Next Exit

Trey Burns, Harris Chowdhary, Finn Jubak, Jonathan Molina-Garcia

October 12 – December 7, 2019
EXTENDED THROUGH DECEMBER 14

Opening Reception | Saturday, October 12 | 6 – 9 pm
Artists’ Walkthrough | Sunday, October 13 | 12 pm
Screening of “True Stories” | Monday, November 4 | 5:30 – 9:00 pm
La L’aceate Trail | Saturday, December 7 | 10:00 am – 4:00 pm

Over the course of several months, ex ovo’s Allison Klion and four local artists —Trey Burns, Harris Chowdhary, Finn Jubak, and Jonathan Molina-Garcia—engaged in a series of in-depth conversations about Dallas’s history, legibility, aspirations, and encrypted realities. The resulting exhibition consists of the manifested footnotes from these discussions and draws on shared research and development of ideas around Dallas’s myths, landscape, and the built environment. Next Exit ’s spatial relationship of encountering becomes part of this meaning. The exhibition design operates as a collaborative installation in which a supplemental “gallery infrastructure” — including viewing platforms, alcoves, and wallpaper — permit access and passageway between artworks.

Trey Burns presents a collection of interactive video and image objects; mining familiar landscapes and the banality of everyday encounters, while at times augmenting fictions. Harris Chowdhary’s commercial furniture catalogs likewise borrow from the everyday — this time the domicile of North Texas suburbs — to facilitate uncanny encounters with the imitation products of his childhood and family upbringing. Both Jubak and Molina-Garcia explore the glass armament of the Dallas skyline to various ends and propositions. Jubak’s color photographs take on the vantage point of a pedestrian, condensing the sprawl of downtown into glimpses that expose overlooked lines of sight. Molina-Garcia presents Omni Hack , a scaled replica of the Omni Hotel, programmed with his own messaging — creating a parallel and more inclusive signage that challenges the assumed universality of the Omni’s voice. Both artists’ work can be accessed via ramps that contain Burns’ photographs, videos, and sound works.//

Trey Burns was born in Goldsboro, NC in 1984, and grew up in Georgia, where he attended the Savannah College of Art & Design and received an MFA in 2008. Trey currently resides with his wife in Dallas, TX where they co-organize Sweet Pass Sculpture Park and a new media exhibition space, SP2. As a serial collaborator, his work ranges from a collective photography archive WESSELCASTLE (2012-2016) to the speculative meta-fiction project NGHBRS (2013-ongoing). Primarily a lens-based artist, Burns also explores book-making, installation, video and sound. His work has been shown at the Ecole Nationale d’Architecture Paris, Malaquais Gallery (Paris, France) Pavillion Vendôme (Clichy-la-Garenne, France), the St. Paul’s Cultural Center (Chicago, IL), Wassaic Projects (Wassaic, NY), Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), and solo exhibitions at The May Gallery (New Orleans, LA), The Hand (Queens, NY) and et al Projects (Brooklyn, NY).

Harris Chowdhary was born in Dallas. He graduated from the University of Texas at Dallas with a BS in International Political Economy in 2019. He has worked as an architect, organizer, and artist in Texas, Johannesburg, Mexico City, New York, and Lahore. His work in sculpture has focused on the psychology and politics of space and design. He has shown his own works as part of solo and group shows in Mexico, Texas, New York, and as part of the inaugural Lahore Biennale.

Finn Jubak was born and raised in New York City, and received a BA in film from the University of Chicago in 2018. His work in photography and film engages the materiality of landscape and expressiveness of everyday objects. His images have been published in Hamburger Eyes and Aint Bad. He currently lives in Dallas.

Jonathan Molina-Garcia (b. 1989) is a Salvadoran-American, photo-based media artist. His projects are committed to experiments in radical sharing, as a practice of both material exchanges and social communing. A citizen of the third world and an American DREAMER, his work examines various zones of conflict at the intersection of national and sexual identity, counterfeiting new criminal identities under the aegis of experimental technology and photomechanical media. Heavily grounded in processes of collage, his mediums of interest also include time-based actions: performance art and video; book-making and labor crafts.He holds an MFA degree in Photography from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and graduated with dual degrees in Photography and Art History from the University of North Texas. Recent exhibitions include a solo presentation of the Bethesda Brotherhood at the Lawndale Art Center (Houston), and “Looms” at Sweet Pass Sculpture Park (Dallas). He is the recipient of the 2018 Nasher Microgrant and has been awarded various other developmental grants from organizations including the artist-run space Art Tooth, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, and The Dallas Museum of Art. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Photography and Digital Futures at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Apply to Red Pegasus Citizen’s Council and share your message on the Omni Hack Prototype 1.