Fünf: Exhibition Opening Reception
Please join BSC for the opening reception of our summer exhibition, Fünf, featuring artists Amada Miller, Andrei Renteria, Ethel Shipton, and Jared Theis.
Since 2014, Blue Star Contemporary has annually selected four artists residing in Bexar County to take part in three-month residencies at the Künstlerhaus Bethanian in Berlin, Germany. Fünf highlights the fifth year of BSC’s Berlin Residency Program (2017-18) and presents new work developed by Amada Miller, Andrei Renteria, Ethel Shipton, and Jared Theis while in residence and upon their return to San Antonio.
While in residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanian, Ethel Shipton worked daily to create a mural on her studio wall, using only tape she found in the studio. She continually documented this process, knowing the work would find a new form with her leaving Berlin. Fünf will feature a video installation, as well as a relic for the studio mural. Shipton’s work highlights the idiosyncrasies of a place as observationof the traces of others, seen and heard when we listen and look closely.
Jared Theis’ imagined fantasy worlds incorporate performance, video, costuming, animation, sculpture, and set building. Theis’ environmental installations will feature the debut of a two part tragic love story, The Seasons and Vissi d’Arte. The exhibition will also feature his 2018 works Lolita in the Grass and What Night Tells Me.
Andrei Renteria’s large scale drawings discuss human rights injustices, often illuminating accounts along the U.S./Mexico border. The region is personal and political and following his time in Berlin, Renteria aims to approach the subject symbolically. A series of drawings of funerary wreaths and sculptures, depict subversive methods of violence and intimidation sent to victims messaging their fate.
Amada Miller’s work looks at how we interact with and explain the universe outside of our planet through points of intersection, Utilizing research and materials unearthed from the European Space Agency archives and Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, Germany, Miller’s installation will feature 55 glass bells with iron casted meteorite clappers. The artist takes inspiration from the Apollo 12 mission and its astronauts describing the moon ringing like a bell for 55 minuets after crash landing a module on the lunar surface.
– Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray, Curator and Exhibitions Manager
Image: Detail of Ethel Shipton’s installation