TEXAS ART NOW
Rhythms and Myths
Featured Artists:
Carlos Canul, Michael Roqué Collins,
Sharon Kopriva, Sherry Owens
April 30 - May 28, 2026
Opening Reception:
Thursday, April 30, 5pm-8pm
Exhibition Location:
Horizon on Sunset
2501 Sunset Blvd.
Houston, TX 77005
Curatorial Statement
JIM EDWARDS
Artist, Curator, and Art Writer
TEXAS ART NOW Rhythms and Myths is an exhibition of contemporary artist friends whose art practices are occurring at the zenith of their creative maturity. Their work shares a symbolic, partly pastoral depiction of nature and human cycles of life and death.
Sherry Owens exhibits mixed media sculptures, including Grandfather’s Land, a work whose tangled Crepe Myrtle branches she has painted a ghostly white, perhaps symbolizing dying vegetable matter. Organic and fascinating in its intwined curvilinear form, her sculpture beautifully combines abstracted form with a representation of past life.
Carlos Canul also joins abstraction and figuration in his paintings. In The Journey of Venus through the Underworld, spontaneous, painted gestures at the base of his composition coexist with the illumination of heavenly light at the top of the canvas. Canul’s paintings explore the cosmic worlds of inward and outward atmospheres, the concrete and the ethereal.
Michael Roqué Collins’ large scale Garden of Stone Wings is beautifully painted; radiant in the depiction of the cloud filled sky and mysteriously dark in the placement of the stone wings. Collins’ allegorical garden paintings are dream-like in their suggestion of the past and the present, the dead and the living, antiquity rendered in the light of our contemporary day.
Sharon Kopriva was brought up as a Catholic, with the worlds of saints, cathedrals and animals becoming subjects for her paintings and sculptures. Her Crosscurrents of Darkness and Light features birds. Birds abound in religious iconology worldwide. They act in art and poetry as messengers. In Dante’s poem “Inferno,” birds are described as tormented souls. In Kopriva’s painting, birds are portrayed as creatures bearing witness to human suffering.
These are arguably dark times in our contemporary world. In their depiction of past life - antiquity, dying vegetation, light fading into darkness, spiritual beings - these four Texas based artists portray what existed before, and what exists now: the myths of past and present. The art in this exhibition is not only of this world but about this world, while suggesting visions into an afterlife.
Exhibition Statement
All four artists presented in this group exhibition – TEXAS ART NOW Rhythms and Myths – explore and create their complimentary subjects showing views with essential senses of mystery, memory and dreams within natural and human horizons. Their creative efforts exploring the natural world are filled with interpretations of the inherent mysteries and rhythms that amplify the subconscious realm making these combinations of art a most powerful exhibition.
Collins’ art uses dreams expressing personal mythology through works that tap the viewers subconscious by suggesting cyclical patterns of destruction and entropic nature that often challenge the Western Classical traditions seen in classical architectural ruins overgrown by verdant, natural growth and these are often juxtaposed with the petrochemical world. These power struggles work within his art and function in at least three opposing forces: darkness giving way to illumination, abstraction colliding with reality, and the mythic opposing the quotidian. Verdant gardens and punitive natural forces, often referred to as being dystopian, always play a role in his energetic paintings where hope wins out over darkness. His post-symbolistic tendencies and desire for mysteries relate to the opposing forces seen in Sharon Kopriva's art.
In Kopriva’s art, there are shared connections to rhythms in nature and expressions relating to her history in the Catholic Church. Her works utilize construction methods, which combine both two and three dimensional energies to create heightened mystery emphasizing growth patterns and creation in nature. Dreams and visions also inform her work and over the decades her art has evolved from golden browns to earthen greens expressing hope. Her latest works utilize bird nests, eggs, portraits of important women, and animals as they all reflect the cycle of entropy. Both Collins and Kopriva delve into powerful compositions overrun with branch encrusted vistas that connect their unique creative voices to the sculptural energy of the art of Sherry Owens.
Owens’ usage of branches from the crepe myrtle tree are woven into compositions, which present complex relationships experienced in nature and the human condition. Assembled wood branches create subject matter with poetic undertones often making commentary about human relationships, good and evil, and the larger cosmos. They transcend their wooden origins to allow for the sublime to emerge for the viewer. Her powerful sculptures limited in color allow the interconnected shapes to suggest a broader meaning of being human all the while exploring a personal mythology in her work. The impulse of using abstraction to communicate essential truths relate to the paintings of Carlos Canul.
