Expo 2020 Virtual Exhibition

500X Gallery Hours during Art Walk West (Sat, Oct 24):
11 am - 6 pm (Extended Hours)
No appointments required that day on Oct 24!
We will be limiting 10 people in the space at any given time.

Expo 2020 Virtual Reception via Zoom (Click Here)
Sat, Oct 24 at from 6-7 pm
This includes artist and juror talks in addition to annoucement of jurors’ choice awards.

500X is proud to present Expo 2020, juried by Sedrick and Letitia Huckaby! This year our jurors selected 28 artists: 

Michelle Gonzales | Brooke Chaney | Jim Wilson | Charles Gray | Goran Maric | Eliana Miranda | Valerie Van Over | Kaitlin West | Madeline Ortega | Cindy Nguyen | Hallee Turner |Marianne Howard | Max Marshall | Kyung Hee Im | Purujit Chatterjee | Thomas Flynn II | Kacey Slone | Juan Castillo | Maria Haag | Jessi Jones | Enrique Nevarez | Jas Mardis | Beronica Gonzales | Marquez Munoz | Victoria Gonzales | Austin Lewis | Tiara Francois | Randal Robins

Expo 2020 runs from October 10 through November 1 and will be on view in the gallery and virtually on our website, www.500x.org. There will be artist talks and a virtual reception for Expo 2020 on October 24th during Art Walk West in West Dallas. The physical exhibition will be on view by appointment only. Gallery hours are Saturdays and Sundays from 12-5 pm. To schedule an appointment, visit: http://www.500x.org/schedule-an-appointment. The gallery address is 516 Fabrication Street, Dallas, TX, 75212.

We will also host a VIRTUAL ONLY reception on Saturday evening, October 24th, from 6-7 pm. Please join us on Zoom (Click Here) and feel free to have a beverage ready to *virtually* toast this year's show! We will be announcing the jurors’ choice award winners during the reception. We look forward to seeing those of you who are able to attend the reception Saturday evening. Thank you for supporting 500X!

Expo 2020 Virtual Exhibition

Michelle Gonzales | Brooke Chaney | Jim Wilson | Charles Gray | Goran Maric | Eliana Miranda | Valerie Van Over | Kaitlin West | Madeline Ortega | Cindy Nguyen | Hallee Turner |Marianne Howard | Max Marshall | Kyung Hee Im | Purujit Chatterjee | Thomas Flynn II | Kacey Slone | Juan Castillo | Maria Haag | Jessi Jones | Enrique Nevarez | Jas Mardis | Beronica Gonzales | Marquez Munoz | Victoria Gonzales | Austin Lewis | Tiara Francois | Randal Robins

October 10- November 1, 2020

Michelle Gonzales

Michelle Gonzales’ artist statement: My work explores the nature of history within fragmented memory - the space where reality and illusion collide, and narratives are reconstructed. By juxtaposing abstraction and representation together with the process of sewing textiles and building up the surface with found and made materials, I trick the eye with what is painted and what isn’t. Resin is used to act as a preserver of time and give off a ghostly, and waxy texture that adds to the character of my work. I enjoy working with materials such as used textiles, wood, and old family photographs, which have a history of human interactivity and can trigger personal experiences that transport us somewhere outside of our natural state. There is an ambiguous nature to my compositions which correlates with the nature of remembering something; it constantly changes and shifts.

Brooke Chaney

Brooke Chaney’s Artist Statement: The following group of work is inspired by the physical and conceptual juxtaposition of COVID-19 and the BLM/civil rights movement of 2020. Using the current political and social environment as a catalyst for the work, these sculptures represent the experiences and perceptions of a black female artist discovering and defending her blackness. Through the use of popular ready made materials, the sculptures are intended to arouse feelings of familiarity, humility, and empathy. This series deals primarily with the topic of black sacrifice for white comfort and advancement. In doing that it also raises questions of superiority, race, relationships, and mental health.

Jim Wilson

Jim Wilson’s Artist Statement: My work is an adventure, a journey. Rarely do I have a clear image in mind when I begin a new piece, and I am usually surprised by the final outcome. I let my process drive my work, packing it with the many things I think about and the things I’m interested in. I am fascinated with the amazing world we live in and the mysteries of life, and my work is an exploration into the astonishing complexity of it all. I frequently set up artificial rules in a piece, and then break them with delight. Juxtapositions of chaos and order, beauty and ugliness, seduction and repulsion, harmony and contradiction: these things fascinate me.

