Stilled Chimeras

One Night Event: Saturday, May 12, 2018 / 216 N Edgewood St, Houston, TX 77011

Featuring the work of Margaux Crump  
Hosted by Andrew Grizzle, Patron of the Arts
Special Stilled Chimera inspired cocktail by artist Maggie Nemetz

Inspired by the impossible still life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, Stilled Chimeras are botanical, animal, and sometimes fungal assemblages that display impermanent fantasies. They exist suspended as knowingly fraught attempts to capture and preserve the smallest moments in time, struggling to maintain their fluctuating potential as if at any point they will break the tension of their stillness to grow, die, and decay.

Each Stilled Chimera is a network of discrete beings teeming, writhing, and blossoming within the assemblage and interacting in harmony, contention, seduction, and other natural states. Yet when you step back, the pieces become a distinct being in and of itself. Like the human body — which possesses its own identity yet is comprised of countless microorganisms — the pieces maintain their status as distinct entities within the system of the Stilled Chimera.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Margaux Crump explores the slippery relationship between power and the body— specifically how it manifests in language, taxonomy, and intimacy. With Stilled Chimera, she combines her sculptural and photographic work to create a series that is at once cultural and natural, human and animal, masculine and feminine. Margaux is completely fascinated by the desire to hunt for things: to collect, to preserve, to own. Her work reveals moments where binaries dissolve and we catch glimpses of ourselves in the other. Stilled Chimera is her latest exploration of a more complex spectrum of experience that is organized not by “either/or,” but by “and.” 

Margaux Crump is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant Award. This grant is funded by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.