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Close Encounters: Possession & Exquisite Corpse Draw Jam

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MASS Close Encounters presents a screening of Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 cult classic, Possession in conjunction with the closing of the group exhibition Exquisite Corpse.  The screening is on Thursday, October 23rd from 8-11 PM. From Rotten Tomatoes, “Usually misattributed to the horror genre, this challenging and highly unusual drama stars Isabelle Adjani as a young woman who forsakes her husband (Sam Neill) and her lover (Heinz Bennent) for a bizarre, tentacled creature that she keeps in a run-down Berlin apartment.”

In addition to the screening, there will be a freeform Creative Corpse draw jam.  We’ll explain the premise and provide all of the materials.  All are welcome to participate.  You can also just sit back and watch the movie.  We’ll be making a short run zine of our favorite Exquisite Corpse drawings from this event in the near future.  The event is FREE and BYOB.

Also don’t miss one of the last chances to see Exquisite Corpse: The Body Altered in the 21st Century on view from September 19th – October 25th.


Close Encounters: Fantasizing Queer History

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MASS Gallery, in conjunction with OUTsider Festival, is pleased to present Close Encounters: Fantasizing Queer History, a panel and artist talk featuring artists from two exhibitions, both presented simultaneously in Austin, that center on concepts of queer(ing) history.  Artists from Friendship and Freedom (MASS Gallery) and The Gay Wax Museum! (OUTsider Festival) will be in conversation about artwork that recreates and reimagines queer history, highlighting the camp and nostalgia of our imagined pasts. The panel will be moderated by Erin Gentry, co-curator of Friendship and Freedom and will feature Ben Aqua, Edie Fake, Paige Gratland, and Silky Shoemaker.

Close Encounters: Fantasizing Queer History will take place at 2PM on Saturday, February 21 at MASS Gallery, 507 Calles St, Austin, TX 78702.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITIONS

Friendship and Freedom is a group exhibition of contemporary queer and feminist artworks by Leah DeVun, Edie Fake and the collective known as Nightmare City. The artists in Friendship and Freedom each present work that exists at the crossing of gender, politics, identity, and historical past. Using history as a starting point, these artists express a desire to create ideological and physical spaces in the present for social action, community and camaraderie. Friendship and Freedom is on view January 23rd – February 28th, 2015 at MASS Gallery.

The Gay Wax Museum! is a group exhibition of 3D, life-size dioramas depicting the marvels, despairs, triumphs, experiments, bloopers, possibilities, and cummings-together of queer life as we remember, imagine, and create it. Arranged in traditional wax museum “vignettes” but rendered in many sculptural mediums, the show invites artists and viewers to explore our herstories of past, present and future, literal and fantasized. The Gay Wax Museum! is a part of OUTsider Festival 2015, taking place in and around Austin February 18 – 22.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Ben Aqua is a multidisciplinary artist based in Austin, Texas. Born in Brooklyn, New York, his visual work has been exhibited internationally and published in Rolling Stone, NPR, NYLON, SPIN, NME, Flaunt, Bloomberg Businessweek, OUT, ARKITIP, XLR8R, Beautiful/Decay, Rhizome, Hi-Fructose, JOGGING and Fecal Face. His music has been featured by Interview, The Creators Project, Mad Decent, DFA, VICE, Dummy Mag, FACT, Modular, URB, BUTT and Opening Ceremony. He also runs the experimental art & music label #FEELINGS.

Edie Fake was born in Chicagoland in 1980. He graduated from the RISD in 2002 and has since clocked time in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Baltimore. He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists and his collection of comics, Gaylord Phoenix, won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. In 2011 he helped found the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) and writes reviews for the blog Book By Its Cover. Fake currently lives in California where he is an MFA candidate at the University of Southern California.

Paige Gratland is a Canadian artist who for the past decade has combined interdisciplinary forms to create conceptual work through a pop aesthetic. Gratland’s practice is located in a continuum of feminist sculpture and artist multiple production in Canada. Her work has been distributed through Art Metropole (Toronto) and Otherwild (Los Angeles.) Previous projects have appeared in C Magazine, The Walrus, Geist, Fuse and the Phaidon book Art and Queer Culture, edited by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer. Multiples can be found in collection at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa).

