For the inaugural edition of Dallas invitational, STARS will present new site-specific paintings and sculptures by Danny Bredar alongside a selection of works on paper by Pippa Garner.

After exploring the destabilized nature of “obliterature” in his artist book Approaching Capture (2014) and his 459-page experimental novel Wenzel Beckenbauer (2021), Danny Bredar (b. 1992) has made a physical arrangement in a Dallas hotel room that bridges between his zones of language and painting. A letter written from the fictional subject of a new painting, the woman inhabiting the hotel room, to a meta-character that cameos in both books grants the room the hypothetical status of an imaginary waystation in between modes of reality. The hotel room number is incorporated into one painting as the prototype number of a Boston Dynamics robotic dog, insinuating an animistic machine intelligence present in the form of the room. The nearby Trinity River, the cyclical transience of the hotel room, and the human river of time within each viewer bind the project into an asymptote that is present through its untouchable absence.

Pushing back against systems of consumerism, marketing, and waste, Pippa Garner (b. 1942) has created a rich body of work including drawing, performance, sculpture, video, and installation over her four-decade-long career. Her uncompromising approach to life and practice has allowed her to interact with the worlds of illustration, editorial, television, and art without ever quite becoming beholden to them. As Jan Tumlir wrote in 2019: “Garner’s work skewers the American cult of transcendence through gadgetry but does so from the perspective of a self-exiled devotee. Here, the archetype of the garage inventor doggedly pursuing unrealizable plans is not a laughable figure but a hero, precisely because this figure operates somewhere outside capitalism, beyond the market and the commodity, aiming to singlehandedly transform the stuff of the world.”