Pool Party

About

While depicting environments and objects associated with summertime activities in a vibrant, lighthearted, or meditative sensibility, the work in this exhibition displays an array of reflections on the significance of the objects and products we consume, and the complex visual and emotional relationships between humans and the places we inhabit.

British-born artist William Cannings creates refined, sophisticated, and rigid sculptures that gracefully simulate impermanent, inflatable plastic objects. Through the process of inflating steel under high pressure and hot temperatures, followed by various surface treatments, Cannings’ perplexing sculptures exhibit qualities that are visually congruous yet physically contradictory to the plastic objects they emulate.

James Zamora of Fort Worth and Houston’s Neva Mikulicz are both fascinated with the ocular complexities of our daily surroundings. Zamora depicts grocery store aisles and consumer products in observational paintings that combine broad visual generalizations with carefully manicured nuances, while Mikulicz builds the subjects of her drawings from thousands of individual marks, elevating the integrity of the object through meticulous execution.

Austin-based painter Lana Waldrep-Appl directs her focus onto inanimate elements of infrastructure often found in community parks and pools. Cropping subjects from very specific angles, Waldrep-Appl’s resulting compositions personify the objects with almost awkward qualities, and create a snapshot in the life of the object rather than a portrait of its existence.

The visually pneumatic pieces of Missouri-based Kristen Martincic channel the sensibility of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, depicting minimal pool environments with varying levels of perceived transparency and wide-angle geometric perspective.

Daniela Edburg of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, takes a biographical approach to her environments, creating and photographing artificial character narratives that are simultaneously cerebral and visually stunning. The vibrant color palette and frivolous subjects often give the initial image of effortless glamour, but suggestive elements of an obsessive nature reveal a more destructive undertone.

Chronicling the significance between location and self, Houston-based Celan Bouillet’s work considers the meaning of “home”, and the tireless but futile search for a personal utopia. Bouillets’ highly detailed paintings reference folk tales and mythologies, and intertwine personal memories with fictitious histories and the future of uncharted worlds.

Swiss-born, New York-based Katja Loher produces mesmerizing video works that emphasize the way humans perceive and interact with their surrounding ecologies. Projected onto the floor of the gallery, Loher’s multi-layered video becomes an aerial view of a beautiful microcosm revealing remote environments, natural pools, and endangered species that are often unseen, yet paramount to the biological structure of our world.