Rapture in Rupture

November 15, 2008 – January 11, 2009

Featuring works by Lauren Kelley, Shiri Mordechay,
Mindy Shapero, and Nicolau Vergueiro.

Curated by Elizabeth Dunbar, Arthouse Curator

PUBLIC PROGRAM
Saturday, November 15, 3:00pm
Talking Art with Lauren Kelley and Shiri Mordechay
Arthouse at the Jones Center
700 Congress Avenue, Austin
Free admission

Nicolau Vergueiro, Final Costume Change—Lower Clouds at Moonset (detail), 2008. Magic-Sculpt, clear epoxy resin, paint and cheesecloth, 73" x 91" x 6". Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.

"We are living in uncertain times…. Ours have been frenzied, rapturous times and they are now in shambles, in rupture.

"Rapture in Rupture reveals aspects of our conflicted culture through the lens of four young artists. Their mesmerizing objects or fantastical artistic worlds move between two, three, and even four dimensions, frequently shuttling back and forth between figuration and abstraction. The “ruptures” in their respective works express (sometimes gleefully) chaos, irresolution, and discomfort, perhaps alluding to the imploding rapture that has come to define our specific time and place in the world." – Elizabeth Dunbar, Arthouse Curator


A publication accompanies the exhibition.

Admission is free and open to the public.

About the artists
Lauren Kelley (b. 1975) lives and works in Houston, Texas, where she is a fellow in the Core Program at the Glassel School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As an interdisciplinary artist, Kelley works with drawing, photography, sculpture and video to explore and reveal ideas concerning the lives of black women. Utilizing a unique cast of dolls and puppets who have undergone low-tech—and often hilarious—modifications, Kelley creates theatres of the absurd which are enacted in homemade sculptural dioramas. She received an Altoids Award from The New Museum in New York.

Shiri Mordechay (b. 1974) was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, raised in Nigeria, and now lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Mordechay’s massive works on paper are sprawling, stream-of-consciousness journeys into the psychological recesses of the mind where humans and animals engage in perverse, uninhibited, and violent behavior. Mordechay’s mental and material tensions crackle between seduction and repulsion, abstraction and figuration, and between drawing and sculpture, painting and installation, and between two and three dimensions. Her work has been exhibited in such venues as Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona, Italy and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO.

Mindy Shapero (b. 1974) earned her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Shapero creates surreal narratives of alternate worlds in her drawings and sculptures that lie somewhere between daydreams, fantasies and nightmares. Her use of everyday materials to create fantasy worlds suggests a coexisting enamorment and skepticism of our culture’s rampant consumerism. Her somewhat clunky and awkward works are both intuitive and contemplative, issuing forth from ever-evolving stories dreamed by the artist and sometimes given initial expression in written tales before being transformed into two and three dimensions. Her work has been exhibited in such venues as the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.

Nicolau Vergueiro (b. 1977) was born in New York and raised in Brazil until he was a teen. Verguerio received his BA from the University of California, Los Angeles and his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, and Sao Pãulo, Brazil. Using fabrics as his primary material, Vergueiro intermingles a multitude of social and cultural influences in order to create hybrid artworks that effectively destabilize the familiar in their simultaneous references to fashion, music, design, pop culture, and art history. His use of marginal materials bespeaks a bargain-bin baroqueness perfectly keyed to a collapsing culture of consumer gluttony. His work was recently exhibited at the Aspen Art Museum, CO, and Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, CA.