Fold In: Kristen Cochran, Katy Heinlein, & Marcelyn McNeil

Katy Heinlein, Kristen Cochran, and Marcelyn McNeil

Fold In Dec 8, 2018 – Mar 3, 2019

Katy Heinlein, Kristen Cochran, Marcelyn McNeil Fold In Cecily E. Horton Gallery

Fold In, organized by Katy Heinlein, brings three Texas-based artists together: Kristen Cochran of Dallas, and Katy Heinlein and Marcelyn McNeil of Houston, who have never before exhibited together. Cochran, Heinlein, and McNeil share an affinity for quiet, coyly emoting, almost non-objective abstraction. One essential tool is shared in the creation of their work: scissors. Each artist has a unique way of folding, cutting, patternmaking, zhooshing, and piecing together.

Cochran, Heinlein, and McNeil utilize a carefully considered palette in their toying, sensual exploration of pictorial and actual space. A loose architecture exists in all of the work, a structure that frames a ghostly emptiness. Each artist is pragmatic and provisional, utilizing an economy of means.

There is a deadpan humor present in the work, an obtuseness, a muted feeling, and an acceptance of mystery.

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Kristen Cochran moved to Texas from the Pacific Northwest to complete her MFA at The Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in 2010.

She has exhibited her work across the US and in Europe and has works in private collections in Italy and England. Cochran has exhibited extensively in Texas at venues such as Talley Dunn Gallery, Oliver Francis Gallery, CentralTrak, Barry Whistler Gallery, Liliana Bloch Gallery, RE gallery, Southern Methodist University, the University of Texas at Dallas, Eastfield College, The Dallas Contemporary Museum, and Women & Their Work and Blue Star Contemporary for the 2011 and 2013 Texas Biennials, respectively.

She has been awarded residencies in Long Island City, NY, Mittersill, Austria, Banner, Wyoming and most recently completed a year-long residency at The Center for Arts and Medicine at Baylor Hospitals Sammons Center for Cancer Research. Cochran presently teaches drawing and sculpture at the University of Texas at Dallas and is an educator at The Nasher Sculpture Center.

Since arriving in Dallas, she has taught as a lecturer and a teaching artist at Southern Methodist University, The Nasher Sculpture Center, The Dallas Museum of Art and The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Recent exhibitions include Architectures of Aspiration (r.i.p.) at Liliana Bloch Gallery, The LINE at Site 131 and Interstate at Beefhaus in Dallas.

Katy Heinlein was born in Baytown, TX, in 1973. She received a BFA from University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in 1995 and MFA in Sculpture from Texas Tech University in 1999. In 2000, she relocated to Houston, TX, where she has lived and worked for 18 years.

Heinlein has exhibited her work in Japan, Mexico, New York, Chicago, New Haven, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston and has completed artist residencies in Montauk, NY; Shigaraki, Japan; and Houston, TX. Heinlein has received grants and awards from Houston Arts Alliance, Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, and Miami University.

Marcelyn McNeil is an artist making intimate works on paper and paintings. She has exhibited widely across the United States and participated in multiple Biennials.McNeil has been awarded residencies at VSC, 100 W Corsicana, and McDowell Colony. Additional awards include The Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship, Zeta Orionis Fellowship, VSC, Purchase Award from Portland Art Museum, CAAP Grant from The City of Chicago Cultural Affairs, and Nominee from The Joan Mitchell Foundation. She earned an MFA from The University of Illinois at Chicago and taught painting at The University of Houston as visiting faculty in 2012-14.

Raphael Rubinstein is a New York-based poet and art critic whose numerous books include Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990-2002 (Hard Press Editions), The Afterglow of Minor Pop Masterpieces (Make Now) and The Miraculous (Paper Monument).

He edited the anthology Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice (Hard Press Editions). The Miraculous has been translated into French by Marcel Cohen and published by Editions Greges. From 1997 to 2007, he was a senior editor at Art in America, where he continues to be a contributing editor. He is currently professor of critical studies at the University of Houston School of Art. In 2002, the French government presented him with the award of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2010, his blog The Silo won a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

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"Seeing & Making"

by Raphael Rubinstein Sometimes as we encounter a work of art, it is enough to just look without wondering how the object was made; process and materials barely intrude into our awareness. But at other times, it is absolutely impossible to look without thinking about how the work was made.

