Friday, May. 5, 2017 – Sunday, Jun. 11, 2017

Melinda Laszczynski, Randi Long, and Sarah Welch, curated by Dean Daderko
John M. O'Quinn Gallery

The residents in Round 11 of Lawndale’s Artist Studio Program create new visions, sounds, and ideas that will change the way you experience the world around you. Through prints, drawings, hand-drawn animations, and a newly created comic book that explores the near-future in an ecologically disrupted Gulf Coast; an expansive, gestural installation of playfully perverse, glittery and gritty abstract paintings and sculptures enlivened with video; and household items and refuse wired together to produce explosive sound, as well as quieter collages and scores that synthesize the act of looking and listening, these artists invent worlds for us to enter, explore, inhabit. and enjoy.

Holdouts (Process Art), Sarah Welch, 2017

Melinda Laszczynski
Sparkling Canyon, 2017

Melinda Laszczynski received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Houston in 2015 and her BFA in Painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2010. She recently had solo shows at Cardoza Fine Art and galleryHOMELAND in Houston, TX, and group shows include Galleri Urbane (Dallas) and Inman Gallery (Houston). Laszczynski was featured in the 2015 Amarillo Museum of Art sculpture biennial and New American Paintings MFA Annual in 2014 and 2016.

Grounded in painting, Sparkling Canyon expands Laszczynski’s practice to include video and installation. Pedestals become sculptures, function as screens, and contain dance parties. Images and textures spill out of painted panels and lenticular prints to manifest as new material combinations.

Randi Long
Fecific Spuckups, 2017

Randi Long received her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Houston in 2014. She was an artist in residence at Project Row Houses and Alabama Song in 2015. Long collaborated with Gabriel Martinez and James Racliffe for the project Noise Truck, which received an Idea Fund Award in 2016 and 1St Place, Grand Trophy for Best Music, at the Orange Show's 2016 Art Car Parade. Long has performed in projects with Nameless Sounds at AvantGarten, DiverseWorks, and MECA.

Triggered by timers, these sculptures erupt with sound. A garage door opener spins a bicycle wheel; tables are turned by vacuums and fans; a coffee cup holds a contact mic on a nail. When activated by performers, sculptures become instruments, plinths become stages, drawings and collages become set lists and scores. Earplugs are available.

Sarah Welch
Holdouts, 2017

Sarah Welch is an artist, illustrator, and comix-maker. After receiving a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and moving to Houston in 2012, she began the ongoing comic book series, Endless Monsoon. Welch is a co-organizer with Zine Fest Houston and regularly publishes prints, zines, and comics in collaboration with local print shop, Mystic Multiples. Welch is a past Idea Fund recipient, past resident at UT Dallas Centraltrak, and was recently awarded a 2017 Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant and Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund Award from the Dallas Museum of Art.

This reading room installation features drawings, risograph prints, animations, and objects created throughout the making of the Holdouts comic book. These works function both as investigations in world building for the book and as stand-alone pieces that draw heavily from the comic's narrative. Copies of Holdouts can be purchased from the Lawndale Gallery Attendant or online at mysticmultiples.com. "It was nice...while it lasted" stacked prints in this room are takeaways. Please take one (gently).