CONDUIT GALLERY

David Canright
The Built Environment

Conduit Gallery is honored to announce the exhibition Built Environments by Dallas-based artist, David Canright. The exhibition will be his third solo exhibition at Conduit Gallery.

In David Canright’s, Built Environments, the artist presents a series of large-scale ink drawings. Canright intends for the viewer to enjoy his “queasy admiration for the creativity, daring and gleeful wonder that lies at the heart of science, architecture and engineering.” Both ridiculous and essential, Canright’s drawings are anifestations
of our most human qualities. To enter these drawings is to enter a rabbit hole where a completely whole, imagined yet considered world awaits our travel from room to room, or tunnel to cave, exploring the devious and clever environments created by a very smart, thoughtful designer-artist. Each drawing introduces a radically different point of view to an alternate world where playfulness is supremely rewarded.

David Canright is an artist and writer from Cleveland, Ohio. He studied art at the University of Texas at Austin with Peter Saul and Richard Thompson. After college he spent ten years in New York, where he exhibited work at several venues including Clementine Gallery, The Drawing Center, and the Yale University Gallery. He is
currently making drawings and paintings in Dallas, and his work has been featured most recently at Conduit Gallery and the Dallas Art Fair

Conduit Gallery is honored to announce the exhibition as if they were sure to find their way by Lebanese-born, New York-based artist, Annabel Daou. This is the artist’s ninth solo exhibition at Conduit Gallery.

In this new body of work, Daou explores themes of ownership and dispossession, permanence and impermanence. The act of cutting away, for the artist, is a means of both revealing and obscuring, as well as an attempt to play with ideas of weight and weightlessness. Words and images appear caught in nets of microfiber paper, held in place for a moment, like fragments of thought or memory, even as their meaning remains fugitive.

There is a sense of movement and malleability to these works, which resemble threadbare fabric or fragile tapestries. The hand-cut netlike structures break apart in places and are either visibly repaired by the artist or left frayed.

The grid-like structures of the two large thistle drawings are created from the cutout remains of other works. Thistles, markers of place, replace language, becoming netlike themselves in their interlacement. For Daou, the globe thistle native to Lebanon is a familiar object from her past that has appeared in her work at times of struggle. Daou sees the larger thistle pieces as landscapes of adversity and enticement.

Annabel Daou’s work takes form through paper-based constructions, sound, performance, and video. Daou suspends, carves out, or records the language of daily life: from the ordinary or mundane to the intimately personal and urgently political. In her performance work she explores questions of trust, intimacy, cross-cultural exchange, and the operations of power. Her work frequently evokes moments of rupture and chaos but with the tenuous possibility for repair. Daou was born and raised in Beirut and
lives in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include what is left of us at signs and symbols, New York (2024); War Games at Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin (2024); DECLARATION at Ulrich Museum of Art (2022) and Global Spotlight: Annabel Daou at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (2022). Her billboard project What is mine? What is yours? was shown in Beirut in 2024 as part of Temporary Art Platform’s In the Blink of an Eye. Recent residencies include the Pollock-Krasner award at ISCP in New York and Haus Des Papiers in Berlin. A monograph of Daou’s work is being published by Distanz in the spring of 2025.

J.C. Fontanive
Spinning Stone

Conduit Gallery is honored to announce the exhibition Spinning Stone, by J.C. Fontanive. The exhibition of jewel-like enamel on aluminum wall works will be the fourth solo exhibition at Conduit Gallery for the Cleveland-based artist.

Juan Fontanive’s new works in Spinning Stone are comprised of shapes made of enamel on copper and aluminum which are pieced together into a matrix of studied color combinations forming intriguing wall installations. Fontanive likens his sculptures to the game of Tetris, in which shapes move up, down and around, representing for him, decisions and situations in life where choices are made, and patterns are set.