The abstract paintings and works on paper that Canul creates all carry a strong sense of mystery within natural or human affected mythology, which relates to the art of Collins, Kopriva and Owens. His complex layers of pigment applied by pooling, brushing, and scraping reveal worlds filled with subtle Mayan attributes. These focal areas are only glimpses of the possible worlds his paintings suggest. His masterful pigmentation often offers dystopian landscapes filled with warnings for our current era while suggesting the long held traditions of painting history. The complex layering of abstracted pigment enlivened through a full range of processes provides the viewer engaging rich ambiguities.
"These artists’ works encompass a wide range of subjects with profound meaning though always filled with a deep sense of humanity. Some depict the Southern American Landscape and the imagery of daily life full of passion without boundaries. Their works critically express their concerns about society, politics, religion, the protection of the environment and human existence."
–– Christopher Zhu
Art Critic, Historian, Former Assistant Director of the Shanghai Museum of Art, and former research specialist for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y.
Featured Artists
CARLOS CANUL
Artist Statement
Through the engaging dialogue of paint and all of its physical properties my art plumbs physical and spiritual realms, influences of Meso-American mythologies, and traditions, the collision of abstraction and representational forces all the while holding close, painting as a tactile poetic adventure.
The specific areas of my process intersecting the avenues of drawing and watercolor form as a connective media that feeds all of my oil painting activities. All realms of my thematic interests hold together in oil paintings rich with the variations of thin and thick application processed through a myriad of creative and destructive cycles. These tidal forces of creation, destruction, and back again as creation, in my art bring forth the soul and physical visions in each work.
My painterly discoveries have allowed me to become more sensitive to light and color. I have developed a keener eye to the signals discovered in each new work, and it is my aim to continue to push the physical boundaries of the paint, and elevate the spiritual realms that exists in painting.
“Abstraction allows [the artist] to see with [their] mind what [he/she] cannot see physically with [their] eyes…. Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas.” –– Arshile Gorky
“I paint for my own astonishment.” –– Roberto Echaurren Matta
MICHAEL ROQUE COLLINS
Artist Statement
Through large works of oil on linen, works on paper and mixed media on photographs, I explore lush surfaces, which combine multiple symbolic elements. I investigate themes such as the symbiotic, romantic relationship of darkness and light, the cyclical nature of life and death, the complexities of inner psychological life, and the mysteries and vital importance of individual spirituality. These themes find creative expression through a rich system of synergistically connected metaphoric subjects: primitive ritual forms, the figure, modern day power plants, classical architectural forms, coastal subjects, dreams and above all, gardens. These are all conceived in an allegorical manner where ideas are expressed in an indeterminate state hopefully leaving the viewer floating in worlds of mystery.
In many recent series the garden spaces contain verdant vegetation, which erupts with life amidst abandoned factories, decaying ancient roman buildings and other vestiges of a collapsed human presence. In my paintings nature becomes a punitive element. The architecture is being eviscerated by nature. The buildings are metaphors for our naiveté in believing that nature may be controlled and that it is somehow independent to what humankind inflicts on the planet. Since childhood, I continue to be influenced by my native coastal surroundings, characterized by subtropical vegetation and sweltering, humid atmosphere and symbolic references to water. I imbue these and other elements drawn from my personal experience into a mystical artistic vision articulating the human condition which I feel possesses a certain terrible beauty.
The process of my painting relates to my body movement and to the texture of surface, both its opacity and translucency. Pigment is applied by knife, hand, brush, scraping, veiling and pooling. The sequence of feeding the surface is completely subject to the energy held in each unique painting which I am sensitive to as the content evolves. Most ideas begin in a chiaroscuro world as color develops of its own accord. I follow the currents of thinking, feeling and willing, which will allow discovery to emerge.
