Latitudes at Lake|Flato Architects

Latitudes at Lake|Flato Architects

Through Sunday, Jan 5, 2025

Latitudes
Featuring artists Raul Rene Gonzalez, Ethel Shipton, and Doerte Weber

January 5, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Lake|Flato Architects
311 Third Street
San Antonio, TX 78205

Latitudes is a group exhibition that considers relationships between place and time, language and environment, and work and play through the practice of observing and recording one’s surroundings.

The exhibition features the work of San Antonio-based artists Raul Rene Gonzalez, Ethel Shipton, and Doerte Weber, showcasing multiple medium approaches, with prints, weavings, drawings, and paintings taking various forms. Notably, each artist often integrates found, reclaimed, and unexpected materials into their works to apply additional layers of conceptual meaning. For example, Gonzalez uses found fragments of concrete or a street sign for his painting surfaces. Weber weaves with plastic bags, caution tape, newspapers, and sticks. Shipton creates room-sized drawings and murals with the modest materials of tape and vinyl.

Line as a mechanism for recording time is pervasive—music and dance notation marks record note duration and movement across time, tally marks record passing days, growth rings of a tree mark years passed, and layers of earth reveal geological epochs. The use of line is a key element in compositions, creating movement and layering throughout the works. In a weaving, each “line” and thread are visible indications of the time and labor Weber spent on its making. The lines of tape and vinyl traversing the space in Shipton’s wall drawings converge to create a larger image. The depiction of roofing or scaffolded buildings in Gonzalez’s works feel similar in this respect. The gradual accumulation and building are evident throughout the artists’ works.

We also find the rhythms of day-to-day life. Whether the work has representational or more abstract imagery. Gonzalez, Shipton, and Weber observe place over time and respond to and record their environments.

The exhibition title, Latitudes, plays with the theme of place and use of line as a tool for locating ourselves in the world. Considering the cartographic meaning of latitude with the opposing metaphor of the alternative definition for the word—freedom or having intellectual space to make choices and decisions—encourages both the ideas of precision and openness.

-Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray
Curator and Exhibitions Director
Contemporary at Blue Star

Latitudes is curated by Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray with planning and programming support from Mary Heathcott, Garrett Jones, Evan Morris, and Vicki Yuan. The exhibition will be accompanied by artist talks and a public reception.