Enclaves
Images: Matt Rebholz, Hail Columbia (Ravenous, 0:28:22), acrylic on panel, 24”x58”, 2024 (top)
Jenn Wilson Shepherd, Dante and Beatrice, oil on linen, 24”x36”, 2024 (bottom)
Matt Rebholz and Jenn Wilson Shepherd
Exhibition Dates: September 27 – October 26, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, September 27, 7-10 pm, 2024
About
ICOSA Collective is proud to present Enclaves. Matt Rebholz and Jenn Wilson Shepherd explore the relationship of the world beyond humanism where people are not the central focal point. This omission of humanity in favor of vast depopulated landscapes and wildlife beyond classification examines our current crisis in the age of the Anthropocene and the artists’ tensions between the absence of humanity and the necessity of a human hand to generate the source material. Both artists present worlds where humanity has been omitted in favor of primordial or post-apocalyptic landscapes. Rebholz’s compositions are drawn from film stills borrowed from movies that he has a deep, personal relationship with while Wilson Shepherd’s work is informed by images captured by wildlife camera traps and our cultural history and documentation of extinct animals.
The spaces depicted in Matt Rebholz’s landscape paintings are informed by film stills from movies that he enjoys intimate and deeply personal relationships with. Drawn primarily from Western and other genre films, these environments have been denuded of all evidence of life, leaving rocky and alien landscapes rendered in an electrified, psychedelic palette.
Rebholz engages with film as a coping strategy to manage a lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder. The movies referenced in the paintings represent a comfortable space of retreat and an emotional scaffold in times of crisis. Like bipolar disorder itself, the landscapes that have been built around these films are simultaneously lonesome and populous, quiet and loud, barren and fertile.
The images in this exhibition are translated from film stills borrowed from A Fistful of Dollars (1964, Dir. Sergio Leone, DoP. Massimo Dallamano and Federico G. Larraya), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966, Dir. Sergio Leone, DoP. Tonino Delli Colli), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984, Dir. Leonard Nimoy, DoP. Charles Correll), The Last of the Mohicans, (1992, Dir. Michael Mann, DoP. Dante Spinotti), Dead Man (1995, Dir. Jim Jarmusch, DoP. Robby Müller), and Ravenous (1999, Dir. Antonia Bird, DoP. Anthony B. Richmond).
Jenn Wilson Shepherd takes inspiration from John Berger’s pivotal essay, “Why Look at Animals” and the tens of millennia tradition of depicting animals. She takes a posthumanist lens of our cultural history of animals that seeks to move beyond liberal humanist conceptualizations that continually privilege the human and divide humans and animals based on capacities for reason and language. Wilson Shepherd collects images of camera traps from wildlife refuges-essential tools for scientists to track elusive and reclusive creatures. Behind the camera there is no person, just the machine that is triggered by the animals’ movement. Essentially, the animal activates the image and becomes the unbeknownst author and the observed. She also looks at our invisible connections to our perceptions of fauna and extinction of wildlife with explorations in sound, memory, and smell to move beyond the invisible divide that we create with other living creatures.
Notable exhibitions include TSA LA (Los Angeles), Corbett vs Dempsey (Chicago), Packer-Schopf Gallery (Chicago), Eggman & Walrus (Santa Fe), American University of Beirut (Lebanon), SACI Institute (Florence, Italy), University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center Gallery, Austin Museum of Art, and Kohler Art Museum in Wisconsin. Her work has been reviewed in Artslant, Newcity Magazine, Austin Chronicle, MW Capacity, TimeOut Chicago, Chicago Magazine, Chicago Reader, and the Chicago Tribune. She received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008.
Enclaves
Matt Rebholz and Jenn Wilson Shepherd
Exhibition Dates: September 27 – October 26, 2024
Artist Reception: Friday, September 27, 7-10 pm, 2024
East Austin Arts District Third Thursday: Thursday, October 17, 7-9pm, 2024
Gallery Hours: Fridays & Saturdays 12-6 pm or by appointment
ICOSA Collective Gallery
916 Springdale Rd, Bldg 2, #102, Austin, TX 78702
Instagram: @rebholzjones
Instagram @jennwilsonshepherd
