Teleology, according to artist Jason Villegas, miraculously manifests inside the spanking new space at Okay Mountain in east Austin.
Installation shot
Villegas condenses the design and underlying material elements of his own parallel universe in a perfectly balanced exhibition saturated with galactic paintings, video, styrofoam sculpture and calculated drawings. The young guns at Okay Mountain have landed on the mushrooming Austin art scene with a big bang of a first show.
Visitors are greeted by a monolith, setting the framework for the show titled Repressed Burial Fantasy . On the backside of this black wall, Villegas projects a short, looping video focused on the pathos of indifferent consumer culture, asteroids, crawfish and clusters of disposable detritus. A rotund, bearded, naked man lounges in front of a television, contemplating his girth while being bombarded by advertisements. In both the video and paintings, Villegas consistently presents a mythology based on accumulation, repression and universal symbols of cyclical life.
Bulbous protrusions sprout from corners of the gallery like sculptural portals to this new dimension. The artist’s previous works never saturated a space so well. Most art patrons tend to breeze past work within minutes (or even seconds), but I watched small crowds from the Blanton grand re-opening weekend linger in the space for at least a half hour to enjoy the work and talk to the artist.
Wall of Izods-cell phones
This transcendental content of this exhibition ranges from green two-dimensional monsters and giant peach-colored crawfish to paintings of bursting, celestial phenomena. A trio of curvilinear wooden cell phones was difficult to discern at first glance, but a brave spectator picked one up to see if it functioned (presumably to call for beer, which had almost immediately run out). Painted in trendy colors of white and brown, each phone featured the conspicuous, Izod-esque embroidered patch from many of Villegas” clothing designs. While he’s finishing up his MFA at Rutgers, he wastes no time running his own line of clothing [called ‘school”], editing and creating animation/video loops, drawing, painting, carving styrofoam and working for a big name, hipster clothing conglomerate. He’s a busy bee.
The beauty of Repressed Burial Fantasy is its ability to tie such seemingly incongruous elements into one intriguing sci-fi scene. Villegas” use of portals, parallel universes and single-cell organisms works as a metaphor for birth and death, beginnings and endings.
Upon the back wall of the spacious gallery, a pink, 4-feet tall blob floats, its itchy black-tar mouth making the surroundings seem stressful and unsound. Three little yellow life forms fly towards its head in haste. A northern star, spray painted gold, pulls the viewer’s gaze around the corner past the monolith. The strategic placement of characters, vibrant colors and kinetic lines makes the show a circular journey, ending with a clustered styrofoam sculpture as a focal point. Working with the theme of accumulation, pieces of styrofoam have been refigured into tractors, disregarded paper cups, and animals.
Installation shot
One corner of the space houses detailed framed drawings that incorporate animals and insects in various anti-gravitational amalgamations. One of my favorites includes a fuzzy warren of rabbits writhing in circular puzzle. Which one did he draw first? It’s difficult to say, with all their interconnected limbs and lines.
The wall drawing Cosmic Insect features detailed collisions of millipedes, pupae and jubilant beetles all crawling in a drunken parade formation along a pink line. Using acrylic, ink, spray paint and markers, Villegas draws with a steady hand and an otherworldly lightheartedness. In the drawing titled Seafood , Villegas clearly enjoys shading-in a horseshoe crab shell, the fantastic swirl of a narwhals horn and the suction cups of an octopus. Dollops of mauve and swirling plum give these marine creatures a sense of levity and bliss that you simply have to see for yourself.
In previous installation works at Houston’s Deborah Colton Gallery and DiverseWorks, the artist sought to tie loose ends together with fabric remnants, stuffed animals and humor. Repressed Burial Fantasy coalesces consumer culture into a kind of bubbling solipsism that the artist strived for in his earlier work. The new, medium-sized exhibition space at Okay Mountain, nestled behind an overflowing piñata storefront on Cesar Chavez street, offers enough space to let Villegas explore this personal cosmology without crowding the drawings and paintings. It seems as if the artist has sliced through a magnetic force field, revealing his strange, visual doctrine of design and purpose.
Images courtesy Okay Mountain.
Michelle Gonzalez Valdez is an artist and writer living in San Antonio.
