Recent Exhbition

August 2026, Some* House Art @ Kaleidoscope Collective

Some* House Art, new works on steel and canvas by Gabriel Allred.  This show highlights a selection of mixed media works produced by Gabriel over the last year incorporating silk screened images, acrylic, and paper ephemera. 

The title refers to a selection of the works within the show, unstretched canvas works called tenugui (手拭い).  Tenugui are multipurpose towels from Japan, sometimes used to wrap a bento box or carried as a handkerchief.  These colorful decorative fabrics are also found hung like small tapestries in many Japanese homes.  The “house” art of this show are Gabriel’s tenugui interpretations.

John Baldessari once said: “Every artist should have a cheap line.  It keeps art ordinary and away from being overblown.”  Sharing this ethos, the tenugui within the show represent Gabriel’s “cheap line;” affordable works designed to hang in a home, and typically produced with far less planning than his works on steel.  They are cheaper not only in price, but also in the cognitive effort used to produce the composition of images.

The non-tenugui works of this show are on carbon steel, a thin but hefty industrial material, not typically used as a substrate for wet mediums.  Across the works are paradoxes, both in imagery and material; beautiful handmade frames (produced by Andrew Schriver) holding industrial, rust prone steel. The tenugui are painted on fine Italian super-smooth canvas, yet hung unstretched on cheap wood hangers (produced by the artist) suspended on industrial rigging wire to standards only slightly better than rough carpentry.  The edges of the tenugui are hand sewn with embroidery thread to less than exacting standards.

Images in Gabriel’s works often come from his own photography, but also public repositories, and sometimes borrowed from lowbrow internet culture and memes.  Art concerns itself regularly with semiotics, the study of symbols, but rarely do we see the inclusion of memes in fine art, despite the study of semiotics and memetics being complementary disciplines.  Memetics is the transmission of symbols, the communication of semiotic forms.  Modern digital memes often convey the absurd, inane, or paradoxical; not unlike the the fabric of late-stage capitalism, full of commerce but devoid of a purpose other than perpetuation of itself.  Memes serve as a means of directly conveying meaning, with minimal required discussion between parties, particularly when conveying the absurd.