“In 1986 I moved to austin after screwing around for 5 years studying music, literature, photography, and art history in 5 different institutions of higher learning. When I got here I decided it was time to hunker down and focus on an undergrad degree in art history. I quit producing work and hit the books for a couple of years. After I received a BFA in 1988, I went back to the studio and began paying attention to the artists in my community. Some were professors, some TAs and gallerists, and others were fellow students and artists connected with the music scene. It was only then that I realized how important these artists were to my own education, and to the vibe of the larger scene in Austin, and later, to the rest of the world. These people were my direct influences in 1988, when I was learning what it meant to be an artist, and I have thought about many of them continuously.

When the guys at Domy Books and Okay Mountain asked me to put a show together I started thinking about the relationships between my formative years and the importance of these two spaces in particular, and the rise of artist-run, DIY public exhibition spaces in general. In 1988 it was not so common for a young artist in austin to organize a public exhibition. It was not so common for an artist to think about their relationship to, and their purpose within a larger society.

My interest in this exhibition is to publicly celebrate these amazing people that I learned from, to provide a small glimpse into some of the ideas that were floating around 22 years ago, and to see what they are up to now. I’m also interested to look at our current situation through the lens of 1988 in Austin, Texas to see how we’ve developed as a visual culture. What we’ve learned and what we’ve lost and where we need to go.”

– Andy Coolquitt

Ruth van Beek collects random snapshots, slides and family albums and cuts pictures from newspapers and old books. Together these collected images form an archive in which pictures are arranged in constantly changing ways. Sometimes based on their subject matter, other times based on material, appearance, story or even coincidence.

Van Beek treats the photos she collects as objects. She cuts open the once treasured pictures and rearranges them. By matching photos in actual size and connecting similar elements in different pictures she lets the form, scale and colour interplay. The resulting image is a credible picture of something that never existed. The contradiction between “around the home” activities and news from the harsh and exciting outside world is an important theme in her collages. Plane crashes, disasters, paradise landscapes, ancient civilizations, archeology, weird objects, hunters, explosions, come together with flower arranging, birthday parties, gardening and furniture.

Together with the chaos of the archive, these contradictions symbolize the transformation of the old world as it appeared to us in travel books, encyclopedia and newspapers in the new representation of the world as it comes to us via the never ending chaos of the internet.