Marking Space / Holding Time, a group exhibition featuring women artists who are currently working in Texas and/or have deep Texas roots, opens September 16 in Irving Arts Center’s Main Gallery. The exhibit is free to view Tuesday through Saturday through November 11. 

On September 16 from 6-8PM, a reception and meet the artists event for this exhibition as well as two others – Works by Benjamin Muñoz and Over, Beyond, Between: Landscape and the Transcendent (Paintings by Dawn Waters Baker) will be held.

The work of the artists in the Marking Space / Holding Time exhibition spans a variety of mediums including drawing, painting, mixed media, and sculpture. The artwork presents a response to place, landscape, identity and the passage of time. Through process and materiality, these ideas and phenomena are explored and described, and new spaces are created.

Artists represented in the exhibition include Anne Allen, Jill Bedgood, Daniela Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, Lilian Garcia-Roig, Mayuko Ono Gray, Annette Lawrence, Mihee Nahm, Philana Oliphant, Kim Cadmus Owens, Sherry Owens, Beverly Penn, Tanya Synar and Ellen Frances Tuchman. The exhibition is curated by Marcie J. Inman, Director of Exhibitions and Educational Programs at Irving Arts Center.    

PARTICIPATING ARTIST BIOS

Anne Allen
Anne Allen grew up in Fort Worth and has lived and worked in Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and New York’s Hudson Valley before returning to Texas in 1999. Allen received her M.F.A. in metals from the State University of New York at New Paltz and her B.F.A. in painting and printmaking from the University of Texas at Austin. Allen is. In addition to being a talented artist whose work has been exhibited in museums around Texas and beyond, Allen works as curator and arts administrator. She served as Executive Director of The Old Jail Art Center in Albany, Texas in 2000; as Director of the Arlington Museum of Art (AMA) from 2001-2007; and currently works as a Public Art Project Manager with the Arts Council of Fort Worth and Tarrant County.

Jill Bedgood
Based in San Antonio, Jill Bedgood creates mixed media sculpture and installations that contemplate the dualities in life, the cyclical nature of existence, and the weight of memory. In the tradition of marble memorials, her reliefs, laden with symbolic objects, contrast excess and austerity to evoke transience and immortality. Bedgood‘s artworks function as contemporary memento mori, asking us to consider why we value our possessions and their persistence through time after our own lives end. Her art offers a reminder of the transience and temporality of life.

Daniela Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas
Daniela Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas is a Colombian immigrant who graduate with an MFA in ceramics at the University of Dallas in May 2023. She graduated from Brigham Young University with a BA in Studio Art and a minor in Art History and obtained her MA from the University of Dallas. She focuses on organic forms through hand-built sculptures and ceramic installations to explore the longing of home.

Lilian Garcia-Roig
Born in Havana, Cuba in 1966, Lilian Garcia-Roig was raised and worked in Texas for 30 years but now lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida. Her latest works feature large-scale on-site painting installations of dense landscapes that overwhelm the viewer’s perceptual senses.  Formally, her works are as much about the materiality of the paint and the physicality of the painting process as they are about mixing and mashing the illusionist possibilities of painting with its true abstract nature. On a more personal level, her work, at its core, is about trying to negotiate the complex propositions of sense of place and belonging which so influence the construction of personal identity.

Mayuko Ono Gray
Mayuko Ono Gray is a Houston-based artist whose main medium is graphite drawing. Born in Gifu Japan, she was trained in traditional Japanese calligraphy in her young childhood. Later in her teenage years she was trained in classical Western drawing. After graduating from high school in Japan, she moved to the U.S. and earned her MFA in painting from the University of Houston in 2007. Reflecting a life which is both culturally Japanese and American, her graphite drawings hybridize influences from traditional Japanese calligraphy combined with Western drawing practices and aesthetics.

Annette Lawrence
Originally from New York, Annette Lawrence lived and worked in Denton, Texas between 1996-2021, and now resides in Georgia. Her art transforms raw data into drawings, objects, and installations. The data accounts for and measures everyday life. Her subjects of inquiry range from body cycles to ancestor portraits, music lessons, unsolicited mail, and journal-keeping. She addresses questions of text as image, and the relationship between text and code. Her work is grounded in examining what counts, how it is counted, and who is counting. Her process is one of making and unmaking, looking, and waiting. She recognizes things that go unannounced, remain steady and continuous, are unremarkable on the surface, and develop meaning over time.

