Mine the Gap: 2019/21 Artist Studio Program Exhibition

r

Mine the Gap: 2019/21 Artist Studio Program Exhibition Jacquelyne Boe & David Janesko, Gerardo Rosales, and Holly Veselka Curated by Patricia Restrepo John M. O’Quinn Gallery Lawndale Art & Performance Center Feb 6 – Apr 24, 2021

Jacquelyne Boe & David Janesko, Gerardo Rosales, and Holly Veselka Mine the Gap

Mine the Gap presents new work by Jacquelyne Boe and David Janesko, Gerardo Rosales, and Holly Veselka, created during their 2019/21 Artist Studio Program residencies at Lawndale. Through disparate mediums and for different ends, the artists collectively harness the quiet yet potent power of abstraction, layering, and transference in their experimentations with expression. The gap between reality and the represented offers fertile ground to mine the fleeting, fragmentary, and fragile. Reducing the legibility of referents limits obvious and immediate readings of the artists’ work, instead encouraging close viewing and a multiplicity of meanings.

About the Artist Studio Program The nine-month Artist Studio Program supports three artists annually with an honorarium, project grant, studio space, and curatorial support, culminating with an exhibition of the artists’ new works.

Special thanks to Andrea Allen, installers Jonathan Clark and David Cobb, and Lawndale volunteers Nadia Al-Khalifa, Karen Eisele, Jeanne Jones, Cindee Travis Klement, Erica Lee, Stefania Lenna, Ellie Mix, Francesca Paradiso, Ellen Ray, Niman Rosales, Jose Gregorio Saldivia, Juan Sanchez, Verny Sanchez, and Linda Wu for their assistance in the production of Gerardo Rosales' mural, The Banquet.

Live Sculpture Activation Presented by 2019/21 Artist Studio Program collaborators Jacquelyne Boe and David Janesko John M. O’Quinn Gallery Friday, March 26 at 6:30 PM Saturday, March 27 at 6:30 PM 2

Jacquelyne Boe is a Houston based professional dancer, choreographer, and educator interested in collaboration and experimentation. A graduate of the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, she received a BFA from the University of Oklahoma, where she graduated as the Weitzenhoffer Family College of Fine Arts, Graduate of the Year. Boe has worked with organizations and individual artist such as Erick Hawkins Dance, Erin Reck, Frame Dance, Hopestone Dance, Houston Grand Opera, Open Dance Project, Noble Motion Dance, Sean Curran, Teresa Chapman, and Rob Ashford. Boe is a critically acclaimed dance maker that has been creating original works since 2014. She was named Houston Press’ 100 Creatives, a recipient of Dance Source Houston’s Artist in Residence Program, and is a founding member of a choreographers collective; Perspective Exchange.

David Janesko is an artist exploring the emergence of complexity using an experimental approach that encompasses a wide array of mediums, technology and subject matter. He is specifically interested in the genesis of life, and death, from the early Earth, the emergence of the Self and how the senses and mental illness shape reality.

David grew up in Western Pennsylvania and worked for a number of years as a geologist before attending the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA, 2013). From 2013 to 2015 David was a Graduate Fellow then Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Artist in Sausalito California, and the curator for Flatland Gallery in Houston from 2017 to 2019. David is represented in Houston by Gray Contemporary.

Born in Venezuela, Gerardo Rosales is an artist and educator who has been based in Houston, TX for nearly two decades. His recent work focuses on issues of class, race, gender, immigration, and sexuality. Rosales has exhibited widely throughout Latin America; most recently, his work has been exhibited locally at Project Row Houses and The TransArt Foundation for Art and Anthropology. Rosales earned an MA in Fine Art at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, and his Bachelor’s in Fine Art at the Armando Reverón Art Institute in Caracas.

Patricia Restrepo is a curator, writer, and researcher based in Houston, Texas.

Fostering exhibitions as laboratories, her curatorial interests include the generative potential latent in archives, museology, and performative work. She is the Assistant Curator and Exhibitions Manager at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), where she has worked for over six years. At CAMH, Restrepo most recently co-curated Slowed and Throwed: Records of the City through Mutated Lenses, an interdisciplinary exhibition orbiting around DJ Screw’s process of material manipulation.

