Performance & Reception

Saturday, Aug 4, 2012  |  6pm – 8pm

The Performance title, Medium, refers to both the collection and dissemination of otherworldly messages and to the formal material from which an artwork is created. The Bridge Club Performers will be seated on chairs suspended from the gallery walls and will respond to a combination of objects sound and projection to explore the intentional, wondrous and quasi-religious aspects of both art making and seeking the divine.

The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative comprised of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

PEAT DUGGINS

WREATHS

Nov 3, 2012 through Jan 5, 2013

CHARLIE MORRIS

TRIPPING ON PEBBLES…
SINKING IN STONE

Opening Reception: Friday, May 30, 2014, 6-8pm
Exhibition runs through July 11, 2014.

A series of objects and scenarios, caught between the seemingly objective nature of photography, and the mental creation of tenuous narrative connections. The resultant meaning of which derives from a subjective internal construction.

APROPOS OF NOTHING

Jim Nolan

 

Opening Reception: Friday, May 30, 2014, 6-8pm

Exhibition runs through July 11, 2014.

 

Why and what-for? asks Jim Nolan in his second solo exhibition at Art Palace, APROPOS OF NOTHING. Fascinated by artificial flowers and the 99¢ stores that sell them, Nolan has assembled a series of sculptures, paintings and photographs that are equal parts formal and feral. The work in APROPOS OF NOTHING maintains the identity of its low-brow origin while performing as deadpan lyrical paintings and monolithic objects. Nolan addresses his ongoing concerns in a unique visual language, taking a decidedly blue collar stance to deliver poignant jabs at art history.

DEBORAH ROBERTS
One and Many

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 25th, 2014, 5-7:30pm

Exhibition runs through December 20th, 2014.
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
-James A. Baldwin

Deborah Roberts’ first solo exhibition at Art Palace, One and Many, contradicts and exposes uncomfortable truths, taboos and myths about Black identity and idealized beauty.  Roberts’ paintings, drawings, and collages are contextualized within Post-Black ideologies surrounding power and perception. The work presented in One and Many gives a contemporary voice to personal and political histories.

Roberts earned her MFA from Syracuse University and has exhibited at Rogue Space (New York,) MCCLA Galleries (San Francisco,) Chicago Culture Center (Chicago,) and the Community Folk Art Center (Syracuse, NY.) She recently received the Ginsberg-Klaus Award Fellowship and previously completed the Ox-Bow Residency. Roberts lives and works in Austin, TX.

E R I C   Z I M M E R M A N

ELEGY
FOR LEFT HAND
ALONE

Opening Reception: Friday, April 10th, 2015, 6-8pm
Exhibition runs through May 23, 2015.

 

Eric Zimmerman’s fourth solo exhibition with Art Palace, Elegy for Left Hand Alone is an exhibition of art objects that take their lead from the idea of artifacts, evidence, and symbols. The title is derived from a section of Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld, which itself is a non-linear story about the byproducts of history and the figures who occupy it. Zimmerman’s new drawings, sculpture, zine, and sound piece contained in the exhibition are references to the human place within the world and our effect upon it. Present in this new work is an oblique questioning of the way in which we construct knowledge and a direct interrogation of our need for explanation, quantification, and understanding. A subversion of these needs is sought by placing a range of images and objects within context and proximity of one another in order to establish a series of open-ended and leading propositions. Sometimes these are political, other times poetic, often something else entirely, even something we’d rather forget. Surfing imagery reminds us of the rejection of the forces of Capitalism and an embrace of the doper slacker. In a new sound work Zimmerman has taken the recordings made from hydrophones placed beneath the Antarctic sea ice and filled the air of the gallery space with them. This is the sound of the sea and of transformation, the latter also suggested in a group of paper mache basalt boulders modeled after Joseph Beuys’ 1983 work, The End of the Twentieth Century. Ink drawings of meteorites remind us of the scale of the universe and our endeavor to seek ‘proof’ through science. #000000 Magic #FFFFFF Noise is a new zine containing two poems and photographs about our protagonists existence in the fever dream that is the Bayou City. A small drawing of an Aurignacian stone tool sets up a time-scale and whispers to us from an ancestral history we will never truly know and move further away from each passing second.

Eric Zimmerman received his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. His work is currently on view as part of the group exhibition Urban Ecologies at the Galveston Art Center, and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Zimmerman has previously exhibited at Horton Gallery, (New York, NY,), the Re Institute (New York, NY,) and Seraphin Gallery (Philadelphia, PA,). His solo museum presentations include exhibitions at Austin Museum of Art (Austin, TX,) Texas State University (San Marcos, TX,) the and The Old Jail Art Center (Albany, TX.) He currently lives and works in Houston, TX.

M A R J O R I E .. S C H W A R Z

Opening Reception: Friday, May 29th, 2015, 6-8pm
Exhibition runs through August 1, 2015.

