The Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin is pleased to announce its fall exhibition program.
Nikita Gale: EASY LISTENING
Artist-in-Residence
September 20–December 6
Acoustic foam, felt, audio cable, and music stands are materials Los Angeles-based artist Nikita Gale often employs to visually articulate the mechanics of sound and to point to the intertwined histories of politics and “the crowd.” Gale’s large, multi-part installations are also informed by the relationship between histories of protest and the urban landscape and, more recently, new theories about mass communication, social relationships, and listening. Gale’s work features familiar forms, such as crowd control barricades, that signify control and power; however, the artist reconfigures these items in new orientations which grant them new currency and meaning. EASY LISTENING considers how the new or unfamiliar can quickly become normalized and mainstream, shedding potency or radicality along the way.
Kenneth Tam: Details
September 20–December 6
The passage from childhood to adulthood is marked by key events that are at once mundane and formative—summer camp, the prom, high school graduation, to name a few. Through video and sculpture, Kenneth Tam considers how these milestones form the backdrop against which the socialization of men is staged. Tam’s work questions masculinity, gendered forms of identity formation, and male intimacy. Directing the participants in his videos to respond to both him and one another, Tam conceives of scenarios that nod to group activities meant to foster connection and intimacy. Tam’s videos are playful and funny while opening onto significant and weighty questions. How is gender learned? How does popular culture market and sell a specific form of masculinity?
Maria Antelman: Mechanisms of Affection
September 20–December 6
Merging the digital and analog through photomontage, sound installation, sculpture, and animation, New York-based artist Maria Antelman probes the intersections between the body, photography, computers, and cyberspace. Drawing on the aesthetics of early IBM advertising, which marketed machines and women as objects of desire, Antelman explores the space between the real and its representation in the digital age. In her work, machines observe, adapt, and respond to the conditions of human nature, reflecting those conditions back onto their users. Looking at digital space as an extension of ourselves, Mechanisms of Affection examines the cultural impulse to anthropomorphize technology, automate sensation, simulate connection, and impersonate vision.
Center Space Project exhibitions
Saakred: Sin Nombre, Sin Cuerpo
September 20–October 18
Saakred’s work is interdisciplinary, raw, and deeply personal. Sin Nombre, Sin Cuerpo incorporates a range of media, documenting and articulating a lexicon for learning to live as a trans Latino.
Material Vice
November 1–December 6
Through explorations in sculpture, photography, and video, artists Mia Carrera, Lindsay Davis, and Rowan Summers examine the tension between preservation and decay.
More information about fall 2019 exhibitions and associated programming can be found on our website.
The exhibitions and programs at the Visual Arts Center are made possible, in part, by the Curtis R. and Carol O. Kayem Endowment for the Visual Arts Center and the VAC Founding Donors. Additional funding for this season is provided by the Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation, Suzanne Deal Booth, the Center for Mexican American Studies, the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, the Center for the Study of Modernism, the Department of Radio-Television-Film, the Department of Theater and Dance and the Gender and Sexuality Center, Batch Craft Beer & Kolaches, Richard’s Rainwater, Treaty Oak Distilling, and 31 individual donors who contributed to a HornRaiser campaign in July 2019.