Silky Shoemaker is an artist, performer, and community organizer living in Austin TX. She was the creator and co-host of CAMPCAMP! Monthly Queer Performance Night, Trivia Travesty with Rebecca Havemeyer, and is one of the organizers of Gaybigaygay Music Fest. Shoemaker is also the curator of The Gay Wax Museum!, a dream over ten years in the making.

ABOUT CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

With each exhibition, MASS solicits participating artists to devise a program designed to provide new methods of engaging the public’s curiosity, inviting them to participate intellectually or physically with the exhibition space, as well as the artist’s work and concepts. Open and broad, this prompt can be approached in a multitude of ways: performance based, passive, or completely radical in execution or thought. Close Encounters is a challenge to the artist, as well as the audience, and is designed to provide a new way of encountering and understanding the creative process.

Ultraviolet

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OPENING RECEPTION: 7-11 PM FRIDAY, MARCH 27th
ARTIST TALK: 8 PM FRIDAY, MARCH 27th

Ultraviolet on view March 27-May 2, 2015 at MASS Gallery will incorporate sculpture, installation, photography and experiential works by artists Amy Yoes, Ezra Masch, and Tim Schmidt.

The work of Amy Yoes is laden with an interest in decorative language and architectural space. She responds to formal topologies of ornaments and styles that have reverberated through time, permeating through and informing our mutually constructed visual and cultural memory.

Ezra Masch makes elaborate works that immerses the sensory experiences. His performance and instrumental based site-specific installations incorporate the translation and abstraction of audio video stimulus, pushing the boundaries between instrument, audience, performer, and space.

Tim Schmidt creates sculptures utilizing common materials tying the work to everyday environments. His work often pulls from minimalism, transcendentalism, as well as natural history and vernacular architecture, though any critical social stance or subversion that can be taken by the work becomes blurred by his commitment to the innate qualities of the materials.

Close Encounters: Future Caveman

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MASS: Close Encounters is pleased to present a video by Christa Palazzolo and Michelle Devereux of a site-specific performance by Max Juren at the opening of the exhibition Natural Future Museum at MASS Gallery on May 15th, 2015. In the performance, Juren performs as “Future Caveman”, a homo sapien from the future who inhabits the exhibition space, interacts with onlookers, and communicates through an impassioned dance to Led Zeppelin.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Natural Future Museum, on view May 15th – June 13th, 2015.

ABOUT MAX JUREN
Max Juren makes objects and environments in the form of video, installation, and attempted pop phenomenon product sculptures. He believes in the power of novelty, the gimmick, the absurd, and snacks. His work is concerned with transforming impulse into coherence, and the obvious into entertainment. He lives and works in Austin.

ABOUT NATURAL FUTURE MUSEUM
What would a natural history museum of the future look like? Will our mass-consumption of information morph truths into fantasy? Could our society—one obsessed with products, satire, social media, and environmental collapse—be interpreted by future beings as something completely different from our current reality? Which pieces of our present will be remembered in their correct context and which will be misconstrued? Christa Palazzolo and Michelle Devereux examine these questions through drawing, painting, and installation using the form of a natural history museum as their inspiration.

ABOUT CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
With each exhibition, MASS solicits participating artists to devise a program designed to provide new methods of engaging the public’s curiosity, inviting them to participate intellectually or physically with the exhibition space, as well as the artist’s work and concepts. Open and broad, this prompt can be approached in a multitude of ways: performance based, passive, or completely radical in execution or thought. Close Encounters is a challenge to the artist, as well as the audience, and is designed to provide a new way of encountering and understanding the creative process.

Natural Future Museum

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OPENING: MAY 15, 7-11 PM

What would a natural history museum of the future look like? Will our mass-consumption of information morph truths into fantasy? Could our society—one obsessed with products, satire, social media, and environmental collapse—be interpreted by future beings as something completely different from our current reality? Which pieces of our present will be remembered in their correct context and which will be misconstrued? Christa Palazzolo and Michelle Devereux examine these questions through drawing, painting, and installation using the form of a natural history museum as their inspiration.

Opening will feature interactive elements & a live performance by Future Caveman (aka Max Juren). 

