Impossible exchange: New Lens Based Work from Texas

Third Floor Studios

Artist talk: 6 PM
Opening Reception:
Friday, September 29 from 6:30-8:30 PM
Curated By Lynne McCabe

Performance by Jill Pangallo at 7:30 PM

‘In the photograph you see nothing. The lens alone ‘sees’, but is hidden. What the photographer captures, then, isn’t the Other, but what remains of the Other when he or she isn’t there. We are never really in the presence of the object (the Other). Between reality and its image, exchange is impossible. There is at best a figurative correlation. ‘Pure’ reality, if it exists, remains a question without an answer.

And this is what these photographs are: a question to the Other which expects to remain unanswered’

Jean Baudrillard


Not being a curator, but a lens-based artist myself, I wanted to be as responsive as possible to what I encountered in the many studio visits I undertook. Without an overriding curatorial conceit, I attmepted to have a subjective experience, as Baudrillard puts it ‘photographs (that) are: a question to the Other which expects to remain unanswered.’

Through the divergent media and varied formal strategies in the work exhibited here, in the first survey show of its kind to be hosted by Lawndale, I hope that you are as excited to discover this work as
I have been.

Lynne McCabe

ARTISTS

ROTEM BALVA
Brooklyn-based artist, and former Houston resident, Rotem Balva graduated in 1999 from the Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Her videos and installation-based performances reflect geographies of altered lexicons. Car crashes, sand-fights, and the explosive combination of oxygen and tar, elements that the artists wants to use to emphasize “the ephemeral and transient nature of things,” define her conceptual approach to historical and social events and her research of culture’s changing codes.

AMY BLAKEMORE
Born in Tulsa Oklahoma, Amy Blakemore lives and works in Houston, Texas. She has shown widely, both nationally and internationally; including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the 2006 Whitney Biennial and Pingyao International Festival of Photography, Pingyao, P.R China, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is the recipient of an Artadia: the fund for art and dialogue, New York NY, Individual Artist Grant.

Haunting in their banality, her photographs are an exploration of the medium’s ability to capture memory, the forgotten or yearned for, while her magical use of light as subterfuge is expounded by the formal aspects of the work.

ANDREA CAILLOUET
Andrea Caillouet, grew up in Louisiana, and graduated from the painting program at UTSA in 1999 and has shown at Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, and the Shore Institute of Contemporary Art, New Jersey.

Although trained as a painter, she is exploring the processes of photography, sculpture and installation to understand universal characteristics of the human condition, or aspects of daily existence that transcend cultural or racial identity. Social spaces of interaction, intimacy, memory and domesticity, for example, are the artist’s favorite subjects that she analyzes through a distinct and symbolic use of color.

DUNCAN GANLY
Duncan Ganley is a British artist based in Houston. He received his BFA Degree in 1993 and MFA in 1995 from Edinburgh College of Art, and was a fellow of the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2001-2002.

Working with a variety of lens-based media, he has shown both nationally and internationally; including “Location Shots” at Inman Gallery, Houston, “Endless Film set 2” at the Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND, and :Siting Sculpture” at The Contemporary, Dallas, and, “Emotion” at the Kunst Bunker, Munich, Germany.

BARNA KANTOR
Barna Kantor recently moved to Houston from Austin after graduating from the Transmedia Dept of University of Texas in 2005.

Researching the nature and separation of optical and mental illusions, the artist creates or manipulates sites that house said illusions. He has shown widely in Texas; at The Austin Museum of Art, the Creative Research Laboratory, Austin and at international film festivals such as L’alternativa 9th Barcelona Independent Film Festival.

MIMI KATO
Japanese artist Mimi Kato works with a variety of media, including photography, and video installation. Her work deals with issue of identity. Originally from Nara, Japan, Kato moved to America in 1998 to pursue her interest in art. She received a BA in Photography from Truman State University in 2002, and is currently working on an MFA at The University of Texas at San Antonio.

Recently, Kato has been included in the 2005 New Orleans Triennial at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Crossroads: Asia / America at Galveston Arts Center, and a solo show entitled Yokai Zyukkei: Scenery with monsters at Joan Grona Gallery in San Antonio.

KAREN MAHAFFY
Mahaffy earned her MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio, in 1996. She has exhibited at the San Antonio Art Museum, Sala Diaz, Project Room, and nationally in venues such as Locust Street Projects in Miami, the McKinney Avenue Contemporary and the Center for Contemporary Art in Dallas and SmackMellon in Brooklyn. She has been featured the “Artist Looking at Art” lecture series at the McNay Art Museum and “Two to Watch” at ArtPace Foundation for Contemporary Art in San Antonio.

