FUNHOUSE

OPENING MAY 4TH 7 PM

Funhouse is a group exhibition centered around ideas of death and dying, and features works with themes of grieving, loss, identity, home and memorial.

This exhibit was organized by Albert Chamillard and welcomes the sometimes somber, sometimes humorous, always compelling new work of Amber Doe, Karlito Miller Espinosa, Eli Blasko, Geneva Foster Gluck, Treynor Tetik, Racheal Rios and Albert Chamillard.

Albert Chamillard

Albert Chamillard was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts in 1971.

He moved to Tucson in 1994 and has been a part of it’s art scene ever since. In the late 90’s, Albert cofounded Carbonbase Gallery and Studios, a student-run space in Dunbar Spring. He worked for Eric Firestone Gallery from 2007 to 2012, and founded Atlas Fine Art Services in 2011 and held exhibitions there until 2014. He’s been a preparator at the UA Museum of Art since 2019.

Since getting my BFA in Studio Art in 2003, I’ve been an active exhibiting artist and have shown my work nationally. My most recent exhibition was a solo show at Etherton Gallery in 2023, and I’ve been a freelance artist for Hermés since 2020.

Albert’s work is primarily small scale drawings that are comprised of layers of cross-hatched marks which create textile-like surfaces, and deal with concepts of memory, family, the natural world and ways language affects and interferes with our perceptions of our world. Albert Chamillard has exhibited work nationally and locally at Etherton, Paradigm and Pulp Galleries.

*this

*this is a performance collaboration between Racheal Rios and Geneva Foster Gluck.

Geneva Foster Gluck is an artist and practice-based scholar. Her work combines performance and material storytelling to explore a range of topics and experiences grounded in decolonizing, feminist, and ecological approaches.

Racheal Rios is a femme multifaceted artist making work based off her experiences in this life to disrupt systems.

Amber Doe

Amber Doe (b. Washington DC) currently lives and works in Tucson, AZ. She holds a BFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a recipient of the 2023 Night Bloom MOCA Grant for the Warhol Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts Research and Development Grant, 2023 Projecting All Voices Mellon and ASU Fellowship. Doe has exhibited domestically and internationally. Doe is a multimedia artist who uses sculpture and performance to bear witness to the experiences of black women even as American society aims to render us and our lives as invisible and meaningless. She does not see her experience highlighted in dominant culture, so she uses her art to rectify this representational void.

All of her work is trans species ancestor worship.

Eli Blasko

Eli Blasko is an artist and designer based in Tucson, Arizona.

Primarily working in sculpture and extended media, his work ranges from investigating traditional craft and design techniques to devising expansive conceptual interventions into the lives of objects. He also designs and fabricates highly detailed constructions for public, commercial, and gallery settings. Many of his projects begin as research-based inquiries into the history of objects, images, and geographies.

Eli received his MFA from Western Carolina University, a BFA from Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania , and also studied in the Studio of Intermedia+ at The Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia. Additionally, he holds credentials as a craft instructor in carpentry and welding from the National Center for Construction Education Research.

He has been an artist-in-residence with Touchstone Center for Craft, The Paducah Arts Alliance, Hub-Bub, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, The Charles Adams Studio Project, and Sculpture Space Inc. From 2016-19 he founded and operated Bannan Blasko, an arts + media agency that designed and executed dozens of large-scale commercial art projects and creative campaigns throughout the Southeastern U.S. His clients have included Adidas, Amazon, Kohler, Milliken & Company, and Smartwool, as well as numerous smaller, regional businesses.

Geneva Foster Gluck

Geneva Foster Gluck is an artist, practice-led scholar and physically trained performer/director. Her work utilizes immersive event-making and material storytelling to explore a range of topics and experiences often grounded in decolonizing, feminist, and ecological approaches. Geneva holds a PhD in Philosophy and is the other part of *this, a place-based performance and object-making collaboration with artist Rachel Rios.

Karlito Miller Espinosa

Karlito Miller Espinosa (b. San José, Costa Rica, 1989) is an artist who creates objects and composes installations informed by the direct relationship between capitalism and the structuring role violence plays in its preservation. Through an interdisciplinary practice that employs the artist as researcher and material as witness Miller Espinosa’s intention is to unmask predatory strategies of enforcement that have otherwise effectively been rendered invisible. His work is particularly concerned with U.S. policy and its effects on minority, migrant, and working-class populations.

Karlito has received numerous awards and recognition for his artwork, including the University of Arizona 2018 Graduate Student Centennial Achievement Award, the University of Arizona School of Art’s Marcia Grand Centennial Sculpture Award, and the University of Arizona College of Fine Arts 2017 Creative Achievement Award. His work has been exhibited by esteemed institutions around the world including the Newark Museum, El Museo Barrio in Harlem, the United Nations Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the Street Art Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, Twitter’s New York Headquarters, EARTH University (School of Agriculture of the Humid Tropical Region) in Costa Rica, and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in New York. In 2018 he was featured on the BBC’s Documentary Series The Art of Now and was a selected exhibit for the 2018 Arizona Biennial at the Tucson Museum of Art.

Karlito Miller Espinosa graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2012 with a BFA and from the University of Arizona in 2019 with an MFA and is currently a studio program resident for the 2019-2020 Whitney Independent Study Program.

Racheal Rios

My aspiration is to take up space in a male dominated art world. I be doing it for my bitches, period.

Treynor Tetik

Treynor Tetik was born on the Great Plains of Oklahoma in 1987. He obtained an Associate’s Degree in Art from Northern Oklahoma College and has been a resident of Tucson since 2017. He’s been attracted to dark moody imagery since a young age, which has heavily influenced his art.

Curator Statement

Here is the story of how Funhouse came to be: My Dad passed away in August of 2022 from advanced Parkinson’s, my Mom died several months later from complications arising from advanced dementia - neither seemed a good way to go from what I witnessed. Months later, I was drinking a beer and thinking about my parents and crushed the can when I was done and was struck by how perfectly it had collapsed on itself - I wondered what it would be like to crush hundreds of them, how they would look arranged on a shelf or on the floor, what meaning could be derived from crushed cans and how that related to my parents deaths. This led to a trial and error process where I created a kind of memorial for my folks that also included elements of Arte Povera, Process Art and Minimalist design principles….I wanted to exhibit it somewhere and devised the idea of a group show based on the theme of embracing death and the process of dying. I invited 6 other artists (although I would have liked another 10 to 12) and, surprisingly to me, they all accepted…..I am struck by how differently each of us responded to the prompt, how different each artist thinks about the end of life. -Albert Chamillard