Sarah Aziz and Jack Craft: Tumbleweed Rodeo
January 31 – February 7, 2020
Opening reception: January 31, 7-10pm

Drawing on their collective histories of parasitic engagement, domestication, and the retranslation of foreign phenomena, artists Sarah Aziz and Jack Craft will transport 800 cubic feet of tumbleweed from the Llano Estacado to CO-OPt Research + Projects and, with the aid of 6 Vornado fans, recreate a miniature tumbleweed tornado inside the gallery space. The space will only be occupiable by non-human forms of life, turning every strip-mall passerby into an ecological voyeur, gleaning insights into the “rhythm between containment and shattering.”1 

Tumbleweed (Salsola tragus) is a nomadic weed originating from Siberia; it is an organism that fulfills the final stages of its evolutionary life cycle in death. Once the plant has reached maturity, a bone-like connection anchoring it to the ground breaks, and it’s transmuted into a “traveling exodeisic armature for sprinkling the landscape with thousands of seeds.”2 The gallery will become a new ecosystem that captures, and displays, a perversion of a natural entropic process. The floor of the space will be lined with paper and 6 trays of viscous paint; as the tumbleweeds embark on their windblown journeys around the gallery, their rotative velocities and collisions will be recorded onto the surface of the paper, and dispersed seeds will become embedded into the drawing. They envisage this as being a non-anthropocentric appropriation of Nam June Paik’s Zen for Head.3 The transference of energy is rendered visible through these unpredictable acts of mark making, establishing a relationship between material breakdown and drawing build-up. The project takes the ubiquitous subjects of conservation and accountability and brings it into the collective conscious by exposing their viscera in an ephemeral and controversial way. 

The artists and students from the Texas Tech University College of Architecture will build street furniture out of tumbleweed and mud for viewers to lounge on as they watch the show unfold. And from CO-OPt, the Tumbleweed Rodeo will continue, traveling to Chicago, where, from March 2nd – March 20th, it will be on view at Space P11, a gallery in a subterranean pedway. There, students from TTU will partner with students and faculty from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago to completely mask the interior of the gallery, let the tumbleweeds mark them with paint, and then take these “building patterns” back to Lubbock, and recreate them at 1:1 scale out of tumbleweed and adobe. These tumbleweed and adobe pavilions will be built on the LHUCA campus, and the artists will be hosting a number of collective construction events, and inviting the community in to learn, make, and build with them.

Tumbleweed Rodeo is the second in a series of short-term installations and exhibitions revolving around the theme of “Land” presented from January to March 2020 at CO-OPt Research + Projects. Further announcements about openings and other programming are forthcoming, but a tentative schedule is as follows:

Jan 15 - 28 – What Can We Make When We Can’t Make War?, a collaborative exhibition by J. Eric Simpson and Cody Arnall. Artist talk, moderated by Natalie Hegert, on January 23, 7pm. 
Jan 31 – Feb 7 – Tumbleweed Rodeo, an installation by Sarah Aziz and Jack Craft
Feb – Mar – Visual Resource Management, an exhibition of current research by Everything Is Collective
Mar – The True/False Suite, or, Ruse de Guerre, video, performance and installation by Caroline Doherty

About the artists:
Sarah Aziz is a 27-year old British Pakistani female from Sowerby Bridge – a small post-industrial village in the North of England – living in Lubbock, Texas. Her co-conspirator, Jack Craft, is 57-year old rancher-turned-artist born and bred in Clarendon, Texas. Although they differ culturally, religiously, and generationally, their respective practices reveal a strikingly sympathetic focus: viscera. Their works are temporal and self-destructive; they each attempt to comprehend the entropic processes of time and human/non-human action and aestheticize their viscera. They both engage in acts of sleuthing and mooching in order to collect, then subversively redesign and reuse, quotidian objects. They prescribe to Diller + Scofidio’s belief that “a critical architecture need not rely on the erasure of familiarity. On the contrary, it could use familiarity to earn its welcome into the status quo and then turn insidious.”4 

Sarah Aziz is an architectural designer and educator from Halifax, UK. She holds a B.Arch from Liverpool John Moores University and an MArch from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Sarah has practiced in offices in Leeds, Sydney, and Tokyo, and currently teaches at Texas Tech University.

John Robert (Jack) Craft lives with his family on a commercial cattle ranch in the Texas Panhandle. The ranch is located 70 miles south east of Amarillo, Texas. His art work consists of solid cast-iron sculpture and prints that are made utilizing his sculpture as a tool to create abstract images that reflect the mass and the dimensions of the sculpture.