The idea of color is explored at two different shows this month at Art from the Streets and Wally Workman. Premonition and superstition are questioned in the work of Adreon Henry at Camiba, while playful Western style pieces carefully balanced with themes of modern mythology and pop culture are on display in Cyrus Walker’s show at Assemblage Contemporary. Austin landmarks are also examined at two different shows — photographs of Waller Creek as a dividing border line, as well as some of Austin’s advertising icons and what they represent. Dive into, explore, and be inspired by the arts this month in Austin.
Camiba Gallery
“Adreon Henry: Auspicious Premonition” — Now through July 16
Adreon Henry’s latest body of work investigates the relationship between the power of the mind, prosperity, talismans, superstitions, and luck. Henry’s work asks the questions: Do good luck charms hold any significance to outcomes? Does fate or karma, or the simple belief in one or the other, guide us through our earthly endeavors? Henry has always been curious about how things are constructed and from a very early age he developed a very specific style through repeatedly drawing imaginary friends; these friends still exist today (i.e.“The Pendletons”). Now Austin-based, he continues his creative endeavors, often working with the themes of time, community, and perspective. His use of a variety of screen printing and painting techniques on non-traditional mediums, and his tendency to cut and weave these materials, has allowed him to create a signature visual style, while his many years as a musician gives him a strong foundation to create magnificent sound-scapes and interactive installations.
Art from the Streets @ Canopy
“Green Envy” — June 4 and July 2
Green has been used in art since the time of the ancient Egyptians who used green earth and malachite, while the ancient Greeks used verdigris. Green had a resurgence in art during the Impressionist movement due to advancements in green pigments and paints. The color green creates an atmosphere of serenity and calmness, typically associated with nature, serenity and freshness. Green is the theme at this exhibit from persons experiencing homelessness, at risk, or in transition. Art from the Streets is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, established in 1991 to give transient people a way to develop as artists and to use their creativity to climb out of homelessness.
Assemblage Contemporary Craftsman Gallery
“Cyrus Walker: Boy Howdy!” — June 4 through June 30
“Boy Howdy!” features bold, pulp, playful western style pieces balanced with themes of modern mythology and pop culture. Cyrus Walker’s work captures, reflects, and manipulates the mass-produced dime novels and comic books that influenced the themes of the “Imagined West” through the interplay of preservation and exaggeration. Walker re-introduces these familiar narratives with the addition of vignettes from other prominent genres of storytelling, resulting in new tall tales that are rooted in timeless themes of human nature with a dash of “Giddy Up!” and a little bit of “Whoah Nelly!”
Wally Workman
“Garrido: Solo Show” — June 4 through July 2
The power of color is Jen Garrido’s central focus for this body of work. Her shapes form emotive vessels of pigment built upon one another, filled with love, sadness, passion, exhaustion, grief, joy, and even magic. Representative of the human emotional state, Garrido’s works communicate an ever-changing internal and external growth.
Georgetown Art Center
“A Transient Nature” — June 10 through July 17
“Transient Nature” is the intersection of three Austin-based artists’ environmental concerns. Shawn Camp, Shannon Faseler, and Dameon Lester use their individual pursuits to document geological, atmospheric, and ecological transformation. Each artist references frozen moments in time and space to impress upon the viewer the transient attributes of nature. These artworks are based on ephemeral references, incorporating both geological and constructed linear boundaries to affect audience perception.
Flatbed
“Heather Parrish: Seeing Out the Other Eye — A View Through Waller Creek” — June 12 through July 26
Bearing the name of Austin’s first city planner, this cretaceous limestone waterway is inscribed with legacies of racialized division and displacement. As an Austin native with family traces to the city’s founding, Heather Parrish explores these threads through historical layers of terrain and urban development. Her exhibition uses images sourced from historic photographs of Waller Creek, remembered (sometimes forgotten) as a dividing border line that runs through the city of Austin. Parrish employs printmaking, experimental photography, collage, and installation to unsettle simple binaries and consider complex embodiments of boundaries. Rather than firm and fixed, she explores the dynamic potentialities of boundaries as porous sites of exchange.
Women & Their Work
“Steef Crombach: One Bad Monkey” — June 25 through August 4
Steef Crombach uses iconography as clues to understand our physical environment. She finds inspiration in the commonplace and the local and surfaces overlooked but shared points of reference buried deep within the collective consciousness. In One Bad Monkey, Crombach focuses this process on Austin’s advertising sculptures for commercial businesses. Through soft sculptures and draping foam relief tapestries, Crombach examines the secret life of local icons like the Wheatsville Raptor and the Big Star Bingo Gorilla. She explores each character’s evolution as its identity morphs over time and place. Her focus on these sculptures highlights the often-intangible nature of change and attempts to create a deeper understanding of our shared physical reality.
Big Medium
“Xavier Schipani: The Lightning Can’t Be Harnessed” — June 25 through July 30
Xavier Schipani is an Austin-based transgender artist, who has focused his practice on creating large painting installations that explore the boundaries of gender, body politics, sexuality, and queer identity. His unique voice and personal connection to the themes of his work create intimate experiences in combination with a larger-than-life scale to establish a contrast between the work and the viewer. He continues to investigate fear and anger, masculinity as performance and the ambiguity of what makes a man.
"Green Envy" is an exhibit produced by Art from the Streets, opening June 4.
