Category: Uncategorized

by Reily Wilder

               I walk into the first-floor sculpture room at 11am every day. The week before Texas States student juried show every day I am told to submit my work. The thing is though; I don’t have any work to submit. Four years of creating and learning with nothing to show? Sounds ridiculous. Most things I’ve made have been reused, stripped down, unstuffed, dismantled and thrown away. If you’re a lover of art or an artist yourself (we all are in our own ways) this fact of my art practice might come as a shock. A horrifying waste of time and money even. Though with sculpture, an ephemeral medium, a part of the world as much as we are. There’s freedom to be found for young artists in destroying their art. Creating something that most likely will be destroyed soon after. The medium that bridges between mediums. After throwing away my art year after year. I found Catharsis in the Dumpster. 

                 It was like this day one in the sculpture department.. When I made my first successful piece, a week later I was getting emails asking if it could be thrown away in order for the welders to have sufficient room. I couldn’t keep a plaster cast of guts wrapping an estates sale sign next to my bed. So, off to the dumpster it went.  What of The result of all my hard work? All I had left was amature documentation. I never questioned this pattern or stopped to mourn. I tunnel visioned into my college work. Three years later it clicked when the Spring juried show rolled around once again. An exhibition where students submit work to the TXST art gallery to showcase the student body. Professors in every department encouraged students to engage.. This year I looked around our studio of advanced sculpture students. All being asked to submit work, and none having any. Only one sculpture was submitted out of the whole class. Now wait a minute? I know why I don’t have anything to submit, but why didn’t they? Amazing artists stood around me. I’ve spent years seeing them create and evolve and for what? I had just discovered we were all on the same boat. Asking myself where’s all our sculpture gone? The answers were consistent. Sculptures are very hard to keep inside small apartments. 

                  This conversation was brought up on the opening night of the juried show a week after my own realization. Not a single sculpture made by a sculpture student sat in a room of my fellow young artists. A metal piece here, a ceramic piece there. Both 3D and in the realm of sculpture. Though staying safely in a small scaled, single (or reduced) material range. The one sculpture that had been submitted was not selected for the show. I don’t think the show was poor because of this. Being brought up with no means of bringing others’ works down. This personal thought process is due to my close involvement with the sculpture program. The show was nice and the three-dimensional work that was showcased was among the best ( a metal cast of underwear won best in show). These were individual artists with distinct styles and ranges. Though now when I look at my own work I think of only the dumpster.

                   I sculpt with garbage essentially. Construction material, discarded fabric, found objects, reduced, reused, and recycled. But, eventually also being thrown away for someone else to crush or repurpose. I’ve been sitting on this prick, the dumpster,  the last couple of weeks. Bringing it up in casual conversations with other sculptors. When asking I get knowing scoffs and glances of a shared annoying reality. This isn’t targeted at other art, or a victimization. It’s knowing of the constraints on our physical material, and world views. My non traditional sculpture most lilley will be damaged, discarded, misplaced, and trashed far more than a painting. More than a metal cast,  print, ceramic cup or bowl. I know what those things are. Where they belong. How sad and off kilter it would be to see hundreds of hours worth of a painting at the bottom of a metal dumb. Knowing that it doesn’t belong there. 

                        Often I don’t even know what to call what I make. I’m still young in the early stages of my career. I ask myself  what is sculpture? Where does it land on this standardized scale of understanding what art is? A painting is a painting because it’s a painting. You then can narrow down from there. How do I do this with sculpture? When I can make art out of anything I can find. How can I fit such a variety in a box? I can’t. There’s no box it seems. No set rules in its creation, and on the other hand in its destruction. That is where once again I find myself seeing the dumpster. Making a sculpture for me is being so excited to eat, your first big bite is so good you almost choke. When I have no more room in the back of my car. No galleries to house a large project. I say goodbye. With every buzz of the copper on steel, drill gun whorl I know that I might be making for nothing. Though after accepting the inevitable throw away. I find playfulness in creating. A light freedom of not knowing what could happen. Anything can be realized only restricted in material not space or self.  

      There is a place for a painting on a wall, a palace on a pedestal for shinned metal, places for jewels to hang off fabric, places for video and sound to fill space, and places for a print to sit on a t-shirt. Pushing standardized places is what I love to do, it’s what a lot of artists love to do. Often when boundaries are to be pushed sculpture is a medium that easily breaches these conventions. I see it in so many works around me. When one medium meets another.  All to the painting on the wall. But when the painting starts to create the question “could this be considered a sculpture” my heart spins. And drops. Will the fact of its less-storable nature keep the piece from being “successful”?  On this small scale of things in my college apartment, I found the answer teetering toward yes. 

