Mystic Toolkit, the latest exhibition at Artpace San Antonio guest curated by Anaïs Castro, features UT alumni Rachael Starbuck (MFA in Studio Art, 2017) and Shanie Tomassini (MFA in Studio Art, 2019). On view from January 6 – April 24, 2022, this exhibition is informed by the resurgence of alternative spiritualities in the late 2010s.
Stewart Hall Art Gallery in Pointe-Claire, Quebec presented the first iteration of Castro's exhibition, and "two years later, in a radically altered global context that has left no one untested or unshaken, Mystic Toolkit picks up the conversation again." Alongside Starbuck and Tomassini, Artpace's Mystic Toolkit brings together Alicia Adamerovich, Vanessa Brown, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Erika DeFreitas, and Julian Yi-Zhong Hou. Despite their idiosyncratic visual vocabulary and practice, the artists included in the exhibition all share the recognition for the mystical forces that affect our daily lives and pay tribute to the daily rituals and repeated gestures that keep us wholesome.
Mystic Toolkit comes on the heels of recent projects for both Starbuck and Tomassini. In the summer of 2021, the artist collective of which Starbuck is a founding member, Material Girls, presented a site-responsive, outdoor installation at Sweet Pass Sculpture Park in Dallas titled Desire Paths. This February, audiences in Austin can look forward to work from Starbuck within her curatorial collective Partial Shade in collaboration with project space All the Sudden for a two-day ceramic pit fire event.
Tomassini's latest solo exhibition at Centre CLARK gallery, iPhone Ritual, was curated by Mystic Toolkit's Castro and presented recent work focused on the transitory nature of things. Additional recent exhibitions for Tomassini include a group exhibition at Sporobole gallery in Sherbrooke, Quebec centered on the question of porosity between the real and the virtual, in conversation with work by Martin Beauregard, Khadija Aziz and Philippe Internoscia.