constant escape
Adrian Aguilera + Betelhem Makonnen + Tammie Rubin
George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural and Genealogy Center
March 7, 2019 - July 27, 2019

Constant escape is uneasy. It demands the blinking intermittence, the radical flight, of a certain experience of constraint that will have been best understood as sustained, unflinching fantasy, as a look through or away, listening to and playing over, under. Perhaps constant escape is that which is what we mean when we say freedom.
– Fred Moten

constant escape brings together a range of work by three Austin-based visual artists for a fascinating and intriguing exhibition. These three artists could be regarded as each coming from a different social background and embodying a distinctive cultural identity. Yet, Adrian Aguilera, Betelhem Makonnen and Tammie Rubin prompt us to look at and appreciate their practices for what they are – the works of three individual practitioners who actively reject the imposition of cultural and societal labels, expectations, and boxes. Within their respective practices, we can never be absolutely certain that we fully understand what has captured our gaze – fixed meanings with stable and settled readings elude us.

Each artist creates installations that respond to the formal, architectural and perhaps more than anything, the cultural dimensions of the gallery space. Of course, what the artists ultimately bring to us is an insistent challenging of the materials they each use, a constant interrogation – how they can be used and what they might signify. It is this playful, yet determined and penetrating questioning, that makes constant escape such an engaging undertaking.

Aguilera, Makonnen and Rubin delight in undermining the very idea of easy legibility of their respective practices. Their work always begins with, and leaves us with, the question, “What are we looking at?” But this experience does not stop when we as viewers exit the gallery. Nor should it. constant escape clearly communicates that we would do well, or do better, to set aside all the constraining signifiers of personhood on which our society thrives and relies.

Eddie Chambers, Ph.D., Professor of Art History
University of Texas at Austin

Founding members of the Austin based Black Mountain Project Adrian Aguilera, Betelhem Makonnen, and Tammie Rubin will debut a new body of work in sculpture, photography, text, and video, at the George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural and Genealogy Center from March 7, 2019 - July 27, 2019. This collaborative exhibition, constant escape, provides a sensory prescription for resisting absolute definitions of culture and identity. The concept for this exhibition is inspired by text from Fred Moten’s, Black and Blur (Duke University Press, 2017).

Artwork
Adrian Aguilera, Betelhem Makonnen, Tammie Rubin
mountains / islands / peaks, 2019
3-channel video

untited (...transparency thru opacity...), 2019
carving paper
30 in x 20 in each, polyptych of 3
1/49

untitled (+500 years in américa 01, 02, 03), 2019
vinyl mounted on acrylic
48 in x 30 in
1/5

untitled (here and there), 2019
rock wrappings, transparency film, image
36 in x 36 in x 8 in

Press
https://glasstire.com
https://sightlinesmag.org
https://artinamericamagazine.com
https://austinchronicle.com
https://fuseboxfestival.com