Spellerberg Projects

Lauren Michelle Peterson is an artist, educator, and curatorial collaborator currently living and working in Texas. She uses found objects to consider the potential ontological ramifications of a consumer-based society. Finding and excavating edges through materiality and process, Peterson’s practices include drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. She was named a 2019/20 Aspen Art Museum Fellow and was included in the New American Paintings 150 West edition. Past exhibitions include Off the Wall at Spartanburg Art Museum (SC), Message from the Sea at the GAIA Center in Athens, Greece, and Forget Me Not at Zuckerman Museum (GA). Peterson has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center (VT), Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences (GA), Kimmel Harding Nelson Center (NE), and Jentel Foundation (WY). Recent curatorial projects include Remote Residue at the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art with Doppler Projects (2021). Her work is part of the permanent collection of the High Museum of Art (GA) and Goya Contemporary (MD). Peterson is currently pursuing a PhD in the School of Art at Texas Tech University.

Gallery Hours

Saturday July 11, 11am-3pm
Saturday July 18, 11am-3pm
Saturday July 25, 11am-3pm
Saturday August 1, 11am-3pm
Closing Reception Friday, August 7, 6-9pm
Saturday August 8, 11am-3pm

Every year we put on summertime exhibitions showcasing the artists who practice and work at Spellerberg Projects. This year to celebrate our 10 year anniversary, we are curating 3 shows including current studio residents, studio alumni, and all the talented artists who make up our gallery staff! The Studio Shows are an opportunity for visitors to see the work produced behind the front gallery and connect the ways this community of artists influences each other working within a shared space. This year’s shows are a glimpse at the evolution of that community over the past 10 years.

Join us on the Historic Downtown Square for the annual Lockhart Sip & Stroll, the signature fundraiser for the Lockhart Downtown Business Association. Enjoy an afternoon of tastings from local vendors, live music, and a leisurely stroll through Lockhart’s eclectic shops and merchants. Spellerberg Projects will have our doors wide open — stop by and say hello as you make your way around the square! Check-in and tasting kit pickup begin at 11 AM on the northwest corner of the Courthouse Lawn.

The annual San Marcos Studio Tour returns with open studios spanning two weekends. The self-guided tour features more than 85 artists across San Marcos and surrounding areas. Spellerberg Projects is proud to be part of this year’s tour — add us to your route and come see what we’ve been working on. Studio hours run noon to 6 PM on April 4–5 and 11–12. Admission is free.

Location: Spellerberg Projects, 103 S Main St, Lockhart
Fee: $25.00

Register via Austin school of Film – Click here

This hands-on workshop introduces participants to direct animation, one of the most tactile and expressive forms of analog cinema. Working without a camera, participants will create moving images directly on 16mm film using paint, ink, collage, scratching, and other material interventions, transforming film stock into a surface for experimentation and play. No prior film experience is required.

Also known as cameraless filmmaking, direct animation brings rhythm, color, and texture to life frame by frame. The workshop draws inspiration from artists such as Len Lye, Norman McLaren, and Stan Brakhage, while emphasizing contemporary, process-led approaches to experimental image-making. Over the course of a single day, participants will work with clear 16mm leader and vintage found footage from the 1950s–70s, building abstract sequences that explore gesture, motion, and materiality. The focus is on exploration rather than perfection, encouraging creative risk-taking and discovery.

What You’ll Create

Each participant will leave with a digitized version of their finished 16mm film, along with a collaborative group trailer set to original music that documents the collective output of the workshop.

What’s Included:

Participants receive a 16mm kit including paintbrushes, acrylic paints, paint sponges, a reusable palette, a small magnifying glass, hand-cut 16mm film strips with leader and found footage, plus additional analog tools and materials for experimentation.

What We’ll Explore

About the Educator

Faiza Kracheni (she/her) is a Mexican Algerian American self-taught media artist and musician hailing from East Austin, Texas. Her artistic journey is defined by non-narrative analog film experiments that merge traditional techniques like hand-developing film and painting onto celluloid with new media, transcending the boundaries of the screen.

Faiza’s directorial portfolio includes music videos for a diverse array of artists such as Young Guv, Vosh, Kotunsion, Mujeres Podridas, Don’t Get Lemon. and Single Lash.

With over a decade of experience as an active touring musician, Faiza’s latest creative endeavor is the electronic duo “Flesh of Morning.” Their debut single “Here in Heaven” was released in 2022, with a full-length album slated for release in 2023/2024.

Her multimedia installation “BORN & RAISED” has garnered acclaim, featuring prominently at SXSW 2023 at the City of Austin Public Library Downtown, as well as an international exhibition in Koscie Slovakia in 2022.

Beyond her artistic pursuits, Faiza is a dedicated advocate for the arts community. She plays a pivotal role at the Motion Media Arts Center, serves on committees for various art organizations including UNESCO Media Arts, and represents District 9 as a City of Austin Arts Commissioner.

About Austin School of Film

Rooted in over 30 years of experimentation, Austin School of Film has long championed independent, hands-on approaches to motion-picture making. MOTION STUDIES continues this ethos by creating space for beginners and experienced artists alike to experiment, take risks, and engage with filmmaking as a living, material practice.

