“My focus is on the role of representation in the construction of culture and meaning. Like an amateur historian, I attempt to grasp the larger arc of history by favoring mundane objects and by collecting stories. Historical reenactment is a model for my studio practice as reenactments are both a representation of an event and the event itself. I reference historical eras by representing distinct objects and events such as ballistic diagrams, Valley Forge, birch bark canoes, New World exploration and by representing diverse historical figures such as Pocahontas, Arthur Ashe, George Washington, and Marion Barry.”
At the heart of Heyd Fontenot’s artwork is a protest of dominant cultural perceptions concerning sexual responsiveness and the human machine. He recognizes that mass media exploitations and religious dogmas are designed to manipulate the public by provoking anxiety and encouraging shame. The concerted efforts of both corporations and churches effectively create a false sense of value and morality and Fontenot responds to these damaging effects with humor, empathy and “defiantly gleeful” images. Fontenot is represented by Conduit Gallery in Dallas and by Inman Gallery in Houston.
Harnden received his MFA from Calarts in 2019. As an artist and educator he works across a broad range of mediums including painting, drawing, sculpture, readymade objects, and video installation. Harnden’s work evinces specificity as a concept that offers both the potential for imagining individual autonomy as well as a foreclosure on such a possibility. Harnden has been actively exhibiting his own work and curating and organizing exhibitions with the artist run space previously known as Beefhaus. His pedagogical practice has included various programs associated with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, California Institute of the Arts, and the California State Summer School for the Arts.
Iva Kinnaird is an interdisciplinary artist and occasional pet-sitter. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a BFA in 2014 and now lives and bathes in the swamp water of Houston. She has exhibited around Texas including shows at Culture Hole, Dallas (2018), The Reading Room, Dallas (2018), and Matchbox Gallery at Rice University, Houston (2018). She is a recipient of a Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund grant from the Dallas Museum of Art, and has had residencies with Sojourn Montrose in Houston and with Co-Lab Projects in Austin. She recently lectured at the Fort Worth Modern with Shelby David Meier and is showing off her painting chops in the South edition of New American Paintings.
Pierre Krause is a post-lol multidisciplinary artist, exile writer, curator, filmmaker and full-time freak living an anonymous life in the United States. Their work has been exhibited locally as well as in New York, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Los Angeles, Mexico and Japan. If you need them they are most likely hiding in a bathroom instead of answering their emails.
Travis LaMothe is an artist and designer who received his M.F.A. from Southern Methodist University, and has completed a fellowship at Juvenal Reis Studios in New York. His work draws attention to the display of language, specifically how symbols and words may adorn and announce their intentions before they begin to tell.
Peter Ligon received a BFA from the University of North Texas and an MFA from the Meadows School of the Arts at SMU. He works in a range of 2D media including, oil, water color, ink and ink wash, monotype, and intaglio printmaking. His sources are predominately observational. His operative motives include the implementation of accidental or predetermined strategies in the interpretation of color and spatial relationships of the landscape and built environment.
Michael Mazurek is an artist, curator and teacher. He received an MFA in Intermedia from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2011 and a BFA in Art History from Southern Methodist University. His work has been exhibited in Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen, Malmö, Querétaro, Brooklyn, Chicago, and Dallas. He co-founded and co-directs the artist run non-profit The Dallas Biennial and is part of the collaborative Dick Higgins, which describes itself as artist, artwork and gallery.
Shelby David Meier’s practice is a comedic pursuit of objects and installations centered around a philosophy of the mundane and inherent absurdities that result from living in a “modernized civilization.”
Lucia Simek is an artist, curator and writer. Her work has been shown at Fridman Gallery (New York), Cindy Rucker Gallery (New York), The Reading Room (Dallas), Skaftfell Art Center (Iceland), the Dallas Contemporary, and the Dallas Museum of Art, among others. Recent curatorial projects include to Further Seasons at the Reading Room, the French Room Salon at the Adolphus Hotel, and Boom Town at the Dallas Museum of Art. She has written about art for Flash Art, D, Glasstire, semi.gloss, and others. Lucia also works at the Nasher Sculpture Center where she oversees all media relations, as well as curates a series of international lectures and programs about contemporary sculpture called Nasher Prize Dialogues, featuring artists, critics and curators from around the world. She lives in Dallas with her three children.
Dallas based artist Corri Spencer straddles the line between design, art and communication. Spencer has an affectation for the pictorial, tending to lend more of his works' strengths in the symbols contained therein. Sharp, gestural mark-making and inviting shapes play gracefully with figures lifted from pop culture denoted with witty phrases.
Keer Tanchak is a Canadian artist whose work consists of hand cut paintings on aluminum. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003 and a BFA with distinction from Concordia University in Montreal in 2000. Tanchak won the Artist Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council in 2009 and the Brucebo residency in Visby, Sweden in 2003. She has exhibited extensively in Canada and the United States as well as in Puerto Rico, London, Switzerland, Dubai, and Mexico. She was included in the Texas Biennial 2017 and recently had a solo exhibition “Soft Orbit” at the Dallas Contemporary.