Temperate Grasslands
Curated by Coka Treviño
Featuring: Maria Fernanda Barrero, Hollis Hammonds, Ryan Hawk, J Paul Jackson, Jieun Beth, Betelhem Makonnen, Paloma Mayorga, MuthaGoose, L. Renee Nunez, Dawn Okoro, Nazia Parvez, Sara Vanderbeek, and Cheyenne Weaver.
June 28 - August 4, 2024
Pineapple Spider by L. Renee Nunez, 2023, Acrylic on hand cut canvas, nails, 64 x 81 in, Courtesy of Northern-Southern.
Temperate Grasslands (Austin Texas’ Biome) emerged from a simple, imperative thought, “I want a garden”.
A garden meant a space where I could gather beautiful objects, nature, and life. Organic forms and colors I’ve never quite appreciated; shapes that would make me look twice before knowing what they are. I wanted to feel smaller. To forget how heavy it feels to be a human. Knowing my shape and colors is one of infinity. I want flowers, animals, air, and empty space. Some natural roughness; one that molds couldn’t replicate. Perfect Imperfections.
Mainly it seemed important to be surrounded by a landscape created by artists; To fit within its weird beauty.
Feel imagined as part of their creation. I wanted to be in that context, an expression of art.
I’d also like you to be with me. I want you to feel pretty.
To know you are beauty within itself, worthy of being admired like art.
Come on and play!
Temperate Grasslands runs from June 28 - August 4, 2024
Member Preview: June 28, 7-8 PM
Opening Reception: June 28, 8-10 PM
Gallery Hours:
Saturday, August 3rd 11 AM-4 PM
Sunday, August 4th 11 AM-4 PM
and by appointment (see below)
Culture Complex: 4201 S Congress Ave, #323
EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Jieun Beth received her Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin (2013) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design (2009). She has exhibited regionally, nationally, and internationally, and notable recent exhibitions include the Korea Art Show in Suwon, South Korea (2022), a solo exhibit at CANVAS ATX in Austin, TX (2022), and at ARTIFACT Gallery, New York, NY (2021). She participated in the Desert Door Residency hosted by Big Medium and Desert Door Distillery in Drayden, TX (2022).
Exploring themes ranging from the body to spirit, memory to personal truth, individual to collective, and singular to universal, Jieun Beth threaded concepts between body identity, the identity of memory, and the identity of impermanence.
MuthaGoose
Jill Garcia and Kim Phu are the two artists that make up MuthaGoose. They combine their two styles: Jill’s vintage-inspired, illustrative-leaning, chaotic hands-on collage with Kim’s more clean aesthetic, technology-based concepts, and delicate ceramics. They often work in tandem, passing objects back and forth at every step of the process. This creates unpredictable and unique pieces that often look old, but have modern undertones.
Maria Fernanda Barrero
María Fernanda Barrero is a Mexican artist who lives and works in Monterrey Mexico. Her work is mainly characterized by the use of white paper, or thread, as well as the use of contained monochrome spaces which include elements of nature and landscape.
She graduated from a Masters in Fine Arts Sculpture by the Slade School of Fine Arts, University College London in 2008 and a Fine Arts Bachelor at the Universidad de Monterrey, Mexico in 2003. She also studied sculpture at Europäisches Kunst Akademie, Germany in 2005 and West Dean College, England in 2005. Her solo exhibitions include: By the End of Dusk, Alternativa Once Gallery, Monterrey (2018); A House in the Air at Casa de la Cultura de Nuevo León, Monterrey (2014); The flowers of a Garden that Might Have Existed, Galería CONARTE. Monterrey (2012); A Garden by Dawn, Alternativa Once, Monterrey, (2010). She participated in the Registro 05 group exhibition at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MARCO) Monterrey (2018) and in the X FEMSA Biennale in 2012 as well as in over 40 group shows in Mexico, United States, England, Italy, Israel and Japan. She participated in the Mino Paper Residency (2011) granted by the Japanese government and their exhibition Navigating Light at the Mino Washi Museum, Japan. She obtained the Bernardo Elosúa. Arte A.C. Award Soporte/papel in 2009.
