Studio Show 2024, Part 1
Exhibition • June 15–July 6, 2024
Gallery Hours
Saturday June 15, 11am-3pm
Saturday June 22, 11am-3pm
Saturday June 29, 11am-3pm
Closing Reception Friday, July 5, 6-9pm
Saturday July 6, 11am-3pm
The studio show is a yearly exhibition of all the artists who practice and work at Spellerberg Projects. This year with the opening of the new studios, our numbers have grown and the show is a two part exhibition! Here are the artists participating in Studio Show 2024, Part 1:
Avery M. Michel is a queer artist who through painting discusses the changing prescience of identity. Allusions to queer culture, graphic novels, and mythology/ religion are tools used by Michel in order to discuss their relationship with self and others. Michel received their AA from Blinn College, and BFA from Texas State University(pending).
“I am a painter who works with figurative subjects and self-portraiture. My work discuses introspection through the synthesis of queer identity, pop culture, and religion.
The ever-changing sense of self and exploration of my experiences are riddled with allusions to media that discusses what it means to be human. I like to play with juxtaposing references from comics and pulp with the vibrance of queer culture and the ancient sense of longing that comes from religious imagery.
The work has allusions to the various references I previously mentioned and is focused on using them to depict myself and others at various stages of my life. My work expresses the internal dialogues I have as a queer person. I through my work can express ideas like sexuality, objectification and feelings of being rejected by religion and biological family.”
Laurel Coyle is a multi-disciplinary artist who has called Lockhart her home for the past eight years. She celebrates the richness of Lockhart embraces the growth of the special and unique community.
She picked up her first camera, a 110 instamatic, at age eight, and became fascinated by the possibilities of image making. She still has a box full of exposed film from her childhood that she is slowly processing. She continued photographing through middle and high school. Laurel has a history as a dressmaker and, at 24, purchased her first digital camera. Using an auto timer, she made self portraits while wearing the dresses she created and began to understand the inner workings of digital photography.
The images creates are not of a specific region but are anchored in experience, each image tied to a specific memory. Laurel believes that artistic expression begins with the heart and that art is the physical manifestation of our individual passion.
Ryan Thayer Davis received his BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. He lives and works in Lockhart, TX, working as an architectural interior photographer to support his painting practice. He has attended residencies in Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming, and Iceland.
Ryan works with printmaker-style layers to create sonorous, formal paintings that revel in structure. He’s interested in compositions that push and pull the eyeball brain, juxtaposing and alternating elements that recede and advance relative to the viewer. Seeking paradoxical relationships in space and color, his work allows many avenues of interpretation, from the feeling of landscape and dreamscape, to the pleasures of structural richness and texture, to the melodious nature of line. Generous up front, but deep enough to stay a while.
Sam Foster is originally from Lawrence KS, Sam Foster got his BFA from The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) IN 2012, Studying Painting and Experimental Film. Sam currently resides in Lockhart Tx and is getting his MFA along with his partner and co studio mate Jennifer Moore at Maharishi International University in Fairfield IA in the Low Residency program. Sam has been a part of Spellerberg Projects for the past several years and loves living so close to the studio.
“My painting process is one of construction where I incorporate material processes that are based on chance and the unknown. Dipping fabric into plaster to make hardened compositions as templates to paint on and through my process “clean up” or control. I’m interested in chaos vs control, especially within one’s own life. I also incorporate biographical imagery that has been abstracted by being processed through different photographic / printing techniques. Taken out of context, these images serve as a mysterious symbol to create a new meaning, one that I believe is more truthful or telling.”
Ursula Rogers was born and raised in Lockhart, Texas. She received a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh and an MScE in Intelligence Studies and International Development from Aberystwyth University in Wales. A self-taught photographer, Rogers is fascinated by using mundane subjects to explore memory and storytelling.
Ursula is also a photo journalist who regularly contributes to the Caldwell/Hays Examiner.
“Eli Zapata, pictured with his son Elmo at the family’s body shop in Lockhart, successfully fought for the teen’s freedom when a disgraced detective at Hays County Sheriff’s Office falsely accused him of murdering his mother. Photograph by Ursula Rogers, taken for the June cover story in the Caldwell/Hays Examiner.” Description written by Jordan Buckley