Conduit Gallery | 04/09/22 - 05/14/22 | Group Show | Annabel Daou, Jennie Ottinger, Marcelyn McNeil | Dallas

Art Exhibition |
Conduit Gallery
1626 C Hi Line Dr. Dallas, TX 75207 tel: 214.939.0064
https://conduitgallery.com/exhibitions

04/09/22-05/14/22

Conduit Gallery is honored to present She Never Said That, a solo exhibition of recent work by San Francisco-based artist Jennie Ottinger.

Jennie Ottinger’s work attempts to capture that moment immediately before or after a pivotal event, the tension in that fleeting period of silence and stillness. The unfinished quality lends to the uneasy stillness by making them seem interrupted, as if something sudden and significant occurred.

Ottinger is currently going through a princess phase. She is collecting stories of women who were maligned by history which applies to basically any high-profile woman throughout time. Princesses were pawns used to build dynastic power and in many cases, they were scapegoats, in Marie Antoinette’s case, for all the poverty in all of France and also the downfall of the French monarchy. This applies not just to princesses but any strong woman with proximity to power, like Yoko Ono, Meghan Markel, Anne Boleyn, like Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna who never said “Let them eat cake” and never commissioned a $15 Million (in our current valuation) necklace then refused to pay, and never abused her children. She did what she was bred to do: have babies and look fabulous.

She Never Said That is a series of historically referenced paintings of Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna (AKA Maria Antoinette).

Jennie Ottinger was raised in Massachusetts and therefore knows a lot about the Revolutionary war and cranberries. Just kidding. She doesn’t know anything about either of those things. She does know a lot about princesses though and loves to paint them, among other things. She holds a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, a BA in Art History from the University of the Pacific and received an MFA from Mills College in May of 2008. She has exhibited extensively in the Bay Area as well as in New York, London, Dallas, and LA. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, It’s Nice That, and other places that made her happy. She lives in San Francisco.

Artists in this Exhibition———–Conduit Gallery is honored to present Gods and Grifters, a solo exhibition of recent work by New York-based artist Annabel Daou.

Annabel Daou’s work takes place at the intersection of writing, speech and non-verbal modes of communication. Her paper-based constructions, audio/video works and performances explore the expressive possibilities of ordinary language and reveal intimacies between individual and collective experience. Frequently, her works evoke moments of rupture, chaos, instability and misunderstanding but always with the tenuous possibility of repair. The exhibition is comprised of text-based cut out paper artworks including one monumental piece titled Another Country, which explores existence in another place, the opposites becoming parallels in the constant roil of life.

Of Gods and Grifters, the artist says, “These works are about suspension and weight, rocks become rubble, fabric becomes threadbare, and we use the remains to imagine lives before ours and our own lives in retrospect, always contingent, everything shifting.

Looking at the peeled off bark of trees at the end of the summer, at the carved out lists of gods and places and bills and receipts in ancient Babylon, etched marks deciphered by juxtaposition, these works are both a search and a slow reveal, a stripping or cutting away to make place for words that are markers of our everyday lives and imagine other possibilities of connection.

The works are drawn and cut alternately, a jagged attempt at following a thread or weeding through excess, leaving a remain that blows in the wind, a garment, a tattered flag laying claim to very little.

The soft white porous paper is laid on the ground and drenched in ink and color that pools and dries like water on a stone, bright and liquid and then dry and silvery, worn copper, bare branches in the sun after the rain.”

Annabel Daou was born and raised in Beirut and lives in New York. Daou’s work has been shown at The National Museum of Beirut; The Park Avenue Armory, New York; KW, Berlin; The Drawing Room, London; and The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Public collections include Baltimore Museum of Art; The Menil Collection, Houston; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul; the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; and The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

Daou’s sound installation DECLARATION is currently on view at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas through May 2022. The Museum acquired the work for its permanent collection in 2021. She is also currently the subject of the solo exhibition Global Spotlight: Annabel Daou at Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, Virginia from January through March 2022.————————-Conduit Gallery is honored to present Briefly Gorgeous, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Dallas-based artist Marcelyn McNeil.

Through her experimental approach to painting and process, McNeil challenges traditional assumptions about abstraction to produce works that remind us of the lyrical power of painting in an ever-challenging contemporary moment. The tension in her work enables the chance to engage slowly with the macro-view of the composition and the micro-view of the palimpsest layers. Spare and deliberate forms celebrate the evocative power of color interfolded with soft pours to invite contemplation. Each thin layer on the raw canvas becoming a luminous veil to deeply sensuous effect.

Says McNeil: “In this iteration of paintings, “gravity fed pours” are the heart of the work. Somewhat raw, unfiltered and exposed, these canvases are the most vulnerable and personal to date. Gone are the whites, blacks and greys I have recently relied upon to edit and cover my grounds. This work grapples with ways of seeing, material presence, what is necessary, what’s unnecessary, and how to ride that illusive line where there’s just enough information for the paintings to hold together. Ocean Vuong’s title “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”, captures a space I’d like to find in the work, a place that is at once affirmative and melancholic.

The mechanics of a thing. Through systems of gravity fed pours, I’ve become a bit of a bystander in my own painting process. What I mean by this is my “hand in the work”, or my dexterity, are largely mute when pouring paint. Layers of thinned pigment are poured one atop another and left untouched to settle out, at will, on the canvas surface. The methods and systems I use in making paintings are slow, contemplative and to a degree beyond my control. Having said that, this wouldn’t be my work if I didn’t introduce graphic punctuations. Strong graphics serve as an influencer, conversation starter, and are structurally and spatially grounding.”

Marcelyn McNeil holds a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR) and an MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has been shown widely across the United States—including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and Dallas—in commercial, nonprofit, university, and museum spaces. Within Texas, McNeil has exhibited in multiple biennials and at the San Antonio Museum of Art, Galveston Arts Center, Lawndale Art Center (Houston), Conduit Gallery (Dallas), and others. From 2012 to 2014, McNeil taught painting at the University of Houston as visiting artist faculty. She has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, 100 W Corsicana, and MacDowell Colony, and she has been a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant nominee. Additional awards include the Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship, Zeta Orionis Fellowship, Purchase Award (Portland Art Museum), and Community Arts Assistance Program Grant (the City of Chicago).

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