Markets 101
When: Tuesday, September 26, 6:30-8 pm
Where: Dougherty Arts Center, 1110 Barton Springs Rd
Join Future Front Texas and The Front Market for a candid, hands-on conversation on the world of art markets and craft fairs. Together, we’ll look at best practices for picking shows and popping up—from booth set-up to marketing tips to planning templates. Whether you’re market-curious, just getting started, or you’re a long-time vendor, this session will be designed for all to share, learn and swap community notes.
Presented by Jane Claire Hervey — Future Front Texas. Registration is encouraged but not required. Register at the Eventbrite.
Opening Reception – dARKages: New Work by Leon Alesi and John Mulvany
When: Friday, September 29, 7-10 pm
Where: ICOSA Collective, 916 Springdale Rd
In “dARKagEs,” Leon Alesi and John Mulvany aim to unearth, uncover and breathe new life into images and artifacts that until relatively recently may have seemed invisible, hidden and unknowable. The artists’ use of the neologism “darkages” as the title of the exhibition might seem to suggest that we are currently living through a new dark age- a time of ignorance, fear and oppression with a stagnation of advancement in science and culture. Our uncertainty about accelerated technological advancements in AI and our collective anxiety about the climate and the future hums in the background as context.
Leon Alesi’s photographs, collages, assemblages and found objects embody a sophisticated folk-art sensibility suggestive of an imagined past that echoes into the present. As much an exercise of recording history as it is an experiment of alchemy. Alesi’s Ancestors series – remnants of cedar piers unearthed from the foundations of partially demolished houses in his neighborhood live again as sculptures that stand as witnesses to images depicting their own fall into obscurity and abandonment. For his assemblages, foraged detritus communes with the incorporeal and the previously unseen transforms into an Anthropocene Age avatar.
John Mulvany’s paintings originate in extensive photographic research from Victorian-era natural history museums and West Texas taxidermy shops. Mulvany creates digital collages that embed taxidermy animals into contemporary landscape dioramas which are then reimagined through AI image generation technology. The animals in the paintings are approximations of life, evoking a sense of simultaneous presence and absence, permanence and transience, the real and the unreal.
Throughout the exhibition Alesi and Mulvany find common threads with which to collaborate, utilizing key elements of both artists’ themes and processes. The installation of a natural history museum-style diorama in the window of the gallery opens and completes the narrative.
Opening Reception – Human Constructs
When: Saturday, October 7, 3-6 pm
Where: Austin Fine Art Gallery, 2805 Bee Caves Rd STE 430
Austin Fine Art Gallery is excited to announce the Exhibit Opening of Human Constructs to be held on Saturday, October 7 from 3-6 pm.
The theme of Human Constructs visually explores and invites discussion into the frontier of Human Intelligence vs. Artificial Intelligence. Artists showing represent all media, techniques, sizes, and styles and each have the goal of discussing the impact AI will have on our Future in general, but more specifically- original art. Will texture and traditional mediums prevail in our preferences or will image alone be enough. What will become important art to the future generations? Will they live in a VR world cut off from the tactile? Will art as we know it survive this “tool” we collectively created? Will humanity survive?
Meet the artists and other art collectors and art lovers. Enjoy this first opportunity to view in person and select art from this exhibit for your home, office, and gifts to friends and family. Austin Fine Art Gallery will provide refreshments during the exhibit opening. Exhibition Dates: October 7 – November 16.
Artist Reception – Neal Flynn: Access
When: Wednesday, October 11, 2023, 7-9 pm
Where: Dougherty Arts Center, 1110 Barton Springs Rd
Neal Flynn’s exhibition of mostly new assemblage, collage, and site-specific intervention explores ideas relating to nostalgia, loss, violence, ownership, and modern Western culture. Flynn’s artistic practice involves collecting, journaling, photographing, researching, and responding to the rapid changes in our society, and is informed by his experience as a young, white, cisgender male, gay artist, arts professional, and learner/educator. The materials and imagery he works with are sourced from a restless, Americentric culture of advancement and forgetting. Exhibition Dates: September 30 – November 25.