Fri, Sep 6, 2024 → Sat, Oct 19, 2024
As an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance, Joey Fauerso’s subject matter is both personal and political in nature, centered on family, gender, humor, figuration, and representation. Many of her projects utilize humor and performance to subvert and challenge traditions within Western art.
Her imagery and desire to unfold the boundaries between interior and exterior, as well as the transcendent and transgressive, are informed by a move from Southern California in 1983. It was then that her family joined an experimental utopian community set amidst the cornfields of Iowa where they lived in a Transcendental Meditation community. A persistent influence on Fauerso’s practice is community theater. She grew up working and performing in the theater attached to the Maharishi School. Fauerso acted in numerous productions, and, perhaps more importantly, was responsible for painting many of the sets. Her videos and installations are frontally and theatrically composed, and many of her works are three-dimensional or time-based, incorporating a painterly vocabulary of forms in flexible ways that layer surfaces and subjects.
Fauerso is interested in an expanded definition of painting and has developed a unique subtractive painterly process. She applies paint over an entire surface, and then scrapes it off using various kitchen spatulas, clay tools and silkscreen squeegees. These paintings, often made on the ground, present as two-dimensional carvings and indexical records of the textures of the artist’s studio floor.
The exhibition ‘Bedroom Paintings’ debuts a new four-channel video and a print series produced by Hare and Hound Press in San Antonio that are both inspired by the artist’s own experiences with insomnia and our collective sense of unrest. The video employs the framework of the bed as a place to consider the intersections between painting and performance, presenting an ambitious series of paintings taking the form of pillows and blankets—a deconstructed salon of imagery that pulls from art history and Fauerso’s own life. This horizontal “gallery” is activated through performances by friends and family as they toss and turn, rest, and ruminate amongst the paintings. As the imagery folds and crumples, enveloping the bodies of the performers, new abstractions are created, new relationships are formed. The four-channel video, which is divided between three themes—sleeping, thrashing, and dreaming—includes multiple performers with original sound design by the artist and her father, Paul Fauerso.
Artist BIO
Joey Fauerso, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in the Fine Arts, creates works that include painting, video, installation and performance in addressing issues of gender, humor and family. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Drawing Center in New York, and New Mexico State University Art Museum. Fauerso has been the recipient of multiple grants and residencies, including a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Joan Mitchell Grant for Painters and Sculptors, a 2021 Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, the Open Sessions residency at The Drawing Center in New York, the Golden Foundation Grant, Dallas Museum of Art Kimberough Grant, the RAIR artist in residence grant, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Fauerso is a Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University, and lives with her family in San Antonio.
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