Dallas Art Fair

Booth D10

April 2023

Featuring:

Conner O'Leary

Ana Villagomez

Carlos Rosales Silva

Jenaro Goode

Brach Tiller

Ricardo Partida

Wes Thompson

About the Artists

Brach Tiller: Brach Tiller creates hypnagogic paintings whose meticulous execution and farcical ambiguity blur the lines between fact and fiction. Using digital physics to create a simulation of reality that is unclear, yet recognizable, Tiller renders scenes with great mass whose clean and flat surface echoes the two-dimensional screens which increasingly mediate our interpersonal communication. The humor embedded in the tension between reality and unreality lends an absurdist balance between optimism and nihilism, questioning the new forms of expression in cross-embedded media which might reveal humanity’s innate fluidity. He received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2021 and lives and works in Detroit.

Conner O'Leary: In this new series of paintings, O'Leary confronts the purported relationship between creativity and sorrow with a brash self-reflection that, refreshingly, does not discount the effect that the so-called unreal has on the real. Using only acrylic on canvas to reproduce techniques gate- kept for centuries, O'Leary reports on his solitude almost like gonzo journalism: resourcefulness and a late-onset dose of masculine anxiety take on a sort of praxis when revealing the actual through the seemingly impossible. In revealing the mysteries as revealed within his personal solitude, O'Leary holds the viewer at a distance for their own safety while providing a window into the symbols of our shared discontent. Regardless of our personal diagnoses or lack thereof, if we are alone, we are alone together.

Ana Villagomez: Ana Villagomez is a multidisciplinary artist from Houston and Mexico living in Brooklyn, NY. She obtained her BFA from the University of Houston and MFA from Hunter College NY. Villagomez approaches painting as a kind of symbolic map-making of her diasporic psychogeography. Inspired by the resourcefulness of her family and hometown culture, Villagomez echoes strategies of adaptation-as-resistance in her recombinant approach to texture and form. Her paintings feature ripped and splattered portals of torn ash which take over the eye with a dance of abstracted geometries and brush strokes; the elds' backgrounds and subjects collide into nearly-legible figurations, always with the tenderness and practicality of her cultures' responses to socioeconomic strains like shapeshifting unzoned buildings and the horrors of environmental racism and classist and sexist enforcement of the law. In these, she maps an affective maze through time and space for a history both personal and political, singular and shared, hidden and brought to light.

Ricardo Partida: Ricardo Partida was born in Ecatepec, Mexico. The artist received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois in 2020 and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas- Rio Grande Valley in 2017. Partida’s work challenges conventional power structures by creating exalted alter egos and performative avatars that obscure the artist and the subject bringing light to the “other”, in the painting’s gendered language.

Carlos Rosales Silva: Carlos Rosales-Silva is an artist and educator working and living between New York, NY, and Texas. Carlos Rosales-Silva (He /Him) was born on the border of the United States and Mexico in El Paso, Texas. His studio practice considers the vernacular culture in the American Southwest, the Western canon of art history, and the political and cultural connections and disparities between them. Carlos has exhibited throughout Texas, and in Mexico City, New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Kansas City. He has been an artist in residence at Abrons Art Center in New York, NY, Residency Unlimited in New York, NY (2020), Artpace in San Antonio, Texas (2018), and at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY (2017). Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Ruiz Healy Art in New York, NY, and group shows at The Latinx Project at NYU, Beverlys in New York, NY and Left Field Gallery in Los Osos, CA. Carlos graduated from the School of Visual Arts with a Masters in Fine Arts in 2020.

Wes Thompson: Self-taught sculptor Wes Thompson gathers medium from his environment in a dance of exchange between his body and the bodies which make up his home state–Cypress and fallen Juniper branches–to compose his sculptural systems, humble and strong like houses that weren’t meant for us, or a model of another system beyond our comprehension in synecdoche. He is based in Austin, Texas.

Jenaro Goode: Jenaro Goode is a self-taught painter who was born in Houston, Texas, and is currently based in Austin, Texas. His work is influenced by the surrealist and touches on personal experiences along with the occult.