For this episode, we continue pairing up creatives for Ariel Wood’s “Round 21: cullective” exhibition on view from April 13th until July 7th at 916 Springdale Road. If you are just tuning in, Cage Match Project is a gallery that lives in an industrial caged trailer. Measured at 20x8x7 feet, this weathered and rusted container resides in a gravel parking lot in Austin, Texas, where it is under constant exposure to the elements and 24-hour public viewership. By fully embracing the caged trailer as both literal and conceptual context, Cage Match Project purposefully stages a narrative of the artist-at-odds, with either history, space, or a work of art itself. 

In this episode, Ariel Wood invites sculpture installation artist Maggie Jensen to be in conversation about their shared affinity for pipes and public city infrastructure.

Our current installation, titled “Round 21: cullective” by Texas-based artist Ariel Wood invokes a possible system of water collection, yet elements are either still needed or slowly being taken away. There’s a suggestion of past or future use, yet current stasis. The form of a water tower is built with steel beams woven together with blue twine. Ceramic thrown and altered pipes and vessels are held in alignment via welded steel structures bolted to concrete pavers. Each element holds the potential for collection and conveyance yet falls short of this linear progression. Partially protected from both sight and the elements. Round 21: cullective utilizes the relationships inherent to the exploded-view diagram—a lack of delineated function and an emphasis on labor—to call attention to access, control, and connection or a lack thereof.

In each of Maggie Jensen’s installations, she reveals paths and limits of the internal logic of systems or aesthetics of authority such as an art institution, a natural history archive, or extractive resource infrastructures. In Maggie Jensen’s Round 20 “Attitudes of Humility”, Jensen presented three sculptures that riff on the art-historical Land Art genre of the 1960s and 70s as well as on the constructued politics of landscape painting. “Attitudes of Humility” installation materials included an unaltered HDPE industrial culvert pipe, platforms of cement board and wood, a cast of a water main casing broken by extreme heat-related pressure, and a curved wall mapped with a reproduced constellation used by artist Nancy Holt in the 1976 landwork Sun Tunnels. 

Before we dive into this episode, remember to visit www.cagematchproject.com to register for Michael Anthony García’s Project Management for Artists on July 6th at 11am and remember to register for  the opening reception of “Re-Match: A Cage Match Retrospective” on July 6th from 1-8pm. 

These are free events with registration. Just visit www.cagematchproject.com  and click on the “Re-Match Exhibition” menu tab.