Shows

Encompassing both gallery spaces of Conduit Gallery, Indeterminate Conversations 1990 – 2006 offers a look at four bodies of Annette Lawrence’s work and the transitional pieces between them. The works in the show present a rare gathering of early large-scale pieces with bold patterning, systems of repetition, and multiple parts. Looking at these works now is akin to seeing them come of age. They are full of life and well suited for the disruptive moment we are currently experiencing.

The works in Indeterminate Conversations mirror the process of Annette Lawrence’s studio practice. The exhibition charts Lawrence’s work beginning with the monumental work on paper, Wallpaper, which Lawrence created for her MFA Thesis exhibition in 1990 and presents various bodies of works through 2006. While Wallpaper is a play on space and form through alternating views of shadows cast by a vase of flowers, it laid the foundation for a close look at text as image. After a few years of using words, symbols, and numbers in myriad ways Lawrence made The Ancestors and the Womb (1995), a series of ten works on panel that use quilt patterns as signifiers for the relationship between text and code. A silhouette portrait of Lawrence’s grandmother, who was a quilter, is joined with a tight spiral of dates marking the activity of the artist’s womb in menstrual cycles. The title comes from a line in Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust “the ancestors and the womb, they are the same”. Part of this series was exhibited in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. Five key pieces from the series will be included in this exhibition.

Annette Lawrence created a lovely, quiet and ephemeral installation that compliments her current Modern Billings project with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth www.themodern.org/modern-billings. For Blind Alley, Annette created a linear drawing of one of the photographed stacks of her open journals from the month of August, as seen now on billboards throughout Fort Worth.

Responding to the space and materials of Blind Alley, Annette painted a line that moves and breaks across the edges of the splayed open and stacked journals on the back wall of the gallery in a lush indigo. She then both complicates and unites the space by duplicating the same drawing in white vinyl on the galleries glass front. The drawings appear, disappear, meld and separate from different viewing distances and positions. Close examination of the painted version reveals the process of scaling with faint evidence of a graphite grid and perfect imperfections of the hand.

I’ve always been intrigued by the sheer size of billboards. As a child the larger-than-life scale of NY subway advertisements, and the overwhelming bombardment of Times Square billboards made a lasting impression. The billboards along Texas highways play a strong horizontal counterpoint to the verticality of my earliest visual influences.

My inclination in choosing images for Modern Billings was to go for something quiet in order to stand out in the noise. The images of open journals offer an understated moment for busy travelers. Something for those with sensibilities not often rewarded by billboards. Stacks of open journals at the scale of billboards hold a larger-than-life sized hint at introspection, a paradox.

Modern Billings is a collaboration between the Education Department at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Clear Channel Outdoor, and local artists in the DFW area. Jesse Morgan Barnett and Tiffany Wolf Smith, Assistant Curators of Education, invite artists to use billboards donated by Clear Channel in communities along the periphery of downtown Fort Worth.

For a Dreamer of Houses, an imaginative and immersive exhibition, explores the significance of the spaces we inhabit and how they represent ourselves, our values, and our desires. Discover over fifty works from the DMA’s collection in a variety of media that demonstrate the evocative power of domestic objects and structures. The featured artists use forms derived from dwellings or furnishings to investigate ideas including belonging, alienation, fantasy, gender, and the body.

The exhibition takes inspiration from philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s influential 1958 book The Poetics of Space, and its organization corresponds to five chapters that consider the psychological importance of homes. Major recent acquisitions—including works by Alex Da Corte, Olivia Erlanger, EJ Hill, Francisco Moreno, Pipilotti Rist, and Do Ho Suh—are highlighted in each section.

https://virtual.dma.org/dreamer-of-houses/

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Texas has been well known for its representational and figurative art—think Julian Onderdonk bluebonnets—since at least the nineteenth century. But by the mid-twentieth, parallel with innovations outside the region, several artists began a rigorous exploration of abstraction and non-objectivity—and women artists made significant contributions to the development of abstraction in America.

Texas Women: A New History of Abstract Art explores this untold story. The first major survey to focus on Texas women working primarily in the mode of abstraction, the exhibition will include ninety-five works in painting, sculpture, installation, and works on paper by seventeen artists from different generations—among them Dorothy Antoinette “Toni” LaSelle (1901-2002), Dorothy Hood (1919-2000), Susie Rosmarin (born 1950), Terrell James (born 1955), Margo Sawyer (born 1958), Sara Cardona (born 1971, Mexico City), and Liz Trosper (born 1983).

Visit the San Antonio Museum of Art website.

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Annette Lawrence may be inching towards paint, but her work remains firmly in the realm of drawing. Known for her permutations on calendars, Lawrence continues the theme in Exception: Works on Linen and Paper, her second solo exhibition at Conduit Gallery.

Lawrence considers all of her work to be, in and of, raw material. Her drawings are quantitative accounts of personal events and actions translated into data. In this series, the artist is mining her phone records and translating lengths of conversation into rectangular, circular, and linear, grids. Large chunks of filled-in areas represent hours of deep discussion, needle-thin slivers are momentary ‘hellos’ and check-ins. We can wonder what happened in these conversations, or we can simply imagine who we called (or didn’t call) that day. They can feel astrological in their comparisons of empirical data about dates and times of events.

Lawrence turns the intimate details of her personal life into anonymized, universal data as a way to allow the audience into the conversation. What remains are timestamps and metadata. Her visual language is analog touching the edges of the digital realm. Whether the image is graphed, cut, or coiled, 6 months of phone calls underlie the language and structure of the works in the show.

Visit the Conduit Gallery website

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Annette Lawrence, Amy Elkins, Ariel Rene Jackson, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Mimi Onuoha, Paul Anthony Smith and Sadie Barnette

Curated by Elisa Durrette

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Conduit Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of work by Annette Lawrence: Standard Time. With an ongoing interest in the implications of the written word as object and idea, Lawrence’s works in Standard Time include a series of 12 graphite drawings and a large scale installation mined from meticulous digitization of the artist’s own journals which span 25 years. The exhibition will be the first for Lawrence at Conduit Gallery.

In Standard Time, Annette Lawrence has created a monthly visual representation of 25 years of journal writing into 12 graphite drawings on paper and a multi-layered suspended transparent photo print installation. The presence or absence of Lawrence’s journal entries per day, month, and year are codified and transcribed into darkened or empty cells within circular grids. The graphite drawings reveal the mark of Lawrence’s hand while maintaining the privacy of the written words. Lawrence creates a system that offers a cumulative view of day-to-day actions in two and three dimensions. The large circular grids

The Denton Black Film Festival and The UNT on the Square are pleased to announce an exhibition by Denton artist Annette Lawrence titled Around Again, January 7 – January 30, 2016. The exhibition is presented by the Institute for the Advancement of the Arts and the Denton Black Film Festival (January 28 – 31, 2016). A reception will be held on Thursday January 28, 2016, 6-8:30 pm, with remarks at 7:00pm.

Around Again features pieces from the formative years of Lawrence’s art practice. The subjects of text as image, textile patterns as text, and the use of everyday experience as material for art making were just emerging in the work. Around Again is a look at the roots of Lawrence’s current work that codifies personal text and information in a system that offers a cumulative view of day-to-day actions over time.

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