CONDUIT GALLERY

Margaret Meehan
Annette Lawrence

September 7– October 19, 2024

Annette Lawrence
Ahkelo’s Walk

Conduit Gallery is honored to announce the solo exhibition, Ahkelo’s Walk, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Annette Lawrence.

Annette Lawrence’s work, Ahkelo’s Walk, involves counting days by walking miles. It is a natural extension of her practice of recording everyday occurrences. Like her other works, this project reflects her commitment to finding meaning and beauty in what life brings. Akhelo’s Walk is a deeply personal project that has been ongoing for three years. In March 2021, Annette Lawrence turned her walking practice into a memorial to honor her late nephew, Lawrence (Ahkelo) Wade Kimbrough (September 28, 2000 – February 14, 2021). Friends and family contributed to the 7444 miles logged for each day of Ahkelo’s life, making this a collective act of remembrance. The charts created to record the miles are the data set for the works in Ahkelo’s Walk.

In previous works, Annette Lawrence has used tipping text in space to create a more dynamic image. For Ahkelo’s Walk, the charts are repeatedly slanted and mirrored in various sizes, resembling imaginary birds, planes, rocket ships, robots, and architectural schematics. The numbers are illegible, yet taken as a whole, feel familiar.

Lawrence adopted Ahkelo’s color sensibility for her new paintings. His palette is present in photo transfers of close-up pictures of his most colorful clothes. The wrinkles and textures in the fabrics give the transparent circles of color dimension. They read as planets, portals, or bubbles floating in space and nod at the thin veil between spirit and material.

Ahkelo’s Walk is a love story.

Annette Lawrence’s work has been widely exhibited and is held in museums, and private collections including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Rachofsky Collection, ArtPace Center for Contemporary Art, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, American Airlines and the Art Collection of the Dallas Cowboys. She received a 2018 MacDowell Fellowship, the 2015 Moss/Chumley Award from the Meadows Museum, and the 2009 Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. Her work was included in the 1997 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. She is an alumnus of the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Skowhegan School. She received a BFA from The Hartford Art School and an MFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2019, Lawrence presented a talk on the work of On Kawara as a part of the Dia Art Foundation “Artists on Artists” lecture series in New York. Originally from New York, Lawrence served as a Professor of Studio Art in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas form 1996 – 2019.

In May 2021, the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA) announced the Texas State Legislature’s 2021 and 2022 appointment of Annette Lawrence as State Artist of the year, Visual Artist, 2D.

In 2023, Lawrence accepted the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor and department chair position at UNC Chapel Hill. She currently resides in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Decatur, Georgia.

Margaret Meehan
There’s a Moth Inside Mother

Conduit Gallery is honored to announce the solo exhibition, There’s a Moth Inside Mother, an exhibition of new sculpture and mixed media works by Margaret Meehan.

Moths are a more ancient form of butterfly that fly by night and are drawn to the light. They are nocturnal creatures symbolic of transformation.

There’s a Moth Inside Mother, an exhibition of new works by Margaret Meehan, is about watching female friends have children and seeing those children grow; watching friends try to have children and failing; watching friends lose children; and watching her own mother age. When one identifies as female, a sometimes r(aging) female, life contains mourning, loss and transcendence – all stages of moving through the various cycles of life.

The contemporary political climate is waging a war on women’s bodies, their agency, their right to choose. This war goes beyond sex and is a fight against all forms of gender identity and gender expression and there is an awareness of this in Meehan’s new work. She is inspired by how folklore and fairy tales address similar themes in ways that are horrifically violent but somehow innocent and echo the anxieties that we have in moving through the world. In particular, she has been reading contemporary takes on fairy tales, like the book Happily by Sabrina Orah Mark and My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, a collection of 40 new short stories by various writers.

If puberty introduces young girls to the notion that growth can cause anxiety, then menopause is its mirror. One’s sex, one’s gender, one’s sense of self – in relation to the materiality of a body – offers life as a constant state of metamorphosis, an oscillation between innocence, awareness, and the promise of wisdom. The inverse of the embodiment of an imagined sense of self is a stranger staring back at us in our own reflection.

Much of Meehan’s new work uses humor and lightness to address such topics. By referencing cartoons like Little Miss Sunshine, Nancy, and the Peanuts comic strips, all drawn from her childhood, and mashing up the timeline with historical fertility goddesses, such as Sheela na Gig and the Venus of Willendorf, she creates new deities for her own modern narrative.

There’s a Moth Inside Mother is about being (an)other, being a (moth)er, being a non-mother, and it’s about having a sense of humor inside it all. Hoping that, like a fairytale, “they all lived happily ever after.”

Margaret Meehan is an artist living and working in Richmond, VA. Her work is a research-based, multidisciplinary exploration that pulls from film, music, popular culture, folklore, and traditional crafts. She considers the origins of outcasts through their representation – in particular, the tendency for women and societal “others” to be seen as monsters. Meehan’s research includes teratology and medicine, ornithology, the aesthetics of cuteness, materiality in high and low culture as well as modes of feminist protest. This all stems from her curiosity about the lines that separate what is protected from what is feared and how gendering plays into these expectations.

Her work has been shown at ArtPace San Antonio, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, The Dallas Museum of Art, Flowers Gallery in London, Conduit Gallery in Dallas, and Ulterior Gallery in New York. Awards and residencies include the Nasher Sculpture Center Microgrant, ArtPace International Residency, The Lighthouse Works Residency, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Residency, the Dozier Travel Grant from the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship. Meehan’s work has been featured in the Guardian, Sculpture Magazine, New American Paintings, and Artforum, among others.

Conduit Gallery
1626 C Hi Line Drive. Dallas, TX 75207  214.939.0064

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 AM – 5 PM

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