Most fundamentally, my painting relates to the tenants of Post Symbolism, where each painting is an ethereal membrane suggesting the poetic as experienced through dreams, memory, mystery, and morphic resonance. The paintings generate an aura of evanescence conveying essential ambiguities. The resulting opposing thematic elements are centered in supernatural realms where enlightenment and darkness, the mythic and quotidian, by the balancing of abstraction and representation, are revealed in visions of the cyclic patterns of destruction and creation present in nature. The discovered subjects in each painting reveal an art balancing the creative notions of art about art and art about life and the human condition.
SHARON KOPRIVA
Artist Statement
There is a time in my memory where Truth was rarely questioned. When we turned on the news, we heard the word from Walter Cronkite, and that’s the way it was. Now we find ourselves considering everything we read, hear, and even what we see! We are left with a world of chaos and confusion. It enters our brains, travels through our being, and comes out through our fingers into our art. Crosscurrents of Darkness and Light, 2024, is about Earth creatures trying to survive and function in our crazy world. Birds represent all earthlings without considering race, size, or generation. Though the egg image has been used many times before in my practice, it has recently become more prominent and meaningful as a symbol of hope, survival, and the continuation of humanity and all that is sacred to us.
My artistic journey began in 1982 with a visual and spiritual epiphany in Peru — an event that would continue to inform my work for more than forty years. I felt I had physically walked into my painting, Relics, 1981, that was hanging in my thesis exhibition in Houston. Removed from my sheltered world of Catholicism, my mind was opened to other realities. I returned to my studio knowing the path my art was to follow. I spent two years developing my first body of work and beginning a thirty-year investigation of my birth religion, producing a body of more than a hundred paintings and sculptures in detailed papier mâché. They were a fusion of Christian and indigenous Peruvian imagery, often including the use of the mummy form.
In 1988, I met artists Edward and Nancy Kienholz. They not only became special friends, but also mentors and influencers of my art. I moved from single to multiple-figure installations; The Confessional, 1992, is a sculptural tableau with three figures depicting one of the most sacred of Catholic sacraments. Summers with the Kienholz’s in North Idaho, and long walks in the forests began to affect my palette and my life. I found I could have my best conversations with God in the woods. Paintings began to show life deep within the green landscape that has come out of my footsteps in the mountain forests. One large triptych, Cathedral Green, 2011, is a built-out painting with attachments, depicting lush green growth encroaching upon stolid Gothic architecture. It represents for me, hope and the resolve of a long spiritual search.
Weald, 2017, from the green series, is on display in this exhibition. This unruly forest is a hint of chaos to come.
SHERRY OWENS
Artist Statement
Remnants of personal stories, visions and observations in nature are the driving forces in my work. For almost 40 years I have used the sinewy crepe myrtle tree to tell stories — of the Texas landscape, of death, renewal, beauty, and of today’s growing environmental concerns. Like many artists, I work in isolation to address environmental themes that have a direct connection to place, land and sustainability. My art making is slow and involves a lot of time collecting trees by the side of the road. I’ve always loved the long process of getting to an end — to realize something filled with magic that can make you wonder where it came from or if it has a function. I like to think that I make the most out of what a single stick has to offer by emphasizing its linear movement. My way of weaving a bundle of sticks together piled on the floor of my studio nourishes my visual dialogue. If someone asks me, where do you start or how do you know when it’s done, then it makes me think they are beginning to understand how I build a relationship with these natural materials. Using this fabric from nature evokes the life cycles of the natural world.
Making a mark on a page is similar to constructing a sculpture, one stick at a time. I keep a sketchbook; that’s where the dreams start. My studio is full of trees — it is like entering a forest and is a place of truth and possibilities. Sometimes I’ll make a sculpture in wood with the sole purpose of burning it out to cast in bronze. Bronze has another kind of beauty all to itself and I can cast small extensions of tiny myrtle sticks, that would otherwise fracture like a bone, in bronze. Early on as an artist I was a weaver; now I can continue that exploration with a more delicate line as in constructing a spider’s web in bronze. However, my love of the slow hand is always visible with the whittled facets I cut on the surface of the sticks. So many sticks — so many lines assembled together with hand carved pegs — it is a kind of repetitive motion that is meditative to my soul.
Printmaking is also a part of my practice, and I am currently exploring various processes to find the path of a line. Drawings too are often created intuitively and spontaneously through gestural mark making. I see the linear sculptures in wood or bronze through gestural abstractions in space. Every story starts with a line from nature. It is all nature as meditation.
