July 12 – September 06, 2014

Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce the gallery's 2014 summer exhibition, a group show including Norkio Ambe, Colby Bird, Ben Durham, Richard Forster, Francesca Gabbiani, Carl Hammoud, Jim Hodges, Roy McMakin, and Frank Selby.

Colby Bird made his newest House Lamps—roughly hewn, precariously balanced sculptures of organic materials paired with lightbulbs—mostly from objects found within walking distance of his mother’s Austin home. The bricks, stained 2x4s, chunks of cement, alabaster fruit, driftwood, brightly painted bamboo roots, and small, shapely logs combine and transform into zoomorphic forms or pseudo-archeological artifacts. Bird’s House Lamps are cheeky, sometimes kitschy, and although their roots are in minimalist sculpture they are obviously handmade. The unrestrained earnestness and hard work Bird puts into these sculptures—sawing, sanding, drilling, balancing, wiring—make up for his lack of technical savvy. Despite appearances, Bird’s treatment is anything but haphazard; struggling in the studio is his way of dealing with the career expectations prescribed by his middle-class suburban upbringing. Flâneurism is something Bird simultaneously chases and runs away from. His House Lamps reconcile these contradictory impulses. Although delicate, they are warm and comforting.

The rigors of artistic practice are an important factor in Richard Forster’s work, too. Every day, Forster goes for a walk on the beach and spends hours and hours in his studio hunched over his drawing table. The three photogravures in this exhibition were made from pictures Forster took while standing on a pier looking down at the incoming tide. He made the three photographs at random intervals over the course of two minutes. The way Forster stretches two minutes of clock time into weeks of drawing/printmaking/art-making time recalls Einsteinian ideas of relativity: time can be measured by a second hand, by successive waves breaking on a shore, and by the millimeters of a drawing Forster completes in a day as he works down the page like an extraordinarily sensitive typewriter. Monotony and endless repetition can be strikingly beautiful.

Expectation (and its subversion), on the other hand, is a thread that connects Roy McMakin’s practice to some of the other artists in the show. He uses the language of traditional American furniture and domestic curios but tweaks form and function to reflect his understanding of domesticity and companionship. Untitled (Vases about Language and Redemption), a collaboration with Heath Ceramics, is a group of seven classic vessels (in Heath’s distinctive colors) that McMakin redesigned to render unusable. Where pitchers, kettles, and amphoras have abbreviated handles, vases and jugs have holes in the wrong places. McMakin’s work continuously renegotiates the fluid boundaries between art and design and the spectrum of utility that lies between the two disciplines. Equally relevant to Untitled, however, are the trappings and disappointments of interpersonal relationships. At once vulnerable and assertive, McMakin’s vases are unabashed, if not confused, about what they are and are not.

The 2014 Lora Reynolds Gallery summer exhibition pulls together a broad range of sculpture, drawing, and painting from a group of artists with divergent interests and surprising parallels.