January 13 - February 19, 2016
Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 13, 6 - 8pm
Featuring the Artists:
Nate Cassie
Judy Rushin
Levente Sulyok
Curated by Christie Blizard
Levente Sulyok will also be giving an artist talk on Wednesday, January 13, 11:30am - 12:30pm in the Art Bldg room 3.01.18A.
During his keynote address at the 2005 conference Contemporary Painting in Context in Copenhagen, Peter Weibel equates painting to a vampire that sucks the blood of the other media for its survival. After all, it is ancient: between 35,000 and 100,000 years old, easily damaged by daylight, and apparently lives forever. It was created to capture flesh and indeed has acquired a kind of blood lust for survival. It is clear that painting no longer holds the kind of territory it used to have. It has had a target on its back for staking for decades and continues to die and be resurrected. Like a vampire, it is both dead and eternal. But it certainly is enjoying a new and robust kind of afterlife, one that is dark, elegant, and alone.
The three artists in this exhibition, Painting Can Be A Vampire, Nate Cassie, Judy Rushin, and Levente Sulyok explore various conceptual and material thresholds within contemporary painting. They metamorphose the orientation of the phenomenological body, conceptual furtiveness, and the picture plane as an event horizon of both matter and meaning. Through corporeal transformation, erasure and resurrection, invisibility and reflection, each artist finds his/her own way through the fertile connective tissues of painting and its others.
Judy Rushin shows her work in museums, galleries, and front yards across the U.S. She has recently exhibited at The Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota; Terrain Projects, Chicago; Threewalls Project Space, Chicago; The Orlando Museum of Art; Alexander Brest Museum, Jacksonville; Flashpoint Gallery, Washington DC; Co-Lab Projects, Austin, and Kiang Gallery, Atlanta. In 2015 she collaborated on an artist book called VVVVV, a box of colors and shapes that engage your eyes, hands, and ears. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is Associate Professor of art at Florida State University.
Nate Cassie was born in New Jersey and grew up there and in the Midwest. He moved to San Antonio in 1993 to attend graduate school at UTSA, obtaining his MFA in 1995.
Cassie’s work encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture, video and digital media. The medium used for each project is carefully chosen for its ability to best express the concept that drives the work. One recurrent aspect, both formally and conceptually, is a revolution of elements around a gravitational center reflecting an exploration of the cyclical nature of systems.
His recent work has been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad including the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museo del Arte in Queretaro, MX, The McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, and most recently at the Armory Print Fair and Inked, Miami. He is a past fellow in the Artpace San Antonio’s International Artist-in-Residence Program and the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts’ FIVA Residency Program in Miami, FL. Cassie lives and works in San Antonio, TX.
Born in Hungary, Levente Sulyok immigrated to the United States at age 17. He holds a BA degree in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA degree in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. He works as an Associate Professor of Painting at Wichita State University in Wichita, KS. Sulyok has participated in 45 exhibitions across the US and internationally over the past decade. His recent work has been included in the 1st Asuncion Biennial (Paraguay); the 12th Havana Biennial (Cuba); the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, the Ulrich Museum of Art; the University of the Pacific, Stockton CA, and a collaborative intervention into the dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany. He is currently collaborating with several artists on new projects.