Charles Gray

Goran Maric

Goran Maric’s Artist Statement: Coming from a country torn by a civil war, and later working in Afghanistan as a contractor the instances of human traits, i.e., destructions, wars, made profound influence on who I am as a human being as well as an artist. For that reason I want to revisit these memories but not as a direct description of the destruction wars leave behind, rather as a reflection of relations, or contradictions between perceived fragility of human flesh and or spirit in relation to materials associated with strength and endurance, i.e., stones, concrete blocks, bunkers and or sandbags.

In order to protect the personnel living and working at the Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan from the frequent 'incomings,' the phrase used to describe rockets or mortar attacks coming from the outside of the base, there were concrete bunkers installed throughout the base covered with sandbags so to minimize the possible direct rocket impact. Sandbags and the structures built using them are an important decorum of the life on a base in a war zone. They are those markers that can separate life from death. The biomorphic yet architectural structure of sandbags filled by send themselves, or as a structure built piling them up on the top of each other would leave me mesmerized by its paradox, the soft appearance through tactility is replaced with hardness and coldness of sand.
Along these markers the sandbags depicted in large industrial mash banner prints or as physical objects in installations are the ones I and my coworkers had been installing around these bunkers.
The location of silkscreened sandbags in the installation, at the bottom of structures, is a strategic construct. Doing so, I wanted to address the lowest strata these people, the workers, occupied in these living social structures known as military bases. As one can see the only way the wooden installation could be stable is if it were supported by the sandbags. These sandbags have silkscreened images of the workers who carried quietly the everyday activities not seen by many, yet of an undeniable importance for orderly conducts of everyday business on the base.

Formal vocabulary of visual art, i.e., portraiture, which as such throughout the history has been used to depict the kings, royals and wealthy and doing so enshrine them into the pillars of history was utilized so to portrait the ordinary everyday people, the workers, the manual labor who are considered the lowest chain in a corporate world, and maybe doing so enshrine them into the pillars of history as well.

Eliana Miranda

Eliana Miranda’s Artist Statement: My work explores the environmental impact on human migration. Ecological disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, major flooding and so forth are some of the instances that can lead to vast migration. I use color and line as mechanisms for emphasizing environmental damage and the displacement it will inevitably cause for many.

Valerie Van Over

Valerie Van Over’s Artist Statement: With my current body of work, “Measured Encounters”, I create otherworldly landscape images that investigate the relationship between humans and nature, and perception and reality. Influenced by psychology and philosophy, I'm interested in the ways in which we translate experiences to memory, as well as the tension between nature and artificiality.

I draw upon my love of naturalism, traveling, and collecting memories.By using digital manipulation to intervene in the traditional landscape, I provide a glimpse into other worlds, question the nature of reality, and destabilize trust in the senses. I create several different versions of similar photographs to represent the fluidity and fallibility of memories. I build alternate universes to seduce the viewer with color and artificiality while simultaneously begging the question: how do we know what we see is real?

Kaitlin West

Madeline Ortega

Madeline Ortega’s Artist Statement: Through the incorporation of gathered organic materials with traditional sculptural media, my work focuses on the relationship between society and the environment and how my heritage influences my personal connection to the natural world. My work makes use of processes involving plants and other flora in order to produce objects that have been altered, often through methods of destroying the materials, from their original state, while preserving the memory of the initial substance. I oftentimes make work by repeating this process of destruction, creating multiples of a similar form, in order to reference the idea of generational time or ancestry. This reference to heritage stems from an exploration of natural materials or objects that are sentimental to me or have significance in Spanish or Native American cultures.

By altering these materials that are sentimental to me, my work represents properties of conflict, aspects of change, and my personal lineage. The intentional damage acts as a way to display life and death, the fragile nature of time, or the distortion of information. The remnants that are created through these processes become a metaphor to memory as they act as products of the original substance. This becomes a way to preserve a thought or memory, time, and place that exists due to this emotional connection to my family history, nostalgia, and interest in the natural world.

