9/14/13 – 10/26/13

Lilian Garcia-Roig: Sight-Specific

David Graeve: Social Memory #3, Conversations with Sophie, Target MAC Drawing

Tony Orrico: Waning

An opening reception with the artists will be held Saturday, September 14 from 6:00 – 8:00pm.

Please join us for an informal talk with Lilian Garcia-Roig starting at 5:30pm and a performance by Tony Orrico at 6:30pm.

Exhibitions will be on view through October 26.

Large Gallery
Lilian Garcia-Roig
Sight-Specific

The MAC believes that there is a rich art tradition in Texas that deserves to be nurtured and encouraged. Nearly twenty years of programming that consistently exhibits both native Texas artists and artists who are transplanted to Texas reflects this mission and desire to understand the region where we choose to live. This fall, The MAC is pleased to feature Southern Methodist Universities’ Meadows School of the Arts graduate and thirty year Texas resident, Lilian Garcia-Roig. Her exhibition, Sight-Specific continues The MAC’s tradition of exhibiting artists that developed their talent in Texas.

Sight-Specific is a selection of recent large-scale works and groupings that depict the dense forest landscapes from Northern Florida and Georgia as well as the Cascades Mountains in Washington State. Many works in the exhibition are from two on-going series: Cumulative Nature and Hyperbolic Nature. Garcia-Roig paints outdoors, a method art historically known as en plein air, a French expression for “in the open air”. However, unlike the 19^th Century Impressionist painters who sought to capture a single moment, Garcia-Roig paints over the course of an entire day placing an important emphasis on the performative aspects of on-site painting. The changing of light and passing of time is imperative to documenting a first hand and extended experience of nature. Both series in Sight-Specific represent the first groups of large-scale paintings produced in this manner (rather than over multiple half-day sessions as she had done before) continuing to increase the productive tension Garcia-Roig seeks between the materiality of paint and the optics of representation.

Garcia-Roig considers her current reinvestigations of the traditional plein air methodology as an act of defiance in a virtualized world that often lacks unmediated or meaningful experiences with nature. In Garcia-Roig’s paintings there is an immediate sense of the temporal and sublime, that nature is intoxicatingly near and yet unreachable.

Lilian Garcia-Roig was born in Havana, Cuba, moving to Texas at age five. She grew up in Houston and was a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin until 2000 when she moved to Tallahassee where she currently lives and is a Professor at Florida State University. Garcia-Roig earned her BFA from Southern Methodist University in 1988 and her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania,  Philadelphia, PA in 1990. She has since exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums. She has held fellowships at the MacDowell Colony in 2006 and 2008 as well as the Vermont Studio Center in 1994 and at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1991. Garcia-Roig also received an individual artist fellowship from the state of Florida in 2008, the highly prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting in 2006, an NEA Mid-America Arts Alliance Award in Painting in 1994 and a Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art in 1992. In October of this year, she will be a Visiting Artist at Southern Methodist University. Lilian Garcia-Roig has been represented in Dallas by Valley House Gallery and Sculpture Garden since 1991.

Art Talk Saturday, October 12 at 2:00pm

 

Square Gallery
David Graeve
Social memory #3, Conversation with Sophie, Target MAC drawing

The MAC is pleased to announce Social memory #3, Conversation with Sophie, Target MAC drawing, an exhibition featuring the work of David Graeve. The site-specific installation in the Square Gallery will include a two part experience. Graeve will present a time-based action art performance within a one mile radius of The MAC to gather source material for the installation. Documentation of the performance in the form of video and stills will be projected through a screen composed of varying scale balloons ranging from three to eight feet in diameter. The balloons serve as a filter to mediate and further abstract the projected images, while physically enveloping the viewer. Other video source material will be derived from collaboration with the French artist Sophie Berard’s interpretation of Duke Ellington’s “blues in orbit” through movement and physical interaction. Interest in community activism inspires Graeve’s approach. The performative aspect of the piece seeks to elucidate how individuals shape a collective community, in this case the Dallas community.

Often relating to environmental concerns, human rights initiatives and social activism, Graeve’s large scale balloon installations have gained wide spread attention at venues across the country. Sites include the Aspen Ideas Festival, Dallas Art Fair and Discovery Green. A visual departure from the balloon installations, Grave’s large-scale cast aluminum and auto paint sculpture along with a site-specific fused glass block sculpture can be viewed locally at the Texas Sculpture Garden.

David Graeve was born in St. Joseph, Minnesota. He grew up in a household of social activism -his father worked for the Democratic Party, and his mother was involved in first wave feminism. Graeve obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts, with a focus on sculpture, in 1991 from the University of Minnesota. In 2011, Graeve obtained his Masters of Fine Arts, emphasis on sculpture, from the University of Houston.

Grave cofounded the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, where he worked as the Public Relations Manager, Curator and Installation Manager for nine years between 1991 and 2000. Since then he has been heavily involved in major art projects in Houston where he co-founded ISSE (International Society of Social Engineers) at the University of Houston and is an organizer and participating member of Culture Crawl Collective (CCC) a radical group of experimental artists exploring nonconventional forms of expression.

Grave is a recipient of The City of Minneapolis Award of Merit Q Award, The Curators Award of Merritt at Galveston Art Center, and the Davis-Ryan Award. David Graeve is represented by Deborah Colton Gallery in Houston, Texas.