The works in Spinning Stone are a part of a larger series of enamel on copper works that are based on drawings, each separate shape or section is fired individually in a kiln. The sections are held together like puzzle pieces evoking an array of thoughts, often intertwined with the systems or methodologies used in the drawing process.
Movement, and how light interacts with color in a composition are illustrated by the mechanics of the hand, wrist, or stylus creating different 3-dimensional illuminated spaces. The translucency of the glass enamel surface echoes the thematic ideas of illumination, bringing them into actual space. The idea of light found in the work is
then intertwined with the process, as well as the figurative and concrete parts of the final work.Each section of this work is cut from copper sheet then fired in a kiln at 1450 degrees. The baked vitreous enamel has a rich depth and translucency that catches the light. The sections then become jewel-like when seen from different angles. Separate elements are held together with imagined gravity, while the alchemic nature of the firing shows another natural process.

J. C. Fontanive was born and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and received his BA from Syracuse University, and an MA from The Royal College of Art, London. His work has been shown at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Monash University Museum of Art, The Oliver Ranch Foundation, Columbus Metropolitan Library, The Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Gulbenkian Foundation, Tyler Museum of Art, Museum Meermanno Huis van het Boek, The Hague, The Nassau Museum of Art, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland, The Center for Book Arts, The Contemporary Art Society, London, among others. Fontanive won the 2018 Brooke and Hap Stein Emerging Artist Prize, MOCA Jacksonville and The Desmond Preston Drawing Prize, The Royal College of Art, and has also been awarded the residency at The Marble House Project, VT. Fontanive lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio.

With an educational background in Art History, Anthony Sonnenberg mines societal and artistic movements to build bodies of sculptural work, installation, photography, video, performance and wearable art all with Decoration at its center. For Sonnenberg, “Decoration makes visible all the innumerable intricate structures of social hierarchy. Decoration provides all the visual contexts that let us know who is favored by our current society and who is not – who is a president, a priest, or a prisoner.
However, it is also a double-edged sword that can easily cut both ways. It is the perfect tool to reinforce hierarchies but also the perfect tool to infiltrate or even collapse them.”

Sonnenberg focuses on the areas of decoration on the edges of normal everyday social life, such as objects associated with death and funerary processes or expressions of queer identities. Areas where the rules on how things are meant to work are not so clear, allowing more questions and alternative suggestions.

In For as Long as I Live, I Will Sing My Song, his ceramic sculptures are “decorative art Frankensteins” found figurines, silk flowers and fringe fired together into a new unified whole. He often refers to his ceramic sculptures as “decoration made of decorations.” A large sculpture, Shield (I know it makes no sense to cry) (2024) is his manifestation of decoration as a tool to project beauty, style and uniqueness, to
protect one through the perception of confidence and power. Two crowns and portraits continue his work using the orchid as a symbol for queerness, both in celebration and mourning. All are forms of Decoration’s fantastical ability to change the perception of a thing without having to change the thing itself. In his ongoing advocacy for the underdog, Sonnenberg has built a studio and research-based practice that continues to empower the often overlooked and underappreciated.

 PROJECT ROOM:
Francisco J. Marquez
Jaretito, No Te Pongas Triste….

Artist’s Statement:

My work is shaped by growing up between two homes — the one where I was born, and the one where I was raised. With each annual visit to Mexico, I slowly started to see things change, familiar places faded, and people I loved grew older. I felt a quiet sorrow, knowing that the moments I cherished would never come back in the same way. Through abstraction I exaggerate form and color, which feel odd and disconnected but the paintings are always deeply rooted in a specific place or moment. Each piece reflects a personal experience or interaction— an attempt to capture a fleeting moment, a meaningful conversation, or the distinct atmosphere of a location. The process is driven by intuition. I focus on surface activity, layering thin coats of oil paint to gradually reveal the composition. Nervous, tentative lines reflect my efforts to recall memories—Lying beneath the shade of a mesquite tree, watching my grandmother prepare dinner, or honoring a childhood library that no longer exists. They’re about accepting change and growing out of the wistfulness of childhood.
Born in Mexico 1999, Francisco J. Marquez lives and works in Dallas TX. He earned his BFA in Drawing and Painting at the University of Texas at Arlington in 2024. Marquez has exhibited work at Conduit Gallery, Cima TX; On Air! at the Oak Cliff Assembly, and at The Eclectika at 711.

Conduit Gallery
1626 C Hi Line Drive. Dallas, TX 75207  214.939.0064

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