New Works: 06.1

Artpace San Antonio is pleased to announce New Works: 06.1, on view March 8 through May 7, 2006. The exhibition presents new projects by resident artists Edgar Arceneaux (Los Angeles, CA); Augusto Di Stefano (San Antonio, TX); and Ranjani Shettar (Bangalore, India). Selected by Douglas Fogle, Curator of Contemporary Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA, each artist alternately explores the foundations of humanity in our boundaries, our collision with nature, and our tragic sense of humor.

About the Artists Edgar Arceneaux’s Alchemy of comedy …Stupid combines film, performance, photos, and print to extract connections between the medieval science of alchemy and contemporary comedy. The project centers on a multi-channel film featuring comedian David Alan Grier experimenting with the same routine in three locations. Like a scientist might consider the four basic elements of air, water, fire, and earth, the production mixes proportions of colors, music, audience, and wordplay. Objects in the gallery expand on the idea of tragedy as an inherent part of both comedy and alchemy, which was applied to prolong life and cure disease. Arceneaux’s Artpace project will travel to Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Special thanks to them and The Joyce Foundation, which provided additional funds.

Augusto Di Stefano’s paintings, drawings, and, for the first time, printed material, explore processed and gestural marks that slip between geometric abstraction and strangely lone structures. In Di Stefano’s paintings, the solitude of flawlessly coated backgrounds is strategically broken. Untitled features a deep grey field marred by thick, black, finger-like gestures heavy with the emotional residue of the artist’s hand. Movement is contained in a form reaching toward one edge, alluding to space beyond the painting. Di Stefano’s drawings pulse with the juxtaposition of inside and outside, moving further from the gestural to rigid, produced forms. The semicircular arrangement of works encourages connections and distinctions.

In Ranjani Shettar’s I’m no one to tell you, what not to do, biological research leads to her considered treatment of materials. Both the three-dimensional sculptural installation and framed print connect with South Texas by incorporating native woods. For the installation Shettar carved, sanded, and polished sections of mesquite into rounded sculptural nodes. Mounted on the wall, the wooden forms congregate convey the irregular balance of nature. Nearby, ropes of watery green algae hang from the ceiling and appear ready to host the wooden fungi. The algae, cast by hand from silicone rubber, is an additive process which complements the reductive act of carving, just as each element in the installation networks with the other to exist and be complete. The project is a subtle meditation on relational negotiations, particularly mutual symbiosis. Ranjani Shettar’s works suggest the mutual benefits and beauty of sharing and cooperation over competition and combat.

About the Curator Prior to joining the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2005, Douglas Fogle served for ten years as curator at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. While at the Walker, Fogle initiated an emerging artist series and a number of group exhibitions such as Stills: Emerging Photography in the 1990s (1997). His most recent exhibitions include Painting at the Edge of the World (2001), solo exhibitions with Catherine Opie and Julie Mehretu, and a historical survey of the conceptual uses of photography entitled The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982, which opened at the Walker Art Center in October 2003 and will travel to the UCLA Hammer in Los Angeles before continuing on to Europe. He regularly contributes to journals such as Artforum, Frieze, Flash Art, and Parkett.

New Works: 06.1 is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy, with additional funding from the Texas Commission on the Arts and Rosina Lee Yue and Bert A. Lies, Jr., MD.

Pressetext

New Works: 06.1
Kurator: Douglas Fogle

mit Edgar Arceneaux, Augusto Di Stefano, Ranjani Shettar