“A Question / Some Mild Anxiety / The Results”
Another Russell Etchen Project

Featuring: Tim Kerr, Johanna Jackson, Andy Coolquitt, Tamar Ettun, Chris Johanson, Dana Dart-McLean

November 11th – December 2nd, 2016

Co-Lab Projects’ DEMO GALLERY
721 Congress, Austin, TX 78701
Open Hours: Thursday-Saturday 12-6pm

Opening Reception: Friday, November 11th, 7-11pm

New chapters are important. Every six weeks, a haircut. A medium chapter break. Every week, the laundry. A small chapter break. Every day, for sanity’s sake, there are the dishes, making the bed, coffee, breakfast. Tiny chapter breaks. Leaving Texas behind to move out West. A very big chapter break. It has been nearly two years, though, and self-imposed obligations call out. And so, a return to Texas. A return to Austin.

By the time this exhibition opens, we will know who the next president is. And, no matter how it turns out, we will absolutely be entering a new chapter. Voters from every generation maintain that this is the oddest election year they’ve ever seen. Definitely the lewdest, the cruelest. The one that really pulls back the curtain on the true state of our country. Look around. Humans are moving into a new time. We’ve crossed over. And it is painful. No one knows what they are doing. Not even the people who insist that they do.

Congratulations, by the way, on making it this far. Do you remember what it was supposed to feel like? Conceiving two-thousand-sixteen was something for daydreaming teenagers sitting in the back row of the classroom, doodling in the margins of unfinished homework, fidgeting, listening to loud bands on crummy home-dubbed cassettes waiting for one bell or another to ring. Figuring out how you could possibly make it to this then-imaginary world that surely could and would hold unknown pleasure, chaos, and the steep uphill climb toward something resembling middle age.

There is hope that you can still find, in that indiscernible web you might refer to as “your network”, people willing to take risks and meander towards the unknown. To really take it day by day. To collaborate on something like music, art, publishing, or printing. “Dying” mediums eking out an existence that lives outside the forms we’ve allowed into our lives, albeit truly grating against our true selves.

A teenage punk wonders, “Will this ethos, a feeling only a handful hold onto, still determine decisions down the line?” The answer, much to your (usually financial) detriment, is “yes, yes, yes.” So, here we are. Still doing things for reasons other than making money. For reasons that elude most proper capitalists. For reasons that keep many people alive. If for nothing else but that sentimental “community” concept. The one that tends falls apart under the microscope.

It has taken a collaborative community that not one of us could have predetermined. A job leads you to a person, and then another person, and another, until, finally, many years later an exhibition rears its head from the pond and makes for land. And here we are. Land. An exhibition proposed over half a decade ago by Tim Kerr, and only now coming together in a form very different than imagined.

For two weeks, the six artists involved will start at a point that looks like the dot at the end of a question mark. From there, they will work on their own and together to produce an exhibition inside a massive one-hundred-year-old building in downtown Austin, three blocks from the capital of Texas where, you imagine, a lot of really intense energy is currently going down. Where everyone is preparing themselves for the next chapter. For the next era. For the next “future.” – Russell Etchen

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Artist BIOS:

A former resident of both Portland, OR and San Francisco, CA, Johanna Jackson currently lives in Los Angeles, CA. Jackson has exhibited her work widely throughout the United States and abroad since 1999. Her works are part of the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Henry Art Gallery and the Portland Art Museum.

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Chris Johanson

multi media artist that tries to fill up time positively, not interested in one medium unless that medium is what some call living. Up for selfish expression as well as collaborative living. Often spends time considering food as the most beautiful sculpture, using color texture and taste as important to an important ritual of creating and sharing food. Seeks out bent life and glitching poetry in people and places. Looks for places where things can grow and believes that we make this or that happen collectively.

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Dana Dart-McLean

I am an artist, art therapist (MFTi), and art teacher interested in

what paintings tell us
about mapping
what is seen.

I care for the quantum leap–do you? Let’s talk.

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Andy Coolquitt is perhaps most widely known for a house, a performance/studio/domestic space that began as his master’s thesis project at the University of Texas at Austin in 1994, and continues to the present day. He has recently completed a four month residency/exhibition at Artpace in San Antonio, TX, titled Studio Art……………Period Room. In 2014, Coolquitt was artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, which culminated with an exhibition, Multi-Marfa Room, at the Locker Plant in Marfa. Recent solo exhibitions include somebody place at Lisa Cooley, in New York, This Much at Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna, Austria, and no I didn’t go to any museums here I hate museums museums are just stores that charge you to come in there are lots of free museums here but they have names like real stores at Maryam Nassir Zadeh in New York. In 2013, Coolquitt was an artist-in-residence at 21er Haus in Vienna, Austria, and opened an exhibition there that July. In Fall 2012, he presented a major solo exhibition titled attainable excellence at AMOA-Arthouse in Austin, Texas. This exhibition was organized by the Blaffer Museum in Houston, and opened there in May 2013. A full-color monograph published by the University of Texas Press accompanied the exhibition and features contributions from Dan Fox, Matthew Higgs, Jan Tumlir, and Rachel Hooper.

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Tamar Ettun (b.1982, Jerusalem) is a Brooklyn-based sculptor and performance artist, she is the founding director of The Moving Company. Ettun received her MFA from Yale University in 2010 where she was awarded the Alice English Kimball Fellowship. She studied at the Cooper Union in 2007, while earning her BFA from Bezalel Academy.

Her numerous exhibitions and performances include: Uppsala Museum of Art, Bryant Park, Sculpture Center, Diana Lowenstein Gallery, Fridman Gallery, The Knockdown Center, Zurcher Gallery, The Watermill Center, Madison Square Park, e-flux, Transformer, The Queens Museum, Braverman Gallery, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Herzelia Museum, The Jewish Museum, Andrea Meislin Gallery, PERFORMA 13, PERFORMA 11, PERFORMA 09.

Ettun has been honored by several organizations including Iaspis, Franklin Furnace, The Pollock Krasner, Fountainhead Residency, The Watermill Center, MacDowell Fellowship, Abron’s Art Center, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Art Production Fund, Socrates Sculpture Park, Artis, RECESS, and Triangle.

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If self-expression has no boundaries, why do people keep putting labels on it?

For those of you with scorecards, Tim Kerr’s first art award was winning a fire prevention poster contest in elementary school. Like any self-respecting artistic outcast in Texas, he moved to Austin after high school graduation where he has lived ever since with his wife Beth. He earned a degree in painting and photography at the University of Texas at Austin and studied the latter with Garry Winogrand. Tim was awarded a Ford Foundation Grant while at UT. He won a slot two years in a row for the new songwriter’s contest at the Kerrville Folk Festival during this time as well.

After college graduation, Tim became involved musically and artistically with the early stages of the DIY punk/hardcore/self-expression movement. The idea that anyone could and should participate in self-expression burst every door and window inside of him wide open. He was a key member of bands that have made recordings for such labels as Touch & Go,