Rachael Starbuck & Michael Muelhaupt

— meantime —

and
— on going on —

with
Ben Heyer
Erin Miller
Evan McGraw
Katie Bullock

Rachael Starbuck & Michael Muelhaupt return to Austin and Northern-Southern for a collaborative show of space and sculpture: meantime.

Opening Reception: Sunday, October 20, 5–8pm

Visiting Hours: Thursday–Sunday, 2-6pm until November 10.

Gathering materials from what they find around them, Starbuck & Muelhaupt transfigure objects to fit rhythmic lives. Their media includes the space and the air of the gallery, which they choreograph into currents with sets of household fans. Their art is porous, it seeps and breathes into our everyday world. They sculpt responsive bodies, containers alternately emptied and filled.

Accompanying meantime is a group show, on going on. Work by Ben Heyer, Erin Miller, Evan McGraw, and Katie Bullock. A collection of visual expanses and images like air and breath made by a group of artists that share an almost compulsive process, repetition/rituals. Selected and organized by Rachael Starbuck and Michael Muelhaupt, and Phillip Niemeyer, on going on shares space with meantime, as a beach is the sharing of land and sea.

Rachael Starbuck‘s work imagines touch and its absence. Ceramic pots bulge like bags with soil. Brass rods lithely support the stems of living plants. The plants, nurtured by Starbuck, are descended from cuttings from her childhood home in Florida. Hand-sized and pit-fired ceramic “handholds” echo the feel of Starbuck’s holding hands as if they were yours.

Michael Muelhaupt sculptures are functional furniture. With some, he Frankensteins surplus furniture parts into witty pastiches, like a ’00s Droog designer. Other pieces lovingly tease modernism, upholstering pirated classics with white socks or Starbuck’s father’s old leather belts. Gentle startles, the sculptures are comfortable in unexpected ways.

Jesse Cline‘s sculptures are puzzles as formal meditations. Tactile, oblique, and hypnotic, the pieces are answers without questions.

FITTING is Texas late-Covid, an earth-toned punk. Subversive by being kind, gentle, crafted, warm, life-scale. Their hands make homes.

read more:
Fitting: three zines, one by each artist [pdf]

“Sit and Stay Awhile” by Lauren Moya Ford for Glasstire

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Photos by Alex Boeschenstein: