Current Exhibition

Anthology

Fri, Jul 12, 2024 → Sat, Aug 24, 2024

• Opening reception: Fri, Jul 12, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

Erin Curtis, Sara Frantz, Jessica Halonen, Raychael Stine

Anthology is a collection of paintings that utilize flowers and flowering plants within their subject matter. Colorful gardens and dense, flowering trees. Vivid wildflowers sprouting from the surface. Hardy white and lilac bouquets with delicate green stems decorating walls. Bold floral shapes floating atop fields of abstracted forms. 

The four artists in Anthology incorporate, alter, transform, and transfigure flowers in various ways, with each metamorphosis involving a different approach, process, and intent. Canvases are cut, at times exposing a layer beyond the stripes and botanical shapes on the surface, while at other times collaged on top of it. Locally foraged plants and flowers, embedded into paintings, become sculptural milieus. Forced perspective landscapes and rocks residing on domestic wallpapers obscure the boundaries between interior and exterior spaces. Trompe l’oeil flowers and water drops playfully comingle with illusionistic, fantastical background scenes.

Erin Curtis (b. Albany, NY, 1977) lives and works in Austin. Her new works reflect her interest in geometric abstraction and its historical roots in weaving, nature, and ritual. Curtis’s work combines utopic ideals of beauty and structure combined with process and chance. Primarily working as a painter, she also creates large-scale, site-specific installations and public art projects with a painter’s sensibility. Her current paintings are created with hand-cut canvas that is layered over stretchers or painted panels, creating dense and vibrant works.

Curtis has received grants from the Dallas Museum of Art, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the City of Austin, and the District of Columbia. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Galveston Art Center; Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX; Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA; and Flashpoint Gallery, Washington, DC. She has created commissioned works for the Chicago Transit Authority; City of Washington, DC; Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State, Kabul, Afghanistan; The City of Austin; and Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston. Curtis attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2010 and was awarded fully funded residencies at Anderson Ranch in 2012 and Vermont Studio Center in 2014. In 2008-2009, Curtis was a Fulbright Scholar in Jaipur, Rajasthan. Curtis graduated from Williams College with a BA in Liberal Arts in 1999 and received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007.

Sara Frantz (b. 1981, Wheaton, IL) is heavily influenced by travel and movement, specifically the shift one sees along a route. Her work indulges the familiar themes of environment, consumption, space and forced decorative imitation of nature in a controlled revelation of landscape. Frantz fragments and re-configures the built environment through the prism of various styles and techniques. The effect is one of collage, with the parsing of techniques held in tension with the unifying structure of landscape imagery: sky, horizon, and ground. In doing this, Frantz enters conversations about once-exalted Modernist pictorial styles, entangling them with local, familiar, and banal conditions. In effect, elements within her paintings co-mingle to form an inherently fractured, yet beautiful, image of both our contemporary environment and our means of envisioning it. Her new works incorporate flowers and plants that she foraged while walking around San Luis Obispo.

Frantz received her MFA in Painting from the University of Texas at Austin and her BA from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Recent solo exhibitions include Pamala Walsh Gallery, Palo Alto, CA; Left Field Gallery, Los Osos, CA; Sala Diaz, San Antonio, TX; H.J. Miossi Art Gallery, Cuesta College, San Lucas, CA. Frantz has been an artist in residence at the NES Artist Residency in Skagastrond, Iceland; Cow House Studios in Ireland; and the Vermont Studio Center. She is a Professor of Studio Art and Department Chair at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo.

Jessica Halonen (b. 1972, Milford, MI) conducts extensive research for her works, delving into the intersections between art, science, and history. She has engaged with topics that include genetic engineering in the pharmaceutical industry and the historical and metaphorical implications of the color blue. Her new paintings, which fuse abstraction and trompe l'oeil, are informed by a collection of toxic wallpaper samples published by the Michigan State Board of Health in 1874. The book warns of the hazardous particulate matter shed by these decorative papers that were printed with lead and arsenic based pigments typical of the time. These works were originally included in her solo exhibition in 2022 at testsite in Austin, with an accompanying essay by Kelly Baum, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Halonen earned her MFA in Painting from Washington University in St. Louis and has been an Artist-in-Residence at the MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire; Kunstlerhaus Bethanian, Berlin; Artpace, San Antonio; and the Core Program, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including at The Contemporary Austin, the Dallas Contemporary, the McNay Art Museum, the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Art Museum of South Texas, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Halonen currently lives in Austin and works in San Antonio where she is an Associate Professor of Art at Trinity University.

Raychael Stine (b. 1981, Chardon, OH) creates luscious, joyful paintings that integrate multiple painterly languages and approaches to mark, texture, and levels of visual legibility that allow for playful slippage between formal and material abstraction and traditional devices of painterly representation. Color schemes are derived from looking at photographs, flowers, skies, dogs, hummingbirds, rainbows, postcards and more. Moves are inspired by sensual experiences like sniffing, kissing, and crying. A trompe l'oeil teardrop can become a dog’s ear or a flower petal. A cosmos flower can be a portal into the greater cosmos.

Stine’s driving forces are joy, pleasure, wonder, and embodied emotional intuition. As a professor, Stine loves giving permission, teaching materials and skills, and fostering curiosity and trust in one’s vision. She also guides non-traditional plein air studio courses where students and artists build portable studios and explore what it can be to work outside, while visiting sites across the southwest, camping, hiking, and sitting. Stine prefers sensory embodied experience rather than rational linear approaches to making and exploring.

Stine earned her BA at the University of Texas at Dallas and her MFA at the University of Illinois Chicago. She currently lives along the river in the North Valley area of Albuquerque with her dogs Mouse and Petunia, where she is Associate Professor of Painting and drawing at the University of New Mexico.

Recent exhibitions include Emma Gray HQ/Five Car Garage, Los Angeles; Eugene Binder, Marfa; Art Palace, Houston; L.A. Louver, Venice, CA; Rhona Hoffman, Chicago; Smoke the Moon, Santa Fe; and 1969 Gallery, New York City; among others. Her work has been included in NADA NY, NEXT Art Chicago, and Art on Paper New York.

Stine’s work has been featured in several New American Paintings issues, Hyperallergic, New City Chicago, Arts+Culture Texas, Glasstire, NY Arts, and Southwest Contemporary. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, and has previously been a resident at Millay Arts, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, 100 West Corsicana, and the Jentel Artist Residency. She received a Dallas Museum of Art DeGoyler Grant and is a 3-time Joan Mitchell Award nominee.