substainability
January 20 - March 7, 2011
Gallery I & II
School of Art Design
Texas State University
Opening on January 20th at 5p.m., Gallery I & II in the School of Art & Design is pleased to announce SUBstainability, a group exhibition co-curated by Gallery Director Mary Mikel Stump and Art History Faculty member Andy Campbell, regarding the multiple ways that we are sustained emotionally, mentally and bodily.
As part of a larger series of events and programs associated with Texas State University's Common Experience topic of Sustainability, this exhibition seeks to take a more expansive approach to the word- so as to subvert and complicate the dominant deployments of (environmental) sustainability, thus the neologism SUBstainability.
At the heart of the exhibition is Felix Gonzalez-Torres' seminal installation Untitled (Placebo) ( 1991 ), on loan from the Museum of Modem Art in New York. It is a carpet of silver cellophane-wrapped candies that, through viewer participation, slowly disappears over the course of the exhibition. The work is shown with Jonathan VanDyke's video Everyone I Ever Loved (Katz Painting, Colby Museum) (2008), which shows the artist contemplating those he has loved in the past while gazing at a large Alex Katz painting. Similarly, key works by Dario Robleto also touch upon this sub-thematic of loss. In Words Tremble With The Thoughts They Express (2008), delicate feather-like forms are made from stretched audiotape of the last recordings of now extinct birds and languages. It is from loss and depression (emotive and physical states) that new ways of understanding the world are produced, something akin to what theorist Heather Love calls "feeling backward".
Disappearance is part of the narrative here, but so are growth, regeneration and vulnerability. David Maisel's photographs of crystalline structures growing on forgotten cremain cans are evidence of this. Eve Andree Laramee's works, Tincture of Smithson (1992) and Breathing Into Each Other's Lungs (1998) reinforce the kinds of creative acts that can come from interacting with contemporary art and with other humans.
The exhibition includes works by the following artist:
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Dario Robleto
Eve Andree Laramee
David Maisel
Jonathan VanDyke
Ivan Lozano
Jeanne Quinn
Kiki Smith
William Betts
Sarah Sudhoff
Chris Sauter
IanBogost
Anthony Campuzano
Enrique Martinez Celaya
Darren Waterston
Alex DaCorte
Loren Erdrich
Wendy Kawabata
Susan Skilling
Andrew Sendor
Anne Siems
Mark Mumford
Mark Newport
Whiting Tennis
Sherry Markovitz
Marie Watt