Rapture in Rupture.

Arthouse at the Jones Center | Austin, Texas

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Rapture in Rupture" (through January 11), dedicated to these uncertain times, is viewed through the lens of four young artists: Lauren Kelley (Houston), Shiri Mordechay (New York), Mindy Shapero (L.A.), and Nicolau Vergueiro (L.A./Sao Paulo). Their respectively fractured work can be seen, according to curator Elizabeth Dunbar, as embroiled in "the imploding rapture that has come to define our specific time and place in the world. The world is mixed up--should it surprise us that the art of our times would be mixed up too?"

Lauren Kelley's Wild Seed (2008), a 4-minute stop-motion animation and digital video with sound, depicts an idyllic garden filled with animal-shaped topiary. All of a sudden, an unexpected wave of green ooze inundates the scene. A male voiceover speaking in French at first seems to be describing the action occurring on screen, until it becomes clear he's really talking about gender and racial stereotypes. Shiri Mordechay's massive mixed media on paper landscape, Untitled (2007), is sutured together from hair, string, additional handicraft and found objects, depicting grotesque animal and human body parts, autumnal foliage and monkey-like creatures that migrate off the page in an untraceable scramble. Faced with this scandalous improvisation, the viewer oscillates between the ridiculous and the sublime, abstraction and figuration, drawing and sculpture, beauty and the beast, before being led inevitably to the tangled web lining the work's inner margins.

It is to Mindy Shapero's "outlandish" titles that we must turn to access the fantasy world of her two sculptures and single work on paper. One of the former, The infinite truths of flatterland (hugging air til it hurts and spinning out into other dimensions in between night) (2006), features seven layers of flat cylindrical rainbow-colored Celluclay stacked and interspersed with small gray circular and cone-shaped mounds. Traveling Eye (2007-08), the other, is a painted, silver-leafed wood and fiberglass candy-cone structure, whose concave base reflects back a depthless, Kapoor-like eye. The rainbow is a common motif in Shapero's hybrid, pseudo-animistic cosmology, serving as a slippery toehold on its otherwise in-between shapes and forms.

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Nicolau Vergueiro's five assemblages consist of mixed media and found fabrics, some with hand-drawn images of individuals and random words, stitched together as either floor or wall pieces. Intercalations--Nine Miles East of the Dead Sea (2008), for instance, draws us into the limbo of simultaneous rapture and rupture. The idea that the rapture in Christian eschatology is a worldwide raptus--or "snatching away"--is never far from the surface of this thoughtful body of new art.

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