Mihee Nahm
Mihee Nahm teaches painting at the University of Dallas.  She received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012 and completed a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 2008. Her work, which has been shown in solo and group exhibitions nationally, was influenced by living as an expatriate in America for over a decade. The experience pushed her to explore themes of memory, sense of place, and nostalgia. Her art captures a sense of poignancy found in nature that evokes bittersweet feelings of melancholy and the fleeting passage of time. Her emotive, lifelike renderings conjure the scent of rain, the feeling of changing weather, and the moods that they bring.

Philana Oliphant
Philana Oliphant is originally from the Texas panhandle, but now lives and works in East Texas, where she shares the forest and a studio with her husband and three rescue dogs. Her work, which includes drawings, sculpture, installations and prints, has been exhibited nationally for thirty years and is included in several permanent collections in Texas and beyond. Her art combines complex, intricate mark-making and paper-cutting with elegant three-dimensional forms to evoke a meditative, physiological response: the rhythmic sound of graphite on Duralar or a blade cutting through Yupo. Her highly detailed, palimpsestic works explore time and memory, as well as environmental change, loss, and repetition.

Kim Cadmus Owens
Born and raised in Texas, Kim Cadmus Owens moved to Dallas in 2006 after having lived on both the East and West Coasts as well as Japan. She received her MFA in Art from Towson University near Baltimore, Maryland, and her BFA in Painting and Drawing from the San Francisco Art Institute. The daughter of an engineer and a painter she has turned her innate interest in structure and space into works which negotiate place and our experience of it. In 1998 the incorporation of digital processes enabled her to create works tied directly to our contemporary modus operandi. Her studio practice includes paintings, drawings, prints and installations. Her work has been exhibited nationally and can be seen locally in North Texas along the DART Light Rail line. As a Station Artist, she has created art and designs at the Las Colinas Urban Center Station.

 Sherry Owens
Sherry Owens lives and works in Dallas, and she received a BFA from Southern Methodist University. For more than 30 years Owens has used the sinewy crepe myrtle tree to tell her story – of the Texas landscape, of death, renewal, beauty, and of today’s growing environmental concerns. Owens begins by collecting discarded trees, whittling, carving, waxing, painting, dyeing and burnishing the branches before she assembles them with pegs, baling wire and other material choices. The narrative of each sculpture is decided well in advance of its assembly; the subsequent choice of each stick, each gesture, and each connecting point resembles the marks of drawing in the third dimension. Her work has been shown throughout Texas and the southwest and she has completed several large public art projects, including a large-scale bronze through the Love Field Modernization Program at Love Field Airport in Dallas and a monumental commission for the Ben E. Keith Company, also in Dallas.

Beverly Penn
The impulse to arrange the wild variety of the natural world to fit an intellectual symmetry is a fundamental human urge. Beverly Penn’s sculpture speaks to the power of this desire. Her work explores the contradicting need to both idealize and modify the natural environment. Penn, who is a tenured Professor in the School of Art & Design at Texas State University in San Marcos, is the recipient of numerous fellowships including a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy; a Connemara Conservancy Artist Grant; grants from the Texas Commission on the Arts and a Fulbright Fellowship in Barcelona, Spain. She has also received nine Texas State University Faculty Research Grants involving research in Mexico, Italy, Spain, and New York. Her sculptures are included in the collections of the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., the Monarch Center for Contemporary Art in Washington and numerous museums across Texas.

About Tanya Synar
Tanya Synar is a sculptor and installation artist who works in cast metal, video, audio and a range of materials. Her interests involve exploring perception and crossing into science for inspiration and assistance. She has collaborated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and has won numerous grants and awards including an Illinois Arts Council grant, Puffin Foundation grant and several Texas Woman’s University research and development grants and awards. Currently in progress, her project Mapping Galaxies in Iron, involves 3D printing from Hubble Space Telescope data to create otherworldly, imagined spaces. “Through stories, we chart and map regions that are inaccessible to us. Because Galaxies and solar nebulae exist outside of our daily reach, we imagine.”

About Ellen Frances Tuchman
Ellen Frances Tuchman is a Southern California native, a child of Disney and Technicolor, living in Dallas for the past 35 years. She has exhibited widely since graduating as a textile major from California College of the Arts (CCAC)in 1976. That essence is a thru line in all her work — from the heavily beaded ephemera she layers into narratives to her exuberant, abstract paper quill paintings that clearly were influenced by the LA light and space movement she grew up with. Fetish finish and a wonderment, even an innocence, resides in her obsessively detailed paintings. Pigments of beads, sequins, nail polish, acrylic, colored pencils, eye shadow, or thread cavort — contradicting traditional expectations about fine art materials and crafting. Women’s needlework is elevated to high art with her contemporary takes on the unrelenting stimuli in modern life. Tuchman’s work is unique, a precursor to current surface, textile, and materialism trends seen in painting.