Steve Turner Contemporary is pleased to announce its participation in Texas Contemporary, the inaugural edition of an exclusively contemporary art fair in Houston, to be presented between October 20 and October 23 at the George R. Brown Convention Center. The gallery will feature the work of three artists, Edgar Orlaineta from Mexico City, Deborah Grant from New York and Camilo Ontiveros from Los Angeles. All three artists create highly accomplished formal works that deal with race, class and nationality.

Edgar Orlaineta (b. 1972) creates works that re-contextualize modern design to demonstrate aesthetic and social values. At Texas Contemporary, he will present sculpture, collage and video from Solar Nothing, a new series based on Charles Eames' 1958 Solar Do-Nothing Toy. Eames' original 1958 toy was commissioned by Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America) for its Design Forecast program and advertising campaign that aimed to promote the use of aluminum in industrial design after World War II. Without a mandate for a specific function, Eames designed a toy that had no specific use, hence its name. He wanted to create something related to natural resources, something that would convey an idea, yet not something that had a specific use. He was inspired by the idea of solar energy and used it to power the prototype toy. Though the toy was never mass-produced, and the current whereabouts of the original is unknown, the Solar Toy received a lot of attention in 1958. Over the past several years Orlaineta has done extensive research, and based on his findings, he has produced new versions of the toy, using a combination of traditional Mexican and modern industrial techniques to recycled aluminum, tin and wood. His photo-collages are based on period press accounts and the remnants from his own production processes. His video depicts ten Sufi solar ritual dancers wearing Tanoura skirts whose designs were based on the Solar Toy's shapes and colors. The video is reminiscent of Eames' films, Power of Ten and Tops while the costumes are related to Mexican crafts.

Orlaineta received an MFA from Pratt Institute, New York (2004) and a BFA from Escuela Nacional de Pintura y Grabado, Mexico City (1998). He has had solo exhibitions at the Casa Estudio Luis Barragan, Mexico City; Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City and Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York.

Deborah Grant (b. 1968) will present works from By The Skin of Our Teeth, a series based on the life and work of Bill Traylor. It is part of an ongoing project that Grant has labeled Random Select. Over the last ten years, Grant has deconstructed and then reassembled visual, historic, and literary material from unrelated sources to create her own non-linear narrative. In appropriating the artworks of famous male artists from the canon such as Picasso, Basquiat and Bacon as well as somewhat lesser known African American artists such as William H. Johnson and Bill Traylor, Grant has reworked images to address histories and narratives pertinent to her own life experience and identity.

For By The Skin of Our Teeth, Grant investigated the life and work of American artist Bill Traylor (1854-1949), a self-taught artist who was born into slavery on a plantation near Benton, Alabama. After emancipation, his family continued to farm on the plantation until the 1930s. In 1939, at age eighty-five, he moved to Montgomery, where he slept in the back room of a funeral home and in a shoemaker's shop. During the day, he sat on the sidewalk and drew images of the people he saw on the street and remembered scenes from life on the farm, hanging his works on the fence behind him. That year, he met Charles Shannon, a painter, who brought Traylor art supplies and bought his drawings for nominal sums. During the next four years, Traylor produced between 1200 and 1500 drawings. In 1940, there was an exhibition of Traylor drawings in Montgomery, and in 1942, there was one in Riverdale, New York. The shows produced no sales.  In the late 1970s, Shannon, who had preserved Traylor's drawings for over thirty years, began to show them to art dealers and museum professionals. This time, the drawings proved popular with critics and the public; two 1979 exhibitions at the R.H. Oosterom Gallery in New York launched a succession of almost forty solo shows and hundreds of group shows in the years since. Traylor has become among the most highly regarded and sought-after of self-taught artists. His work is held in many public collections including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, with thirty-one drawings, and the High Museum of Art, with thirty-five, currently hold the largest public collections of Traylor drawings. Traylor is known for his intriguing use of pattern versus flat color, a sophisticated sense of space, and the simplified figures that give his work a startlingly modernist look. Using a stick for a straightedge, he created geometric silhouettes of human and animal figures which he then filled in with pencil, colored pencil, or poster paints.

Grant received a BFA at Columbia College, Chicago (1996), an MFA in painting from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia (1999) and did residencies at the Skowhegan (1996); Studio Museum in Harlem (2002/2003); and the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito (2004). She has had solo exhibitions at Roebling Hall, New York, (2006), Dunn and Brown, Dallas (2007) and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles (2007). She will have a solo exhibition at Steve Turner Contemporary in 2012.

Camilo Ontiveros (b. 1978) will present two works, It's Not Just Security, It's Peace of Mind, a wall installation consisting of sixteen security system boxes that Ontiveros collected over a period of six months while he worked installing alarm systems in homes and banks across Los Angeles and Orange counties, and Este Es Mi País, a large photograph of a Navy billboard that shows the face of a young Latino sailor juxtaposed with the Spanish words that translate as This Is My Country. In both, Ontiveros expands on his work relating to questions of immigration. He questions how borders--whether individual, domestic, or national--are currently enforced.

Ontiveros received an MFA from UCLA in 2009 and a BA from the UCSD in 2006. He is co-founder of Lui Velazquez, an artist residency program in Tijuana and co-founder of Imprenta, an alternative space in the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles. He has had solo exhibitions at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2009) and Steve Turner Contemporary (2009 & 2011). He was the 2010 recipient of the Illy Prize at ARCO Madrid and had work in the 2010 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art. Ontiveros explores issues relating to immigration, the border between Mexico and the United States, unofficial economies, labor and notions of value.

Steve Turner Contemporary represents the work of emerging and established contemporary artists. Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11- 6. Please contact the gallery for further information.

Contact: Steve Turner, steve@steveturnercontemporary.com , 323.931.3721

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