[click pics for full image]

Flex-Space at Pump Project’s Satellite Studios presents

New & Recent Works by Rachelle Díaz and Gerardo Arellano
Reception: 8pm-10pm, Friday, October 7 – one weekend only show!

Open Gallery Hours: 12-5pm, Saturday, October 8
1109 Shady Ln., Austin, Texas 78721

Two friends, one long overdue show. I have about an equal amount of wonderful art buddies I’ve met both through random interwebbing and slightly tipsy chattin’ at shows. But the internet folks stand out more so because they’ve put out the extra effort to find people in their locality via good ol’ fashioned sober Google/craigslist/Flickr searches. I first received an email from Gerardo 6-7 years ago, saying something to the effect of:

Hey, I’m a painter. I like your work. I’m new in Austin and looking to meet other painters.

Kind of out of the blue, non? Honestly, I wasn’t sure if it was legit, but I liked what I saw on his website. Months passed… I can’t remember when I actually met Gerardo in person, but I believe it was when I invited him to participate in Vision Riot 2, one of my solo forays into curating (credit to Ricardo Acevedo for the concept). Besides, who in the art world can recall the exact moment you met such-and-such person? It all blurs together.

Much like our work as artists blurs together: painting, photography, graphic design, hair/makeup/fashion styling, community outreach. Aesthetically, our work is both influenced by strong design skills, a love of bright colors, a sense of humor, and a certain studiousness about the world — visually, socially, spiritually — and what it all might mean, or not mean at all. Lighthearted and sincere.

Gerardo will be showing paintings from 2006 to present and a site-specific mural. I’ll have a new series of drawings up and will be debuting a self-published/bound zine, “Hippy Fit,” a personal photographic essay reconciling art, fashion and fitness.

To that effect, we plan to have a good time AND donate 20% of art sales to Casa Marinella, a local organization dedicated to assisting immigrant families. Although this is a one-weekend show, it’s not just gonna be another “hey-look-at-me-I’m-an-artist” East Austin kegger. We both genuinely care about helping people in our community, so friends and guests can not only pick up some great art at an affordable price, but also make a donation to those in need.

What is not awesome about that? Our good friend DJ Rocoroyo will be laying down the soundtrack and we’ll have all the usual refreshments at the reception on Friday night (special thanks to J. Haley and Pump Project Satellite), and possibly leftovers during open gallery hours on Saturday. Come celebrate with us.

Acrylic on tear-off gift wrapping paper from the book 18th-Century English Floral Patterns
Painted over the course of winter 2009 – spring 2010

Exploring another facet of screens, color science, art/creativity, what the human eye sees/absorbs/interprets/reproduces in this set. Specifically the idea of art as decoration, like wallpaper, as a receding into the backdrop of living spaces, not really serving an intellectual/spiritual/emotional purpose except to compliment the furnishings. Yet why do we decorate? We still feel these trappings provide a touchstone for self-identification, an object we see that expresses how we feel inside, a thing we connect with emotionally. In the Colorbars set, the connection we have to decoration has been broken down into math, a means for machines to reproduce our visible spectrum through a glass screen. I painted these in a faux naïve style not to much to show the rudimentary function of machine, but to demonstrate the human impulse to reproduce things visually AND to take in images others have reproduced, whether it’s taking snapshots on vacation or watching television. However, I am also wondering if these things are imposed on us by western society. Do we follow these threads because we are at leisure to do so? Is it because of our educational canon, that one be “well-rounded”? Or is it truly some sort of instinct? Do children enjoy coloring in coloring books, would they do it naturally, or do they do it because it’s an activity directed to them by authority? What if we weren’t attached to images?

