As part of San Antonio's Contemporary Art Month, Blue Star Contemporary (BSC) is presenting a trio of exhibits by past participants in its three-month residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany.
The exhibitions, which opened March 4, will run through May 29.
BSC selects four artists annually to live and work in Berlin, where they have access to workshops and exhibition opportunities. The artists whose work is now on display include Jimmy James Canales, Megan Harrison and Justin Korver, each of whom took part in the program's 2018-2019 cycle. The work in each exhibit reflects how the artists have fared since their return from Berlin and how each have coped with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Megan Harrison: 'From Your Brow Rise Leaf and Lyre'
Harrison's latest body of work is an immersive installation of large-scale creations depicting what appears to be the inside of a womb. Found within these massive paintings and ink-stained surfaces are intimate family portraits and small figurative sculptures centered around the concept of fertility. However, a jaggedness or roughness imbues the endless abstract shapes that fill the walls.
A tiny portrait of a baby, umbilical cord still intact, is affixed to the center back wall. It becomes hard to breathe with the realization that this work is a meditation on love and loss and all the emotions a mother must endure upon giving birth to a stillborn child. A book of poetry lies open elsewhere in the gallery, displaying the words, "To the one who is knocking and knocking, will you still be there when the door opens?"
"As my world contracted through grief and pandemic isolation, I created works for private contemplation, to be opened or held in quiet places," Harrison writes in an artist statement. "The making of these personal altar pieces and cherished objects can be interpreted as spiritual acts, expressions of healing and love..."
Jimmy James Canales: 'The Line Layer'
Canales' exhibition transforms a gallery space into a fantastical industrial panorama filled with mechanical figures, each centered within groupings of geometric shapes, patterns and material resembling an obstacle course.
"These assemblages are transformed into archetypal obstacles including the mountain, the bridge, the tower, the throne, the web, stepping stones and finally, the grotto," Canales explains in his artist statement.
Canales cites boardgames and videogames as sources of inspiration, but also considers "the life altering experience of travel, parenthood, loss and the pandemic."
In B'okay, Canales' robotic figure is covered in a skin of artificial flowers and leaves, a merging of geometric and organic shapes, emblemizing the creations that occur in nature and those made by human hands. Although frozen in time, Canales' figures are made for movement and seemingly represent a yearning to escape their contained spaces.
Justin Korver: 'Buck'
While many of the works in Korver's exhibit take on a comical or campy tone, it doesn't shy away from addressing serious subject matter. "Buck" is an examination and rejection of traditional gender roles, focusing on the relationship between the hunter and prey animal, in this case, the deer.
"My interest in hunting as a subject is due to my dad who is an active hunter," Korver writes in an artist statement. "He was my first model of traditional masculinity and what men were supposed to be, a mold I did not fit."
When walking through the exhibition, it's difficult not to think of the 1942 animated Disney film, Bambi, which features a feminized, white-tailed fawn with batting eyelashes that many forget is male.
In the sculpture Tenderest Meat, Korver transforms an open carcass, its innards spilling, into a landscape featuring leaping fawns.
Free, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Thursday-Sunday, on view through May 29, Blue Star Contemporary, 116 Blue Star, (210) 227-6960, bluestarcontemporary.org.
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