1878 & Brown Foundation Galleries
November 19, 2022 - February 5, 2023
ArtWalk Reception
Saturday, November 26, 2022
6 – 9 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
Exhibit-Connect: The Truth About Leaving a Legacy - Choosing How We are Remembered
Thursday, February 2, 2023
1:30 - 3:00 PM
Click here to register.
This exhibition is supported in part by a grant from Texas Commission on the Arts.
Eileen Maxson
The Word Is Not Lucky
Eileen Maxson's exhibition, The Word Is Not Lucky, processes the flooding of her parent's home and grandfather's passing through an unlikely coincidence. Both events happened on her birthday, August 27.
In video and photo-based works, Maxson sifts through and wrings out images, media, physical "stuff," and memories, remaking them as probing and sometimes humorous portraits of her family. With levity throughout, Maxson confronts herself and her parents with the material excess of American life while working to connect the dots between what they had and the forces of nature that took it away.
In Small Claims, a series of 304, 8.5 x 11-inch prints, Maxson recasts the pages of her parent's insurance claim into an epic, chronological accounting of family purchases 1950-2017. Spanning the memorable to the mundane, this photographic typology encompasses a lifetime of lost possessions.
In the video My Mom Knows Her Stuff, Maxson blindfolds and challenges her mother to identify, by touch alone, her "tchotchkes" that survived the flood. From wine-drinking Christmas dolls to Santa's trash can filled with fake fruit, the exercise goads her mother's wit while she proves a close connection to her things.
In other works, Maxson takes a somber tack. For example, The Word Is Not Lucky, a video portrait of Maxson's father, tells his compressed life story, an archetypical picture of the American Dream underpainted by his father's combat service during WWII and late-diagnosed PTSD. While the video 8/27/XX finds Maxson searching for her grandfather's memories of war through a mini-DV tape that survived the flood.
Eileen Maxson is an interdisciplinary artist working at the confluence of video, performance, installation, intervention, and photography. She received her BFA in 2002 from University of Houston, her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008, and attended De Ateliers, Amsterdam from 2008-10. Exhibition highlights of her work include Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; and Museum of Moving Image, Queens, NY. Maxson has received awards and grants from Houston Arts Alliance, Nasher Sculpture Center, Mondriaan Foundation, and Artadia Foundation, among others. In 2005, she was awarded the inaugural Arthouse Texas Prize.