Cindy Nguyen

Cindy Nguyen’s Artist Statement: The artist displays her subjects immersed with solace and surrounded by the uncontrollable. She uses a motif of floral etching with douses of colour, and her subject suspended in a spotty euphoric imagery. She captures a delicate contrast of chaos and the reflection of innocence and her femininity.

Hallee Turner

Marianne Howard

Marianne Howard’s Artist Statement: My series, “We’re All Gorilla Girls Now” was prompted by reading Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel in the summer of 2019. That book combined with the #MeToo movement made me think of “The Guerilla Girls”, the infamous gang of unknown women artists who wear gorilla masks and protest art shows where there are no female or people of color artists represented.

As a result I began collecting vintage photographs of women as source material for my paintings. I use a combine my love of drawing, painting and photography in this series to create images that retain a deliberately unfinished and “partially stated” feel. This allows space for the viewer to fill in the blanks with their own experiences while questioning what “real information” can be gained by photographs in a digital age.

I am interested in the way women have been photographed and represented in family photos that have survived over time. Since I am working from black and white photos, my color palette utilizes strong present day colors that would not have been the norm when the original image was created. This serves as a bridge between time frames. The use of photo based images, color and gestural mark making move the viewer back and forth between the three traditions of drawing, painting and photography while exploring the role of women during the evolution of these mediums as vehicles for cultural storytelling.

Max Marshall

Max Marshall’s Artist Statement: At the beginning of quarantine I started taking walks as a way to get out of the house and have some time to myself. Quickly, I began to notice patterns forming in trash on the side of the street, yard ornamentation and intentional symbols, such as tagging, construction signs and stickers. The more I diversified my routes and farther I walked the more obvious the patterns became. As a way to document them, I began photographing everything that caught my eye. This resulted in an increasing ability to see when things were out of place or the pattern I had come to know was disrupted. These disruptions, often ephemeral and absurd, take on a totemic quality as they become strangely significant in a time of great fluctuation and change, acting as markers of contemporary life.

Kyung Hee Im

Kyung Hee Im’s Artist Statement: My artwork speaks about social and physical isolation and the many ways we maintain connections remotely. The isolation of the figurative elements in my work is as important as the connection and fragile threads that bind them together.

One of the main components of my works is threads which represent connecting things. When they break or cut, the threads can be re-connected by tying. The nature of fibers tend to stick together and be entangled, and I find similarities in human relationships. To think about these connections, my ritual has become wrapping thread around works. Through the repetition of circular movement, I am in a loop of spiraling and continuously repeating until the thread meets the edge. The spiral resembles the timeline of a tree’s growth which also represents how my time is embedded in my piece. Wrapping threads around pieces becomes my meditation.

Purujit Chatterjee’s Artist Statement: Mythology provides a lens through which to explore seemingly inexplicable cultural elements as contemporary extensions of timeless truths. These metaphorical characters and their stories, passed down for centuries, ground my emotional experience of and reflection on our present America, where the unprecedented is the new norm. The oil paintings in this series blend the styles of multiple artistic movements, namely High Renaissance and Surrealism, to connect the dream-like distortion and fragmentation of modernity to a former, more recognizable experience. Born from a contemporary society in which the expression of the unique is often othered and silenced, my vision intends to voice cultural anxiety and extract meaning from this disorienting and surreal reality, offering a meditative solace in our current post-truth mythos.

Thomas Flynn II

Kacey Slone

Kacey Slone’s Artist Statement: Recently, I have been exploring how place, time, and experience alter my personal identity. The loneliness and longing that come with the separation from the transition into growing older has become the focus of my current work. I have been researching and creating my own personal archive by taking and collecting photographs, writings and items from my day to day life and using them to record my personal change. Connecting this archive with other medias such as sculpture, video and bookmaking, I have made my intimate ideas available to a larger audience. I am interested in how my individual memory and change become available and relatable, blurring the lines of the real and remembered, my experience or someone else’s. Reconstructing my identity through what I am making allows myself to mourn a past existence while accepting where I might end up.

Juan Castillo

Juan Castillo’s Artist Statement: I like juxtaposing seemingly contrasting images/ideas. I think the resulting harmony and/or tension created in the product reveals a lot about the viewer's biases. Indeed, it is hard for images, especially ones of a political nature, to exist objectively in space, if at all possible. Most of the experience of viewing is theater (and I like a good show). Consequently, the work is set against the backdrop of the made-for-TV theatrics of Trumpian politics. The images are ultimately about how our biases determine our understanding of, and engagement with, any media.

