CRUSH
Alex Diamant, Lauren Moya Ford, Logan Larsen, Kerry Maguire, Virginia L. Montgomery, Alexandre Pépin, Mai Snow
April 8th - May 13th
Opening: April 8th, 7-10pm
This exhibition features a collection of works that explore crushing— materially metaphorically, emotionally or accidentally.
The language we use to describe intangible feelings commonly draws from material metaphors: our hearts break and melt, our stomachs are tied in knots and filled with butterflies. Feelings of love, desire, and attraction are often described using terms of damage or dissolution. We are undone by our feelings, longing to let ourselves go.
The artists in this show make work that negotiates the relationship between control and release, desire and destruction, intimacy and longing. In CRUSH, colors pool and spread; boundaries are breached; surfaces are soaked, brushed, carved and pressed; hands reach, touch and try to hold it together.
Alex Diamant is a painter, drawer and maybe sculptor based in Portland, Oregon. He works with a mixed casting/monoprinting process where physical desires and visual inclinations can unfold together. These procedures are geared toward revealing what can emerge in spite of all intention. Originally from New York, Diamant received a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin and currently works in custom fabrication. These opposite worlds of art and design provide a necessary tension that feeds into the work.
Lauren Moya Ford is an artist and writer from Austin, Texas. She has exhibited and performed her work at The Menil Collection’s Byzantine Chapel, Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum, the University of Texas at Austin's Visual Arts Center, and at art spaces in Lisbon, Madrid, Montreal, Philadelphia, Porto, and Tokyo. Her work – which spans drawing, ceramics, photography, text, and printmaking – explores her ongoing relationship to memory, the body, and nature. Since 2019, more than 250 of her exhibition and book reviews, essays, and interviews have been published in print and online by Apollo, Art Papers, Flash Art, Frieze, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, Mousse, Sightlines, and others.
Logan Larsen is an artist from Houston, TX with degrees in both Studio Art and Art History from the University of Texas at Austin. His work touches and fuses a multitude of media including drawing, painting, publishing, and printmaking. His work has been exhibited with the International Print Center New York, Co-Lab Projects, the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the National Young Arts Foundation. Larsen has worked as a Risograph Lab Fellow and manager at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently based in Austin, TX.
Kerry Maguire is a writer, multidisciplinary artist and electronic musician from Moh'kins'tsis. Using techniques of imprint, transfer and decay, she explores writing and experimental printmaking as a way to create an unstable index of reality. In her practice, she works with images of landscape, and with steel, water, and clay to posit precarious, nascent archives of place. In her work, time and chance have primacy over control. By engaging with rust, water in all its forms, graphite and metal she collaborates with entropy and disintegration in a rigorous refusal of mastery.
Kerry has exhibited her installation work, prints, sculpture and sound work in Austin, TX; Brooklyn, NY; Ireland; Latvia; Estonia; and across Canada. She has received travel grants to conduct sonic research in Ireland and material exploration on Toronto Island. Maguire has participated in artist residencies at Artscape (Toronto), The National Music Centre (Calgary, Canada), the New York Studio Residency Program (Brooklyn), and The Burren College of Art (Ireland).
Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) is a multimedia artist working across video, performance, sound design, and sculpture. She is known for her unique, synthesia-esque, surrealist works that unite elements from mysticism, science, innovation culture, and her own lived experience as a neurodivergent individual. Her artwork is surreal, sensorial, and symbolic. It shifts in subject matter from stones to moths and machines, as VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures and recursive symbols like circles, holes, and spheres. Her artistic efforts are characterized by material experimentation, somatic sensitivity, and her unusual studio practice of hand-raising the moths and butterflies appearing in her videos. VLM’s diverse artistic movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures via gestures of agency, intimacy, and empathy. VLM also holds a parallel career; she works as a visual ideation scribe, a Graphic Facilitator, a unique profession for which she travels the world to diagram the development of ideas at group meetings like TED talks, DEI events, and innovation conferences. In her work as a fine artist, VLM turns this professional skill-set, which she describes as “mind map scribing,” inwards, to render the contours of her own subconscious and the symbolics of storytelling. Collectively, VLM's symbols, forms, subjects, and gestures rupture material surfaces, opening up portals into the hope of atomic consciousness. VLM has had solo presentations with New Museum (NY), Times Square Arts (NY), Museum Folkwang (Germany), Wright Lab at Yale University (CT), The Lawndale Art Center (TX), False Flag (NY), and Hesse Flatow (NY). She has also exhibited in group exhibitions at institutions including SculptureCenter (NY), La Panacée-MoCo (France), The Hessel Museum at Bard College (NY), The Banff Centre (Canada), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), Kling & Bang (Iceland), and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), among others...
Alexandre Pépin is a French-Canadian visual artist born in Tio'tia:ke (Montréal) (1992) and currently living in Austin, Texas. He holds an MFA in Studio Arts at the University of Texas at Austin (2022) and a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University in Montréal (2016). Pépin draws from the legacy of Byzantine and Early Renaissance Frescoes, Post-Impressionism, Tonalism, The Viennese Secession, and Pattern and Decoration to portray moments of Queer intimacy and spiritual contemplation. Grant Recipient of the Quebec Arts and Letters Council (2017) and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2019), Pépin participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (2017) and at the Ox-Bow School of Arts (Summer Fellowship, 2021), and showed work through solo and group exhibitions in Canada and the US. His work was recently reviewed in Esse Arts + Opinions (Summer 2021), New American Painting (Issue 156, 2022), Glasstire (Moya Ford, A commitment to(...), 2022), and Sightlines Magazine (McKetta, Studio Visit:Alexandre Pépin, 2022).
Mai Snow is a Non-binary, immigrant artist from Polevskoy, Russia. They split their time living and making work between Texas and New England. Snow received their MFA from University of Texas at Austin in 2020 and their BFA from Maine College of Art in 2013. Snow has shown their paintings throughout Texas, New England, and in various parts of the Midwest. They currently teach at Texas State University and at the Art School at The Contemporary Austin. Snow is the Co-creator of a local DIY Gallery space, Shedshows, in Austin, Texas.
