June 3 – July 31, 2015 University of Texas at San Antonio, Gallery
Co-curated by Dr. Scott Sherer and Marissa Del Toro, Elemental 'Scapes explores the many ways we view and re-consider the built and elemental fixtures of the landscapes of our everyday lives. Artists featured in the exhibit include Sara Frantz (California), Bethany Johnson (Austin), Ted Kincaid (Dallas), Benjamin McVey (San Antonio), Michele Monseau (San Antonio), and Liz Ward (Castroville).
The structures become jewels within their spaces, exciting the viewer to consider how we engage with visual markers.
Sara Frantz’s paintings use vibrant color to alter the architecture of office buildings and private homes and their locations in the landscape. The structures become jewels within their spaces, exciting the viewer to consider how we engage with visual markers.
Bethany Johnson’s intricate line drawings focus on the visual representation of information. Johnson investigates the various methods of science, cartography, philosophy, as well as poetry and visual art, and her work explores the unexpected convergences and compatibilities between different systems of interpreting and recording phenomena.
Ted Kincaid’s digital photographs explore the boundaries and relationships between painting and photography by asking his viewers to consider the potentially tenuous line between manufactured images as straightforward photographic images and actual photographs that appear too fantastic to be from reality.
Benjamin McVey’s digital videos investigate the spatial separation that individuals inherently maintain between themselves and environmental and cultural factors. His work concentrates on specific experiences while also shifting those dimensions. His time-based work explores the relationships between what might be considered to be complete experiences as consolidation of fragmented parts.
Michele Monseau’s current work explores cinematic and theatrical landscapes by seeking out discrepancies between individual experience of landscape/architecture, and corporate (collective) abuses of the environment. By conflating both landscape and architecture through layered and overlaid video works, her “moving paintings” create multiple levels of meaning — a dramatic fictionalization of the subject.
Liz Ward explores her interest of environmentalism and artistic representation in work that transforms the history of landscape painting with the complexity of subjective and critical modes. Her environmental riverscapes capture the essence of southern culture and the Mississippi basin with its intersections of natural, cultural, and personal histories.
Review: Artists navigate our place in the landscape by Steve Bennet in San Antonio Express-News on June 9, 2015.
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