SUBSTAINABILITY
GALLERIES [1] & [2], TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY
01/20/11 - 03/01/11
CO-CURATED WITH MARY MIKEL STUMP
Austin Critics Table Award: BEST GROUP GALLERY EXHIBITION
Let’s be clear: we believe in love, dancing, vomit and sweets; broken vessels, video games, sewing and ashes; exhibitions, soiled bedsheets, swimming and meditation; the Lone Ranger, breathing into each other's lungs, Victorian hair, and sororities. We hope you do too.
Forever and Ever.
The galleries at Texas State University are pleased to announce SUBstainability, a group exhibition co-curated by gallery director Mary Mikel Stump and art historian Andy Campbell, regarding the multiple ways that we are sustained emotionally, mentally and bodily. As part of a larger series of events and programs associated with Texas State University’s Common Experience topic of Sustainability: Science, Policy & Opportunity, this exhibition seeks to take an expansive approach to the word – so as to subvert and complicate the dominant deployments of (environmental) sustainability, thus the neologism SUBstainability.
At the heart of the exhibition is Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ seminal installation Untitled (Placebo) (1991), on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is a vast field of silver cellophane-wrapped sweets that through viewer participation, slowly disappears over the course of the exhibition. The work is paired with Jonathan VanDyke’s video Everyone I Ever Loved (Katz Painting, Colby Museum) (2008), which shows the artist contemplating those he has loved in the past while gazing at a large Alex Katz painting. Similarly, key works by Dario Robleto also touch upon this sub-thematic of loss. In Words Tremble With The Thoughts They Express (2008), delicate feather-like forms are made from stretched audiotape of the last recordings of now extinct birds and languages. It is from loss and depression (emotive and physical states) that new ways of understanding the world are produced, something akin to what theorist Heather Love calls “feeling backward”.
Disappearance is part of the narrative here, but so are growth, regeneration and vulnerability. David Maisel’s photographs of crystalline structures growing on forgotten cremain cans are evidence of this. Eve Andrée Laramée’s works, Tincture of Smithson (1992) and Breathing Into Each Other’s Lungs (1998) reinforce the kinds of creative acts that can come from interacting with contemporary art and with other humans. Additionally, a new work from multimedia artist Ivan Lozano, whose work in the past has sought to recover lost moments in queer history, will be premiered.
Artists represented include: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Dario Robleto, Eve Andrée Laramée, David Maisel, Jonathan VanDyke, Ivan Lozano, Jeanne Quinn, Kiki Smith, William Betts, Sarah Sudhoff, Chris Sauter, Ian Bogost, Anthony Campuzano, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Darren Waterston, Alex DaCorte, Loren Erdrich, Andrew Sendor, Anne Siems, Mark Mumford, amongst others.
Artist Lecture: Ivan Lozano: January 19, 2 p.m., JCM 2121
Opening Reception: January 20, 5-7 p.m.
Artist Lecture: Dario Robleto: February 9, 2 p.m., JCM 2121
Artist Lecture: Eve Andrée Laramée: February 23, 2 p.m., JCM 2121
Luke Quinton, "At Texas State, An Exhibit of Contemporary Art Ponders the Big Questions" Austin360
S.E. Smith, "SUBstainability" [review] Art Lies
Robert Faires, "Art to Enchant" The Austin Chronicle
Kate X Messer, "Let Me Tell You About My Grandchildren?!" The Austin Chronicle