for the time being
/
2022
︎︎︎
for the time being
Texas Woman’s University
Division of Visual Arts – East | West Galleries
300 Texas St
Denton, TX
Exhibition: Jan 18 - Feb 18, 2022
Artists reception: Feb. 3 from 5 - 8 pm
Artists Panel Lecture: Feb. 3, from 6 - 7 pm
Texas Woman’s University’s East and West Galleries (Division of Visual Arts) is excited to announce for the time being, an exhibition curated by faculty at TWU that features works by prominent artists Annette Lawrence, Betelhem Makonnen, Kristen Cochran, and Alicia Eggert. The Artists Panel Lecture will bring together all artists from the show for a discussion centered around themselves and their art, and will conclude with a Q&A with audience members. for the time being centers around each artist’s unique relationship with time. Whether embedded in their working process or surfacing as a message, the works are inherently philosophical as they relate to the construct of time in unique and innovative ways. This manifests through expression reflected in the duality and multitude of experience which encompasses linear and circular, analog and digital, light and dark, life and death. Some works nod to the ways in which the pandemic restructured the ways we record, perceive, and have lost time. These losses carry a sense of grief that is both personally and universally felt. Other times, the works reflect the phenomenological construction of the natural world as we process being a part of the whole.
Annette Lawrence will be showcasing a new set of graphite, ink and paper drawings that examines and records the process in experiencing grief and loss. Betelhem Makonnen will be showing video installations and sculptures that examine the movement of time and space, the weight of time, and a sense of being part of a larger collective through language. Kristen Cochran’s work for the exhibition will include new sculptures and works on paper created at a recent residency that reference time as a construct through a series of processes that recall the body, rest, notions of labor and social expectations. Alicia Eggert will be including a large neon sculpture that expresses the way words can be an image that carries meaning and place, and a piece that includes live flowers that will decay during the run of the exhibition displaying the passage of time across organic material.
Curatorial team: Caitlin Spencer and Julie Libersat
Technical Director & Gallery Manager: Blake Weld
for the time being Panel Discussion Annette Lawrence, Betelhem Makonnen, Kristen Cochran, and Alicia Eggert with moderators Megan Griffiths and Caitlin Spencer
change means revolution in Amharic (person, place and thing) /
2022
2022
︎︎︎
change
means revolution in Amharic (person, place and thing)
Crit Group Reunion, Chapter Two: Facing Each Other
November 20, 2021 – January 16, 2022
The Contemporary Austin–Jones Center, Austin, Texas
change means revolution in Amharic (person, place and thing), 2019
2 channel video w/multichannel audio
05:36 mins
camera and editing: Betelhem Makonnen
music: Kennedy Mengesha Akele Deme
Cousins navigating the streets of their birth city, still-home to one and back-home to the other. A backwards amble into the grounds of childhood at the intersection of history and memory with globalization’s algorithmic winds of change.
Press
Hyperallergic
Women and Their Work
Sightlines
Crit Group Reunion, Chapter Two: Facing Each Other
November 20, 2021 – January 16, 2022
The Contemporary Austin–Jones Center, Austin, Texas
change means revolution in Amharic (person, place and thing), 2019
2 channel video w/multichannel audio
05:36 mins
camera and editing: Betelhem Makonnen
music: Kennedy Mengesha Akele Deme
Cousins navigating the streets of their birth city, still-home to one and back-home to the other. A backwards amble into the grounds of childhood at the intersection of history and memory with globalization’s algorithmic winds of change.
Press
Hyperallergic
Women and Their Work
Sightlines
people the We
Adrian Aguilera and Betelhem Makonnen Prizer Arts and Letters
October 30 - January 10, 2021
؟america in surveillve will who
؟real who
؟free who [1]
people the We is a collaborative exhibition by the artists Adrian Aguilera and Betelhem Makonnen conceived in the wake and on-going aftermath of the Black Lives Matter led uprisings that were reignited in May 2020. Over a series of masked and socially distanced exchanges, mostly in the natural spaces outside both their studios, Aguilera and Makonnen tried to give form to the overwhelming personal and collective emotions of rage, disappointment, exhaustion and bruised hope that they experienced in the last six months. Cultivating their continuous curiosity about the relationship between symbols and collective identity, transnationality and diaspora perspectives, as well as history's inextricable hold on the present, Aguilera and Makonnen introduce new multimedia work in conversation with existing work to reflect on this (re)current moment in our country.
How can notions of nationhood be projected as a process, rather than a settled thing, place, or entity? Can symbols prone to discovery, conquest, and subjugation be reimagined as instruments for new forms of social constructions and therefore the creation of futures that acknowledge the personhood of all citizens? Conflating the past with the future and the analogue with the digital, Aguilera and Makonnen's works propose nationhood as a process that requires translating histories and future ideals through relationality while vigilantly rejecting fixed monolithic reifications. Opening on the eve of the 2020 watershed presidential elections, people the We offer text-based, cyanotypes, video, installations and a publication that engage foundational questions and ideas of citizenship – who belongs and who doesn’t? And, who’s dreams are who’s nightmares?
Exhibition Resources
linktr.ee/peoplethewe
"people the We" Publication Live-Readings
Press
frieze
Glasstire Top Five: Oct. 29, 2020
Sightlines
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[1] WHO REAL? by Egyptian American poet Marwa Helal. The violent hypocrisy of the iconic phrase from the US Constitution as well as this poem, which echoes its questions, inform the exhibition's title.
[2] Here is a list of thinkers that held us in company and conversation throughout the last months, in the making of this exhibition and beyond: James Baldwin, Dionne Brand, Octavia Butler, Aimé Cesaire, Angela Davis, Fela Kuti, Eduardo Galeano, Édouard Glissant, Marwa Helal, Salif Keita, John Lewis, Mance Lipscomb, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Bob Marley, Toni Morrison, Juan Rulfo, Christina Sharpe, Subcomandante Galeano, Peter Tosh, Caetano Veloso, the Wachowskis, Sylvia Wynter, Kathryn Yussoff.