Sign Language: Juan Angel Chavez and Michael Genovese July 17 - September 30, 2008 University of Texas at San Antonio Downtown Art Gallery 501 West Durango Street San Antonio, TX 78207
July 18 - September 5, 2008 Unit B (Gallery) 500 Stieren Street San Antonio, TX 78210
Statement Unit B (Gallery) and the UTSA Downtown Art Gallery are please to present Sign Language featuring new works by Chicago-based artists Juan Angel Chavez and Michael Genovese. The artists’ works will be exhibited at both galleries during Contemporary Art Month.
Juan Angel Chavez and Michael Genovese are non-degree holding artists and old friends that started making their art on the streets of Chicago doing “non-permission” collaborative works—creating a graffiti-like Sign Language. Forming their ideas from what they know on the streets—albeit signs, found materials, street vendors—the personalities and pasts these objects and people hold are the true stimulus for their works. While each have their own individual artistic style and perspective; they both generate their inspiration by experiencing what’s in front of them—the everyday and it’s history.
Juan Angel Chavez is a multi-media artist whose work is political, not in the sense that he’s pushing a statement, but by the act of obtaining and reconstructing the things he finds. He goes to places most people generally avoid to collect his art supplies—post-industrial and pre-gentrification areas of cities where deterioration grows—gathering objects with personality and history that describe our cultural makeup. In the studio, these objects are assembled with other found histories to form languages of the has and has been that comment on the now. These works are realized in large-scale sculptures, tableaux’s, collages, installations, and public works that observe the natural and the manmade.
Michael Genovese is a sign painter and he believes that traditional sign painting is a living language, much like graffiti, and that hand-painted signs are a world apart from the printed signs that so often clutter city streets. As a service, he likes to give back. He’ll paint signs on local street vendors food carts in exchange for a hot dog or a fruit cup—a politically conscious and kind gesture. In his recent body of works these old school sign-making traditions have come to fruition in large hand-painted festive signs; and in aluminum engravings that allow the viewers to leave behind some street-like history by engraving words and/or drawings directly on the surface of the aluminum panel—“legal” graffiti—providing the here and now language to future viewers in future places.
Min-Tse Chen: Story June 26 - August 16, 2008 Joan Grona Gallery San Antonio, TX
Neither once upon a time nor on-going now, the story suspends in another space-time continuum. No beginning, no end. –Min-Tse Chen
Min-Tse Chen is a visual storyteller. Much like a story, her drawings are presented with bold, yet delicate strokes that contain magical scenes and recognizable characters—sometimes mysterious, sarcastic, and funny, but always arresting. Chen creates these impromptu gestures by projecting the concerns of her immediate thoughts—both emotional and psychological—spontaneously to paper. Attributing her inspiration to popular culture, she provides the scenes and characters that we can all relate to, but leaves the viewer to realize and get lost in their stories. click an image below for full slideshow
____________________________________________________________________________________________ Goin' Mobile: Adam Blumberg, Min-Tse Chen, Mark Hogensen, Michele Monseau, Tao Rey, Mark Schatz, Ethel Shipton April 3 - June 28, 2008
Blue Star Contemporary Art Center
San Antonio, TX
November 16 - December 15, 2007
Polvo
Chicago, IL
April 14 - May 5, 2008
Commerce Street Artists Warehouse
Houston, TX
Statement Out in the woods or in the city
It's all the same to me when I'm driving free
The world's my home
When I'm mobile
Going Mobile, The Who
Inspired by The Who song of the same name Goin’ Mobile is an on-the-road inspired traveling exhibition that investigates the literal sense of travel—point A to B, beginning to end, start to finish, back and forth, one way and dead ends—Goin’ Mobile ventures in every direction to guide the viewer on a trip to those familiar and unknown places along our traveled and explored routes. Paying special attention to the driver’s seat view of landscapes in our daily and worldly travels, Goin’ Moblie is a memoir to places we expect to know.
Animal Logic and the Lack Thereof: Jackie Arnette, Damon Bishop, Min-Tse Chen, Keiler Sensenbrenner December 2 - 25, 2005 Three Walls San Antonio, TX Animal Logic and the Lack Thereof explores the relationships that animals have with humans, and humans have with animals—the environments we could exist in, the lives we could lead, and the love that we could unconditionally share. Each of the artist’s work investigates these ideas and brings to fruition the notion of a world co-existing with nature. Voiced politically, environmentally, socially, and unbelievably, these works provide both a serious and hilarious perception of these relationships.
