The UT Visual Arts Center opens its Fall 2016 season with works by a dynamic lineup of emerging and established artists from around the world exploring a variety of themes.

The Vaulted Gallery will feature the work of Mexico City-based artist Victor Pérez-Rul in the multi-part exhibition Placeholder, which runs from Sept. 23 through Dec. 10. Pérez-Rul’s has collaborated with UT students in art, physics, engineering, architecture and design to create an immersive installation that recycles solar and kinetic energy, bringing into harmony the movements of humans, sun and wind. Maquettes of Perez-Rul’s related work—solar-powered pods that emit sound and light at night—will be exhibited on the outdoor plaza of Austin’s Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC). Both projects are curated by Leslie Moody Castro (M.A., Art Education, 2010).

MOVING MOUNTAINS zeroes in on Peru, a country best known in the United States for its impressive Incan ruins, majestic Andean glaciers and the Amazon. Against this popular imaginary of unspoiled nature, Lima artists Edi Hirose and Nancy La Rosa examine how extractive industries—stone-quarrying and mining, specifically—accomplish a proverbially miraculous feat: they literally move mountains. Through works in photography, drawing, printmaking, and video installation—never previously exhibited in the United States—Hirose and La Rosa expose the dramatic transformations of the Peruvian landscape by natural resource extraction. 

In Everyday Ogres, Tania Mouraud presents a new work that expands her efforts to the Gulf Coast. Commissioned by the Visual Arts Center, Mouraud traveled to Texas in June 2016 to film oil refineries along the Houston Ship Channel: sites that represent the dangerous monumentality and surreal everydayness surrounding energy use and production in the United States. Filmed at night, the installation captures a haunting vision of metal cities filled with toxic smoke and threatening power.

Lastly, in addition to the perennial laboratory space FIELDWORK, the VAC is presenting Research Image/Search Asteroid highlights the collaboration between Cory Fitzgerald and Studio Art graduate student Bucky Miller that explores the absurd and surreal in photographic documentation during the artists’ travels together. Fitzgerald and Miller play with photography’s peculiar relationship to time, memory and history. 

DJ set by Chulita Vinyl Club and refreshments provided by Austin Beer Garden Brewing Co and Cold Ones Pops.