MARFA — Wrong Gallery is pleased to present The Crack-Up featuring new paintings and video by artist Joey Fauerso, which continue the artist’s interest in the intersections between painting and performance. There will be an opening Thursday, October 10, 5 to 7 p.m., at 110 N Highland Avenue in Marfa. Everyone is welcome.
The work in this exhibition ties into the artist’s current solo show at David Shelton Gallery in Houston titled Bedroom Paintings. Both exhibitions use the framework of the bed as a place to explore the history of painting as well as the collective unrest of our cultural and political moment.
The Crack-Up presents an ambitious series of paintings taking the form of pillows — a deconstructed salon of imagery that pulls from art history and Fauerso’s own life. The paintings are activated through performances of the artist and friends as they toss and turn, rest and ruminate, amongst the pillows. The exhibition and single channel video take their name from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 essay “The Crack-Up,” which became a major influence for Gilles Deleuze’s seminal text The Logic of Sense.
An interdisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, installation, video and performance, Fauerso’s subject matter is both personal and political, and centers on family, gender, humor, figuration and representation. Many of her projects use humor and performance to subvert and challenge traditions within Western art.
Fauerso is interested in an expanded definition of painting and has developed a unique subtractive painterly process. She applies paint over an entire surface, and then scrapes it off using various kitchen spatulas, clay tools and silkscreen squeegees. The paintings, often made on the ground, present as two-dimensional carvings and indexical records of the textures of the artist’s studio floor.
Fauerso, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in the Fine Arts, creates works that include painting, video, installation and performance. Her work has recently been exhibited at the David Shelton Gallery, Western Exhibitions, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Drawing Center in New York, and New Mexico State University Art Museum. Fauerso has been the recipient of multiple grants and residencies, including a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Joan Mitchell Grant for Painters and Sculptors, a 2021 Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, the Open Sessions residency at The Drawing Center in New York, the Golden Foundation Grant, Dallas Museum of Art Kimberough Grant, the RAIR artist in residence grant, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Fauerso is a Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University, and lives with her family in San Antonio.