Maria Haag

Maria Haag’s Artist Statement: In my work, I visualize existence as a journey, transcribing the actions of folding, layering, and lyrical line as a metaphor for the change that is enacted and the space that is traversed. The cyclical movement of society from utopia to dystopia and the fragility of individuals caught within that eternal cycle is what inspires my imagery.

For me, the journey begins with suffering, seen as a sort of storm - a wrenching out of the common through a series of events, active or passive, which create a puncture in what is in order to open space for what could be. Suffering always implies a change of state, thus a journey over a distance which could be physical or spiritual.

The violence of the hand crumpling something is especially interesting to me. A paper that is crumpled has changed greatly from what it was, paradoxically creating distance by bringing disparate elements close together. How does proximity affect space, and what does this mean in terms of the journey?

Jessi Jones

Jessi Jones’ Artist Statement: Guided by my study of photographic language, I cultivated a curious relationship with surveillance as I performed for the camera capturing movement translated through an absurdist methodology grounded in my yoga practice of over three years. I found it alluring how I would conduct myself into being subjected, and I began studying panopticonic ideas of ever-evolving mechanisms of surveillance in society (thank you, Foucault) - whether trickled down into identity, neurodiversity/metaphysical philosophies, or systemic structures of class, womanism, racism, sexuality, and gender. I am intrigued by panopticism and surveillance, because they are forms of societal and self imposed restrictions that can manifest in unhealthy behavioral patterns that I am actively working on shedding. Formations of surveillance directed my perspective to a broader, collective point of view: I am now interested in assessing the human experience as an individual vs. as a collective consciousness, and the myths of individuality that have been weaponized against us - primarily black society, as a means of control. The theories that helped drive research and examinations in my work are derived from the ideologies and studies of /Dr. Amos N. Wilson, a psychologist specializing in African diaspora relative to American social theories, and black society’s adaptations and resistance to standards of whiteness. Most of my work, however, is of internal sourceness - rooting from family trauma. In partnership with my identity and internalizations, I extend a spiritual philosophy into my focused practice of movement grounded in an absurdist, dynamic methodology by allowing the space and all that occupies it, whether physical or on another supposed plane of existence, to constitute equal authority, to reclaim itself, and to offer support upon this collective, conscious existence. Surviving physical, sexual, verbal, emotional child domestic abuse, severe poverty, homelessness, growing up in life threatening rural neighborhoods in an interracial family, navigating my identity as a queer, multiracial woman with a black parent has imposed deeply engraved psychological responses to feeling stuck, limited, and unsafe. I have had many behavioral tendencies that were motivated by fear and an everlasting verge of breaking. I realized that all these external entrapments developed into my own superficial delusions of limitations and self-detained aptness. I have a sacred care and curiosity for my own psychology, the psychology of blackness, whiteness, and indigenous dispositions, as this is my family lineage. I approach these nuances with an understanding that they carry much weight within me, but I do not need to take ownership over these energies, and the emotions that manifest as a result. Upon practicing healthy self-evaluation and self-parenting, I have found a deep love for open space, and all its occupants. This is a result of relying on myself, and never having a true sense, or connection to family. I mindfully practice cultivating a loving, boundary respecting relationship with everything in my immediate environment - as is - chaotic, peaceful, and everything in between. The unconventional movement I practice is a shedding of continual repression of multi-generational trauma and patterns of confinement. It is a confrontation, a gathering, a hearing, and a letting go of cycles. As I heal, I break these cycles. As I heal, I free my family and my ancestors that so deliberately move within me. The vigorous movement I endure not only gives visual rendition to my path of healing, and redefining my concept of family, ancestry, and history, but also spotlights the animalistic nature of the body - as well as the other realm-like forms of consciousness I may or may not occupy outside of my identity as a person. I am resolving the measure of how my people and I are seen as animals, how parts of my essence react to my human experiences, and how my body is a withstanding, yet fragile vessel in this life. These gestures ultimately challenge various confines subjected unto humans - particularly black, indigenous, women of color, and people of color assigned female at birth - and contribute to repressed elements of curiosity, odd behavior, and destruction in the space around me.

