Lawndale Art Center May-June Exhibitions

Lawndale Art Center presents four exhibitions on view May 9 thorugh June 14. Reception Friday, May 9, 6:30 – 8:30 PM, artist talks at 6:00 PM.

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS:

Practice
Shayne Murphy, Jim Nolan & Emily Peacock
Lawndale Artist Studio Program Exhibition
John M. O'Quinn Gallery

The Lawndale Artist Studio Program is part of Lawndale’s ongoing commitment to support the creation of contemporary art by Gulf Coast area artists. With an emphasis on emerging practices, the program provides three artists with studio space on the third floor of Lawndale Art Center at 4912 Main Street in the heart of Houston’s Museum District. This exhibition features residents for the eighth round of the Lawndale Artist Studio Program, Jim Nolan, Shayne Murphy and Emily Peacock.

Shayne Murphy presents new work focusing on the creation of invented spaces that combine the real and imagined. The spaces represent a hyper-reality; a place where dreams, memories, and the future converge. By combining different visual languages, he seeks to explore the relationships between abstraction and realism through paintings, drawings, and installation based works. Imagery is often distorted and manipulated taking on a fantastical quality while still maintaining a connection to the physical world. The occupants or figures within these spaces embody different roles including that of transient, protector, destroyer, or at times remain unknown.

In an attempt to better understand his own art making process, Jim Nolan will remake and reinterpret three of his older sculptures that were destroyed in moving from the East Coast to Texas.

Through photographs, videos and small installations, Emily Peacock explores her relationship with her sister through staging gestures and examining elements of the environments, objects and routines associated with shared personal histories. Drawing on her close family relationships, this exhibition of new work plays with modes of portraiture and the various ways we interact with photographs as personal objects.

Residency Exchange
Lawndale – CentralTrak
Spencer Brown-Pearn, Heyd Fontenot, Sally Glass, Jeff Gibbons, Shawn Mayer, Lynne McCabe, Shayne Murphy, Jim Nolan, Emily Peacock, David Politzer & Liz Trosper
Cecily E. Horton Gallery

In an attempt to break down barriers and to create an exchange between the artistic communities of Houston and Dallas, this exhibition presents an exchange between current and past residents of the Lawndale Artist Studio Program and CentralTrak: The University of Texas at Dallas Artists’ Residency.

This project creates an opportunity for dialog between a number of artists with relationships to one or both of these non-profit institutions and artist residencies. Select resident-pairs from each program will perform an art/idea exchange, engaging in the “intimate” artistic act of conceptual collaboration, opening up a dialog and creating new artworks which combine their individual art practices.

Euclid's Line
Michelle Chen-Dubose
Grace R. Cavnar Gallery

Michelle Chen-Dubose’s paintings document a conflation of questions with what is seen through the blurry window of a moving vehicle. Long stretches in a car can be a strange gap in the continuity of everyday life. In this space, we are moving, sitting still and waiting at the same time. Chen-Dubose tries to isolate something experiential in this shared movement and pause.

Fused Dualities
Lauren Salazar
Project Space

Lauren Salazar merges the dualities of craft and minimal abstraction, domestic and high art, the traditional and the contemporary through woven installations and sculptures. Salazar invites the viewer’s associations about weaving with domestic objects, tradition and craft and in her work aims to subvert and expand upon these associations by exploiting and magnifying the formal gridded world within the process.

In weaving, Salazar is able to connect and explore within the medium’s layered cultural heritage while also indulging in the geometric abstract language that she loves. After her pieces have been woven and are off the loom, the second act occurs. The pieces are aggressively manipulated.

Weavings are bound, bolted, and stretched onto and across frames, walls, ceilings, and floors. Process as well as literal and metaphorical tensions are present within the final abstract pieces.

Also on view
through January 2015

The People's Plate
Otabenga Jones & Associates
North Exterior Wall

Through a collaborative art project/public health program, Otabenga Jones & Associates will attempt to mitigate the ongoing health crisis of obesity and its related risks. The Collective will create a public mural at the Lawndale Art Center along with a series of adjacent programs, kicking off a year-long commitment to health education.

Programs will include cooking classes, a foraging workshop, an urban gardening workshop, an instructional cooking video and a line of mass produced lunchboxes that will be made available to the public. Inspired by the Black Panther Free Breakfast for School Children Program, which saw the Panthers cooking and serving breakfast to poor inner city children, the Collective aims to provide at-risk community members with a set of tools that will encourage self-sufficiency and empowerment in terms of maintaining their own health through food choices, while building community.

The People’s Plate is a project of Creative Capital.

The Lawndale Mural Project is generously sponsored by Kinzelman Art Consulting.