Left: Andrew Blanchard, Right: Jonas Criscoe, Call & Respond, 2018
Artist-run gallery ICOSA is an Austin staple, and in February, the latest work of collective members can be seen at ICOSA’s home base in East Austin and in Los Angeles at both Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles (TSA) and Monte Vista Projects (MVP) in the exhibition Natural 20. Not without its obstacles, the Natural 20 opening reception on Friday, Feb 9 included the alumni work of Adrian Aguilera (VAC gallery preparator), Andrea de Leon (BFA in Studio Art, 2012), Brooke Gassion (BFA in Studio Art, 2006), Erin Cunningham (MFA in Studio Art, 2007), Jonas Criscoe (BFA in Studio Art, 2006), Matt Rebholz (MFA in Studio Art, 2008), and Teruko Nimura (MFA in Studio Art, 2009).
Natural 20's conception marked an effort to work with Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles and Monte Vista Projects (MVP), two groups who share the same self-determining and organizing philosophy as Austin-based ICOSA. Despite initial difficulties with the theft of artworks, Natural 20 opened on February 10, 2018 with an impromptu UT Austin reunion as several ICOSA artists sent more works at the last minute and LA artists contributed pieces to fill out the exhibition.
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In Austin, ICOSA exhibited Call & Respond, featuring the work of alumnus Jonas Criscoe (BFA in Studio Art, 2006) and Andrew Blanchard. Evoking a musical call-and-response, Blanchard and Criscoe’s print works use appropriated imagery, text and photography to transform the context of the original source material, and impart a sense of history and nostalgia through the surfaces of their works while simultaneously mirroring our hyper visual world.
“It was like wandering around back roads and stumbling into small towns to explore their junky antique shops, blasting country or Christian music on the drive,” Melany Jean of the Austin Chronicle remarks of Call & Respond. “With Dixie totems like stacks of signage towering above beefy automobiles of various type and size, the collection is striking, with each piece exploring within itself amusing contradictions of the South.”
On Criscoe's works, Jean reflects how “every inch of every work is covered, with assemblages of arrows, roadside or junkyard found objects and typography evoking an expertly assembled Mod Podge collage, marking directionality. You know where you are, instinctively, but with no clear orientation. Taking familiar, stereotypical even, signifiers of rural roads and the small-town South, and flattening them into one another, literally, through the process of printmaking, Blanchard and Criscoe somehow, through juxtaposition, manage to avoid one-dimensionality.”
Natural 20 features the work of Adrian Aguilera, Alyssa Taylor Wendt, Andrea de Leon, Betelhem Makonnen, Brooke Gassion, Bug Davidson, David Bae, Elaine I-Ling Shen, Erin Cunningham, Jonas Criscoe, Matt Rebholz, and Teruko Nimura. The exhibition will be on view at Tiger Strikes Asteroid and MVP galleries from February 10 - March 4, 2018. Call & Respond in Austin was on view at ICOSA’s East Side gallery from January 13th - February 10th.