CONDUIT GALLERY

March 8– April 19, 2025

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.

Anthony Sonnenberg
For as Long as I Live, I Will Sing My Song

March 8 – April 19, 2025

Open Reception: March 8  // 5:30 to 7:30pm.

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: Renata Cassiano Alvarez
Cuarto Verde

March 8– April 19, 2025

Open Reception: March 8 // 5:30 to 7:30pm.

Conduit Gallery is honored to announce a solo installation of new ceramic works by Mexican-Italian ceramic artist Renata Cassiano Alvarez.

With her studio focus on practice, Renata Cassiano Alvarez was prompted to ask herself what would happen if the glaze became the structure of her ceramic sculptures. In her recent works, Cassiano Alvarez transforms glaze from surface material to the structure itself. Her unique process, molding and cutting colored porcelain and glaze, echoes methods used in the Studio Ceramics era of the 1950s. The resulting pieces are reminiscent of archaeological artifacts as well as reference the industrial tile work
ubiquitous throughout Mexico and other Latin American countries.

Cuarto Verde, the installation of Cassiano Alvarez’s ceramics, is inspired by the lush cloud forest landscapes of Veracruz, Mexico where it is wet and green year-round. Three large totems in the exhibition are reminiscent of their place of origin and seemingly defy gravity with their top-heavy glaze forms and sinewy structures, while the smaller pieces are more playfully demonstrative of her process.

Educated in Mexico, Italy, Denmark and the US, Renata Cassiano Alvarez has had the opportunity to work in different artistic environments, leading to a dynamic relationship with different materials and processes. She is a 2024 winner of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award for her sculpture. She has worked alongside clay artists such as Nina Hole, Gustavo Perez, Akio Takamori, amongst others. Her work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in public collections in Estonia, Italy, Taiwan, Germany, Denmark, Latvia, China, Slovenia and Mexico. She works between her studio in Veracruz, Mexico and Arkansas, US.

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

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 AM – 5 PM
conduitgallery.com