Performances: will take place off site of The MAC. Live streaming of Graeve’s location will be available on Facebook and Twitter

24concentriccellstructures-24 hour walkabout September 7th at 6am – September 8th at 6am

Open Seat at The Pew– 12 hour performance September 13th from 9am-9pm

Art Talk:
Saturday, October 5 at 2:00pm

 

New Works Space
Tony Orrico
Waning 

The MAC Professionals + Artists Collective (The MAC PAC) is a membership group of The MAC, made up of Contemporary Art enthusiasts with a shared interest in engaging with the North Texas art community, and all it has to offer. We invite you to join us for the inaugural MAC PAC Sponsored Exhibition; Tony Orrico’s Waning, in the New Works Space. The MAC PAC Sponsored Exhibition grants its members the opportunity to be active in programming exhibitions in the New Works Space gallery. This crucial component to the identity of The MAC PAC encourages engagement in contemporary art and its presentation. Tony Orrico is a visual artist, performer, and choreographer, currently based in Chicago. The artist was a presenter at Poptech 2011: The World Rebalancing. He collaborated with choreographer John Jasperse on the visual Design for ‘Canyon’, presented at BAM’s Next Wave Festival (2011). He was also one of a select group of artists to re-perform the work of Marina Abramovic during her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Tony Orrico will perform live for more than 30 hours over the course of four days in response to the New Works Space and Orrico’s most recent body of work, CARBON.  The first performance, waning, will take place for an intimate VIP audience for the duration of 45 minutes. Subsequent performances over the course of the following three days will continue with the same technique of “decaying the action” that is used in waning while investigating new ideas directly onto the wall. The last performance, the final stage of a new work in progress entitled Exhausted Objects, will take place during the exhibition’s opening reception. These performances will accumulate and overlap in the space, leaving behind original drawings on the wall that may be viewed through the duration of the exhibition. Scheduled screenings of video from Orrico’s CARBON will be on view during the course of the exhibition as well.

Orrico will conduct a two-day workshop to further engage the DFW artist and collector communities. The workshop, Being to Begin investigates the origins of creative energy by using symmetry, voice, stillness and other potential points of entry.  Participants may be asked to take part in durations of stillness, spontaneous action, movement and vocalization exercises, journaling through drawing, compositional studies, and improvised performance. Space is limited.

The fee is $20 for students, $80 for adults. Public registration starts on Wednesday, August 21 at 11:00am. Please call The MAC 214-953-1212 during normal operating hours to reserve your spot in The Workshop.

The exhibition Waning and the workshop engage in the relevance of performance art in our cultural landscape by involving DFW artists, curators, and educators to take part in the production of time-based works.

In support of Tony Orrico’s exhibition Waning, The MAC PAC has launched an underwriting campaign that will provide much needed support to cover artist travel expenses, an honorarium, artist accommodation, integral two-day workshop, exhibition documentation, and installation expenses. Donors will receive an invitation to the VIP reception and will have priority enrollment in the Workshop. If you are interested in supporting this exhibition, please contact LauraLee Brott at lbrott@the-mac.org or visit The MAC website for details. MAC PAC membership information can be found here.

Thank you to our current exhibition sponsors: Anonymous, Sue Benner, Susan Bishop-Red Rose of Texas Art, Chris Bramel, Linda Clary, Judy Desanders, Susan and Warren Ernst, Catherine Feehan, Sally Francis, Barbara Franklin, Dr. and Mrs. Gerald Friedman, Philip Goodman, Goss-Michael Foundation, Lara and Stephen Harrison, Lance Jones, Kickstarter Campaign Backers, Patricia Lawrence, Douglas D. Martin and Michael Perez, Jo Mattison, Ann McIntyre, Ellen Moore, Performance SW, Tegwin and David Pulley, Dorothy Rickey, Jordan Roth, Gail and Richard Sachson, Judith Seay, Vanny Sim, Judy Steiner, Marjorie Stephens, John Stevenson, Sara West, Fran White Shurtleff

Kickstarter Campaign Backers: Courtney Brown, Leslie Connally, Matty Davis, Elizabeth, Jeff Frazier, Jessica Iannuzzi Garcia, Danielle Georgiou, Kevin John Gilhooly, Kevin John Gilhooly, Laura Green, Kathy Robinson-Hays, Bonny Leibowitz, Elaine Martzen, Kevin McCullough, Charles Dee Mitchell, Jeanne Neal, Alexis O’Connell, William John Ortiz, Andrew Overby, Randi, John Reoch, Louise Rosenfield, Alison Starr, Robin Ann Walker, Pete Yunyongying

Important Dates for Waning

VIP RECEPTION: Tuesday, September 10

PUBLIC PERFORMANCE DATES: Wednesday, September 11 – Friday, September 13. Each day from 11:00am-9:00pm.

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, September 14, 6:00pm – 8:00pm. Performance will start at 6:30pm. CARBON screenings will take place before and after the performance.

WORKSHOP: Saturday and Sunday, September 28 – 29, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm

ART TALK: Saturday, September 28, 5:30 – 6:30pm

Additional CARBON screening dates and times are TBD. Please refer to The MAC website to keep up to date.