That is certainly the case with each of the works on view in Fold In. When we gaze at Marcelyn McNeil’s Ramp Painting No. 2, a large, unprimed stretched canvas leaning against the wall at a substantial angle, our eyes retrace the gravity-induced flow of paint as it must have slowly descended to form the tongue-like peninsulas of vivid color that define the composition. This painting as well as the other work by McNeil in the show—a more sombre, but strongly sensual painting titled Condensed Version—mark a departure for the artist, who has gained attention for exuberant abstractions in which almost cartoony abstract shapes jostle against each other and push gleefully against the edges of the canvas. McNeil describes her new paintings as seeking a “more contemplative, meditative experience,” which they clearly achieve, while also sparking a lively dialogue with art history, from Matisse’s cut-out Blue Nude to Morris Louis’s abstract Veils.

In the work of Katy Heinlein, the coalescence of what we see and how it was made is even more explicit. Using a distinct set of soft and hard materials (wood, aluminium and various kinds of fabric), Heinlein assembles casual-looking constructions that invite us, nay, require us, to examine their structure as the only way to adequately apprehend them. Wood frames, draped fabrics, sewn-together pieces of cloth, tautly stretched bands: these are sculptures that tell the story of their own making. But not everything is easy to see: they also tease us 4

with hidden volumes, with covered struts, with a seductive play of apertures, transparency, and concealment. Her work can also engage, without being site-specific, the contingencies of installation, as when On Again Off Again On Again is propped against a column in the middle of the gallery or Snake Eyes huddles in a corner of the space.

The simultaneity of object and making (or, more accurately, unmaking) reaches its apogee here Kristen Cochran’s “deconstructed” and “suspended” (the artist’s terms) workshirts. Cutting away everything except the seams of various types of clothes and uniforms associated with manual labour (fluorescent road-crew work shirts, blue work shirts, a white painter’s suit), Cochran hangs these slender seams on simple metal hooks to create delicate, symmetrical drawings in space. (Bilateral symmetry is a theme that recurs through the show, with the effect of subtly evoking the human figure via abstract forms.) The physical properties of each type of clothing affect the hanging structures, which possess a memorable totemic quality, even as they lead us to think about issues of class, labour, and the diminishing role of the handmade in our society, themes that also inform Cochran’s cement-filled work gloves and photographs of unstitched pockets.

It was many decades ago that art historian Leo Steinberg observed how works of art were among the last handmade objects in our society. If that still remains true, it must be because we continue to have need of them, need to share the endlessly resourceful efforts of artists as they assemble and disassemble the world around themselves, and us.

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Katy Heinlein, Kristen Cochran, Marcelyn McNeil Fold In Exhibition Checklist

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01.

Kristen Cochran Ghost Painter, 2018 Deconstructed painter's suit, hardware 53 x 22 x 4"

08. Katy Heinlein

On Again Off Again On Again, 2018

Cloth and wood

59 x 43 x 4"

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Katy Heinlein Fig Leaf, 2018 Polyester, pine, acrylic and flocking 13 x 12 x 14”

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Katy Heinlein Snake Eyes, 2018 Polyester, silk, pine and aluminum 52 x 40 x 30”

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Marcelyn McNeil Condensed Version, 2018 Oil on raw canvas 58 x 66 x 72"

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Katy Heinlein Double Blind, 2015 Polyester, silk and pine 30 x 30 x 38”

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Marcelyn McNeil Ramp Painting No. 2, 2018 Oil on raw canvas 38 x 44 x 95"

04. Kristen Cochran

Safety Yellow w/ Sunset, 2018

Deconstructed work shirts (road crew

with office cubes), painted steel, hardware

73 x 32 x 7 1/2" 05. Kristen Cochran

3 Blues, 2018

Deconstructed work shirts (hardware

with casual Friday), steel, hardware

78 x 37 x 9” 06. Kristen Cochran

The Union, 2017

Work gloves, cement, wire

Dimensions variable 07. Kristen Cochran

The Edge of Artists and Workers

(Pockets in Blue), 2018

Digital C print on cotton rag

47 x 35"

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Installation image by Ronald L. Jones.

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.

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