Top Five: July 11, 2024

Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.

For last week’s picks, please go here.

A piece by Juan Juarez

1. Juan Juarez: Looking for Ghosts
Laredo Center for the Arts
June 7 – August 2, 2024

From the Laredo Center for the Arts:

“High strangeness describes a quality of the peculiar, bizarre, and utterly absurd. Paranormal researchers employ the term to qualify unexplained phenomenon. I think it occupies a gray zone where gaps of memory and a construction of events exists. A threshold one must pass through to experience an altered reality parallel to our own. You may call it a dream, fantasy, or liminal space. Do you believe in ghosts? I think we are touched by ghosts every day…

Juan Juarez is a photographer and native Laredoan currently working at Syracuse University School of Art as as Associate Professor of Studio Arts/Painting & Drawing.”

Claire Cowie, “Dusk,” 2024, mixed media on paper, 46 x 30 1/2 inches

2. Claire Cowie: Blind Spot
James Harris Gallery (Dallas)
June 1 – July 20, 2024

From James Harris Gallery:

“James Harris Gallery is pleased to present our tenth exhibition with artist Claire Cowie. Her first at our new gallery in Dallas. Paper has been the artist’s primary material. Like much of Cowie’s past work, the six pieces in the exhibition use multiple perspectives and multiple points of view.

Titled Blind Spot, the artist questions ideas of what we see, what we ignore, and what we think we perceive. Her deliberate conflation of positive and negative space and intense patterning creates circuitous paths that lead the viewer through Cowie’s personal visual archive which entangles public observation and private introspection. Along with direct application of pigment, she has repurposed her previous watercolors and prints along with pieces of fabric that embellish and enhance her work, a cacophony of referential imagery as well as abstract forms. Her work will be on display in our main gallery.”

A piece by Eli Ruhala

3. Eli Ruhala: Queer Narcissus
Arts Fort Worth
July 5 – August 10, 2024

From Arts Fort Worth:

“In Queer Narcissus, a narrative emerges from images compiled over the past three years. Each watercolor drawing abstracts compositions from snapshots taken of the artist by an amorous subject. These images, shared between lovers, transcend mere documentation; they serve as meditations on the intricacies of affection and the transformative power of shared gazes.”

4. Re-Match: A Cage Match Project Retrospective
Cage Match Project (Austin)
July 6 – 24, 2024

From Cage Match Project:

“Cage Match Project (CMP) gallery presents Re-Match: A Cage Match Project Retrospective exhibition featuring artwork and workshops by previous CMP artists, with an overview of nine years of site-specific art installations. CMP gallery lives in an industrial caged-trailer. Measured at 20 x 8 x 7 feet, since 2015, this weathered and rusted container has served as a site for artists to purposefully stage a narrative of the artist-at-odds, with either history, space, or a work of art itself. Featured artists include Jesse Cline, Emily Lee, Annie Miller, Rachel Means, and Emma Rossoff.”

A piece by Heather Suarez

5. In/Congruity
Mercury Project (San Antonio)
July 12 – August 30, 2024

From Mercury Project Gallery:

“The title can be read as either incongruity or in congruity, its interpretation as much up to its audience as it is to the artists. This dual title charges the twelve artists of the show to examine the roles of consonance and dissonance, and asks the viewers to observe the harmony and cacophony that arises from their twelve voices.”