June 13 - July 18, 2009


opening reception for the artists:
Saturday, June 13, 2009  5:30 - 8:30pm

Rex Ray
New Works

Rex Ray is one of San Francisco’s most accomplished and prolific visual artists. Known to traverse both the design and art worlds, Ray’s art can be found in museums and galleries as well as rock clubs and on Swatch watches. Paper pieces, cut from fashion magazines and hand painted, are assembled by Ray to create brightly colored collages that range from delicate botanicals to ebullient constellations and modernist sequences.

Rex Ray Art + Design, a monograph of the work of Rex Ray, was published by Chronicle Books in November of 2007.
In March of 2009, Rex Ray opened his first solo museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver.

Other recent exhibitions include; The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; The Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, CA; The Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, CA; The San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Rule Gallery, Denver, CO and Broadbend Gallery, London, England.

Ray’s design work includes; line of rugs with Elson & Company; a limited edition Artist Series Messenger Bag for Timbuk2; a signature gentlemen’s Swatch; CD packaging for David Bowie, Joe Satriani, Matmos, Deee-Lite and has worked with Bill Graham Presents in over 100 tour posters.

left: Rex Ray,  Alecetoria, 2009, oil, acrylic & mixed media collge on linen, 76x65"
left: Rex Ray,  Menegodium, 2009, oil, acrylic & mixed media collge on linen, 76x68"

Heyd Fontenot
Get Your Wood On

Heyd Fontenot occupies a world of cultivated friendships and cooperation. His delicate and fey drawings and paintings render the likenesses of friends and acquaintances in the tight-nit Austin art world which he inhabits. Yet while his nude subjects frolic happily across his wood panels and stark white paper, there is a sense of the diabolic in the work.  Not only does the exhibition title Get Your Wood On imply the wood panels that Fontenot paints on but it also addresses the uneasy titillations which our culture associates with the nude. 

Heyd Fontenot was born in 1964 in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He has lived and worked in Austin, Texas since 1989. This will be Fontenot’s first solo exhibition at Conduit Gallery as a represented artist, though he is a well known Texas artist showing recently in such venues as Art Palace, Austin, TX; Inman Gallery, Houston, TX and Mulcahy Modern, Dallas, TX. In 2007, he was a resident at the Pouch Cove Foundation in Newfoundland, Canada and in the same year was awarded Dallas Museum of Art’s Dozier Travel Grant.

left: Heyd Fontenot, Wendy & Manny, Dave & Ellen, with Three Others, 2009,
           oil on panel, 48x48"
right: Heyd Fontenot, Michelle (Dallas) decorated with red dots, 2009, ink on paper, 12x9"

PROJECT ROOM

Alejandro Diaz

Alejandro Diaz uses language and wit to explore the cultural stereotypes that pervade his Mexican heritage as well as his experiences as a contemporary artist. His neon signs (Make Tacos Not War, Wetback By Popular Demand, Wanabes Welcomed!) illustrate an artist attuned to sweet and hilarious camp that magnifies socio-political conventions ripe for discussion.  

Born in San Antonio, Texas, Alejandro Diaz earned an MA from Center for Curatorial Studies from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York in 1999 and a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1987.

Diaz was featured in the 2009 Volta NY show and currently has a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. 
He is also currently included in Seriously Funny, a group exhibition at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ.

Additional exhibitions since 2000 include, the seminal Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2008); ArtPace, San Antonio, TX (2006); the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL (2008); Surge – 798, Dashanzi Art Festival, Beijing, China (2007); a public project with the Public Art Fund, New York, NY (2005); Galeria O-Itatti, Mexico City, Mexico (2005) and I (Heart) CUBA, Eighth Havana Biennial, Havana, Cuba.   

image: Alejandro Diaz, Happiness, 2008, neon, size variable, editon 5