     I see the dumpster bright as day. Sometimes I wish I’d fallen in love with an artform I got to keep more often than not. Though I do look at the option of the dumpster as an advantage. I’m not afraid to say goodbye and move to my next project. As I roamed this question of the dumpster. A seasoned sculptor told me that inside the sadness of letting go. I had found catharsis. Without ripping out the old stuffing, how could I stuff something new? The money I have to involve myself in my art isn’t enough to have everything be new. That’s why I chose sculpture in the first place. It was the cheapest of the departments to work in. I dove in the dumpster after every school day with my friends. Most of all of our early works were made this way.

          I found my opinion on what sculpture is. Its catharsis. Uncontrollable nature of things. Lovely accepted push and pull. It’s life to me. A medium that holds boundless freedom. A medium that lacks respect and understanding. But doesnt need it. Without sculpture to join art and us on the third realm. We would never breach new art. 

“This is a red flag.” 

That’s what he said to me upon entering my pink bedroom–full of flowers and frills, lace and bows, plushies and dolls. He wouldn’t be the last. Why men feel compelled to offer their opinion on my carefully curated living space (which I adore) is beyond me. I never asked, and yet they offer it anyway–and such a tired judgement at that. Why is my exuberant, unapologetic display of girlhood a ‘red flag’? Often dismissed as vapid or weak, hyperfeminine aesthetics are instead a powerful artistic language in reclaiming and celebrating girlhood, challenging patriarchal views, and reimagining femininity as something worthy of space, depth, and meaning. Women artists use hyperfemininity not as decoration but as defiance. 

Femininity is a disease, a hindrance, a handicap–something meant to be suppressed. At least, that’s what we’re taught. Growing up in the 2000s, the ideal woman was not feminine at all. She had to be beautiful and thin, of course, but also eat pizza, drink beer, and scorn anything “too girly” –the classic “not like other girls” girl. I, like many young women, internalized this rhetoric, equating the feminine with unintelligence and docility–an unfortunate narrative drenched in misogyny. To succeed, we’re told to shed the very feminine traits that society once imposed upon us. We must assimilate, abandon softness, and perform power on masculine terms. But if we as women hate femininity, where does that leave us? 

From Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides

The dismissal of feminine traits translates into the dismissal of feminine-coded media and art. Films, music, fashion, and visual arts associated with girlhood are frequently classified as lowbrow or unserious, not for lack of merit, but rather because the systems that determine cultural value weren’t built to recognize them. Chick flicks, romance novels, and bubblegum pop–media made for women, by women–are often labeled as guilty pleasures, if not outright garbage. Why is softness synonymous with stupidity? Why must women still prove we are worthy of taking up space? No one questions the artistic merit of a gritty war film, but anything centering girlhood must bear the burden of proof. It must earn legitimacy by being more than what it is–more than fun, more than play, more than pink. 

 This double standard has long shaped the reception of female artists who dare to center femininity in their work. Sofia Coppola’s films are criticized for presenting style over substance, despite their visual and emotional depth. Petra Collins’ dreamy, nostalgic photographs are belittled as “Instagram art,” regardless of their lineage in surrealism and feminist portraiture. Georgia O’Keeffe’s floral paintings are reduced to tired sexual innuendos, stripping away their painterly innovation. But these artists are not soft, they’re deliberate, stylized, and self-aware. Hyperfemininity in their hands becomes performative and powerful–art with intention. Whether it be Coppola’s pink haze of melancholia, Collins’ intimate memory, or O’Keeffe’s monumental florals, the feminine is not the weakness but the subject. That alone makes it radical. 

Georgia O’Keeffe, Hibiscus with Plumeria, 1939

It’s not that femininity as a whole is absent from art spaces; in fact, it abounds in representations created by men. Museum halls are no stranger to nude odalisques, seductive Venuses, and tender Madonnas, but these figures are less agents and more aestheticized objects of consumption, whose femininity exists for the pleasure of the viewer, not for themselves. This is femininity for men: silent, sexualized, and stripped of complexity. Beautiful but voiceless, decorative but not disruptive. 

