September 6 - 28, 2024
From Mercury Project:
“Artist Statement:
The Woman Under the Water
This body of work explores fairy tale, ecology, and healing. Humans have lost our connection to the Earth we are a part of, a Mother that has valuable knowledge to share with us.
My studio practice for the last few years has started with almost daily walks along the San Antonio River. I found myself getting to know her, her cycles, the wildness she displayed before a rainstorm, the hum of new bugs in the spring, her sparse silence on cold days…I could hear her screaming during last summer’s 110 degree days. Yet, she continues–her long hair strung with trash and algae after a heavy rain. Those that feel her irritation, endlessly comb out the bottles, cigarette butts and Styrofoam trying to comfort her. Through it she continues to flow, to grow, to rage, to live: providing habit and nourishment to everything around her. Gentle species like muscles slowly return to live in her gills. Lush trees grow and create shade for her skin. She has the ability to heal quickly, if we help her, if we give her time. Fish could fill her veins with sparkling scales again, her eyes could clear. I feel her retreating completely from certain parts of the river, too dirty and filled with poison she couldn’t breathe. But on stormy days, when hail falls from the sky the size of baseballs, I hear her screaming again. She is angry, powerful, and destructive. I look around to see if other people can hear her and are scared as well.
It is not difficult to predict how a culture whose practices have strangled, used, neglected and endangered the Earth would then treat those with less power in the population. As a woman and a feminist I see this acutely and most knowledgably in the treatment of women, but these violent practices have veined out in all directions, equally destructive.
The masks, photography and sculpture in this exhibition seek to tie women to the inherent power and wisdom of the natural world in a mutually empowering symbiosis. As we take care to learn her lessons, to clean her hair, to feed her, to listen and tell her stories; we in turn learn her lessons of resilience, growth and rage.
Artist Bio:
Sarah Fox’s multi-media narratives and characters are created from embodied female
experience. Stories of life, loss, sex and love are told through archetypical hybrid creatures. The
resulting drawings, cyanotypes, and video works suggest a fairytale with an undercurrent of
dark symbolism.
Her work has been shown throughout Texas, as well as in the Kinsey Institute (Bloomington,
Indiana), Field Projects Gallery (New York, New York), Espacio Dörffi (Lanzarote, Canary Islands), Casa Lu (Mexico City), and Darmstädter Sezession, (Darmstadt, Germany). She has participated in artist residencies throughout the US including The Vermont Studio Center, The Women’s Studio Workshop, Wassiac Projects, and residencies abroad at Casa Lu in Mexico City, Residencia Nautilus in the Canary Islands, Atelierhaus Hilmsen in Hilmsen, Germany andKünstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. She received an Individual Artist Grant from the City of San Antonio in 2021.
Fox lives and works in San Antonio, Texas. She received a BA from Southwestern University in
Georgetown, Texas where she studied studio art and feminist theory. She received an MFA
from the University of Texas at San Antonio. In addition to teaching at Texas A&M University, she runs an art and ecology summer camp for young artists in conjunction with the San Antonio River Foundation. www.sarahfoxart.com
About Mercury Project: Antonia Richardson, a visual artist and painter, had a long held dream to have a live-work-gallery-studio space. a creative space where artists could work, where art could be shared and experienced featuring artists of all disciplines. a place to grow. She found it in a 1940’s factory warehouse in southtown that would become Mercury Project.
Warren retired following a career as a graphic, environmental, furniture and exhibit designer. He began experimenting with field photography and natural light in 1998. His narrative travel photography was captured in the 2009 exhibit beneath the tropic of cancer. Warren’s photography is also exhibited nationally and part of a corporate collection.
Through Mercury Project, the two artists set forth a mission to bring art and culture to the community and beyond. https://www.mercuryproject.net/about”
Reception: September 6, 2024 | 6–9 pm
538 Roosevelt
San Antonio, 78210 Texas
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