2019
Virginia Fleck
Ted Carey
REBRIS presents two contemporary Austin-based artists working with discarded, post-consumer materials: Virginia Fleck and Ted Carey.
Download a pdf of the zine for the exhibition with artist interviews
Ted Carey‘s assemblages regard things as words. Recognizing matter as embedded with both personal and universal associations, his witty and economical arrangements serve as a poetry of gestures. A recent piece at Museum of Human Achievement exemplifies: suspended from a two-by-four, an inverted lawn chair and an umbrella of dry leaves dangle in absurd and counter-intuitive equilibrium. Each Carey installation is unique to its surroundings, riffing off the given architecture and the particularities of place. We are excited to see what Carey does with Northern-Southern’s front gallery.
Likewise, Virginia Fleck has free reign over the back gallery. Fleck is known for ebullient plastic bag mandalas and glittering installations of aluminum can tabs. She uses post-consumer materials as media of joyful defiance, unearthing the hidden beauty of disposable items that continually pass through our hands. Most recently at The Femme Abstract exhibition at EAST 2018, she showed a master-work: a cascade of hundreds of thousands of linked aluminum can tabs.
The ready-made is a tradition at least a century old. In recent decades the medium has matured into one open with possibility and edged with relevance. Human-made debris is the omnipresent material of our times. Fleck and Carey operate in a cultural sphere where re-use as art is no longer a novelty. Freed from shock, they arrange with nuance: Koi ponds of junk.
