SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Artpace San Antonio announced two new exhibitions opening this summer: Michael Guerra Foerster: Every Time We Say Goodbye and Carbonate of Copper, curated by Artpace Curatorial Resident alumna Jennifer Teets. Both exhibitions opened to the public with a reception on Thursday, May 19, 2022.
In the Main Space gallery, local artist, and City of San Antonio Department of Arts & Culture 2022 Individual Artist Grant Recipient Michael Guerra Foerster, showcases his exhibition Every Time We Say Goodbye. In this exhibition, Foerster explores ideas of intimacy, separation, grief, and memory through ceramic sculptures he calls Floops. This work takes root in the artist’s subconscious and touches upon the fundamental transformation of interpersonal relationships through time, the coping mechanisms used to bring closure to traumatic experiences, and the incredible toll of the human condition. Every Time We Say Goodbye will be on view May 19–September 4, 2022.
Gwenneth Boelens, Liars Cloth, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and KLEMM’S, Berlin.
On view in the Hudson Showroom, Carbonate of Copper features international and Texas-based visual artists and scholars who work in varied media to examine questions of circuitry, flow, foundation, and cultural inheritance, particularly in relation to infrastructure, the environment, and geological time. The exhibition sits in company with the award-winning poem and forthcoming volume Carbonate of Copper by Houston-based writer Roberto Tejada. Featured artists include Gwenneth Boelens, Anna Mayer, Kate Newby, George Smith, Josie Ann Teets, and Roberto Tejada.
The use of the poem is one of a conductive thread, establishing a unique counter-response to the writing’s exploration of vibrant matter – objects alive in their complex interrelationships, entanglements, and tendency for open-ended change. In the poem and exhibition, labor and extractive processes are positioned in contrast to our everyday experience of being used, of using, of residue, squandering, of constraint, of rebuilding, and preservation. The artwork in Carbonate of Copper evokes deeper thought by requiring closer contemplation of material and process. Kate Newby’s installation, I love you poems (2018-2022), for example, investigates the way material interventions are made in response to a site’s particular temporal, physical, and geographical conditions.
Carbonate of Copper considers what we inherit and its inextricable connection to socio-environmental shifts in Texas and at large. The exhibition will be on view May 19–August 28, 2022.
