Angela Fraleigh and Marc Swanson
Angela Fraleigh
by the time i tell you it will all be forgotten
Marc Swanson
Midnight Sun
On view through August 20, 2011
3901 Main St
Houston, TX 77002
T 713-526-7800
F 713-526-7803
info@inmangallery.com
Inman Gallery is delighted to welcome Angela Fraleigh and Marc Swanson to Houston for these concurrent solo exhibitions.
Angela Fraleigh: by the time i tell you it will all be forgotten presents a group of new works which examine how we construct narrative and how personal and collective stories are conceived and developed over time. Representational elements collide with juicy painterly abstraction to explore fantasy, sexuality and nostalgia for lost youth. The exhibition includes large scale canvasses as well as a new series of graphite drawings and intimate, fragile sculptures. The dramatic scale variations provide tonal contrast and emphasize the artist’s distortion of insignificant scraps of memory into heroic gestures. The works are installed as a running line around the main room of the gallery, emphasizing their collective narrative quality; the monumental canvasses serve as points of exclamation in the ongoing dialogue.
Marc Swanson: Midnight Sun includes a selection of the artist’s work from the past four years. Mining his own personal history and using carefully selected materials and images, Swanson creates quiet, iconic sculptures and drawings that explore how masculine identity is constructed in our contemporary society. The works selected for Midnight Sun share an expansive, enveloping character. Warm, incandescent light, thin drawn lines radiating outward from collaged eyes, mirrored Plexiglas and plastered bandages combine to create an installation rich with spiritual overtones. The expansive quality merges with a quiet nostalgia; the name of the exhibition is taken from the name of a gay bar in San Francisco. Swanson uses the name to acknowledge a bittersweet memory for a time when being gay meant being a member of a coded, secret society (gay bars are often titled with only oblique references to their clientele’s sexual orientation; Swanson’s current exhibitions at CAM Houston and Baldwin Gallery, Aspen are also named for gay bars). In so doing he allows that, on the eve of the historic vote making same sex marriage legal in New York, in all progress, something is lost.
The two exhibitions taken together underscore a contemporary practice where elements of personal history become staging grounds for wide-ranging exploration of the complex construction of “truth”, that ever elusive stable ground. Each artist looks longingly at the past while negotiating the swirling waters of a complex contemporary world.
About the artists:
Fraleigh’s exhibition is her third with the gallery.
Born, 1976 in Beaufort, SC, and raised in rural New York State, she graduated with an MFA from Yale University, then spent two years in Houston as a Core Artist in Residence at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2003–2005. Recent solo exhibitions include far as my eyes could see, University of the Arts Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2011). Her work has been included in group shows such as Learning by Doing: 25 Years of The Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Phantasmania at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. She currently lives and works in Allentown, PA, where she teaches at Moravian College.
Midnight Sun is concurrent with Marc Swanson: The Second Story at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Swanson (
born 1969, CT, raised in New Hampshire) graduated with an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, NY in 2004. He has exhibited around the country since his inclusion in the inaugural Greater New York at PS1 in 2005, including solo exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. Important group exhibitions have included The Spectacular of Vernacular, Walker Art Center (traveling to CAM Houston summer 2011), Between Spaces, MOMA/PS1, New York, among others.
He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
The above exhibitions will be on view through Saturday August 20, 2011.
Inman Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located in Houston Texas. Member ADAA.
Upcoming gallery exhibitions:
Opening Friday September 9th, 2011
Tommy Fitzpatrick
and in the south gallery
Nina Bovasso.