Lone Stars

Andrea Bonin

Courtney Dudley

Eli Durst

Max Marshall

Curated by Beatrice Shen

7 Dunham is pleased to present Lone Stars, an exhibition highlighting four unique perspectives from young artists born and raised in Texas who have recently relocated to New York. Curated by Beatrice Shen, a recent New York to Texas transplant, the exhibition seeks to explore honest and personal narratives that illustrate the Texan state of mind. The daily mundane, intimate details, and traces of childhood permeate through each artist’s visual meditation of their Texan past.

Andrea Bonin uses industrial and domestic raw material, bits of detritus, and the handmade to explore ideas of space, architecture, landscape and memory. Her concrete and plexi sculptures evoke the expounding construction and vast highways that serve as the life vein throughout Texas. “My process involves a conscious physicality in relation to the objects I make and am surrounded by, as I am constantly aware of their weight against mine.” Andrea’s experimentation with form and materials invoke sentimental familiarity and simultaneously expands upon the inherent commutative qualities of the poetry in everyday life.

Courtney Dudley has deliberately branched out of her Texan roots and established a new identity as an artist in New York. Her series it is only a short walk from home...is a personal documentation of her hometown. The snapshots reveal a detached yet informed view of the familiar places and faces that she has left behind. Despite the disconnect from her past, Courtney’s vignettes offer a sensitive and poignant glimpse into a former reality.

Eli Durst’s photographs are a direct reaction to the suburban landscape from his Austin boyhood. From eating a burger on a parking lot sidewalk, to a teepee’d tree, or a turtle in a cramped tank – Eli manages to capture profound beauty in life’s ordinary moments. “While I am now far enough removed from this environment to see its ambiguities, idiosyncrasies and shortcomings, I still feel a personal connection to it, finding a certain level of comfort in its indistinguishable strip malls and soaring overpasses.” By treating a typically perceived banal existence with a personal reverence, Eli transforms objects and fleeting moments that can easily be considered intellectual junk into a cultural relic.

Max Marshall uses photography to explore his lifelong interest in nature and science. His works illustrate the complex ways that the living world impacts our day-to-day life. A tightly wound python, a fly in a bushel of daisies, and a carp coming up for air – all of these happenstances are frozen in time in his inquisitive portraits of the natural world. Besides natural elements, an ambiguous footprint in the mud and profile of the artist’s girlfriend Andrea offer a hint of nostalgia and romance.