Constant Escape
March - July 2019
Exhibition Summary:
Constant Escape brings together a range of work by three Austin-based visual artists for a fascinating and intriguing exhibition. These three artists could be regarded as each coming from a different social background and embodying a distinctive cultural identity. Yet, Adrian Aguilera, Betelhem Makonnen, and Tammie Rubin prompt us to look at and appreciate their practices for what they are – the works of three individual practitioners who actively reject the imposition of cultural and societal labels, expectations, and boxes. Within their respective practices, we can never be absolutely certain that we fully understand what has captured our gaze – fixed meanings with stable and settled readings elude us.
Each artist creates installations that respond to the formal, architectural, and perhaps more than anything, cultural dimensions of the gallery space. Of course, what the artists ultimately bring to us is an insistent challenge of the materials they each use, a constant interrogation – how they can be used and what they might signify. It is this playful, yet determined and penetrating questioning, that makes constant escape such an engaging undertaking.
Aguilera, Makonnen, and Rubin delight in undermining the very idea of easy legibility of their respective practices. Their work always begins with, and leaves us with, the question, “What are we looking at?” But this experience does not stop when we as viewers exit the gallery. Nor should it. constant escape clearly communicates that we would do well, or do better, to set aside all the constraining signifiers of personhood on which our society thrives and relies.
Eddie Chambers, Ph.D., Professor of Art History
The University of Texas at Austin
Featured Artists:
Pictue by ArtPace
Adrian Aguilera
A conceptual artist whose work uses the printed media as a symbol for mechanical reproduction of the natural world and its potential of (de)construction of cultural meaning.
His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas (Austin, Texas), The George Washington Carver Museum (Austin, Texas), Leun’un ArteHabitación (San Pedro Garza Garcia, Mexico), Institut Culturel du Mexique (Paris, France), and The Mexican American Cultural Center (Austin, Texas).
He received his BFA in painting from the University Autonomous of Nuevo Leon, Mexico in 2004. He currently lives in Austin, Texas.
Picture by Big Medium
Betelhem Makonnen
A native of Ethiopia currently lives and works in Austin, Texas. She completed an MFA (2019) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a New Artists Society Merit Scholar and a B.A. (1995) in History and Literature of Africa and the African Diaspora from the University of Texas in Austin.
Working with a variety of mediums that include video, photography, and installations, she researches questions on perception, presence, and place within a trans-temporal and trans-locative topology that operates on the relational dynamics of African diasporic consciousness. She exhibits in galleries and cultural institutions nationally and internationally. In addition to her practice, she is an active member of the Austin-based contemporary arts collaborative Black Mountain Project.
Tammie Rubin
A visual artist who transforms familiar objects into mythic sculptures and installations that explore the gaps between the readymade and the handcrafted object. Rubin received a BFA in Ceramics and Art History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an MFA in Ceramics at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Her work has been featured in online and printed publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Glasstire, Sightlines, fields, Conflict of Interest, Arts and Culture Texas, Ceramics: Art & Perception, and Ceramics Monthly. Rubin has discussed her work and shared her techniques through lectures and workshops at various art centers and universities.
Pictures by Jeanette Nevarez