She also curated Will Boone: The Highway Holly Veselka is a conceptual artist with a Hex, which housed all new site-specific work focus on project-based, research-oriented and was the artist’s first solo exhibition, sculptures, archives, and installations that and Stage Environment: You Didn’t Have examine humanity’s relationship with the to Be There, a celebration of CAMH’s natural world. She has exhibited her work long-standing history of championing internationally and received recognitions performance. Restrepo has managed and including her selection as a 2019 Launch contributed to the institution’s publication Pad Artist by Studio Modo and the city of Austin, a summer artist residency in 2018 at production and orchestrated the digitization of all of CAMH’s catalogues to increase ACRE in Steuben, WI, and being listed on accessibility to the museum’s significant Creative Capital’s On Our Radar in 2016. In the summer of 2019 Holly exhibited at ACRE scholarship.

Projects in Chicago, IL, conducted visual Restrepo has curated exhibitions and research at the Mammal Research Institute performance programming at Alabama of the Polish Academy of Sciences in the Song, Hardy and Nance Studios, Houston Białowieża Forest, Poland, and participated Center for Photography, and Northset in the 2nd Annual Digital Naturalism Residency. She has contributed to Conference in Gamboa, Panama. Born publications including Terremoto and Gulf in Houston, TX, Holly now lives with her Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. family in San Marcos, TX and is an Assistant Restrepo holds a Master’s degree in Cultural Professor in the School of Art and Design at Studies from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Texas State University.

Belgium and Bachelor’s degrees from Rice University.

3

Mine the Gap: 2019/21 Artist Studio Program Exhibition Jacquelyne Boe & David Janesko, Gerardo Rosales, and Holly Veselka Essay by Patricia Restrepo Mine the Gap presents new work by Jacquelyne Boe and David Janesko, Gerardo Rosales, and Holly Veselka, created during their 2019/21 Artist Studio Program residencies at Lawndale. Through disparate mediums and for different ends, the artists collectively harness the quiet yet potent power of abstraction, layering, and transference in their experimentations with expression. The gap between reality and the represented offers fertile ground to mine the fleeting, fragmentary, and fragile. Reducing the legibility of referents limits obvious and immediate readings of the artists’ work, instead encouraging close viewing and a multiplicity of meanings.

Collaborators Boe and Janesko have created a dynamic installation of interlocking vessels activated by multi-channel projections and, at times, live dancers. Chirality III constitutes the third part of their series Chirality, a term used to describe an object and its mirrored pair, such as the right and left hands. Boe and Janesko pivoted in response to the pandemic, seeing possibilities instead of limitations in the ensuing restrictions. The artists refocused on parameters of isolation and the technological vehicles through which we can view performance. Chirality III will offer three distinct stages during the run of the exhibition. The work is be energized initially by a 5-channel installation of collaged video, including documentation of virtual dance exercises. When Chirality III is activated by live bodies, dancers perform inside the self-contained vessels. Following the performance, its documentation is projected within the piece. Boe and Janesko also present a focused selection of cameraless photographs that act as visual maps of the video projections and choreography.

Visitors are greeted by Rosales’s monumentally-scaled, site-specific wall painting, upon which an effusively colorful painting is hung. Merging visual references to natural and spiritual realms alongside animal-centric mythology, Rosales's work is dense with narrative weight and surreal scenes. His pieces also hint at political considerations with formal 4

references to fences, as well as homoerotic symbolism upon close inspection. Confronting the weight of the history of painting while reckoning with his identity as a gay immigrant, Rosales contributes his dizzying constellation of distinctive and personal figuration. His overlaying process also mirrors his thematic focus on the survival strategy of clandestinity.

This new work was born out of the approach Rosales fostered during his residency to embrace spontaneity and playfulness while developing his signature intensive layering process.

Veselka's research-oriented work examines humanity’s relationship with the natural world, focused particularly on the interconnectedness of Houston's environmental landscape.

Her presentation includes a multimedia "hyperobject" installation, suite of prints forming a digital herbarium, and video works. Each component of her presentation contains iterations of 3-D scans of objects taken from the Buffalo Bayou vicinity, such as styrofoam, sand, brick, and shale. Subverting the scanning technology's intended use, Veselka strips the detritus and natural elements of their original context to create airy, glitched, compelling, and eroded echoes of the originals. This multistep procedure opens options for configurations not anticipated or predicted by the artist, affording the outsourced scanning systems partial artistic agency. The artist enables us to experience what technologies see when they observe the natural world. Rendering these objects often unrecognizable, Veselka celebrates the flaws inherent in technological transference, likening the process to the work's intangible and fragile subject matter.