Hollis Hammonds
Hollis Hammonds is a multimedia artist whose work, built on memory and utilizing evidence from the public collective consciousness, investigates social issues ranging from economic disparity and state violence to environmental degradation and human-made disasters. Her drawings and installations have been widely exhibited throughout the US, including solo exhibitions at venues such as Women & Their Work in Austin, TX, Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC, Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, TX, and the Reed Gallery in Cincinnati, OH. Hammonds has been an artist-in-residence at McColl Center for Art + Innovation, the Ucross Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Hollis is also part of the collaborative team Hammonds + West whose multimedia projects and exhibitions revolve around the theme of climate grief and making visible individual contributions to climate change. Hammonds is the author of Drawing Structure: Conceptual and Observational Techniques and has had her creative work featured in New American Paintings, Manifest’s International Drawing Annual, FOA (Friend of the Artist Magazine), Uppercase Magazine, and Art on Paper. She is currently a Professor of Art at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX.
Ryan Hawk
Ryan Hawk is a visual artist who uses video, sculpture, and site-specific installation to imagine alternative corporealities and forms of embodiment. Solo presentations of his work have been held at the Gray Contemporary, Lawndale Art Center, The Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum, and The Museum of Human Achievement. His work has also been included in group exhibitions, screenings, and festivals such as Perform Chinatown, Los Angeles; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn; the Museum of Fine Arts in Nagoya, Japan; Jonathan Hopson Gallery; and many more. Notable awards include an SMFA Traveling Fellowship, The Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund from the Dallas Museum of Art, and a two-year fellowship with the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Hawk holds a BFA in studio art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an MFA in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin.
J Paul Jackson
Jonathan Paul Jackson (b. 1984) is an African American Visual Artist from Houston, Texas. He works in all mediums of Art, including Painting, Sculpture and Illustration. At the age of 11, he completed his first large-scale painting, and by the age of 16, he was showing in coffee shops in the Houston area. Jackson has some formal education in art, but is mostly self-taught. His fabric and stitched art was his first full series. In 2008, Jackson started curating art shows for fellow visual artist, putting his own art career to the side for a couple of years, but he never stopped sketching and drawing. In 2011, he returned to his art, producing a series of oil pastel works jazz greats, political figures and everyday objects. His other works involve experimenting in Neo-Expressionism on a series of action paintings.
Jackson’s paintings range from a series of color studies or what he has come to call Color Meditations, in which he experimented with color while researching the masters of color, Matisse, Warhol and Gauguin, he soon realized that it was not the colors they used to create the work but how they applied the paint/color to the surface that truly defined them as "Masters of Color." Jackson explores the historical symbolism of Indigenous people and interprets the imagery found there into his modern style; creating a personal totem by “writing” with their language. He applies the same method of making work to his landscape paintings by using nature to interpret into his own visual language. Currently he’s working on a series in which he takes photos of nature, prints out the photo and hand embellishes the print outs. It’s conceptual series about how we all see the same nature but interrupt it a different way. He has exhibited at numerous galleries in Houston, as well as the Fort Worth Community Arts Center, and at Flight Gallery in San Antonio.
foltzgallery.com/artist/jonathan-paul-jackson
Betelhem Makonnen
A native of Ethiopia, Betelhem Makonnen is an artist living in Austin, TX, with a MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in History and Literature of Africa/African Diaspora from UT Austin. Her work in photography, video, installation and writing is shown nationally and internationally– including Women & Their Work, The Contemporary Austin, The Philbrook Museum of Art, Big Medium, Le Musée des Abattoirs, and The Carver Museum, with performances and screenings at The Blanton Museum, IVAHM, and Casa Daros. Her work has been featured in a variety of publications including Artforum, NYT, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Zoetrope, O Menelick 2º Ato, Revista Lampejo, and Glasstire. In addition to her practice she co-organizes Addis Video Art Festival, a platform for video art in Ethiopia, and is a co-founder member of the Austin-based arts collective Black Mountain Project.
A continual blending of anthropological, philosophic, and historical – personal and collective – poetic inquiries provides the platform for the development of the conceptual foundation of my practice. My works translate perception, presence, and place within a trans-temporal and trans-spacial topology that operates on the relational dynamics of my African diasporic consciousness.
