ROUNDS
In 2017, artist and curator Ryan Hawk invited artists Michael Muelhaupt and Rachael Starbuck to become Cage Match’s first installment in its series of public art installations. Since the opening of ROUND ONE in February 2017, the Cage Match Project identified “Rounds” as a term to present future exhibitions.
ROUND ONE by Michael Muelhaupt and Rachael Starbuck
February 17 – March 31
For the projects’ first installment, ROUND ONE, artists Michael Muelhaupt and Rachael Starbuck addressed the cage as a metaphor for the porous body. Inspired by the permeability of the structure’s form, the artists employed specific materials such as translucent plastic, cast paint, and raw clay to soften the rigid structure of the cage, ultimately complicating the boundary between interior and exterior space.
Rachael Starbuck is an artist, educator and arts organizer born and raised in Miami, FL; currently living in Austin, TX. In her practice Starbuck navigates how we make and maintain connections––negotiating touch, desire, intimacy and communication across distance. She makes fluid fleeting objects that are sensitive to their environment and live in the space between distance and proximity.
Michael Jay Muelhaupt is an artist whose work has taken many forms, ranging from large installations, sculptural objects, video, and most recently functional furniture. His furniture is constructed from discrete parts: materials found on the curb, belts from his partner’s late father, craigslist purchases, his old clothes, pieces of other furniture, and various other objects.
Round 2, Suspension of Belief by Michael Anthony García
April 21 – June 9
Michael Anthony García’s Suspension of Belief explored themes of displacement, immigration, and migration. Multidisciplinary artist & independent curator Michael Anthony García, claiming both Mexican and US citizenship, is based in Austin, Texas and predominantly focuses his practice around photography/video, sculpture/installation and performance. He is a founding member of Los Outsiders curatorial collective and have curated large-scale exhibitions of international artists, in and out of the US. Notably, he has had solo curatorial projects for Mexic-Arte Museum, Texas State University Galleries, the gallery at the Austin Central Public Library and Fusebox Festival. He participated in the 2011 Texas Biennial and has won awards both for his curatorial and three-dimensional work. He co-hosts an intersectional conversation podcast named El Puente and is publisher for POCa Madre Magazine. García has premiered work for The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art Biennale in Houston, The Contemporary Austin, Soundspace at The Blanton Museum of Art, El Museo de la Ciudad de México, and ThreeWalls in Chicago.
The ideas presented in this work represent multiple, entwined themes common to many Latino migrant worker experiences, particularly those of female immigrants. Be it through human trafficking, or abuse at the hands of other migrants or employers, they are taken advantage of, often with small children in tow. These sacrifices are made just to have a chance to create a better life for their families.
They are asked to take leaps of faith, suspend their belief, and their worth for a chance at a better future. The title “suspension” is also used here in its scientific sense: a mixture in which particles are dispersed throughout the bulk of a fluid. Women are transformed anonymous molecules, asked to dilute their beings to become a part of something larger, to lose their characteristics, their language and sadly too often others’ respect for their bodies.
Round 3, Help Earth Rover Get Unstuck by Rachel Stuckey and Jesse Cline
July 28, 2017 – August 31, 2017
Help Earth Rover Get Unstuck is an emotionally stuck AI looking for validation and attention online and IRL. The project crowdsources help and advice from visitors through a clunky analog “forum” and a Twitter-activated selfie station. Visitors can interact with Earth Rover’s Ansible (selfie station/surveillance module) by triggering the camera module. Camera is activated by pressing a button or by tweeting #helpearthrover. Earth Rover posts recorded images with auto-generated commentary about identified lifeforms, the weather, or existential musings using the Twitter handle @HelpEarthRover. https://rachelstuckey.net/earthrover.html
I started re-doing missions I finished early on . . . I’m stuck in a hidden lobby, how can I leave? Every time I reboot and scan my memory unit for the correct pathway . . I reach the same impasse. The mission won’t let me go to sleep or leave the house . . . I can’t click on the mirror. If I’m truly glitched in, is there a way to go back and reload a previous save? The way I’m stuck, I can’t even kill myself, and loading the last save was three cycles ago. Thanks.
I’ve gotten stuck many times, and fast travel is the only way out . . . I went to the past, but now I am stuck here. Help me purchase fast travel, please! The solar panels are not recharging at all (no they’re not overheated, yes there is sunlight). Is this supposed to happen or is there something I’m doing wrong?