Michelle Devereux was born in 1982 in Dallas, Texas. She received her Bachelor of Arts Degree from Bard College in 2004. She moved to Austin in 2005 and since then has co-founded an art circuit tap troupe known as What’s Tappening?!, is a former member of a female-centric video collective called Austin Video Bee, played drums in a band called SSSSTORMSHELTERRRR, released a self-help themed art book with Monofonus Press called Turn this Book Right-Side-Up, had a drawing of a rollerblading alien go viral on the internet, and had a two second youtube “cameo” in Miranda July’s movie, The Future. Her installations, performances, videos, and drawings have been shown locally at Co-Lab, Domy Books, El Cosmico, Mass Gallery, Monofonus Press, Museum of Human Achievement, and Okay Mountain. Other notable recent shows include a two person show at New Image Art Gallery in Los Angeles, in addition to a pizza themed group show at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea. Her recent work is an exploration of the natural world juxtaposed with themes of human excess and novelty using a variety of media, but her love lies in colored pencil and airbrush.

Christa Palazzolo is a painter and musician based in Austin, TX. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The University of Texas at Austin in 2006, and spent a brief two-year stint in NYC shortly thereafter (until she realized how much she missed breakfast tacos). A member of several Austin bands, she’s toured nationally and throughout Europe. Her paintings have been featured in exhibitions in Dallas, Houston & Austin, Texas. Her visual art mixes conceptual portraiture, humor & environmentally-conscious subject matter.

Hot Box Close Encounters: Zine Workshop with Josh House

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Josh House will be demonstrating book-making and zine-making techniques useful to artists or enthusiasts wanting to self-publish. Using accessible photocopying and at-home techniques, Josh will show the process he uses to document and publish his own projects, including his upcoming … Continue reading

Hot Box Close Encounters: Revisiting Playland

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Rachel Simone Weil will discuss the history of girls’ video arcade in the 1980s and 1990s and how the legacy of these spaces persists through artistic reinterpretation. This informal artist talk will be followed by an open studio and an … Continue reading

Hot Box Close Encounters: Open Studio

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Please join us for an open studio to see what our Hot Box resident artists have created. Come see Josh House’s installation The Gate is Open, and Rachel Simone Weil’s playful collection of 1980s and 1990s femme video arcade ephemera.


Fashion Island

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Opening Reception: Friday, November 13, 7-11pm

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so the heavens are filled with rarified, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don’t see humans as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millipedes — “with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other,” says Billy Pilgrim.

— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five or The Children’s Crusade

Even if we left tomorrow, we would be here eternally, repeating consecutively the moments of this week, powerless to escape from the consciousness we had in each one of them — the thoughts and feelings that the machine captured. We will be able to live a life that is always new, because in each moment of the projection we shall have no memories other than those we had in the corresponding moment of the eternal record, and because the future, left behind many times, will maintain its attributes forever.

— Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel

Titled after ambitiously/dreamily/nostalgically-named shopping districts in the Orange County area, this show consists of oversize prints, not photographs but made from photographic materials; appropriated from a set of consecutively shot images. They are flattened, condensed into a single frame, and then expanded to larger-than-life size.

The flux of lossiness appears as waves of high-and-low detail expanding outwards. From digital primordial slush piles, there is a suggestion of figures on a field; people, sort of.

Mons Dew

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Opening Reception: Friday, September 18th 7-11 PM

Piles, patterns, screens, scans, cans, leaning, gleaming, explosions lay down and hang around.  I see you—through a cool mountain dew.

MASS is pleased to present a selection of new and re-imagined painting, sculpture, video and installation works by five artists who transform traditional techniques and everyday objects into visionary constructions to confuse, illuminate and delight the senses.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Patrick Berran had solo exhibitions at both White Columns and Chapter NY and was included in a group show at Jack Hanley Gallery in 2014. Additionally, he has shown paintings at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, and with Art Production Fund, among other venues nationwide. White Columns presented Berran’s work at NADA, Miami in 2013 and at the INDEPENDENT, New York in 2014. Patrick Berran lives and works in New York and received his MFA from Hunter College.

