Joey Fauerso: Wait for It
Joey Fauerso, The Waiting Room, 2020. Acrylic on canvas. 84 x 139 in. (2.1 x 3.5 m). Courtesy of the artist.
Working across a range of media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, and video, San Antonio-based artist Joey Fauerso engages with notions of domesticity, the body, gender, and identity. Her oeuvre consists of large-scale figurative paintings as well as complex and layered installations, akin to theatrical sets, that the artist outfits with painted canvases, props, and sculptural elements. Fauerso’s installations contain details activated by participants—friends, peers, and perhaps most notably, her children—who push, prod, and nudge these items into action in the context of the gallery or for the camera’s lens. Though created by the artist, they are modified by her collaborators. Her paintings, by contrast, are produced in her studio through a subtractive process in which layers of paint are built up and scraped away, resulting in works that are textured and fluid.
Wait for It presents recent painted portraits of the artist’s friends and family alongside You Destroy Every Special Thing I Make (2017–19), a four-channel video installation documenting the construction, demolition, and reconstruction of an installation staged within the artist’s studio. Privileging the role of painting within her practice, Wait for It focuses on Fauerso’s commitment to portraiture and representations of the figure—whether in motion or silent and still. Fauerso’s figures often appear expectant and sometimes even burdened, as if anticipating an event that will never happen; their gazes and poses are poignant metaphors for contemporary life, marked by time spent waiting.
Joey Fauerso: Wait for It is organized by MacKenzie Stevens, director, with Clare Donnelly, manager of exhibitions and programs. The exhibition travels to the University Art Museum (UAM) at New Mexico State University from June 10 – September 2, 2022. The UAM presentation is organized by Marisa Sage, director, with Jasmine Herrera, art museum coordinator.
This exhibition is part of the Visual Arts Center's participation in the Feminist Art Coalition, a nationwide platform for art projects aimed at generating awareness of feminist thought, experience, and action.
Joey Fauerso: Wait for It is supported, in part, by Suzanne Deal Booth, Jeanne and Michael L. Klein, and Fluent~Collaborative.
Bio
Joey Fauerso (b. 1976, San Antonio, Texas) lives and works in San Antonio, Texas. She has had solo and two-persons exhibitions at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2020); Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio (2019); Testsite, Austin, TX (2018); David Shelton Gallery, Houston (2016); and Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, LA (2016). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the New Mexico State University Art, Museum, Las Cruces (2020); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2020); MASS MoCA, North Adams (2019); Aquarius Studios, Brooklyn (2019); Arts and Literature Laboratory, Madison (2019); Museo de Arte Moderno Medellin, Medellin, Colombia (2017); SET-Lugar a Dudes, Cali, Colombia (2017); Blue Star Museum of Contemporary Art, San Antonio (2016); Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Unidad Lerma, Mexico (2016); Artpace, San Antonio (2016), amongst others. She was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 2020. In 2021, Fauerso will be in residence at the Yaddo Residency in Saratoga Springs, New York, and in 2022 she will participate in the Interlude Residency in Livingston, New York. Fauerso is Professor of Art at Texas State University, San Marcos.