Ink, acrylic, and colored pencil on paper
April 2010

Many times I feel a need to take apart someone else’s art to figure out how it works (but not put it back together), just to satisfy my curiosity. These cloth studies were inspired by Pattie Lee Becker’s Ropes exhibit I saw at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art earlier this month. Her drawings brought me back several years ago to the memory of this dude who lived two apartments down from an ex-bf. His 300 sq. ft. efficiency was covered top to bottom in massive drawings and paintings of loops, knots and intertwined strings. The paintings weren’t really that great, I don’t think he’d ever shown any of his work, he just seemed like a normal guy who was obsessed with these shapes. This obsession perplexes me. Cloth studies aren’t anything new, but besides just a drawing exercise, I was also trying to get inside the mind of someone captivated by producing the same object over and over, seemingly indifferent to the evocative repercussions of repetition. While my work has themes, I feel like I’m trying to show different sides of the same thing in various ways. I suppose I tinker because in the future I may need to draw upon the lessons learned, kinesthetically figured out. For me, there’s really no better way to learn than to attempt and apply it to myself. I’m also fascinated by The Other: obsessive and compulsive artists who must be constantly active, people for whom drawing is an end in itself. The drawing I’ve done lately is a means to something else.

Pencil, ink, acrylic, collage
March 2010

My scanner really sucks at picking up pencil drawings! This quality is terrible, but a scanner’s all I have at the moment as my digital camera broke a couple of months ago.

Pencil, ink, acrylic
January-February 2010

Lately I’ve been doodling a lot, trying to regain a sense of design. It’s funny, because although I’m a full-time graphic designer (and production artist and customer service rep and project manager and copywriter and…), I feel I’ve lost a sense of visual design, of creating and arranging elements within a space. Or maybe I’m just now seeing the differences between the two, because I don’t have any creative blockage when it comes to arranging information (text and images), but in composing an image that’s not an accident, or taken from life, I’m at a loss.

Staring at Screens painting #2 (original photo)
Acrylic on canvas
worked on June-November 2009

An issue of layered solids

Although I have a BA in Art with a concentration in painting, I was never taught basic techniques how to wield acrylics or oils. Yet, at as artist, I’m highly skeptical of “tips/tricks/helpful hints.” in art. I was taught Technique — Hannon excersies in the form of life drawing for three years: one in high school, two in college. That was helpful. It validated the experiments I’d done, discoveries I’d made on my own around ages 13-15: there are no lines in the world, only variations in shadow.

In 7th grade, a piano teacher showed me how to “improvise”: certain cadences and arpeggios that could create a new piece or transition an existing song in performing with an ensemble (vocalist, instrumental). It killed, to this day, the composing I’d done on my own since I was 7. I felt I learnt more from music theory, which was pure math and pure ear, dissecting intervals, the algebra of counting, without any connection, any “tips”. “Ear” was what I felt naturally. While I didn’t always get all the math equations of the annual TMTA theory tests correct (but close enough to get a 95-100% score every year for 10 years), I aced the listening part of the exam every year. It was like the final round on Wheel of Fortune where you’d get R S T L N  E on the board: depending on grade level, there’d be 2-5 questions with different notes filled in. The moderator would play the whole melody and you’d have to figure out the rest; to use the Wheel of Fortune example by grade 9, you’d be lucky to get a couple of R’s and one N, I think the last one I took in 12th grade had the key signature and the first two notes out of 10 measures. It was also like “So You Want to Be A Millionaire?” in the sense that in the early years, you could ask the moderator to play over certain measures as often as you needed, by the upper levels, they could only play it through, no special requests, maybe three or four times. No colors or flashing lights, just melody, just intervals, just the distance between two things.

I also entered a new school in 7th grade, and enrolling in a new school means new competitions, chosen or not. A classmate, J., was a pianist and a good student, like myself. Yet we passively hated each other. She was a memorizer of literature, algebra, science, Chopin. I felt the knowledge I sought, and while I had an desire for it, it was a desire for utility, for creativity, not for… well, I still don’t understand people who learn based on memory to this day, over 15 years later.

What I was sold as “improvisation”, as creativity, in 7th grade connected empirical knowledge and interpreted emotion, irrevocably, instead of figuring out the connection on my own, as an artist. So, sure, I could probably take a painting class and be “taught”, but I’m so paranoid of the creativity being killed for life. Figuring out on my own how to paint layers that are also solid colors is a puzzle. With music, as with art, I have to use mathematic and scientific processes to work out and to feel, to creep my way to the solutions of the problems for myself

$5 gets you art, drinks, food, music
Starts at 9pm
901 N. 13th Ave. Tucson