother, Froncell Juan Reece, is a 24 year old man diagnosed as autistic, with moderate cerebral palsy and severe echolalia. Froncell has a constant routine that he follows every day. Irene and her sister Nancy, (Froncell’s twin) are part of that routine. So are her parents. Growing up Irene came to understand that her brother's mind was pure, innocent, undeterred and unaware of the daily happenings of the world. Yet Froncell understands he is different. Different in appearance, different in temperament, different in his use of language and different in how he processes things.

Play It as It Lays • Curated by José Guadalupe Garza
Work by Margaux Crump, Marie Bannerot McInerney, and Gillian Tobin
Grace R. Cavnar Gallery

Curator Statement
Play It as It Lays takes its title from the 1970 novel by American writer Joan Didion. In this group exhibition each artist provides a distinct monologue with overarching themes of nihilism, fatalism, sexual desire, and longing that are all at once spiked with brilliance, beauty, wretchedness, modesty and self-doubt. Their relationship with materials and the space they occupy stand in for bodies, places, dreams and memories. The transformation of materials and objects not only allude to the literary but also the cinematic. Together their purpose is not to create a narrative but to provide a portal that is at once visceral and metaphysical, harmonious and discordant, near and distant, authentic and constructed. It is a means to make sense of the world and how they navigate through it. Each negotiation, compromise and confrontation is revealed discretely on her surface. It is the evidence of accepting the existing conditions when acting and reacting to a problem-–one, which is both unique in its inception but also universal in its open-endedness.

Artist and Curator Bios
Margaux Crump is a Houston-based artist whose objects, drawings, and texts are rooted in the slippery relationship between desire, intimacy, and control. She has exhibited nationally, most notably at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis and The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Washington, DC. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, MO and her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio, TX.

Marie Bannerot McInerney is artist, curator, and educator. Her work investigates conceptions of fragility, instability, and experiential knowledge. She has exhibited across the United States and abroad including shows at the Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, WA, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in Saint Louis, MO, Corcoran College in Washington, DC, and Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Her formative years were spent in Houston, TX before she earned her BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA at Washington University in Saint Louis. She part of the curatorial collaboration Plug Projects; is currently Vice President of Annual Meetings for the Friends of Dard Hunter, and serves as Assistant Professor in the Fiber Department at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Gillian Tobin received her BFA in 2009 from the Kansas City Art Institute, concentrating in painting and art history. Tobin also holds an MFA in Visual Art from Washington University and an MA from Eastern Illinois University. Tobin has contributed to multiple exhibitions throughout Missouri and Illinois. She was a recipient of the Charlotte Street Foundation Studio Residency in 2014-15. Her practice is driven by material experimentation with a focus on the ontology of objects. She lives and works in Kansas City, MO.

Curator
José Guadalupe Garza is an artist, educator and curator living and working in St. Louis, MO. He earned a BFA from the University of Florida and MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Garza examines the way in which one constructs/reconstructs histories and how ideas are a dialogic conflation of different people, places, and times. He generates shifts in meaning and interpretation by demonstrating how concepts and relationships are constantly inverted and transformed through the use of improvisation and assemblage. His practice is informed by, and connected to ideas relating to aesthetics of power, manifestations of desire, the ready-made and the moving image as a tool and vehicle for propaganda.