In contrast, artists like Sofia Coppola and Petra Collins offer a deeply psychological and personal portrayal of femininity, based in subjectivity rather than spectacle. Beneath the pastel palettes lie an intimate exploration of the interiority of girlhood. Their work features adolescent girls navigating emotion, isolation, desire, and vulnerability, not sanitized into something palatable for men. It invites the viewer into the feminine world, not to fantasize, but to sit in it and contemplate. By spotlighting women’s lives and experiences, they reject the traditionally ornamental function that femininity is assigned in art. It’s not women to be looked at, it’s women looking back. 

From Petra Collins’ series OMG, I’m Being Killed #2

In a time where reproductive rights are back on the ballots and gender norms are reasserting themselves under the guise of tradition, the hyperfeminine becomes more than just an aesthetic–it becomes a site of resistance. It is not just about accepting femininity but reclaiming it. It’s about elevating sensitivity, emotion, care, and beauty in a culture that deems these traits as liabilities. It’s a refusal to apologize for softness. A refusal to be made small. A rejection of the notion that femininity exists for men at all. 

To those who still believe femininity is frivolous, that softness signals weakness, and beauty cannot carry depth–maybe my girly room is a red flag. Yet the flag doesn’t indicate danger, but defiance. This space, like the art of Coppola, Collins, and O’Keeffe, was not created for the male gaze, but in spite of it. It’s a declaration that femininity is not a flaw to tame and subdue, but instead a powerful lens to explore memory, experience, and meaning. I’ll keep my cherubs, floral still lifes, and princess canopy bed. They can call it naive or too much, but it’s not for them. It’s for me–my rebellion in blush pink.

San Marcos Studio Tour- Mothership Studios/ Jessamyn Plotts

Through the noise, a voice rings clear–in an ensemble of artistic expression, Jessamyn Plotts’ work moves with purpose–strange, sacred, and haunting. Amidst the charming, eclectic mixture of works by local artists and the standard gallery hang, a portal to another realm lay in wait. Tucked between unassuming walls, I found a living room (or rather a dingy basement den), viscera strewn about, and fully equipped with a David Lynch vigil, as any good basement should. Though the Twin Peaks marathon playing on the television enticed me, the space itself, in all its gloriously awful (in the best sense of the word) disarray, captured me. This art experience, created by Jessamyn Plotts with the American Communal Industries artist group, challenges viewers, immersing them in a simultaneously dreamy yet grotesque meditation on the self that resonates as remarkably human. 

Not to say I didn’t enjoy the rest of the exhibition–I certainly did, though some works were more successful than others, perhaps to no fault of the artists involved, but rather a lack of curatorial vision. Overall, the show was pleasant, providing a sample of the many regional professional and amateur artists participating in the tour, from paintings to ceramic sculptures, collage to textiles, metal work, and more. Works of varying styles and subjects were arranged neatly on the walls with no discernible rhyme or reason. While the studio tour as an entity undoubtedly builds connection and community amongst artists, accomplishing Mothership’s mission to “embolden the local arts community,” I couldn’t help but feel something was missing in the group exhibition–a theme. Mothership brandishes the tour’s inclusivity, allowing any willing artist to participate in the annual event, a noble endeavor indeed–providing resources and a voice to aspiring artists–yet disserviced by the absence of an overarching identity. Don’t misunderstand, artistic merit abounds in this preview, but that’s precisely what it is–a teaser, not an exhibition. I found myself searching for wall text or a pamphlet–something, anything–to tell me what exactly I was looking at and why I should care. A lens in which to view the works presented would provide needed structure, coherence, accessibility, and purpose to the show; pieces, when placed in conversation with each other, rather than simply beside, promote audiences’ intellectual or emotional engagement, and ultimately transforms a collection of seemingly unrelated artworks into a unified experience. 

