A String in the Maze: Martha’s X Megan Mulrooney

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

 
-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

A String in the Maze, co-presented by Martha’s, Austin and Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles, brings together a group of artists connected to Texas, working across varied forms. The title borrows from Blood Meridian, where McCarthy evokes the tenuous logics we formulate to navigate an ultimately unknowable world -- like a single string in a vast maze. There’s a glimmer, too, of Ariadne’s glittering thread from Greek mythology: spun in devotion, it offers her suitor a path through the Minotaur’s labyrinth. McCarthy’s string is a gesture toward coherence in the face of inscrutability; hers, a wager on love, on the possibility of resolution.

Some works move with a solemn rhythm: Matt Kleberg’s vestibular abstractions, all portals and thresholds, or Ethan Cook’s quiet weavings that edge toward architecture. Others seethe and swell: Piper Bangs’s pears forms seem to ferment in situ, and Ana Villagomez’s canvases pulse as if painted from within a storm system. Narrative is not absent, but it tends to appear obliquely -- smuggled in through allegory, costume, or reverie. RF Alvarez stages a still life like an altar, while Montrel Beverly’s pipe-cleaner boots feel like relics from a speculative rodeo. Conner O’Leary’s objects are poised and inscrutable like props from a dream, and Chantal Wnuk’s monumental figures, caught mid-contortion, seem less like figures than geological events made fleshly.

Texas here is less a fixed geography than a field of interference: heat mirages and long horizons, tangled trees and overripe fruit, sunblasted afterimages and shifting borders. The works in this exhibition trace their own errant courses through memory, myth, and abstraction -- not defining the state but passing through it sideways, each on one route among many.

Featuring:
RF Alvarez, Piper Bangs, Montrel Beverly, Sean Cairns, Ethan Cook, Otis Jones, Matt Kleberg, Laura Lit, Jonny Negron, Conner O’Leary, Claire Oswalt, Alexandre Pepin, Carlos Rosales Silva, Wes Thompson, Ana Villagomez, and Chantal Wnuk