Kirk Hayes
New Paintings
Kirk Hayes is a trickster. He is an artist whose work appears to be a slapdash collage of torn paper, tape, wood and metal. Or so the eye tells you. In reality, the work is the product of oil paint, applied with incredible skill, to look exactly like something it is not. The images Hayes paints assault your senses by their bold, dark humor.
Michael Roch
Cumulous
In Cumulus the latest exhibition of work by Michael Roch, the artist captures grand themes in quiet and subtle painting and sculpture. The ambiguous cloud formations suggest to him shapes which he adeptly translates into paintings and sculptures of animals and plant life tossed into humanist iconography. A rabbit is laureled like an athlete. Black flowers bloom under a nubbly, curtain-like overhang. A wasp bucks in a C-shape over a crown. To achieve the tactile and soft surfaces Roch trowels, in-lays and sprays colored joint compound directly onto drywall. Michael Roch lives and works in Marfa, TX.
PROJECT ROOM
Adrian Esparza
Who Knew
The Conduit Gallery Project Room will feature Who Knew an installation of wall drawings and figurative ceramic works by El Paso artist Adrian Esparza. Esparza will transform the intimate gallery into a surreal garden inhabited by crossbred ceramic figures taken from decorative molds, deconstructed while in the green ware state and reassembled into curious and lively characters.
Adrian Esparza's work was featured in both the Dallas Museum of Art's Come Forward exhibition of emerging Texas artists as well as Texas Trialouges at Blue Star Art Space in San Antonio.