Despite this, a collective communal identity emerges, not through the exhibition, but through the artists themselves. The works don’t all necessarily harmonize with each other–many felt distinctly solitary in their surrounding companions–but resonate regardless because of who made them, not how they were arranged. The voice of San Marcos speaks, artworks as its vessel, offering insight into local memory, emotion, and experience. Not every work is sublime, but together reflect our local cultural zeitgeist nonetheless. Yet, what constitutes the sublime in art? Innovation? Technique? Palpable emotion or aesthetic appeal, perhaps? Yes, probably all of these, but ultimately, for me, an artwork will only excel if it moves you–commands contemplation, stirs the soul, follows you home at the end of your visit. Paul Murray’s Hopkins Sunset particularly spoke to me. Maybe I’m partial to impressionism, nevertheless, I couldn’t help but delight in Murray’s rendering of San Marcos’ historic town square. I found such comfort in the all too familiar view and yet yearned for it still. Something so simple as a landscape felt like a distant memory of a place I lived and loved long ago–a souvenir of an ephemeral moment slipped away. Its small scale and local subject matter give way to a distinctly intimate experience unreplicable outside the context of the San Marcos cultural scene. While Hopkins Sunset doesn’t break the mold, Murray elevates the mundane into something nearly sacred, revelatory even–A love letter to the city through tender, yet deliberate brushstrokes. 

Additionally, I found Elijah Cuminato’s Frederick quite compelling despite its relative simplicity. The weight of the world hangs heavy upon poor Frederick’s shoulders. Tired eyes glow against a creature’s shadowed form, revealing only a pair of disheartened hands, strikingly distinct in their realism compared to the flat field of yellow beyond him. We wonder what lurks behind the shadow and what darkness could befall our subject so treacherously amidst the sunny warmth of this golden expanse. Cuminato builds mystery through tension, juxtaposing both dark with light, and minimalism with realism, resulting in a mutual somber uncertainty between us and our forlorn friend Fred (I’ve been there too, buddy. Hang in there). Frederick and Hopkins Sunset are contemporary interpretations of surrealism and impressionism, respectively; just two of a diverse range of styles on exhibit, demonstrating the breadth of the artists and expression throughout our city. Many pieces reference local history and culture, providing a through-line to the exhibition. Ultimately, these San Marcos-isms capture the spirit of the tour, which itself is a testament to the unique artistic community that the city fosters. 

The absence of a curatorial voice in the main exhibition becomes glaringly apparent upon entering resident artist Jessamyn Plott’s studio. This space, the third stop on the tour, was less a studio and more a deeply personal sensory experience. Though small and chaotic (think the size of a large closet), its details delighted my eyes. The walls were painted black, chairs aligned in front of a TV playing the entirety of Twin Peaks, and paintings (of sorts) hung haphazardly from the ceiling and walls. I sat and watched as scraps of chiffon, latex gloves, and paper swayed around my head, contemplating this almost overwhelming yet surprisingly cozy space. Above, a cow heart reared its head through an incision on a sheet of bloody tissue stretched across like a canopy, blocking the view of the unfinished gallery roof, thus immersing us further into the scene. To one side, a tiered wrought iron shelf held rows and rows of candles lit in commemoration of the late (great) David Lynch, offering visitors a chance to participate in lighting one (I chose one with a dove spreading its wings), effectively obscuring the threshold of reverence and performance. On the obverse wall, soft lamp light diffused through cut-outs in draped cloth, illuminating painted polaroids and paparazzi pictures–representations of the self made tangible. Plotts explores an unconventional form of self portraiture in which not all images are necessarily her likeness, but rather reflections or extensions of herself. She confronts issues of physicality, grappling with an acute awareness of the body and the transformation of digital media into our material world as a means to perhaps make sense of our corporeal existence on earth. What constitutes us if not our friends, memories, and interests? 

Plotts’ quick, energetic style flourishes in her paintings of photographs, imbuing a transient moment with longevity. They read as both divine yet disposable, interchangeable but intimate–clearly we’ve exited the gallery and entered a devotional space. Its no surprise the work fosters an air of sanctity, with its votive candles flickering, scattered images hanging, and makeshift pews; it conjures a russian orthodox icon corner, holy portraits suspended to represent the elevation of the soul when praying, but rather than dieties and saints, we observe ourselves, the seemingly insignificant, the spectacular moments of beauty that occur everyday. Plotts spotlights this unseen identity–selfie sessions resulting in countless, nearly indistinguishable photos that normally stay neatly confined to the depths of our phone’s camera rolls, an unapologetically disorganized home studio, or the weight of existence in our own skin–the parts of us we deem unfit to share with the world. And yet they remain parts of us, still. The work becomes an ode to the unseemly; an embrace of our most personal, primal self. Through documentation, she elevates these expendable images to nobler heights, prompting reflection on the ways in which we construct our public and personal identities. 

