Future Regions
Raymond Uhlir, Mountain, 2011. Acrylic on shaped canvas. 38 x 38 in.
Future Regions pairs the paintings of Houston artist Shane Tolbert with the paintings of Austin artist Raymond Uhlir. The selected works reflect interests in monuments, materiality, natural and built spaces, irrational science, the Internet, and artifacts.
Tolbert employs unorthodox processes in his use of materials such as plaster, bleach, salt, Mylar, and corn starch to create abstract works that both degrade and celebrate the modernist painting tradition. Through the creation of invented histories, Tolbert carves out a space for his paintings to exist as relics of civilizations lost or objects of the near future.
Uhlir takes images from the Internet and out-dated nature magazines, which he refers to as “cousins of the slept-through documentary films of science classes past.” Employing the language of cartoons and the lineage of landscape painting, Uhlir transforms his source material onto shaped canvases creating rebuilt environments fraught with discovery, fantasy, and narrative possibilities. Time as a construct dissolves in both artists’ work as each creates a mythology through abstraction and figuration. What emerges in Future Regions is an installation of paintings that refract and crystallize nostalgia for the past and anticipation of the future.
This exhibition is curated by Katie Geha, a writer, curator, and art historian living in Austin.
Bios
Shane Tolbert is a painter whose sensitivities and skill set are pushing him closer and closer to the pantheon of cultural production. When not in the studio, he can be found fishing on the banks of the bayou at dawn. Tolbert lives and works in Houston and teaches painting and drawing part-time at the University of Houston. He is represented by Hiram Butler Gallery in Houston, Texas.
Raymond Uhlir was born in Hinsdale, Illinois in 1979. In 2002, he earned his BFA in Studio Art at The University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2010. He has been active in several artistic collectives and has shown at various locations around the U.S. He currently lives and works in Austin.