Embracing mediation as a central methodology in their practices, the resident artists find feedback and artifice generative. They collectively contribute considerations about the transference of movement—between worlds, formats, languages, technologies, and dreams.

The artists champion asymmetries in translation processes while embracing structural shifts due to the pandemic into their praxis. Consequently, and encouragingly, (mis)translation serves as a vehicle for understanding the artists' personal pasts alongside our intersecting histories.

5

Jacquelyne Boe & David Janesko, Gerardo Rosales, and Holly Veselka Mine the Gap Exhibition Checklist

window

4

John M. O’Quinn Gallery

3 6

5

2 7 8

stairs

elevator

Grace R. Cavnar Gallery

1

en t ra n c e

6

Gerardo Rosales

Jacquelyne Boe & David Janesko

01. Bonding, 2020 Acrylic on paper 10 x 14”

05. Chirality III, 2021 5 channel video projection, digital video projectors, vinyl, projection screen, paint pigmented with powdered graphite, and wood Dimensions and duration variable

02. The Banquet, 2021 Acrylic and latex on wall Dimensions variable 03. Cine Tropical, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 74 x 107” Holly Veselka 04. Buffalo Bayou Collection, 2021 3D printed objects: PLA bioplastic, pigmented powder coat, found bayou sediment; braised metal; HD videos (color, no sound, looped); and found objects

Fauna Collection: ibises, dragonfly, armadillo, hummingbirds

Historical Collection: bison skull (scan in collaboration the Polish Academy of Sciences Mammal Institute), brass clock, marble bust, cotton

Flora Collection: baby's breath, spring wildflower bouquet, summer wildflower bouquet, green bouquet

Color Collection (great blue heron, blazing star, magnolia, toad, oak pollen, wildflower, pinecone, piano, fall foliage bouquet

Dimensions variable

06. Chirality, 2020-21 Chemically-altered silver gelatin paper on Dibond Dimensions variable Holly Veselka 07. Thistle, 2021 Objects collected from a site of significance to the artist’s dad HD video (color, no sound, looped), 15:00 minutes 08. Herbarium, Buffalo Bayou, 2021 Archival pigment prints on cotton rag (12 pieces), Edition 1 of 1 Objects (left to right): Maple, Shale, Sediment, Cotton, Brick, Spiderwort, Railroad Spike, Huisache, Tennis Ball, Styrofoam, Acorns, Spring Wildflowers 19 x 13"

7

Mission Lawndale is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center that engages Houston communities with exhibitions and programs that explore the aesthetic, critical, and social issues of our time.

About Lawndale believes in the role of art and artists to inspire and inform the world around us. By serving as an intimate gathering place to experience art and ideas, Lawndale seeks to foster connections between communities in Houston and beyond. Lawndale presents a diverse range of artistic practices and perspectives through exhibitions and programs, including lectures, symposia, film screenings, readings, and musical performances.

Through exhibition opportunities, the Artist Studio Program, institutional collaborations, and the engagement of an advisory board comprised of artists, curators, and scholars, Lawndale seeks within its mission to support all artistic and cultural communities of Houston.

Supporters Major support for The Artist Studio Program is provided by Kathrine G. McGovern and The John P. McGovern Foundation.

Lawndale’s exhibitions and programs are produced with generous support from The Anchorage Foundation of Texas; The Brown Foundation, Inc.; The Brown Foundation, Inc.; David R. Graham; The John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation; The Joan Hohlt and Roger Wich Foundation; Houston Endowment; The National Endowment for the Arts; The Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation; the Texas Commission on the Arts; The City of Houston; and The Wortham Foundation, Inc. Additional support provided by Benjamin Berg/Berg Hospitality, Illuminations Lighting Design, Lindsey Schechter/Houston Dairymaids, Saint Arnold Brewing Company, and Topo Chico.

Additional support provided by Benjamin Berg/Berg Hospitality, Illuminations Lighting Design, Lindsey Schechter/ Houston Dairymaids, Saint Arnold Brewing Company, and Topo Chico.

4912 Main Street Houston, TX 77002

www.lawndaleartcenter.org