Moreover, Plotts blurs the line delineating the space as strictly an installation, shrine, or performance, mimicking the multiplicity of self expression. Philosopher Judith Butler defines identity not by what we are, but rather by what we do. In essence, we assume the role of performer in both identity and the exhibit. The former in our daily rituals–how we dress, pose, speak (I suppose I’m performing right now), and the latter in our participation–sitting, watching, lighting a candle, remembering. But why do we perform and if we always are, can anything we do truly be genuine? Sincerity is not found in the absence of performance, but in the moment a performance feels inhabited–chosen, not imposed–unencumbered from submitting to outsider approval. That being said, we don’t exist outside of cultural norms; in fact, our performances are constantly informed by them, even in acts of resistance–haunted, if you will. There’s a certain duality in the process of self portraiture–it, of course, involves capturing a likeness but also constructing an identity–it’s a mirror of the artist, yes, but a curated one, intended to be witnessed. Plotts lays herself bare at the viewer’s hands in this raw self portrait, and yet it’s clearly no ordinary rumination on the self–it’s theatrical, surreal, and most of all staged. Every tear, tatter, and crooked painting offered to us faced careful consideration, but what remains hidden? 

Lynch’s essence lingers, not only in “Laura Palmer’s Theme” echoing from the TV, but in the disorienting, fragmented reality thrust upon us on entry. Like a Lynchian protagonist, we navigate a scene, almost familiar but increasingly foreign on inspection, caught between the seen and the suppressed. Identity, a key theme in the late director’s work, writhes on the threshold of reality and perception–recognition and repression–the self is rarely singular or stable, and becomes further obscured through performance. The boundary between truth and illusion dissolves, giving way to the realization that identity, as one, is ultimately undefinable. Lynch suggests our performances emanate not from social conditioning, but our innermost desires, memories, and traumas–the unconscious seeping into our waking reality. Here, ritual, self portraiture, and staging complicate the work, both concealing and revealing the self. She does not confess to a unified identity, but rather something fractured and incoherent–a seemingly contradictory amalgamation of selves. Yes, it’s the mundane, the grotesque, the spectacle; but in the same breath it’s the sacred, the beautiful, the sincere. It’s a selection of glimpses, not a full story. Perhaps the full story can never be accessed. With such radical vulnerability, one might expect the “whole truth” of her identity, but such a thing doesn’t exist–the truth must be discerned from what we’re shown, and especially from what we’re not. 

While identity slips through our fingers, Plotts grasps it in her hands, bridging the immaterial soul and physical body through ritual. A cow heart looms above, its presence palpable, pulsing. The sheet of skin it rests upon buckles at its weight like a hernia: its materiality inescapable, yet fleeting, much like our own bodies. Each morning, the flesh is cut and the heart emerges through this portal–a living relic, exposed and watched. By night, it is returned to the earth, and the wound sewn shut–a temporary cure, for both flesh and heart will suffer the same fate tomorrow. With each cycle of incision and burial, Plotts confronts identity as a process of perpetual rupture and reformation, while grounding it in the realm of tangibility. The body becomes both the site and the offering of the ritual–the sutured wound serving as physical evidence, a kind of scarred archive of memories: what we lose, conceal, or survive. The wound is not erased but reconciled. The heart exists at the crossroads of the disembodied and the material, a liminal object connecting the digital and visceral–image becoming active. The transient life of the organ mirrors the ephemerality of virtual media, both impermanent, but the heart requires labor and care in disposal, drawing attention to its reality–its weight. The ritual, sacred and surgical, contemplates what it means to occupy space, to be seen, and to be changed. 

Plotts’ studio offers not resolution, but an invitation. Through the chaos of fragments and gestures, something undeniably real manifests: identity–unfixed, constructed, and performed. It’s disturbingly divine, dramatically staged, but never false, simultaneously revealing the limits of self expression and the power of deliberate presence. In the scope of the San Marcos Studio Tour, her immersive installation shines, mirroring the very nature of the showcase: a portrait of distinct voices–often at odds, sometimes harmonious, but ultimately human. Perhaps the absence of a curatorial vision imitates the fractured ways in which we experience identity. The artists share a space not to conform, but to coexist; unified not in theme but in geography, memory, and a shared instinct to create. If identity cannot be fully seen, the Studio Tour reminds us it can still be felt. We don’t always need a neatly packaged narrative–just the chance to witness each other, flaws and all. 

Welcome to Texas State Web Pages. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!