Melissa Brown’s solo exhibitions and projects have included: Four Play at Essex Flowers, Palisades at Kansas, Paper Fortune at CANADA, Smokin’ Mirrors at Bellwether, Dotto Lotto at Winkleman, Eye in the Sky Hold ‘Em at Where Gallery in New York City and Gertrude’s Nose at Fred Giampietro in Connecticut. Internationally she has mounted solo exhibitions at Kenny Schacter, ROVE in London and Roberto Paradise in Puerto Rico.  Her paintings, prints and animations will be included in Providence, a forthcoming museum exhibition at the Museé International des Arts Modestas, France. Her work has been shown at Mass MOCA, Zieher Smith, P.P.O.W, Socrates Sculpture Park, High Dessert Test Sites, Art in General, Sue Scott Gallery and Bronx River Art Center, to name a few. She participated in Performa 07 and staged How to Win the Lottery at the Nuit Blanche in Toronto 2009.  She was awarded the Joan Mitchell Grant for painting in 2012. NADA NY presented Eye in the Sky Hold ‘Em as a special program in May 2015.

Andy Coolquitt was born in Texas in 1964, and currently lives in Austin. In April and May of 2014, he was artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, a stay that culminated with the exhibition Multi-Marfa Room, at the Locker Plant in Marfa. This past September, he opened his 4th solo exhibition, somebody place, at Lisa Cooley Gallery in NYC. In the spring of 2014, Coolquitt had two solo exhibitions, including This Much at Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna, Austria, and no I didn’t go to any museums here I hate museums museums are just stores that charge you to come in there are lots of free museums here but they have names like real stores, at Maryam Nassir Zadeh in New York. In 2013, Coolquitt was an artist-in-residence at 21er Haus in Vienna, Austria. In Fall 2012, he presented a major solo exhibition titled attainable excellence at AMOA-Arthouse in Austin, Texas, organized by the Blaffer Museum in Houston, and opened there in May 2013. Coolquitt is perhaps most widely known for a house, a performance/studio/domestic space that began as his master’s thesis project at the University of Texas at Austin in 1994, and continues to the present day. Recent group exhibitions include Thief Among Thieves, at The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, Colorado. The problem today is not the other but the self, at The Goethe Institute, New York, and Burn these eyes captain, and throw them all in the sea! at Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey; His work is included in the collections of the Philbrook Museum of Art, the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, and the D. Daskalopous collection, among others.

Stacy Fisher has had two-person exhibitions at Regina Rex and Cleopatra’s in Brooklyn, and Weekend Gallery in Los Angeles.  Her work has been included in many group exhibitions in New York at galleries such as Jeff Bailey, BravinLee Programs, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, Horton Gallery, and Mixed Greens, among others.  She has also exhibited in Chicago at LVL3 and Nudashank in Baltimore.  Fisher has received fellowships from the Edward F. Albee Foundation and The Vermont Studio Center.  She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Shara Hughes was born in Atlanta in 1981, she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been seen in numerous solo and group exhibitions. The former include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia, Atlanta; the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta; American Contemporary, New York; Rivington Arms, New York; Metroquardo, Turin; and the Galerie Mikael Anderson, Copenhagen. This year she is participating in group exhibitions at Coburn Projects, London and Salon 94, New York, Jack Hanley, New York amongst others.

MASS Close Encounters: DOTTO LOTTO Draw Jam & Video Screening

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Featuring video and animation works by Melissa Brown, Andy Coolquitt, Erin Dunn, Leif Goldberg, Billy Grant and Takeshi Murata. While predominately focused on contemporary approaches to stop motion animation, the work we’ll be screening comprises the full gamut of cinematic production from 16mm film in Leif Goldberg’s Life Under The Three Suns to high-end CGI in Takeshi Murata’s OM RIDER.  In addition to the screening, attendees are invited to contribute to the ongoing crowd-sourced animation project by Melissa Brown, Dotto Lotto.  In Dotto Lotto,  Brown invites participants to fill out pre-made connect-the-dots cards as they wish.  Each card is then shot as a single frame in an ever growing animation. MASS will provide the Dotto Lotto cards and drawing supplies.

Free and open to the public, BYOB.

Also don’t miss one of the last chances to see our current exhibition Mons Dew on view from September 18th – October 24th.

Dotto Lotto from Melissa Brown on Vimeo.

Takeshi Murata Salon 94 OM Rider Trailer from Salon 94 on Vimeo.

ABOUT CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

As an expression of MASS Gallery’s mission to create meaningful and significant moments for artists and viewers to connect, MASS introduces Close Encounters. In line with the continual effort to provide artists with the physical and mental space to challenge and develop their practice, Close Encounters will be a platform for them to reflect on their process while providing new avenues for gallery audiences to experience contemporary practices.

