Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.
For last week’s picks, please go here.
1. CTRL+X: Composed/desCompuestos
Arts Fort Worth
March 3 – April 29, 2023
From Arts Fort Worth:
“We invite the community to an opening reception at Arts Fort Worth Friday, March 3 from 6 to 8 pm for the exhibition CTRL+X: Composed/desCompuestos curated by Laredo-based cultural worker Maritza Bautista.
CTRL+X is the keyboard shortcut for ‘cut.’ In this exhibit, CTRL+X represents artwork with a ‘rasquache,’ or DIY aesthetic, common in border, Mexican-American or Chicano working-class communities. The artworks are composed of often scavenged materials and concepts taken from cultural representations of ordinary, everyday objects and people.
The artists in this joint exhibition, Gil Rocha and Cande Aguilar, are native to south Texas and have exhibited their artwork widely on the national and international level. Rocha and Aguilar create artworks that give the impression of being improvised, implying an almost-uncomposed (or descompuesto) resolution.”
2. Tom Bandage
The Car Wash (Houston)
February 24 – March 10, 2023
From the organizers:
“The solo exhibition of work by Tom Bandage is composed of three totems to entropic interiority rendered in steel and aluminum. In these works the artist uses monochromatic grayscale and moderated reflective opacity to establish an encrypted surface. The materials contain the possibility for reflection but eschew this in their natural state, creating a mask layer which simultaneously invites and rejects the viewer.
The physics of tension generates the forms, which are pressure bound from either side. Their geometric configuration dictates their orientation under this tension. Physics, Anatomy, Violence, and Stoicism are all reasonable points of departure in the investigation of the work’s libidinal qualities. These are direct and immediate interpretations. However, they limit the viewer from accessing the full figured liminal state of the artworks which evades semiotic interpretation.”
Chad Rea, “Heartivism,” at Cloud Tree Studios & Gallery
3. Chad Rea: Heartivism: A new lens to look at life through
Cloud Tree Studios (Austin)
March 3 – 19, 2023
“Multidisciplinary artist Chad Rea brings his newest batch of work and his uplifting brand of activism he calls Heartivism to Cloud Tree Gallery. Drawing inspiration from current events, and utilizing techniques mastered as an advertising agency creative director, Chad allows his message to inform the medium. His paintings, sculptures, and digital works reflect the ever-changing times we live in and his materials, processes, and artistic styles evolve from one collection to the next. In 2020, only three years after he began to make art professionally, Chad was named ‘Top 10 Visual Artist’ by The Austin Chronicle. With HEARTIVISM, he aims to arouse, delight, and reframe the human experience through the lens of radical acceptance, compassion, and self-love.”
Mariana Olague, “Paint all outlets white,” at the 2023 UTEP Faculty Biennial.
4. Study is what you do with other people: 2023 UTEP Faculty Biennial
Rubin Center for the Visual Arts (El Paso)
January 19 – April 7, 2023
From the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts:
“Including recent work by 21 faculty members in the Department of Art at The University of Texas at El Paso, the 2023 Faculty Biennial surveys the points of intersection between the practice of teaching and the studio. A unique opportunity for students to see the works made by their teachers, the exhibition also reaffirms how faculty members first came to teach: through their excellence in creative work, material investigations, and conceptual rigor. Taking its title from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s collaborative book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), the exhibition points to the radical potential held within cacophony.”
Cara Rae Joven, “Bell IIIII,” 2019-2022, steel, rope, 2.5 x 2.5 inches, height varies, at Co-Opt Research and Projects
5. Cara Rae Joven: Notes on Bells
CO-OPt Research + Projects (Lubbock)
February 25 – April 9, 2023
From Co-Opt Research and Projects:
“Bells is a group of sculptures that embraces its environment and the world it was made in. There are nine sculptures made of rope and manipulated, found steel hardware. Each sculpture comprises a cap, a clapper and an anchor. An arrangement of caps sits on the floor and over them hover clappers hung with rope suspended from the architecture of the space. On the other end of these ropes are anchors holding up its parts. The gallery floor is a field of anchors and their corresponding caps not too far away. The space is filled with the colorful rope running perfectly plumb from the gallery’s pipes and wooden slats near the ceiling and angling away from its vertical center.
I became interested in the simple mechanism and principles behind, or rather inside, of a bell. This work explores the different forms that perform the parts of a bell. They are hung from the highest point of a space, maximizing the space it occupies, but vertically. Reminiscent of lost and faded aspirations of monumentalism. These sculptures not only embrace the architecture they are bound by, but also lean into the gravity and forces of tension and weight which all play an integral part in the work.”
