There’s a slightly ominous sense of mystery to the trio of solo exhibitions that recently opened at Contemporary at Blue Star.
While a symbolic piece of firewood conjures the Log Lady of Twin Peaks fame in Jason Willome’s “When a Mind Wanders,” a dimly lit room with curious acoustics sets the stage for Nadia Botello’s “Theophany” and nearly total darkness evokes an isolation tank in Fabiola Menchelli’s “ombré.”
Taken out of context, all three shows could be misunderstood as conceptual pursuits devoid of narrative. But digging into the themes and processes behind each reveals a wealth of highly personal, even poignant meaning.
During a walkthrough of the exhibitions, Contemporary at Blue Star Executive Director Mary Heathcott explained that the surface-level darkness was purely coincidental but that connections to nature and the senses emerged as intentional themes for the institution’s programming this year.
“We thought it would be good to ground people,” Heathcott said, citing the tumultuous political climate. “That’s something that [Curator and Exhibitions Director] Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray shepherds and develops … so that there’s a conversation between the exhibitions.”
Allowing artists to experiment with the overall design of the gallery spaces is also a theme — one that Heathcott hopes contributes to the experiences of repeat visitors.
“It’s something we’re always thinking about,” she said. “We want the best presentation for the artwork, but we’re also thinking about visitors returning and having the space reveal itself anew.”
Jason Willome
Raised in the rural town of Mico, Texas, Willome works between painting, drawing and sculpture while fostering local talent as a professor in the Art and Art History Department at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
“My recent works depict disaster and wreckage — otherworldly, flooded or snow-filled landscapes with only traces of human presence — created by pours of house paint, ridiculous faux painting techniques and other surface artifacts,” he explains in a statement about his latest projects.
Created in 2024 as part of the Contemporary’s Berlin Residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Willome’s “When a Mind Wanders” arose from a reflective moment in 2022 when he was helping his father Tom Willome — a longtime San Antonio artist and educator who’s battling Parkinson’s disease — move out of the home he built.
Determined to preserve a keepsake from his parents’ home, Willome grabbed a single log from a pile of firewood. Presented in the gallery as a family heirloom or artifact, the log translates into drawings, paintings and sculpture in the gallery, including an entire woodpile cast from expanding foam.
“Taking the log from the cord there was done in a kind of panic of realizing I wouldn’t be back there again,” Willome told the Current. “I made the mold after reflecting on why I had taken it. Selecting the [expanding] foam was intuitive. Initially I planned to try casting it in different materials to see what emerged but the foam fit perfectly from the start. The color was bone-like and suggested emptiness or something insubstantial, and I thought the forms that escaped the mold were reminiscent of smoke — they revealed how the casts were made, and that they were the result of filling a void.”
Below the synthetic woodpile, three hexagonal cyanotypes of images created by the James Webb Space Telescope are attached to the wall in an unexpected way that exemplifies the creative use of space encouraged at the Contemporary.
“This is [curator McGilvray] proposing how to present these on the wall … so that the viewer is encouraged to view them from all angles,” Heathcott said.
Addressing loss, consciousness and transformation, “When a Mind Wanders” also evidences Willome’s keen interest in astronomy, not to mention his fascination with trepanation — an ancient surgical procedure that involves boring a hole in the human skull.
These seemingly disparate topics converge in First Light (Antenna), which invites viewers to peer through a hole in a sculpture of trepanned skull to gaze at a seemingly endless image of the cosmos.
Nadia Botello
“We have wanted to work with Nadia Botello for a while,” Heathcott said as we entered the dim confines of “Theophany,” the title of which references a classical Greek term for the “appearance of a deity.” A ninth-generation Texan known primarily as a sound artist and composer, Botello feels a strong connection to waterways and presents the San Antonio River as her exhibition’s protagonist.
“What might a river have to say for itself if we knew how to listen?” Botello ponders in her artist statement.
In response to that line of inquiry, Botello gave the San Antonio River a chance to “speak” for itself in her 16mm film What the River Says. Opting for an organic, analog process, Botello submerged unexposed film stock directly into the San Antonio River, inviting it to use its own natural elements to create a narrative from abstract imagery.
“The river is sort of the author, the filmmaker, the cinematographer,” Heathcott said of the piece, which was selected by famed director Richard Linklater as a finalist for this year’s Water, Texas Film Festival.
Swaying gently on the opposite wall, Botello’s Phainein comprises three silk banners she printed with images of waterway microplastics and then attached to the wall with fly fishing lures. Bookending the space, the sculptural water tanks Bodies of Water I and II are outfitted with amplifiers that play long-form compositions created from San Antonio River hydrophone recordings. Like Willome’s First Light (Antenna), Botello’s sound pieces invite interaction.
“This sound sculpture uses your own body as a resonating chamber,” Botello explains in the exhibition notes. “By placing your body in contact with the sculpture, you enter into a dialogue with the river’s sounds, historical data and human breath.” As Heathcott pointed out, the experimental recordings draw an interesting parallel with the muffled acoustics associated with Botello’s former role as a competitive synchronized swimmer.
Fabiola Menchelli
In 2024, Heathcott and a group from Contemporary at Blue Star traveled to Mexico City to attend art fairs and visit with artists including Fabiola Menchelli. At that time, the Mexico City-based artist was showing richly colored photograms mounted on stainless steel.
The jewel-like reds, pinks and purples from that body of work are nowhere to be found in “ombré,” a suite of nine dark photograms presented in an even darker room. Experimenting with a technique that flourished in the hands of Man Ray during the Surrealist and Dada movements, Menchelli takes photo paper into an analog darkroom and strategically exposes it to light, albeit without a negative.
“Because I work with color photographic paper, I must work in complete darkness — with no safelight,” Menchelli told the Current. “So I navigate and create the pieces entirely by touch, folding the paper by hand. … For exposing the paper, I use an enlarger, much like in conventional darkroom practices, but instead of projecting images from negatives, I introduce color by using gels to modify the light.”
Not unlike walking into a photographic darkroom, entering Menchelli’s “ombré” is disorienting and requires slowing down to allow one’s eyes to adjust to the intense darkness of the space. Conjuring the meditative mystery of floating in a sensory deprivation chamber, the space opens up ever so slightly to reveal the geometric folds and layered details of Menchelli’s “camera-less” photographs.
“‘Ombré challenges notions that the qualities and experiences of darkness and emptiness are solely ominous or belonging to negative analogies,” curator McGilvray said in her statement about the exhibition. “[Menchelli] is interested in the paradox of darkness being nothingness and everything, and the potential of the unknown that resides there.”
‘Theophany,’ ‘ombré’ and ‘When a Mind Wanders’
Free, noon-5 p.m. Wednesday, noon-8 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday-Sunday through Oct. 5, Contemporary at Blue Star, 116 Blue Star, (210) 227-6960, contemporarysa.org.
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This article appears in Aug 7-20, 2025.