aT THE HOUR

FoRREST ADERHOLT

ABout the Artist

Forrest Aderholt is an Austin based painter and textile artist. Born in 1993 in Dallas, Texas he obtained a BFA from Southwestern University in 2016. Aderholt’s work often incorporates textiles and painting together. His mix of personal narrative with mythology often questions how individuals are situated in larger political structures such as religion and capitalism. 

“My work starts with a story, or a specific memory of an experience or an image, oftentimes originating in my upbringing in conservative Christian culture. When I begin to ruminate and work through the memory I begin to realize this event in my young life was part of how I understood the world. From personal memory, my work then drifts into biblical allegory, myth, pop culture, capitalism, and politics. Blending specific memories with larger themes of cultural and political issues exposes how I, and everyone else, are indoctrinated into massive power structures, such as religion, white supremacy, and imperialism, in private spaces. Being raised in such systems informs our relationship with the planet we live on and the other living beings on it. In order to ask the question, ‘how have we all become trapped in this web of domination and destruction, created and led by the rich and powerful, that has led us to the brink of totally consuming our planet and every living thing on it, including ourselves?’

I start with my own personal experiences and begin to connect the dots.”

ABout the Artist

Elena (El) Gonzalez was born in 1995 and raised in Seguin, Texas. They graduated with a BFA from Southwestern University in 2018. They have participated in Currents Undergraduate Residency at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Summer Studio Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. They have exhibited at Sarofim School of Fine Arts in Georgetown, Tx, VCU School of the Arts in Richmond, VA, Yes Ma”am Projects in Denver, CO, and Friend of a Friend in Denver, CO. Gonzalez lives and works as a carpenter in Denver, CO.

“This work highlights the unexpected properties of the materials found in the home and in everyday life. I utilize their roles within my memory in formal explorations between a material thought process and the range of human experience in order to discover a new space that grows between them. I investigate the ways that we evolve through trauma and its sociopolitical, environmental, personal, and spiritual influences. My ideology is based in the writings of Chicana theorist and activist, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and her concept of the mestiza consciousness. Anzaldúa defines this variously as “a consciousness of duality,” a reviving of the connection between the conscious and subconscious minds, and a focus on the spiritual potency of our experiences. Anzaldúa employs this method of thought in order to combat rigid, habitual modes of social tradition that perpetuate systems of violence on both a personal and global scale. 

I apply Anzaldúa’s theory to domestic spaces and the human body, drawing upon formative experiences from my upbringing to draw out the nuances of domesticity and patterns of habit that simultaneously shape oneself and society. I appropriate objects and materials found in the home, manipulating and combining them in ways that evoke memory, and inevitably feelings of history, trauma, and nostalgia that may be embedded within them.

How do oppositions inform and complement each other? How do we work through our own internal conflicts and open ourselves to different realms of possibilities with which we can liberate ourselves and rethink the framework of society? We are beings of complex and fluid consciousness, a summation of colorful experience existing within the same body; trauma, joy, destruction and creation. By understanding the personal as political and confronting ingrained social systems on these levels, one may enact both inner and global social change.”