2023-2024 Solo Exhibition Series

Women & Their Work is pleased to announce the artists selected for our 2023-2024 solo exhibition series. Chosen by jury through a call for entries, these eight artists were selected from a field of nearly 450 entries sent in from across the state. Each artist will create a new body of work for her exhibition. 

 

Alejandra Almuelle

alejandraalmuelle.com | Austin, TX

Alejandra Almuelle’s immersive installations juxtapose large, suspended, ceramic sculptural figures with wall installations of clay pieces to suggest a parallel between the earth and the body. She questions a mindset that values the natural world and human beings as resources and examines how territories and their peoples have been historically shaped for extraction, production, consumption, and ownership.

 

Elizabeth Chapin

elizabethchapin.com | Austin, TX

Elizabeth Chapin is interested in how myths—from Eve to Venus—inform women’s responses to themselves and each other IRL and online. Using foundational stories as precursors to the crafted identities we present to the world, she likens social media to an ongoing religion of both self creation and self exile. She incorporates a variety of mixed media onto sewn canvases, turning an otherwise flat portrait into a 3D manifestation. These dimensional forms are often animated by projection-mapped video, simulating the effect of screens which simultaneously augment and impoverish life.

 

Dan Jian

danjian.info | Fort Worth, TX

As a Chinese immigrant, Dan Jian finds landscape acquires meaning through memories. She transforms the traditional Chinese ink landscape scroll format infusing it with charcoal dust and burned ashes on translucent paper; layers of hand-cut shapes create introverted landscapes filled with narratives and symbols. Imagery pulled from the Texas landscape merges with personal and cultural memory to reference the multiple meanings of home and belonging.

 

Yuni Lee

yunjunglee.com | Dallas, TX

Yuni Lee creates dimensional paintings richly imbued with nostalgia, blending references to her birthplace of Seoul, South Korea and American culture. Large scale, abstract paintings are constructed using layers of texture and pattern. She collages traditional Korean fabrics, recycled copy paper, and other materials to create dynamic forms that fuse nature and technology. Neon accents the surface of her luminous paintings, connoting the inviting and recognizable glow of the Korean night scene.

 

Monica Martinez

monica-martinez.com | El Paso, TX

In photographs, videos, and installations, Monica Martinez examines the dualities of her hometown—Juarez, Mexico—from the vantage point of El Paso where she now lives. Mass production is the locus of mechanized industry and culture in Juarez; Martinez observes the relationship between mechanized factory labor and the hyper-normalization of violence. She compares feminicides and organized crimes to manufacturing machines due to their rapid production of goods/violence. 

 

VLM (Virginia L. Montgomery)

hellovlm.com | Austin, TX

At the heart of VLM‘s practice is a continuous conversation between ecology, mysticism and the intersectional politics of panpsychic feminism. Using video, performance, sound and sculpture she creates an immersive installation to explore new connections for consciousness between humans and the natural world. VLM’s diverse artistic movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures via gestures of agency and empathy.

 

Grace Nicole

gracenicole.format.com | Dallas, TX

Grace Nicole’s Southern Creole heritage informs her photographs that center on Black female identity. Featuring intimate portraits and images of domestic scenes, her work captures the pain but also the beauty and resilience of her experience as well as that of other Black women who inhabit her photographs.

 

JURY PANEL

This year’s jury panel was comprised of artists Yuliya Lanina and Jenelle Esparza as well as Women & Their Work staff. Lanina holds an MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY Purchase College. Lanina’s honors include a Fulbright to Vienna, Austria as well as artist residencies at The Headlands Art Center (CA), and Yaddo Colony (NY). She is Assistant Professor of Practice at the Depart. of Arts and Entertainment Technologies at UT Austin. Jenelle Esparza received a BFA in Photography from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is a co-founder of Presa House in San Antonio and is a McNay Museum Educator For Family Programs. She was the recipient of a 2018 Artpace International Artist Residency and a National Association of Latino Arts and Culture Artist Grant.