Austinist Art Review: 10.07 Works at SVT Gallery

New works by Austin-based artists Ian Cion and Carter Cox are on display at Salvage Vanguard Theater Gallery's current multimedia exhibition, 10.07 Works.

The show, featuring paintings by Cion and sculptures by Cox, is the second exhibition in the SVT’s new gallery space, which opened its doors this summer as part of the revamped and revitalized permanent location for the theater company on Manor Road. In 10.07 Works, each artist’s work plays off the other's to create a visual dialogue that explores the artistic process. Using a variety of everyday materials, they present contrasting concepts — the metaphysical versus the rational, distance versus proximity, and fluid versus fixed states.

The exhibition’s curator, Christina Hiett, chose to work with Cion and Cox “because of their inventive, vibrant, and large-scale works."

The vibrant hues on his over-sized canvases snake horizontally and vertically, leaping from one canvas to the next and
traveling across patches of earth-toned surfaces.

"Both artists question and play with ethereal subjects while using everyday objects to examine their inquiries,” said Hiett, who previously organized 2006’s highly popular and critically-acclaimed exhibition Celebrated Skin: Tattoo Art and Artists.

Seeking to evoke ideas surrounding human survival in a world with increasingly limited resources, Hiett regards the artists’ creative use of “earthly materials” as means of transforming the simple objects of everyday life and work into “abstract and methodical constructions.” The result of these constructions, juxtaposed with one another, compels the viewer to contemplate where we possibly fit in the whole scheme of things.

Cion, an accomplished artist who has shown his work in Paris, Amsterdam, and Bangkok, connects the experience of painting to that of “an archaeological dig on a strange and beautiful planet.” The vibrant hues on his over-sized canvases snake horizontally and vertically, leaping from one canvas to the next and traveling across patches of earth-toned surfaces. The overall effect recalls typographical maps, aerial city views, or images of riverbeds as seen from Google Earth. Zoom in, and one sees that Cion incorporates a collage element, layering acrylics with Sharpie markers and ordinary house paint. From a distance, the viewer may experience a sense of vertigo, as vast landscapes of color sweep across the gallery walls.

Equally accomplished, Cox describes his art “as a technology that allows him to take hold of abstract ideas about phenomena and bring them into [a] sculptural space” that is accessible for himself and his audience. For the colossal sculpture Bucketball, which takes up most of the center of the gallery, he combined several five-gallon plastic buckets with plastic athletic balls to create the perfect mixture of balance and tension, harmony and precision. Due to the impressive scale of this geometric structure, it frames Cion’s paintings at nearly every turn, reinforcing the dialogue between the two artists’ works and communicating the idea of the celestial and the molecular—yet another set of contrasting concepts to ponder.