With unfixed and many-ed points of departure, I use (re)search, (re)configurations, and (re)combinations and to make works that take form in the in-between spaces existing in paradoxes, feedback loops and sites of connection. I want my works to contribute towards an unlearning that brings othered planes of perception into view.
Paloma Mayorga is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, video, performance, and installation. Often using her own body as medium, Mayorga explores movement, place, and cultural identity in relation to landscape and ancestral uses of plants.
Defined by her bicultural upbringing, Mayorga grew up taking long road trips between Austin, Texas and Mexico City. She observed changes in the landscape and developed a sense of home through the plants that decorated the gardens of her grandmothers, as well as those that were utilized in local cuisine and home remedies.
Her art practice is rooted in exploring memories attached to plants, with a special focus on Latinx ecofeminist perspectives. Mayorga’s work investigates the concept of botanical wisdom, or the practice of slowly unearthing bits of inherited knowledge that have been passed down generations of women as tools for healing and survival.
L. Renée Núñez
Born in Texas, Indigenous and Mexican American artist L. Renee Nunez lives and works on the Edwards Plateau near Balcones Canyonlands Preserve which serves as constant inspiration with its untouched landscape. L. Renee has a BA in Fine Art from the University of Texas. Recently she has exhibited with Northern-Southern gallery in downtown Austin.
Dawn Okoro’s desire to make art sparked from her love of fashion illustration and design. Her work is influenced by punk, hip-hop, and the composition techniques used in fashion photography.
Okoro has collaborated with Pepsico and her work has been on set for productions at NBC, Sony Pictures, MAX, and BET. She is featured in Architectural Digest, Hyperallergic and W Magazine. Okoro’s work has also been exhibited at Christie’s New York in the exhibition “100 Years of Harlem.”
Nazia Parvez is a British-Asian artist and writer, raised in London, and currently based in Austin, TX. She has a multidisciplinary background that includes architecture and design, photojournalism and documentary film. Her emerging art practice encompasses different media and technologies — from sculpture and photography, to VR and interactive installations — and is informed by a general curiosity about the world.
Sara Vanderbeek
Sara Vanderbeek is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and art advisor based in Austin, TX. Her work responds to place, politics, motherhood, mental illness, and trauma. She has engaged in projects at venues nationally, including The Contemporary Austin (TX); Bentonville Film Festival at Cache (AR); Deitch Projects (NY); Facebook Open Arts (TX), and TSALA (CA) upcoming.
Vanderbeek is the Co-founding Executive Director & Curator at DORF, an artist-run experimental contemporary art gallery that provides space for artists and advocacy initiatives. As a consultant she has formed several notable private and public art collections including Texas Municipal Retirement System (TX) and University Health (TX) and was a founding member and board president of ICOSA Collective (TX). She began her career as a Specialist at Christie’s Auction House in New York where she gained professional training in art appraising, cataloguing, and sales.
She has received grants from the City of Austin Economic Development Department, Mid-America Arts Alliance, Christie’s Auction House, National Endowment for the Arts, Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, and was a finalist for the 2022 Artpace International Artist-In-Residence Program. She received her BFA in printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design.
Cheyenne Weaver
My work is driven by a deep desire to connect with Place. I use natural materials as a poetic alchemy to fill the void in relation that we’ve lost as a culture through colonialism. By researching nature, material and history, I aim to develop a better understanding of the more-than-human world, and draw on the weird and ironic narratives hidden within.
Cheyenne Weaver (b. San Miguel de Allende, México) is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and drawing. Weaver grew up in Austin and has spent time in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. She received a BFA from CalArts in 2004 and a Masters in social design from AC4D in 2011. Her work has been exhibited recently at The Contemporary Austin, and Sam Houston State U. Gallery (Huntsville), as well as the Tang Museum (Saratoga Springs), Grey Gallery (New York); Parrish Art Museum (Southampton); the University of Houston Blaffer Gallery (Houston); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, LACE (Los Angeles); Pomona College Museum of Art (Pomona); the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena); Shoshana Wayne Gallery (Santa Monica); and Machine Project (Los Angeles). Cheyenne lives and works in Austin, Texas.