A Guided Meditation with Erica Nix

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MASS: Close Encounters presents a guided meditation, led by workout guru and performance artist Erica Nix. The guided meditation, written by current exhibiting artist and MASS Solo Cup 2015 winner, Maura Murnane, combines Vipassana meditation with themes from the movie The Bodyguard, and meaningful-sounding Photoshop actions.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Fashion Island, on view November 13th – December 19th, 2015.

ABOUT FASHION ISLAND
Titled after ambitiously/dreamily/nostalgically-named shopping districts in the Orange County area, this show consists of oversize prints, not photographs but made from photographic materials; appropriated from a set of consecutively shot images. They are flattened, condensed into a single frame, and then expanded to larger-than-life size. The flux of lossiness appears as waves of high-and-low detail expanding outwards. From digital primordial slush piles, there is a suggestion of figures on a field; people, sort of.

ABOUT ERICA NIX
Erica Nix is a photographer and performance artist. Her main project is Workout with Erica Nix! which combines dance, comedy, and gender politics into a potent and contagiously fun experience.

ABOUT CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
With each exhibition, MASS solicits participating artists to devise a program designed to provide new methods of engaging the public’s curiosity, inviting them to participate intellectually or physically with the exhibition space, as well as the artist’s work and concepts. Open and broad, this prompt can be approached in a multitude of ways: performance based, passive, or completely radical in execution or thought. Close Encounters is a challenge to the artist, as well as the audience, and is designed to provide a new way of encountering and understanding the creative process.

Staycation

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Opening Reception: January 22nd 7-11 pm

MASS is pleased  to present Staycation, an exhibition featuring six Austin-based artists whose works display different approaches to abstraction and painting. Artists included in this exhibition are Jeana Baumgardner, Anthony Creeden, Ryan Davis, Caitlin Halloran, Dan Sutherland, and Raymond Uhlir. While their approaches to image-making share an interest in the deconstruction and rearranging of shapes, color, and form, a full spectrum of processes and goals leads to a wide range of outcomes.

Staycation is the first of an annual series of exhibitions at MASS Gallery based on studio visits with artists working in Austin, TX. The series is designed to broaden the curatorial practice at MASS, and give Austin-based artists more opportunities to show amongst their peers.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jeana Baumgardner received her BFA in Painting from the University of Iowa in 1998. In 1997, she was awarded a Fellowship from Yale University and attended the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut. After receiving her BFA, Jeana attended Hunter College in New York City where she received her MFA in Painting in 2001. Her work has been reviewed and/or published in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Artworld Digest, Zing Magazine, and Flaunt Magazine. Her work has been exhibited in Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, New York, and Venezuela.

Anthony B Creeden is an artist living and working in Austin, Texas. Born in Washington D.C., he earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin in the painting department. Recent exhibitions include the Elmhurst Art Museum in Elmhurst, IL, and William Benington Gallery in London, UK. Previous exhibitions include RAID Projects in Los Angeles, CA, Free Range Gallery in Chicago, IL, and Saugatuck Center for the Arts, Saugatuck, MI.

Ryan Davis was born in 1984 in Austin, TX, where he currently lives and works. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a BFA in Studio Art in 2006.

Caitlin Halloran was born and raised in Franklin County, Massachusetts. A recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Greenfield Community College, she is a current MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dan Sutherland grew up in the suburbs of Washington D.C., received his BFA from James Madison University and his MFA from Syracuse University. Dan lives and works in Austin, Texas, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has exhibited his work throughout the United States and is represented by Moody Gallery in Houston, TX and Dutton Gallery in New York.

Raymond Uhlir was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1979. He earned his BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas – Austin in 2002 and his MFA in Studio Art from the University of California – Santa Barbara in 2010. He has been active in several artistic collectives and had his work exhibited at various galleries and museums across the United States. He currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.

 

Body Talk

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OPENING FRIDAY, MARCH 11, 2016, 7-11 PM

MASS is pleased to present BODY TALK, an exhibition of diverse media including video installation, sculpture, and drawing opening Friday, March 11, 2016, 7:00 – 11:00 p.m. and running through Saturday, April 16, 2016. The three-person show includes Johnston Foster (Halifax, Nova Scotia), Irena Jurek (New York, NY), and Jared Theis (San Antonio, TX & Oslo, Norway). Employing anthropomorphic figures, mythological beings, and fanciful models, each artist provides the viewer with an interpretation of our natural world which plays with the edge of plausibility. Using the body as its vehicle the work in BODY TALK explores the psychological, social, political and theatrical life of living bodies and the spaces they inhabit.

