El Rincón Social: Houston's Creative Collaborative
Featuring works from Darwin Arevalo, Dylan Conner, Theresa Escobedo and Jonathan Paul Jackson
On view at MKT BAR January 25 - March 10, 2017
Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 25 - 6 to 9 PM
"El Rincón Social: Houston's Creative Collaborative" Is a curated presentation of artworks from artists Darwin Arevalo, Dylan Connor, Theresa Escobedo, and Jonathan Paul Jackson. Collectively representing the alternative space in which they create their work, this exhibition highlights the current climate of urban and alternative art-making in Houston, Texas and spotlights the dynamics of each artist’s respective experimental processes as they approach image-making, sculpture, landscape and narrative.
Darwin Arevalo received his BFA in painting from the Kansas City Art Institute. During his time in Kansas City he participated and worked in community based non-profit organizations for inner city youths and programs as an art educator, lead artist, and lead muralist while also showing in local galleries. He hopes through his work to engage with the local community on the street level and to contribute to the development of a progressive and innovative artistic environment in Houston. The result of his artistic experimentation is rooted in processes that exploit the unpredictable intersections of materiality and form. as each of his artworks is in the first place, a reaction to itself.
Dylan DeBock Conner, born in Houston, received his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD and studied Art History at the University of Houston. Conner explores material, form, and process directly in the new works to debut in this exhibition. Concrete, steel, and plaster are the foundations of Conner’s most recent body of work. He investigates the dualities of liquid and solid, ridged and fluid, movement and rest. His latest series employs unique casting techniques, honed and developed through years of experimentation. Materials used are found, fabricated, manipulated and molded in these works that respond to the exhibition space. Controlled fabrication is complemented with an allowance for the materials to behave according to their physical properties.
Theresa Escobedo is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator, and arts director currently living and working in Houston, Texas. She studied at the University of Houston and received a Bachelor Degree of Architecture in addition to a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Design with a focus on community planning. Her interest lies in exploring the myriad of connections between objects, ideas of time and change, history and memory. Theresa’s most recent creative work is executed through Main Street Projects, an artist-run collaborative active in the Mid Main neighborhood in Houston, which brings art into urban surroundings via historical buildings, visually engaging the street and the pedestrian to improve the public's accessibility to contemporary art and to beautify and repurpose neglected spaces. As the active Director of Main Street Projects, she curates, coordinates, and executes public programs and projects designed to activate public spaces and to give artists the opportunity to impact neighborhood experiences through creative place-making and social inquiry. Theresa’s most recent photographic work makes use of analog and instant photography to explore the complex nature of chronological time as it relates to people, to place, and to space.
Jonathan Paul Jackson, a native Texan, is a self-taught artist working in Houston. Having apprenticed with and been influenced by Houston artist Angelbert Metoyer, Jackson has inserted himself into a heritage of Houston art-making that begins, in some ways, with patriarchal figures in Houston art Jesse Lott and Bert L. Long, Jr. His artworks are the result of experiments in abstraction as he forages a new philosophy toward painting that is at once his own as well as part of a larger dialogue about the nature of painting and perception, executed through the filter of an African American perspective.