I am a lone, severed unit of a huge, electronic brain. The window I previously went through is closed. I’m about halfway through the geothermal valley — I’m not starting it again . . . I had to take a long phone call and when I came back I completely forgot how I got in. The ansible is only accessible from the exterior panel . . . attempting to communicate with the local fauna . . . Call home for me? Thanks. . . . If it matters, I also found the three potion elements just before this – but don’t see the cauldron to put them in. Does this have anything to do with it? Please help!!!
Rachel Stuckey is an artist, media arts project consultant, and nonprofit professional in Austin, TX. As an artist she investigates historical and contemporary enthusiasm, confusion, and mystical lore about computers and life online. She creates performative videos and interactive environments, hybridizing New Ageism with technophilia and pop culture. Stuckey has attended residencies at Belgrade Art Studio, Vermont Studio Center, Laboratory, Signal Culture, and the Media Archaeology Lab. Her work has shown at The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale online, Partial Shade and Hyperreal Film Club in Austin, Moonmist in Houston, Drkmttr in Nashville, aCinema in Milwaukee, Other Cinema in San Francisco, Film Forum and Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, daswerk in Vienna, Slovenski Filmski Center in Ljubljana, and elsewhere.
Jesse Cline is a visual designer, digital artist, and educator interested in contemporary systems of representation and production, as well as the appropriation and diversion of those systems. How do people use language and signifiers to define themselves? How do these systems overlay and augment meaning? Cline received a BS in Electronic Media, Art and Communication from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a MFA in Design from the University of Texas at Austin. @superpattern
Round 4, Work In Progress by the collective FLEET
September 9 – October 29
FLEET is an artist collective of six members; Michael Colaianni, Haley Hill, Brooke Johnson, Emily Lee, Tín Rodriguez, and Connor Walden. Their collaborative work centers around reactions to changing physical and conceptual environments, as well as responses to the current political climate that are performed through a lens of absurdity.
Michael Colaianni @michaelcolaianni
Haley Hill is a Texas-based food, beverage, and product photographer
Brooke Johnson is an artist whose work has been featured in numerous key galleries and museums such as Visual Arts Center, University of Texas at Austin. Johnson has been featured in articles for Glasstire and Art Daily. In 2019, Johnson received an Artist Award by Dallas Museum of Art.
Emily Lee (b.1996, Beaumont, TX) is an installation-based artist living in Texas whose output includes a wide range of media and processes including sculpture, image-making, video, object theater, communal events, and critical writing. Their works are site-specific installations of multiple parts. These parts––an aluminum cast of a circle drawn in sand, a space heater, a kodak photograph Lee shot at age seven, segments of a broken jade bracelet, to name a few–are used and then re-used in other installations, creating a multimedia vocabulary of parts. This repetition allows Lee to investigate the site itself and the habit of meaning-making through objects.
Connor Walden was Raised with a twin brother in a conservative Christian suburb of Dallas, Connor Walden is an artist currently in Los Angeles. After spending his formative years as an adult in the liberal secular cities of Austin and Seattle, Connor finds himself in a state of ambivalence, holding a complex of feelings, ideologies, and communities. In order to continue this dialectic move, Connor’s studio becomes a playground to feel around for common threads and pokey stitches. His current body of work investigates the relationship between steel and yarn, two materials he learned to work with from his grandfather and grandmother, respectively. Playfully and intuitively made, the works explore the tension and relationship between hard and soft, heavy and light, tough and tender—while also confronting the gendered context of material to parallel his own identity formation.
Connor has exhibited throughout the US, including Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles. He is in collections in California, Washington, and Texas.
Tín Rodriguez is an artist whose work has been featured at the Visual Arts Center, University of Texas.
Round 5, Deadfall by Sterling Allen
November 11 – January 15th
Sterling Allen holds a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College. He is a co-founder of Okay Mountain, a collective and former gallery based in Austin, Texas. He has exhibited, organized, and completed projects at venues throughout the United States and received several residencies including the Artpace International Artist-In-Residence Program in San Antonio, TX and a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE.
Allen has exhibited at numerous venues, including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and VOLTA NY. He has been twice nominated for an Art Matters Grant and was recently awarded a Rauschenberg Foundation Residency. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art. Sterling lives and works in Austin, TX, and is currently an Associate Professor at Texas State University.