Foster sees himself as a hunter, a gatherer, and an alchemist cruising the streets and back alleys of wherever his situation leads him. Using the rejected and forgotten objects our sprawling sub/urban world, Foster presents his audience with iconic narratives that serve as cultural X-rays penetrating the endless heaps of popular culture, history and urban myths. Tinged with self-deprecating humor and violence, the artist creates work that is at its core optimistic and not afraid to have fun.

Jurek uses humor as a method of resisting the notion of a conventional gendered sexual identity. By taking cultural clichés and purposely perverting them, she questions and pushes the limits of stereotypical sex roles. Using the recurring character of the cat woman she builds her narrative around the prevalent and provocative anthropomorphized fantasy of woman as sex kitten. Subverting the visual trope of portraying females as eroticized subjects for the male spectator’s gaze her cat women are instead active participants. Comfortable in their own furry skin—independent, feral, and unpredictable creatures—they live by their own set of rules.

Theis’ vivid and visceral body of work exists in a utopian universe populated by a species of fanciful creatures. The artist builds mythologies surrounding the inhabitants of this fantastical environment through video, animation, performance, objects and sculptural suits. Particularly interested in vulnerability and how organisms adapt to suit their surroundings, Theis follows his creatures through different periods and stages of their evolutionary development as he helps them navigate their fictional world. The suits themselves become a means of taking on the role of these creatures and enter into their imagined landscapes. In an act of physical and mental endurance the artist wears these ornate and unwieldy shells to inhabit his creation and explore other states of being. The armor clad artist becomes a survivalist being, playing out dramas driven by primal instincts and on film his creatures enact rituals that recall long forgotten experiences in a place beyond our own reality.

ARTIST BIOS

Johnston Foster is an artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He studied sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University, Hunter College and the Skowhegan School of Art. Over the past sixteen years he has shown his art internationally in galleries, museums and public art institutions in North America,Europe, South America and Asia. When he is not collecting junk and garbage to make sculptures, he helps run Thief & Bandit Jewelry and Apparel with his artist and designer wife Amie Cunningham, as well as skateboarding, watching cartoons and making noise with their three sons.

Irena Jurek was born in Krakow, Poland in 1982 and currently lives and works in New York. She received her BFA in 2004 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA in 2008 from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan. She recently had a solo exhibition with Jeff Bailey Gallery in Hudson, New York, and with Zurcher Gallery, Paris. Her work has been included in group exhibitions in New York at Know More Games, 247365, Denny Gallery, and others.

Jared Theis was born in 1977. He currently works between Oslo, Norway and San Antonio, Texas. In 2012, he earned an MFA from the University of California, Davis. While at UC Davis he received a Joan Mitchell MFA grant and the Robert Arneson Award. In 2014 he was awarded a Statens kunstnerstipend from Kulturradet, Norway Arts Council in Oslo.

Showing People, a gallery within a gallery

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Sam Schonzeit and Vianney Fivel, in conjunction with their current project Make Believe invite any and all recalcitrant, reluctant, and/or lapsed artists/creatives to participate in Showing People, a gallery within a gallery.  Interested participants are encouraged to bring work by Thursday July 7, but later submissions may be accepted as well, no promises.  If you would like to participate or have any questions, please call Sam at (212) 300-6138 or reach them via email at sam.schonzeit@gmail.com or vianneyfivel@gmail.com.


FIRECOP Screening

2016 Hotbox Residency

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MASS will transform its gallery space into a working studio for two artists this summer. The fourth annual Hotbox residency program will take place over a 5-week period and will give selected artists the opportunity to explore new ideas or practices, while allowing them to engage with the Austin community. Taking advantage of the prime production time of the summer months, MASS hopes to nurture projects through this program that would not be realized otherwise.

Each artist accepted as a Hotbox resident is obliged to participate in MASS’s public engagement series, Close Encounters. Close Encounters is a program designed to provide new methods of engaging the public’s curiosity. Open and broad, this prompt can be approached from a multitude of ways: performance based, passive, or completely radical in execution or thought. This program is a challenge to an artist’s current practice and designed to provide audiences with a new way of encountering and understanding the creative process.