In her recent work, Still Life with Whiskey and Yo La Tengo (2005) and Still Life with Fruit and Zhuang Zi (2005), she addresses the subtle relationships between issues of time and contextual space. Focusing on the overlapping, quiet rhythms and understated beauty of the mundane and routine, the almost still images in the work are viewed through veils of space, sound and incident, and invite the viewer to slow down to the near discernable pace of the work, to sort out its context and recognize the nature of the prosaic.

AMANDA MOON
Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Amanda Moon currently lives in San Antonio, Texas. She graduated valedictorian from the Atlanta College of Art in 2004 with a BFA in Photography. She has worked for prominent San Antonio art institutions such as ArtPace and currently, Finesilver Gallery. In her recent body of work, she documents sound vibrations from popular songs, which range in genre from classical, hip-hop to death metal, by transmitting the music through bodies of various liquids.

DEMETRIUS OLIVER
Demetrius Oliver earned his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, in 2004 and his BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998. From 2004-06 he was an artist in resident at the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and he completed a residency at Skowhegan in the summer of 2004. Currently, he is an artist in residence, at The Studio Museum in, New York.

He has been the recipient of a Stuart Egnal Award and a Florence Lief Award and has exhibited his work at the Amistad Fox and Meyerson galleries, University of Pennsylvania and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.

MIKE OSBORNE
Mike Osborne received a B.A. in English from Stanford University in 2000, and his MFA in studio art at the University of Texas in 2006.

The recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Taiwan, he is currently residing there. His recent exhibitions include “MFA II,” at The Creative Research Laboratory, Austin, the Austin Museum of Art’s “22 to Watch: New Art in Austin” and “New American Talent 19” at Arthouse, Austin.

JILL PANAGELLO
Born in Baltimore and raised in southern California, Jill Panagallo is a video and performance artist who headed to New York City at the age 17. In 1993 she received a BFA in communication Design from Parsons School of Design and a BA in Psychology from Eugene Lang College. For the next 12 years she spent her days working at a major advertising firm in New York City and her nights performing on the downtown club and cabaret circuit. In the fall of 2005, Jill relocated to Austin to pursue an MFA at the University of Texas.

STEPHANIE SAINT SANCHEZ
Stephanie Saint Sanchez was raised in the small town of Beaumont Texas where her imagination was encouraged and thrived. As founder of La Chicana Laundry Pictures she has written, produced, and directed, over 16 genre splitting shorts Based on the images, sounds and psychosis’s in her surroundings both real and Imagined, Arty Pants wise she has also crossed over into multimedia installations like “Dolls House” and art car creations, the “Video Washing Machine” and the “La Loteria truck

ADAM SCHREIBER
Adam Schreiber graduated from Colorado State University with a B.F.A in Photography in 1999. His recent exhibitions include New American Talent 20 at Arthouse, Austin, Spaces at Worrell Photographs, New York, NY and Orange Coast College; Costa Mesa, California Adam Schreiber has been photographing the sanctioned and marginal corporate landscape for the last five years. He currently lives in Austin, Texas

ANDREW TAYLOR
Houston-based artist Andrew Taylor was born in Southeast Texas and grew up near Dallas. In 1996, Taylor moved to Beaumont, TX and attended Lamar University to receive a BA in Studio Art/Photography. Taylor uses self-portraiture as a means of documenting a reactionary ‘performance,’ mimicking characters found in found family photos. By assuming the roles - and briefly, the identities - of these archetypal males, Taylor creates a link between the past and the present, linking social structures and cultures by visual codes. His recent work raises questions about our romantic notions of manhood.

Andy Taylor is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant through the Cultural Arts Council of Houston/Harris County. Taylor’s work is currently on view in ‘a good man is hard to find’ at The Houston Center for Photography.

DAVE WOODY
Dave Woody was born in Arizona and raised in Colorado. He holds a BFA in Photography from Colorado State University and is currently a third year MFA candidate at the University of Texas in Austin. He has shown widely, exhibitions include The Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa, California and the creative research lab Austin Texas.

Like a documentary photographer who arrived ‘too late’, Woody creates work that invites the second guess. He positions the viewer in an ambiguous place that prevents easy reading and encourages us to wonder what we might have missed and to question if things are actually the way they seem.

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