I Came to See You
McClain Gallery, Houston, TX
29 June - 17 August 2024
McClain Gallery is pleased to announce a group exhibition for summer 2024 featuring the work of Anne Deleporte, Mark Francis, Bradley Kerl, Bruna Massadas, Preetika Rajgariah, Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin, and Salle Werner Vaughn. Focusing on portraiture as an expansive field, I Came to See You bends the idea to include works where the sitter’s face is not visible, the shadow of the artist’s body is the figure that becomes a mirror for the viewer, or where a body at rest, bliss, or holding the mantle of unrequested legacies is the thin line between subjectivity and object. Broaching topics such as Freudian lapses, surrealist symbolism, inherited societal mantles, finding the self through fabricated personae, and seeing oneself represented, the grouped artists draw a picture of what portraiture can do today through painting, photography, found photographs, collage, and other media.
Anne Deleporte (b. 1960, Corsica, France) is a New York- and Paris-based multimedia artist who has always been fascinated with the phenomena of disappearance. True to Deleporte’s signature practice of covering up to reveal, her work engages themes of identity and enigma. Using her collection of maimed photographs, cut out for the laminated identification cards of a prominent Parisian art museum, Deleporte’s ID Stacks ultimately allow the viewer to collapse a plethora of first person stories into a small bust-like object. What were originally photomaton portraits turn into a fun-house, warping hole where a face should be. Deleporte also directly addresses Sigmund Freud in her large scale photographic self-portrait also on view; shot from behind a red cloth, the artist’s face is barely recognizable yet her presence unmistakeable.
Mark Francis (b.1982, New Orleans, Louisiana) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Houston, Texas. His work often addresses his own experience as a Black man, depicting his peers and himself in situations of vulnerability and humanity. Francis lays bare the preconceptions that surround Black men of his age. While intent on depicting joy through color and intimate renditions of his friend’s laughter, Francis also acknowledges the impact of racial a priori on his own mental health. Francis’ practice would not be his own without a playful and ever-evolving technical experimentation using drawing, collage, and painting.
Bradley Kerl (b. 1986, Beaumont, Texas) is a painter based in Houston, Texas. Kerl’s practice investigates methods of framing subjects through the medium and history of painting. Using an iterative approach, and often broadening his scope to the use of common occurrences - his own pocket supercomputer, the art classroom’s still-life, his children’s drawings, a sunset - Kerl’s paintings are a call and response of completely banal yet totally transcendent everyday moments. The paintings in this show, which depict bodies rather than faces, each shift the picture’s surface: one a traditional shadow-selfie on a flat, grassy walk, the other a glimpse of the artist on a pristine cafe door against a busy street. We see the artist move through his day, maybe a tourist, capturing the scenes that will later become paintings, and we see the process of selection and drafting that precedes the play of color and composition on the canvas. In his painting we come to see the artist at work through his portraits in action.
Bruna Massadas (b. 1985, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a painter based in Bozeman, Montana. Massadas approaches painting with a philosopher’s eye. Her transcendent landscapes, bursting with color, are as isolating as they are sublime. Massadas’ portraits depict elements of the self, like the make-up someone prepares with but without the body underneath it. Parts of the body melt away as she focuses on garish face paint and imagined personalities. The faces are mask-like yet the outward-facing persona takes on a life of its own. Like Freud’s multi-layered philosophy of the self, Massadas paints the multiple versions of the sitter in one image - she captures the shell that is projected to others along with the complex and self-conscious individual. She says, “if you removed [...] the body and all that was left was just the performance of the self, [these portraits are] what you would see.”
Preetika Rajgariah (b. 1985, New Delhi, India) lives and works in Houston, Texas. Rajgariah is known for her paintings using yoga mats as supports. Past bodies of work include performance; her paintings belie a long-standing interest in embodied experiences and finding meaning in the space of the self. Rajgariah’s paintings are often self-portraits replicating famous scenes from Bollywood. The artist poses her own body, sometimes standing in for multiple characters, significant for carrying her through a cultural upbringing emblematic of her native India. Using a method of painting and collaging heirloom saris, given to her by her mother and various aunties, Rajgariah made Empty yourself and let the universe fill you, a cut out and oversized double portrait. The two nude figures, pressed against each other front to back, have expressions of ecstasy that only a romantic embrace can elicit. The overlaying of herself onto momentous cultural moments automatically queers the image via the intimacy between two representations of women and the artist’s queer identity. In so doing, Rajgariah asserts and claims a place for herself in a culture that often denied her a sense of inclusion while growing up.
Nick Vaughan (b. 1983, Fort Collins, Colorado) and Jake Margolin (b. 1980, Berkeley, California) are Houston-based interdisciplinary artists. A married couple as well as an artistic collaborative, their life’s work is an ongoing series of fifty installations made in response to little-known queer histories from each state. Vaughan and Margolin’s practice extends to their own autobiographies and their navigation of the mantle of marriage - until 2015 a heteronormative institution. Their oval self-portraits are reminiscent of targets or modern day wanted posters, while each gradually combines Jake and Nick’s shadowy mugs. The dissolution of selfhood into the Couple that often bathes brides and grooms is targeted: marriage is an association, an alliance, but it’s often illustrated with such binding and weighty language as “ball and chain” - a negative and pervasive idea that many queer people cannot relate to. The oval form also recalls the tradition of family portraiture, passed down through generations. The gesture is a keen nod to family structures and the ways in which gayness can insert itself into them.
Salle Werner Vaughn (b. 1939, Tyler, Texas) is a Houston icon and surrealist painter whose work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Vaughn is known for having converted several historical Houston bungalows into an immersive and magical installation called Harmonium. Her painting from the late 1960s is a ghastly yet striking portrait. Upon first glance the viewer might not see the figure, but as one continues to look, a ghostlike face with pointed ears, a skeletal smile, and piercing eyes with enlarged irises emerges as though through fog. The painting’s title, Promise, alludes to a guaranteed eternal life offered through faith in religious doctrines. This portrait seems to question whether eternal life is heavenly or haunting the earthly realm – or a union of both. An alternate title of the painting is The Politician’s Promise; here the artist makes obvious her observation of the world. She says: “I was born in East Texas the day that Hitler invaded Poland. I've been aware of conflict all my life with Korea, Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis, Afghanistan... I think that all of this has motivated my work and I have the hope of bringing a space for peaceful contemplation.” Vaughn asks us to examine what is real, what illusory, and to find the overlaps where both are true.