Cristina Velásquez (b. Colombia) is an artist and publisher based between Austin and Bogotá. She received an MFA from the Bard College–International Center of Photography program in New York City in 2017. Velásquez’s work has been exhibited at the Musée de l’Elysée, the ICP Museum, ArtBo, MoMA PS1, the Houston Center for Photography, among others, and is held in both private and public collections.

Her photobooks have been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Research Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, ICP, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and George Washington University, among others.

Recent awards and residencies include the Lucie Scholarship Prize (2025), Yaddo Residency (2025), the Dust Collective Prize (2025), the Ramona Residency (2025), ReGeneration4 at the Musée de l’Elysée (2020), Light Work (2019), the Carol Crow Fellowship (2019), and the Kris Graves Projects LOST II Book Prize (2019).

Velásquez is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of New Poetics Publishing, an independent press that collaborates with emerging artists on contemporary and experimental approaches to photography in book form. She is also the art director at Paisajes Coloniales. Velásquez is represented by Assembly Gallery.

Kate Schneider (b. 1980, Cleveland, Ohio) is an artist of settler ancestry living in Tkaronto (Toronto). A lifelong resident of the Great Lakes region, her artistic practice considers her personal and ethical relationship to her home and environment during a time of climate crisis.

She has recently received funding from the MacLaren Art Centre’s John Hartman Award (2020) and the Ontario Arts Council (2023). Kate’s works have been shown extensively throughout North America in such galleries as the Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art (Toronto), Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), Spellerberg Projects (Texas), and the Great Plains Art Museum (Nebraska), and published in numerous books and publications, such as PDN’s Photo Annual, Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA), and What Makes a Lake by Another Earth Press. Kate’s first book, How to Understand a Rock, was produced through the Penumbra Foundation’s Risograph Publication Residency (2023).

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.

Join the Workshop

Alex Beriault’s work invites viewers—and participants—to confront hidden, and sometimes conflicting elements of their own nature through sculptural installation, film, and live performance. While “performance” is a term frequently linked to her practice, she approaches it not as acting or pretense, but as a means of revelation: a way to uncover aspects of the self that remain mysterious even to oneself.

Using methods from her own art practice, Alex’s “Private Dance” workshop is an invitation for both first-time and seasoned performers to participate in an experimental performance format that draws upon one’s natural response to music. Each participant selects their own song—without restriction of genre, era, or style—that elicits a personal resonance and authentic impulse to move. Consisting of a series of prompts and exercises designed to ease the participants through the workshop, the experience culminates into a sequence of improvised solo performances whereby everyone, one at a time, dances under a single spotlight in their own manner to their chosen music.

This workshop has nothing to do with professional dance technique. There is no expectation of technical skill or polish. This experience is not only about individual expression, but about existing in a constellation of people. Each person will have their own moment, and we will practice holding space for one another. The Private Dance workshop is not only about performing, it also has a lot to do with observing and receiving everyone’s solo performances as an audience.

This workshop asks you to step into a space of uncertainty — and to move through it. Vulnerability is part of the process. The goal is not performance; it is presence.

Come prepared to show up, take a risk, and support one another.

Artist Bio

Alex Beriault is a filmmaker and visual artist (born in Toronto, Canada) whose works encompass film, performance, installation, & dance. She received her BFA from OCAD University in 2014 as the recipient of the OCAD Sculpture/Installation Medal, and has since developed performance-oriented works in which she uses herself as the primary subject. In 2021, Beriault completed her Meisterschüler at the University of the Arts Bremen under the mentorship of media artist Rosa Barba.

Beriault’s work has been recognized throughout North America and Europe with recent participation as an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center in the United States (2024), as well as her solo exhibition “Talk and Taste your Tongue” at the Kunstverein Ruhr in Essen, Germany (2023). During the 22nd edition of the Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival (LUFF) in Switzerland, Beriault’s film “Birth Proof” won Best Experimental Short Film. Her films and installations have screened and exhibited internationally, participating in festivals, institutions and residencies including CROSSROADS 2022, San Francisco, Rencontres Internationales, Paris/Berlin (2022), the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor (2021), Festival du Nouveau Cinéma de Montréal (2021), the Weserburg Museum for Modern Art, Bremen (2021), GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen (2020), LUFF Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival (2023/2020), Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge (2018), Denniston Hill, Upstate New York (2017). Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Projects, Toronto (2017) and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2014).

JANA HORN is a writer and musician from Texas, based in Brooklyn. Her work has been described by The New Yorker as “aligning with a fraternity of the lonely that cuts across genres: traces of Young Marble Giants, Syd Barrett, and Broadcast all waft through.” At Spellerberg, she’ll be performing with drummer Adam Jones, bassist Jade Guterman and flute/clarinetist Adelyn Strei. Horn’s third album released January 16, 2026 on No Quarter Records.

KNIFE IN THE WATER is a Texas band with a history reaching back to Austin in 1997. The basis of their sound is moored by earthly pillars of STAX/SUN fluency, yet whatever anchor to tradition is unfastened by words and sounds of a surreal bent that wave in and out of waking consciousness. Their 5th LP is coming out in Spring 2026.