March 1 - 29, 2024
From Lockhart Post Gallery:
“Lawns and Gardens presents the paintings and objects of San Marcos based artists Michael Villarreal and Lana Waldrep Appl. Both artists investigate the relationship between the natural and the man made through the way they exist with and manipulate nature in their own domestic spaces. Both artists seek to highlight the idiosyncratic, the playful, and the real over the idealized or picturesque.
From Michael:
Influenced by personal photos, old and new, my current work is a repository of memory, time, place, and self. I imitate household tasks observed from my childhood home, specifically the general upkeep of my family’s yard. My current yard becomes a space for experimentation that loosely mimics these processes and expectations. I observe these moments over time before expressing them as paintings. As a form of sketching, I take a weed eater to mow brick-like patterns into the grass. I arrange landscaping rocks and emulate the foundation of a home with foam cinder blocks. Each painting is created within a week, allowing for alla prima and impasto techniques to produce abstract passages that, at times, never feel finished. Light shifts over the repetition of maintained shapes and grass, capturing the mundanity of the day-to-day. My paintings create an illusion of order through a playful cultivation of the yard, and fulfillment of common practices in domestic routines, creating a connection between materiality and re-interpretation of lifelong experiences.
From Lana:
I make paintings that prize lone viewers, that seek and create silence. In a world that moves at speed beyond our evolutionary capacity, I seek to create stillness. We have become untethered from time and place due to the instant accessibility of the internet and social media. In this new figmented world of everywhere-ness and atemporality, I seek to create singular experiences.
These most recent works feature still lifes that I began during the post-pandemic time. Have we ever spent so much time at home and living with objects? These still lifes consist of plants, handmade ceramics, utilitarian objects, objects that were once of use but are now broken and have entered into the world of “things”, and single use plastics that I have a hard time limiting to just one life. All objects are rendered life-sized, reminding the viewer of their body.
The paintings lean heavily on color and its ability to describe light and, in turn, weather and time of day. Mark-making is physical and visible and ranges from piped-on impasto, to the gestural, to drips, to scrapes and to scratches. This emphasis on the hand elicits a tactile, sympathetic response. You are here. “
Reception: March 1, 2024 | 5–8 pm
111 South Church Street
Lockhart, 78644 Texas
(512) 398-4886
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