ON VIEW
Epiphany
Featuring Michelle Marchesseault, Diana Welch, Kate Csillagi, and Mimi Bowman
Curated by Alyssa Taylor Wendt
September 14 - October 26, 2024 | Open Hours: Saturdays 12-6pm
Artist/Curator Talk with Moderator Justine Kurland: Saturday, October 19th, 7pm (please RSVP)
Closing Reception & Halloween Party: Saturday, October 26th, 7-11pm (please RSVP)
Sponsored by Austin Beerworks
@The Culvert Gallery, 5419 Glissman Road, Austin, TX 78702
The history of humankind is riddled with points of divergence, moments in our evolution that shake the core of our comfort levels and introduce change whether we like it or not. More often, these harbingers are met with skepticism, fear, shock, and dismissal but withstand the test of time, ultimately adding to our human sophistication. When this happens, there is a moment before the outrage, a pause in our interpretation, a moment of blank rapture that defies categorization. In this blind bliss, we are free. Disruption at its finest returns us to a pure state of infantile openness, our senses in a purgatorial free fall and words fail to serve us.
Epiphany. How do we interpret a revelation? What quantifies blown expectations? The divine nature of art lies in the lack of a singular measure of meaning. No standard of beauty, trash, value, or brilliance exists, so why not push beyond what is safe or easily digested?
As a curator, maker, and seeker of art, I live to have my mind turned inside out. The most memorable moments for us all reside in a void of expectation. This precious moment of emptiness is a treasure, that sacred place where we have no answer, no response, no explanation, no doubt. That girl by my locker put her Walkman headphones on my head and I heard the Sex Pistols for the first time. I accidentally wandered into a screening of Cremaster 2 by Matthew Barney in the 1990s and showed me how artists use film as a medium of abstraction. I was the only one who sat through the whole thing. Stravinsky caused a riot by premiering his Rites of Spring in 1913. Shannon Funchess continues to upend traditional dark wave with her operatic feral performances in the band Light Asylum.
I trust in these formative moments, both my own and historical, to help culture evolve. To believe in the exceptional, the dangerous, the potentially offensive with a risk of failure, estrangement, alienation. Challenging our expected interpretation and giving ourselves over to the unknown is the chance we take for growth. Stasis and silence are death. In a transcribed conversation with Seán O’Hagan, the musician Nick Cave states “that the vitalizing element in art is the one that baffles or challenges our outrages. I believe art should be confronting and discomfiting and do more than just affirm your point of view.” I chose the four women for this exhibition and asked them to make new work with this concept in mind, not an easy assignment. Rather than choose works from their oeuvre that have already sparked my neurons, I asked them to undertake visions that risk, push, confound, anger or confuse us.
And here are the results of such an experiment. Working in the heat of Texas swelter, shown in a converted cement culvert, in the outskirts of a town sick with overdevelopment, using raw materials at hand and the depth of their visceral intuitions, Co-Lab Projects and I present Epiphany, a group show with Diana Welch, Kate Csillagi, Michelle Marchesseault, and Mimi Bowman.
- Alyssa Taylor Wendt
Diana Welch is a multidisciplinary artist based in Austin, TX, whose body of work spans sculpture, music, and writing. A self-taught ceramicist, she has exhibited in the US and Europe as one-half of the collaborative Mother of God. Her vessels reference classical ancient clay forms imbued with unexpected flare and subversion through interaction, collaboration, and functionality. As a musician, she has released several recordings, both solo and as a member of the band Stormshelter. A reporter, editor, and author, her extensive writing has been reviewed in Vanity Fair and elsewhere.
Kate Csillagi is an interdisciplinary artist hailing from Austin, TX. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Evergreen State College where she studied fiber art, printmaking, and bookmaking. Her work has evolved over the years to include drawing, mural work, fabric tapestry, and installation. She was also a founding member of ICOSA, an artist-run collective and gallery in East Austin. Csillagi’s work is disruptive and whimsical, constructing unexpected narratives that star her anthropomorphic characters within supernatural scenes. Her work dismantles reality through watery dreamscapes and colorful illustrations, providing refuge from the monotony of modernity.
Michelle Marchesseault splits time between Austin, TX, where she paints, and New York City, where she designs art and interiors for restaurants, television, movies, and the stage. She attended Herron School of Art in Indianapolis for painting and has been creating visuals and environments for over 20 years. The majority of Marchessault’s work fluctuates between studies of color and design that she called “twist” paintings and lush mannerist landscapes where nature is simultaneously gushing with beauty and brutality.
Mimi Bowman was born in Texas in 1989. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2022 with a degree in archaeology and Middle Eastern studies. Bowman is currently abroad pursuing an MA in archaeology at the University College of London, hoping to work in Karez rehabilitation in northern Iraq. In 2023, she curated Oshay Green and Isabel Legate’s dual exhibition Holometabolism at Martha’s Contemporary, and her collaborative video work with Jonny Negron was included in Electricity · Shadow at Château Shatto.
Alyssa Taylor Wendt is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and curator working in Detroit and Austin, Texas. Her recent projects address mysticism, the architecture of memory, and the decodified strata of history using video, ceramics, sculpture, painting, and installation. Earning her MFA from Bard, she has shown and performed internationally since 2004. She recently completed a second master’s degree in museum studies from Harvard and plans to open a small non-profit museum of cultural artifacts in 2026.