Stay plugged into our website, Instagram feed or Facebook page for all the latest on upcoming events as they develop.

MASS is pleased to present the artists selected for the 2016 Hotbox residency program this summer: Kayle Karbowski (Milwaukee, WI) and Leah Shirley (New York, NY).

ARTIST BIOS:

Kayle Karbowski (b. 1992, Chicago IL) is an earthling, feminist, Scorpio (Pisces moon, Aries rising) and cultural producer that was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago. Suspicious of the western coming-of-age mythology, Karbowski utilizes queer narrative structures to deconstruct and reconstruct the infinite ways in which we can create –or stumble upon our identities.  Feminine archetypes, mysticism, science fiction and suburban culture come together in her work as her personal history and future become abstracted. Through video, performance and sculpture, these semi-fictions present themselves as portals or mirrors into a world where the logic of the universe is as poetic and magical as it is “real”. Karbowski received her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2015 and currently lives and works in Milwaukee, WI. She is a co-founder of Milwaukee collective, After School Special, and their co-run gallery, The Lunchbox.

During her residency, Kayle Karbowski will investigate the idea of feminine power and the disruption of patriarchal forms through an experimental film and large-scale fiber work. The film will consist of multiple vignettes from a single day following characters based off of queer or feminist identities. They find their lives intertwined after the collision of two supermassive black holes causes a gravitational wave that disrupts the space-time of Earth. The artist will film in and around Austin and host a recorded participatory improv session loosely guided by the film’s script. Karbowski’s fiber work will be created from a still image from the film made during her time at MASS.

Leah Shirley  (b. 1988, Austin, TX) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in New York, NY. Her work explores themes of the feminine, vibrational energy, the sublime, and alchemy. Her investigations are a way to find herself reflected in the elements and examine her connection to them as a living being. Her work serves as altars to their process— monuments to time, transformation, and the interconnectivity of all things. She received a BFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2011 and her work has been exhibited nationally.

Leah Shirley’s work is an investigation of the self, rooted in ritual processes. As an Austin native returning home, Shirley will spend her residency rediscovering the landscape of her childhood. She will make large-scale altar-like sculptures using locally sourced materials such as limestone and marble, metal, cyanotypes on leather, and cast-resin. Immersive colored-light will bathe the sculptures, activating and charging them within the gallery. Photographs of the sculptures installed in the hill country where she grew up will accompany the work in the gallery installation. Together, the sculptures and photographs will be a tribute to the transformative heat and expansive environment of her birthplace.

Make Believe

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In an effort to explore alternative ways to support artists, MASS announces its second annual art award and exhibition—MASS Solo Cup. Selected through a national open call, applications were reviewed by MASS collective members with the chosen artist/s awarded the opportunity to mount a solo show in our 1500 sq. ft. gallery, plus a monetary honorarium of $1,000 to assist in its realization.

MASS is proud to present our 2016 Solo Cup awardees, Marfa, TX based Sam Schonzeit and Geneva, Switzerland based Vianney Fivel.  Schonzeit and Fivel will collaborate on Make Believe, an evolving installation comprised of fountains, haircuts, a gallery within the gallery, a moving business, life drawing sessions, movie screenings, musical performances, rotary plate digitization of 3d objects, and more.

The public is invited to help participate in Make Believe and the opening on June 24th will serve as an exhibition as well as a chance to meet the artists and learn how to participate if you’re interested. The ways in which Schonzeit and Fivel plan on integrating the community into Make Believe are described in their menu:

menu

After the initial opening on Friday, July 24th, there will be two additional events at the gallery during the show run:

Saturday, July 9, 7-10 PM
The opening for SHOWING PEOPLE a gallery within a gallery, a group show where reluctant or recalcitrant creatives will be invited to show their work.

Thursday, July 21, 7-10 PM
A last hurrah, a closing event. The culmination of a month’s work.

Sam Schonzeit is a semi-pro artist, film maker, musician, gallerist, designer, correspondent, ceramicist and television personality based in Marfa, TX. He has shown his art, wares, and/or films in Tokyo, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Geneva, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Marfa, Austin and Brookings, South Dakota.

Vianney Fivel is an artist living and working.  He graduated from Head-Geneva, Switzerland, in 2009. Along with friends, he makes sculptures and videos. Vianney is also part of Jeudi, a non-profit space based in Geneva, Switzerland.

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