cycles of life - artist reception

Cycles of Life Artist Reception
Margaret Smithers-Crump & Tahila Mintz

Friday, June 12, 5:30 – 8:30 with a brief artist introduction and demonstration at 6:00.

Location: 2000 E 6th Street, Austin, TX 78702
Artist Reception:
On view: May 30 – July 10, 2015 

CAMIBAart is please to present “Cycles of Life”; a two-person exhibit featuring art by Houston based artist Margaret Smithers-Crump and Austin based artist Tahila Mintz.  

Margarete Smithers-Crump received her BFA in Painting from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In her current body of work, Margaret Smithers-Crump focuses on vulnerability, growth, powerlessness, and transformation within natural cycles of life. Her work addresses the passage of time, the maturation of beauty, and the inevitability of disintegration. Using Plexiglas as her primary material, she explores these concepts of strength and frailty and the dual relationship of death and renewal. The Plexiglas can function as a painted substrate or it can function as a substance that can be manipulated.

Austin based artists Tahila Mintz received her Masters of Fine Art in Photography from the University of Texas and her BA in Multicultural Communications from American University. She considers herself a visual story-teller, utilizing a variety of mediums to inquisitively explore and understand herself and how she exists in the world with the amalgamation of her background and life experiences. Each mode of production is aligned with a different series of work. These series overlap and combine to create one larger cohesive body of work that communicates topics of guardianship, land resources, empowerment of women, spirituality, circular time, and being a contemporary Native American.

In “Cycles of Life”, we focus on one series of Tahila Mintz’s work in which she makes abstract wet color photograms as a way to document Ceremony. Due to respect, Ceremony is not a place for documentation style photography, so she utilizes Chromogenic print materials, colored filters, and a variety of raw materials such as cedar, sage, corn, and tobacco, to express deeper investigations into Ceremony for herself and the community.