Porous Matters

April 26—May 24
Opening: April 26, 7—9pm featuring sounds by wishlashh

Porous Matters creates an environment of living art in conversation with the landscape of Austin, refocusing and reinforcing our emotional reliance on nature. This exhibition presents artwork produced in an age of extreme drought: a topic inevitably confronted by artists working with nature in Central Texas. Welcoming exploration of organic and “immaterial” elements—sound, smell, light, text—Porous Matters posits these as inherently social works that prompt communal experience, offering radiant entry points into new relationships between environment and humanity.  

Countless metaphors and symbols have been used to visualize an aquifer in the human mind, like a sponge or a bucket with leaks along its top edge. The impact, scale, and pace of the Edwards Aquifer exceed our imagination, demanding an understanding of unseen movement beneath our feet while also meaningfully emerging for us in the form of natural cold springs—it is at once invisible and immersive. 

Droughts, like floods, are part of waterways’ lifecycles, especially in the karst land and waterscape of the Texas Hill Country. We have all asked ourselves some form of the question: how do we ensure sustainable parameters of this lifecycle? How can we, humanity and the environment that holds us, survive if our springs are no longer replenished? What is our individual role in protecting these often-invisible sources of life, and what is our role as a society? Who is given unlimited access to this precious resource, and what lands and people suffer as a consequence of irresponsible water use? Emphasizing our symbiotic relationship to the unique land and waterscape in Texas, these artworks offer a range of form, texture, and experience, both in the gallery and outdoors in the courtyard. 

These artists find immediacy in depictions of deep time: Emily Lee’s video work Postcard frames and reframes a sublime sunset, challenging our perception of surface and light. The sound piece Gauge 2 (Lock 27 - Mississippi River mile 185.5) by Anika Todd expands our perception of scale to include time and sound, carrying listeners through a waterway ship lock. Diego Miró-Rivera’s Coemergence, a monumental composition of cicada exoskeletons, maps the 2024 double-brood event—the first time in 221 years that the 13-year and 17-year cicada lifecycles aligned. Miles Mattis-Uzzo brings scents rare in the surface world of stagnant water and rot to the gallerygoer’s nose, naturally diffused from limestone doused with Mattis-Uzzo’s engineered perfume. Hannah Spector’s poem alpine (texas) invites a reader to transform into rainwater, flooding over the West Texas desert floor. Outside, Anika Todd’s Dark Study moontower translates waterflow data of the Texas Colorado River into crescendos of light, reaching peak brightness as the water swells between 7pm and midnight. Anahita (Ani) Bradberry’s Floodgate provides a red neon gateway to Todd’s monumental work, symbolically marking a transition into sacred space as visitors walk through it.

As the urgency of drought and severe weather becomes less abstract and more tangible, these works borrow the language of porosity that defines the Edwards Aquifer to encourage a deeper public relationship with this essential indicator of our health and future in Austin.

About The Artists

Emily Lee is an artist, writer, and community organizer from the Texas Gulf Coast. Through their practice, Lee observes how meaning and value are unconsciously reified in objects, social dynamics, and the built environment.
https://leeemily.com
@emilyelisabethlee

Miles Matis-Uzzo is a Texas-based artist and superorganism who communicates through sculpture, poetry, video, perfume, performance, and installation. With these mediums, they excavate the products of gendered power structures, queer ecology, and the ritualistic distancing of our diminishing ecosystem.
https://matisuzzo.com
@e3arthstar

Diego Miró-Rivera’s work is focused on site-specificity, the natural world, how humans relate through the manipulation of space. Some of his works are of immense scale, snow or grass tracks of several kilometers, others fit in the palm of a hand.
https://diegomirorivera.com
@gogomiro

Anika Todd is a sculptor/media artist who investigates the human impulse to own and control; their works critique the cultural assumptions and legislative frameworks that legitimize private ownership of earth and sky.
https://anikatodd.com
@anikatodd

Hannah Spector is an interdisciplinary visual artist, poet, and educator. Spector thinks of language as a solid object—a concrete and spatial expression that can overturn limiting perceptions of the everyday.
https://hannahspector.com

Anahita (Ani) Bradberry is an artist and writer creating sculptural situations with plasma light. As organic bodies and minimal geometries, her practice is an exercise in life-forming: filling tubular vessels with pulsing plasma—the luminous fourth state of matter—and arranging the ethereal light in conversation with its surroundings. Each object is simultaneously a multidimensional line and an atmospheric field.
https://anibradberry.com
@ani.data