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Fünf

Jun 7–Sep 8, 2019

Image Gallery

Fünf

Jun 7–Sep 8, 2019

This exhibition highlights the fifth year of Contemporary at Blue Star’s Berlin Residency Program and features the work of 2017-18 resident artists: Amada Miller, Andrei Renteria, Ethel Shipton, and Jared Theis. The artists present work developed while in residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien and upon their return to San Antonio. The exhibition highlights the diversity of practices in the San Antonio art community and the impact of this life-changing residency.

While in residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien Ethel Shipton worked daily to create a mural on her studio wall, using only tape she found in the studio. She continually documented this process, knowing the work would find a new form with her leaving Berlin. Fünf features a video installation, as well as a relic from the studio mural. Shipton’s work highlights the idiosyncrasies of a place as observed by the traces of others, seen and heard.

Jared Theis’ imagined fantasy worlds incorporate performance, video, costuming, animation, sculpture, and set building. Theis’ environmental installations feature the debut of a two-part tragic love story, The Seasons and Vissi d’Arte. The exhibition also features his 2018 works Lolita in the Grass and What Night Tells Me.

Andrei Renteria’s large-scale drawings explore human rights injustices, often illuminating accounts along the U.S./Mexico border. His approach is personal and political, and following his time in Berlin, Renteria aims to approach the subject symbolically. A series of drawings of funerary wreaths and sculptures depict subversive methods of violence and intimidation sent to victims threatening their fate.

Amada Miller’s work looks at how we interact with and explain the universe outside of our planet through points of intersection. Utilizing research and materials unearthed from the European Space Agency archives and Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, Germany, Miller’s installation features 55 glass bells with meteorite clappers. The artist takes inspiration from the Apollo 12 mission and its astronauts describing the moon ringing like a bell for 55 minutes after crash landing a module on the lunar surface.