Enrique Nevarez

Enrique Nevarez’s Artist Statement: I use my own life experiences to start conversations about the female figure, whether direct and autobiographical or collaged through visual influences around me, narrative is built on my own contemplations on the roles of women in my circle and society at large.

Jas Mardis

Jas Mardis’ Artist Statement: I am a Writer and Fabric Artist with a lot of life between those two titles. In everything I am a Storyteller and try to keep folklore and family stories at the core of it all. I’m somewhere between Mixed Media and Assemblage and Folk Artist with a constant ear to the everyday materials of life reaching out to my creative bent.

Beronica Gonzales

Beronica Gonzales’ Artist Statement: My work centers around themes of self representation, focusing on moments, objects, and environments which elicit visceral personal connections and embodying them in a way which manifests my complicated relationships with what they depict. Part of this connection is communicated through material choice and the inherent implications of a given material. Throughout my body of work, I address general themes of comfort and discomfort in various ways and capacities, typically juxtaposing the two ideas within a single piece. Often, I utilize the material elements of my piece to contrast with the thematic or representational aspects, using objects of comfort as a facade to express themes that carry a deeper meaning. In doing so, I strive to create a unique sense of isolation, detachment, and uncertainty that is a reflection of my own personal experience.

Marquez Munoz

Marquez Munoz’s Artist Statement: Marquez Munoz's work is an attempt to manifest a joyous life through his particular circumstances. Believing that there is optimism in any situation, Munoz chooses to let his artwork reflect the simple joys of life as they relate to different marks of culture, religion, and tradition. It is the purpose of his artwork to bring about conversation and admiration for the natural movements of what is mundane or worldly, and to celebrate what is most primal.

Marquez Munoz was born in Dallas, Texas. He recently graduated, receiving his formal art training from the University of North Texas, (BFA 2020) and lives, and creates in Oak Cliff. Munoz is the youngest three; raised by a single mother. His circumstances as a child allowed him to grow in his understanding of how the power of the mind creates your world. His work is about how our vantage point of the world around us shapes our reality more than the reality its self.

Victoria Gonzales

Victoria Gonzales’ Artist Statement: In my work I utilize color to explore and meditate energy and space through paint. Color is an instrument to depict my direct observations and faded memories of physical and temporal space. Both memories and space blend, layer, and disappear. Through the act of painting, I am recreating the experience of being in the world as a participant and observer. Painting is a means to explore this idea of direct action and involuntary observation by manipulating the physicality of the paint and allowing room for the automatic physical function of mark making. The visibility of objects and a particular setting varies. Sometimes the accumulation of objects, people, landscape, architecture, or memories within a space are necessary and dominant, while other times the representation of these accumulations diminishes, and the automatism of mark making takes over. The abstraction of the tangible and intangible creates a space that expresses my feelings and recollections of the natural world.

Austin Lewis

Tiara Francois

Tiara Francois’ Artist Statement: I make paintings to capture the seemingly small moments that create our everyday life. A slight embrace between distance lovers, lonely tears shed at a party, these are things we may experience quietly but they are the gears that keep our story going. I am a young black girl and my focus is my personal life lens. With my paintings I recreate the memory of a feeling. I do this for myself and all else who has felt it.

Randal Robins

Randal Robins Artist Statement: My recent work is an exploration of the intersection between my childhood drawings, curiosities, fascinations and memories. Through a phenomenological lens, focusing on objects that I grew up with, that have fueled my imagination and stylistic curiosities, as they relate back to my childhood drawings and experiences. These objects operate as symbols, megaliths, and hieroglyphs with the understanding that the surface is a liminal space, for these configurations to interact, and make new meaning. I began this series as a way to explore my unique visual experiences, stemming from heightened visual sensations, many connected to growing up within very elaborate interiors and settings. Through my work, I explore themes of family history, Jewish decadence, inherited taste, fantasies, embellishment, the infinite realm, and anthropomorphized artifice. Furthermore, the almost Neoplatonic pursuit for a personal aesthetic of beauty is always paramount. Thus, the work has a sentimentality to it and an object-like quality that has been filtered through my truths. Ultimately, my recent work is the pursuit of trying to find the common threads between the objects that I have been obsessed with, motifs within my larger body of work, and overarching curiosities that have caused me to wonder.