 

Marjorie Schwarz presents paintings of still life abstracted as bleak, tender impressions. Schwarz’s intimately scaled works use water-soluble oil paint on canvas to render a permanent-yet-perishable quality, like a photograph bleached from the sun or a corroded marble bust. Detail lurks awkwardly within the dark, blocky compositions; haphazard angles suggest instability. By addressing domestic material through formalist language, Schwarz obscures the inherent charm and opens the narrative to subversive interpretation.

Schwarz most recently exhibited a solo presentation of paintings at the Dallas Art Fair (2014) as part of Dutton Gallery. Her numerous group exhibitions include the Dallas Biennial 2014; James Harris Gallery, Seattle; Angstrom Gallery, Los Angeles; Champion, Austin; Dutton New York; and Inman Gallery, Houston. Schwarz received her BFA from Southern Methodist University and currently lives and works in Dallas.

J E F F R E Y .. D E L L

BOUNDARY EXTENSION

Opening Reception: Friday, May 29th, 2015, 6-8pm
Exhibition Walkthrough with Jeffery Dell: Saturday, May 30th, 2015, 2:00pm
Exhibition runs through August 1, 2015.

 

Art Palace is pleased to present Boundary Extension, a solo exhibition of screen prints by Jeffrey Dell. Dell’s work combines graphic shapes and metamorphic color, yielding the subtle spacial qualities of folded paper and curled ribbon. As illusions of three-dimensionality, the work in Boundary Extension expresses Dell’s interest in how basic human desires cooperate with faculties of perception. The exhibition takes its name from a common cognitive phenomenon where we perceive the frame of an image is stretched out farther, including information not derived from sensory input. This error of commission is essential to viewing art, and to sustaining a comprehensive impression of the world. We understand the verity of a piece like Floating Stack 1;  its subject visually checks out as both stacked and floating thanks to our ability to cohesively read the principles of occlusion, physics, and memory. When Dell applies the concept of boundary extension to an ephemeral motif like bows and streamers, the uninhibited spectrums of color lassoed by immaculate edges adopt a striking split-personality. Flat Bow 1 possesses both the anticipation of a coiled spring and the grief of an impotent roman candle. Boundary Extension confirms that perception lacks certainty, but contains an abundance of emotional aptitude.

Jeffrey Dell completed the work for Boundary Extension while attending the four-month Charles Adams Studio Project Artists in Residence program (CASP AiR) in Lubbock, TX. Dell has headed the Printmaking department at Texas State University for 15 years and currently lives in San Marcos, TX. Recent exhibitions include the International Print Center of New York; Minnesota State University; and Galleri Urbane, Dallas. Dell received his MFA from the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque.

A L I S S A   B L U M E N T H A L :  1 9 5 0  –  1 9 7 0 s

SMALL ABSTRACTIONS

Opening Reception: Friday, September 11th, 2015, 6-8pm
Exhibition runs through October 24th, 2015.

 

The exhibition presents a group of paintings by Alissa Blumenthal, an American modernist artist of Russian descent working in New York in the 1930-1980s.  Although she was a prolific painter, Blumenthal had failed to attract the critical and public attention she deserved, remaining in the periphery of New York art scene among the scores of other obscure artists, many of them female. A one-time student of Russian avant-garde theorist, Kazimir Malevich, Blumenthal believed in the metaphysical significance of abstraction, and attempted to represent the non-objective reality of the world through basic geometric forms – but in her own eyes invariably failed, unable to reconcile her actual artistic achievements with the ideal of geometric perfection.

The exhibition is presented by New York-based artist, Tatiana Istomina, who works with painting, drawing and video; Istomina’s projects have been featured in multiple exhibitions in the US and Europe, including the Drawing Center and the Bronx Museum (New York,) Gaîté Lyrique (Paris,) Haus der Kulturen der Wel (Berlin,) and Moscow Museum of Modern Art, among other venues.

T H E.. B R I D G E    C L U B

CUT

Opening Reception: Friday, September 11th, 2015, 6-8pm
Exhibition runs through October 24th, 2015.

 

Art Palace presents Cut, an exhibit of photographs and an opening-night live performance by The Bridge Club collaborative. The images on view offer glimpses of past performances by the Bridge Club from over the past two years. As the evidence of one anonymous collective persona realized by four agents, the tone of the photographs exists in the climate between camaraderie and isolation. The exhibit’s title refers both to the cinematic nature of the photographs on display and to the physical act of cutting, which will feature prominently in the performance. Cut will activate the gallery space where sculpture typically resides and reference the surrounding photographic images, creating a sense of placelessness and ineffable longing.

Recent works by The Bridge Club collaborative have been presented at Prospect 3+ Biennial (New Orleans;) Ulrich Museum of Art (Wichita, KS;) Flux Projects (Atlanta;) Ohio University (Athens, OH;) the New Genre Arts Festival (Tulsa, OK;) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Santa Barbara, CA.) The Bridge Club, comprised of artists Emily Bivens, Christine Owen, Annie Strader and Julie Wills, works in live performance, installation, video and digital media and has been active since 2004.