A Becoming
Jesus TreviñO + Kelsey Baker
November 1 - December 3, 2021
Jesus TreviñO
ABout the Artist
Jesus Treviño (b. 1995, Brownsville, Texas) received a BA in Studio Art from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in 2018, and is currently an MFA candidate in Painting/Drawing from the University of Texas at Austin. He had his first solo exhibition at the Presa House Gallery, San Antonio (2019) and has been included in group exhibitions at the Field Projects Gallery, New York, New York (2021); Carlsbad Museum and Art Center, Carlsbad, New Mexico (2021); Rockport Center for the Arts, Rockport, Texas (2021); K Space Contemporary, Corpus Christi, Texas (2020); Brownsville Museum of Fine Arts (2019), where he was awarded Best in Show; and recently he curated a group exhibition titled, "Between Two Worlds" at the Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas (2020).
“The themes I’m interested in are rooted from my experience being raised on the U.S./ Mexican borderlands and thinking of that space as neither here nor there, as transitional. It’s a region that is passed through, sometimes obliviously, to get to where we want to be, and bears witness to familial histories, histories of injustice and displacement.
I collect images found in family photo albums, personal photos and online articles about border immigration and use them to make paintings that hold memory in the same way land can reveal traces of what was and still remains. I often use disruption and concealment as devices to allow a slow discovery of those stories held within the work, partially buried beneath the surface, and resisting erasure.
Mirroring my relationship to those themes, border culture and identity, the landscapes I make are an amalgamation of places I call home–continuously shifting, dematerializing, and reassembling. Figures are caught in-between, coming into being, emerging, and receding into atmospheric paintings that seem to be fading away or left out in the sun.”
Kelsey Baker
ABout the Artist
Kelsey Baker (b. 1993, Dallas, Texas), who received a BA from Southwestern University in 2016 and an MFA from Washington State University in 2020, is an artist based in Austin, Texas and a member of Contracommon. She uses intermedia practices--incorporating painting, video, and installation--to invent surreal landscapes and evoke liminal spaces. Her work presents the familiar as strange using distortions in placement and scale, allowing the viewer access to realms or states of being that might be otherwise inaccessible. Viewers are invited to experience the in-between spaces. Her work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions nationally, such as the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art; New Texas Talent XXIV at Craighead Green Gallery, Dallas, TX; The People’s Gallery, Austin, TX; Terrain Gallery, Spokane, WA; Gspot Gallery, Houston, TX; and Off the Cost, Portland, OR.
“This body of work arises from a collaborative effort between queer women, expressing the allure and trepidation of the Unknown and the power of gaze, the act of perceiving and of being perceived, as at once both guiding and disorienting. Quietly confrontational, the work looks back at the audience, reversing the expected relationship between subject and viewer, and suggests they look at themselves.
The symbols realized within each work are objects of reflection, they are multivocal, their potential associations mutable and individual. Drawing parallels to Greek mythology—everlasting font of continually recycled symbolism—and fae folklore—the lush, undefined, ambiguous natural world, deliberately removed from society—these works present vestiges of the Liminal. In liminal spaces, norms are suspended, time becomes malleable, room is allowed for the exploration of that thought to be impossible or out of step with mainstream cultural understanding.
There is transformative power in the tension of existing between—states of being, archetypal roles, destinations—in navigating dichotomies, and that troublesome space where they overlap, where seemingly at odds concepts coexist.
The pleasure in discomfort, the thrill in terror, the delight in the forbidden, the revelation of desire in repulsion.”
