Member Preview Hour Lovie Olivia and David Costanza Studio

Lawndale Members are invited to the special Preview Hour of Lovie Olivia’s Tuft & Facet in Cecily E. Horton Gallery and David Costanza Studio’s TipTap in Mary E. Bawden Sculpture Garden. Members are invited to bring a friend, preview exhibitions before the crowds, and mix and mingle over wine and light bites provided by Houston Dairymaids.

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Lovie Olivia
Tuft and Facet
Cecily E. Horton Gallery
September 28 – November 11, 2018

Tuft and Facet is a bright, bold and immersive display that aims to criticise, survey, comment on and celebrate the diverse southern-queer-community. It is race, gender, sexual identity, and material in concert.

Tuft and Facet urges to be an engaging experience that takes cultural cues from black, queer, domestic aesthetics and notions of place. Imbued with southern flair and flamboyance, this installation wishes to evoke a visually nostalgic swaddle for some; a warm sense of jubilee for others. I aim to realize this offering with my use of materials, color and space, while confronting artistic and socio-political traditions. Carefully investigating intersectionality and utilizing my personal visual vocabulary, consistent with my practice, I set out to showcase paintings in the form of ‘neo’ frescos and sculptures molded from plaster and found objects. These paintings and sculptures take up space in a unique fashion — assembled in fractal pieces that span the gallery forming whole works and occupying interesting positions on walls, floors, and ceilings.

Both terms Tuft and Facet are borrowed from design history with origins in domestic and textile industries. In the decorative arts, Tuft is a collection of marks or tentacles clumped together in harmony and Facet essentially translates to many sides, angles and characteristics of something. I approach these concepts of beauty with intentions to broaden the reach of cultural exchange among conflicting communities. I employ these terms as devices to visually and conceptually express the knotty, elaborate variations of identities that can simultaneously exist while also offering a nod to my hybridized material process and techniques. I wish to highlight the multidimensionality of life at the margins.

Lovie Olivia
Beauty, body, archaeology, history, and intersectionality are recurring themes to my ongoing multidisciplinary practice. My paintings, prints, and installations reflect my interests in complex identities, cultural anthropology and social exchange through unusual techniques. I employ a personally modified process of fresco (including digital fresco) that shortens the drying time, experiments with abstraction and incorporates my own visual language while exploring themes of race, gender power and value.
Painstakingly, I manipulate layers of information including cast and troweled plaster interrupted with pigmented veneers, marks and monoprints that merge the worlds of painting, printmaking and sculpture. These multi-dimensional works embody subsequential strata of marks and data through a seductive queering of plaster and other materials. This marriage of archaic and modern materiality are designed to honor the zeal of painting, celebrate the decorative and utilize the art of excavation while carefully addressing human histories, specifically the lives of ‘women of color.’

David Costanza Studio (DCS)
TipTap
Mary E. Bawden Sculpture Garden
September 28 – November 11, 2018

TipTap is an interactive urban object in the Mary E. Bawden Sculpture Garden seeks to bring together the diverse social and cultural bodies in Houston through coordinated play and draws upon the studio’s existing research project, TipTap. TipTap is half hammock/half see-saw, and its alternating motion is controlled through the occupation of its woven surfaces. The structure is produced using 3D printed nodes that define the angles and geometry of fiberglass tubes (similar to PVC pipe). The nodes serve as molds for a thin layer of resin-infused textile, making the plastic nodes structural. After the entire object is adhered with epoxy resin, its top and bottom surfaces are woven with twisted ½” polypropylene rope to construct a soft interface, producing a playful, energetic, woven urban object.

David Costanza Studio (DCS) is a multi-disciplinary design studio in Houston which operates at a range of scales from furniture to landscape to building projects. David Costanza is the director and lead designer of DCS as well as Technology Fellow at the Rice University School of Architecture. Through practice and teaching, his focus is establishing a dialog between the computational tools used in design, digital tools used in manufacturing, and the emergence of advanced building materials. David Costanza is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received both a Master of Architecture and a Master of Science in Architecture.