Rosie Clements and Peter McRury: Surface Tension

Rosie Clements and Peter McRury are showing together at McLennon Pen Co. Gallery from June 20 through July 26, in a joint exhibition titled Surface Tension. Both artists live and work in Los Angeles, and the show brings their two very different ways of handling images into the same room.

Clements, born in 1990 in Fort Collins, Colorado, works across photography, sculpture, and print. Her practice is built around the image: she UV-prints photographs of the close-to-hand objects of her daily life onto bubble wrap. There's something about the choice of surface that changes how you look at the objects she's photographing—the bubble wrap adds a layer of texture and distortion to things you'd usually overlook.

McRury, born in 1992 in Toronto, works primarily in airbrushed acrylic on linen. He takes digital imagery and distorts and reprocesses it into layered, atmospheric compositions. Where Clements is printing onto a physical object, McRury is painting over a digital one, turning a crisp image into something more blurred and painterly.

Despite the different mediums, they're both working toward the same question: how an image loses resolution as it's mediated and circulated. It's a conversation about what happens to a picture when it's copied, printed, or painted over—the way the original detail starts to slip away. Seeing them side by side makes that process easier to spot, with Clements' UV prints and McRury's airbrushed linen playing off each other.

The show is presented by McLennon Pen Co. Gallery, an Austin space that focuses on emerging and internationally established artists, with an aim to present contemporary art that's exciting, poignant, and poetic, placed within an art historical context. You can find the gallery at 1114 W 5th St Suite 202, Austin, TX 78703, and Surface Tension runs through July 26.