Scott Hilton, Sarah Williams, and Clayton Hurt
Opening Reception: March 6th, 7-10pm
Scott Hilton's work is a "photo-opera" titled The Mustard Gas Phantasies of Wilfred Owen. Using antiquated, hand-made photographic processes to create a work of speculative visual fiction, the project purports to illustrate the dying hallucinations of Wilfred Owen, the most noted of the WWI British "trench poets". These dark surrealistic scenes interpret the horrors of industrialised war, convoluted through the dying poet's fevered final hours after his exposure to mustard gas (the first chemical weapon), exactly one week before the Armistace.
This exhibition of paintings by Sarah Williams highlights recent work that closely focuses on her roots in the rural Midwest. The nightscapes of familiar, yet isolated and unremarkable buildings, rooms and scenes located in rural areas close to her home record structures that show character resulting from the history and memory of the people and ways of life that have shaped them. Her use of darkness concentrates attention on both the essential and the obscure forms. The viewer's location is not specifically implied because of the light sources within the paintings. They must find their own way and decide their own approach when out in the rural night depicted in these works.
Clayton Hurt's current exhibition of comes from a hand-picked market of work out of the studio. His work is best informed by the nature of the sketch book and how ideas tend to pile up. These drawings, paintings and sculptures lend themselves to the common thread of Clay's work, this sort of animalistic comedy hour. With undertones of serious issues and playful actions, Hurt re-examines his use of the animal form. Looking further at animals' relationships with nature and the commercial food industry, this show compiles a few years of work based off Hurt's secret cartoon creation Corn Chicken from 2005.
Project Room: labors
The legendary labors of Hercules are retold through the creative lens of Mario Galicia. Galicia's photography finds foundation in classical Greek and Roman mythology through his attention to struggles and stress that the human body is capable of producing. In this creation of contemporary myth the Herculean tale is described through the culture of lucha libre. Lucha libre is the passionate and vibrant sport of Mexican wrestling. The name literally translates as 'free fighting.' Derived from the Greco-Roman style of grappling, lucha libre dates from the 1930s, developing into a sport whose players are known as luchadores. The mask "matters" in lucha libre: both by its capacity to shift the rules of performance and by its capacity to align wrestling performances with other discourses about culture and nation.
Playing the role of Hercules is one certified West Texas Luchador Captain Kiser. In the endurance of Captain Kiser, his merits play part, as does, in a notable way, the contributions of the mask (which does not hide but creates his identity), and of his "pseudonym," which implies justice and mystery, other worldly forces, and self-defense techniques which, incidentally, protect Humanity or restore his own. There are wrestlers of his quality, and perhaps even better, but Captain Kiser is a rite of poverty, of the rough consolations in the Great-Disconsolation-that-is-life, the mix of classical Greek tragedy, circus, Olympic sport, comedy, variety, and catharsis at work.