100 WEST - 12:00 - 4:00 pm | 100 W. 3rd Ave.
Cara Despain - second-floor studio
Soren Hope - third-floor studio
STOREFRONT - 3:30 - 4:00 pm | 203 N. Commerce St. (two blocks from 100W)
Chris Townsend reads and discusses recent writing
ANTEROOM - 12:00 - 4:00 pm | 411 N. Beaton St. (across the street from 100W)
Exemplary - Work by Doug MacWithey Pre-Corsicana from the collections of Charles Dee Mitchell, David Searcy and Ben Fountain, curated by Temple Shipley
CARA DESPAIN
Miami, Florida / Salt Lake City, Utah – 2nd Floor Studio
Cara Despain is an artist working in film and video, sound, sculpture, photography and installation and addressing issues of land use/ownership, climate change, and visualizing the Anthropocene. She tackles the persistent problematic dimensions of frontierism and their impacts on eco- and social systems. She holds a BFA from the University of Utah. She has received numerous awards, including a Harpo Foundation Award and the South Florida Consortium Fellowship. In 2021 she completed her first permanent public art commission for the Underline with Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places. Recent solo exhibitions include “Specter New Mexico” at the New Mexico State University Art Museum in Las Cruces, New Mexico; “Specter” at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, Florida; and “In Memoriam: Carbon Paintings” at the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah. Her work is in public and private collections and has been featured in numerous publications including The Guardian and The Art Newspaper.
During her time at 100W, Cara has continued her dystopic carbon painting series, using debris collected from Colorado’s Cameron Peak Fire (2020) and California’s Dixie Fire (2021). Graphite drawings render mirrored stills from atomic tests. Concurrently, a catalogue of The Mourners exhibition (late-medieval alabaster statues), seen in the home of Corsicana residents, has inspired experiments in staged photography she has undertaken alone at night in the studio. Potentially joined by footage of passing oil trains captured during the residency, these all fall under the umbrella of a requiem for the earth, the climate and ecological systems. caradespain.com
SOREN HOPE
New Haven, Connecticut - 3rd floor studio
Soren Hope paints the body as a site of uncertainty. Themes of swapping, probing, and the fallibility of embodiment play out between figures and within the surface of the paint. In their ongoing body of work, costumes, pranks, double meanings, and incidental resemblances test the trustworthiness of perception. Soren holds a BA in Studio Art from Carleton College and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art. They exhibited their first solo show in 2018 and have shown work with Perrotin, Yve Yang, Spurs, and in Expo Chicago with Eric Firestone Gallery. Soren has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Low Season Artist Projects.
During their residency, Soren has been painting two figures pretending to be one. Scenes of mimicry, pranks, and illusions play out across iterative oil paintings. A second series, primarily of drawings, explores variations on these themes in shifting scales and materials. Translating a physical phrase or body posture across in different rendering modes allows for abstraction through reiteration. Complicating equations of edge and agency, Soren’s figures, rendered with gestural strokes and translucent glazes, avert clear apprehension. Often coming to a numbers game—one or two?—Soren’s paintings invite a complex misrecognition. sorenhope.com
CHRIS TOWNSEND
Antwerp, Belgium / United Kingdom - writing studio
Chris Townsend is a writer and curator specialising in twentieth century and contemporary art. His particular project is establishing relationships between fine art and other forms of culture, notably writing and the moving image. He examines the way in which artists corrode the boundaries between media or use new technologies to extend the analysis of art’s languages and the boundaries of subjective experience within film, photography and performance. Book subjects include Francesca Woodman, Bill Viola and Rachel Whiteread. His scholarly publications concentrate on the European modernist avant-garde’s exploration of intermediality and simultaneity. A Senior Research Fellow of the Henry Moore Institute, he received the H.D. Fellowship in American Literature from the Beinecke Library, Yale University.
While at 100W, Chris has been writing an extended essay musing on artists’ relationship to poetry and performance art with a focus on Nancy Holt’s Buried Poems, which surface questions of encryption and land art’s potential to reframe notions of the American landscape and, by extension, Arcadia. He hopes that this writing and research will lead to a larger project situating cultural revisionism and Western landscape in the vanguard American poetry of the 1970s. royalholloway.academia.edu/ChristopherTownsend
Chris Townsend presents his latest work from 3:30 - 4pm in a newly restored site directly next door to our Storefront at 201 N. Commerce St. Reception to follow.
201 N. Commerce St., next door to our Storefront.
EXEMPLARY
Work by Doug MacWithey Pre-Corsicana from the collections of Charles Dee Mitchell, David Searcy and Ben Fountain, curated by Temple Shipley. Installed across the street from 100 West in Anteroom.
Excerpt from “Nameless,” an essay on Doug MacWithey from David Searcy’s Shame and Wonder (Random House, 2016).
Though the scale of his work was usually rather small, he was inspired by these immense old spaces, loved, as much as anything, the sense of grand necessity [. . .] And although the big ideas that might have needed ten-foot tables never quite got into gear, [. . .] he required, all the more I think, all that expansiveness [. . .] I think such spaces meant to him a kind of endlessness. Historical and physical. Whatever concentrated, pared-away-to-almost-nothing bit of art he did, he wanted to be endless. As if nothingness and endlessness depended on each other. Even some isolated scribble would, in principle, in his heart, belong to an endless series endlessly elucidating endless variations on its faint, essential self.
Twenty years ago, a bearded, hand-painted, ceremonial Goliath-head mask made of papier-maché, unsigned and undated but likely from the late 19th or early 20th century and used for Odd Fellows initiation rituals, surfaced in the orbit of Corsicana and Douglas MacWithey. A “housewarming” gift from Dallas curator (and friend of MacWithey’s) Charles Dee Mitchell, it was the sort of object that would appeal to someone who had recently purchased an historic Odd Fellows lodge—now 100W. After MacWithey’s untimely death in 2010, the mask traveled with his widow, Karan Varma, to Austin. Now it is back, coinciding with a two-part exhibition of MacWithey’s work in Anteroom. Spurred by the mask’s return, three local collectors—Mitchell along with writers Ben Fountain and David Searcy (also both friends of MacWithey’s)—have made possible a two-part, idiosyncratic retrospective of MacWithey’s work.
STOREFRONT
Storefront features published literature and art by the international artists and writers attending studio residencies at 100 West, with recommended books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and plays influencing their work. Books on Texas, translations published by Deep Vellum, children’s books, a rotation of resident art, specialty office supplies, and residency merchandise are also available here. The Storefront hosts book clubs, author readings, book signings, and creative workshops.
All profits from purchases directly support our nonprofit mission to advance new work by an international community of artists and writers with our provision of generous support and historic space in downtown Corsicana. Online purchases at Bookshop.org are an alternative to Amazon and similar platforms for buying books online. Since 2020 Bookshop.org has raised over $33 million for local bookstores and nonprofits like ours.
203 N. Commerce St. Corsicana - two blocks from 100 West.
Open Fridays & Saturdays 10a - 4p.
