Featuring everything from ceiling-height paintings to animations to sculptures made from human sweat, UTD’s SP/N Gallery rang in Halloween season with its newest exhibition, “The Horror.” On display from Oct. 11 to Nov. 16, the exhibition invited artists across the U.S. to explore the unsettling, creepy and grotesque — and challenged many to create or reinterpret their art to fit the macabre theme.
“The Horror” was co-curated by Danielle Avram, assistant professor of instruction in contemporary galleries and SP/N gallery director, and gallery manager Brian Scott as their third collaboration together, following “Last Laugh” in October-November 2022 and “Void” in August-September 2023. While Avram and Scott started inviting artists to participate in “The Horror” around a year before its opening, Avram said she and Scott had been discussing the concept of a horror-themed exhibition for a while beforehand.
“Brian and I share a lot of similarities in terms of the types of subject matter that we’re interested in,” Avram said. “The first two exhibitions we did together … one was [about] dark humor, one was various interpretations of what a void could be. This one is straight up horror because we both share a love for horror movies and grotesque, campy imagery … It’s something we talk about quite frequently, and it seems to be pretty relevant to the way things feel in the world right now.”
A portion of the gallery space is devoted to a solo exhibition of ATEC alum Gray Freeman’s paintings. The solo showing is the third installment of SP/N Gallery Shorts, which began in fall 2024 and invite individual artists to display their works at the gallery for a few weeks at a time. Avram said the solo showings are intended to give upper-level or graduate art students at UTD professional experience through pitching, creating or curating, installing and displaying their artwork, and that Freeman’s showing, on display until Nov. 17, fits perfectly with the works in “The Horror” that occupy the rest of the gallery.
“I primarily make really spooky art, so it was kind of a no-brainer to make it fit with the rest of the gallery,” Freeman said. “[The macabre] has always captured my attention more than most things … whenever I try to do anything else, it just comes out.”
According to Freeman, Avram and Scott invited them to do a solo showing of their artwork before they had graduated, after a triptych they made in their second-ever painting class during their junior year won the SP/N Gallery Award. The triptych is currently on display as part of their solo exhibition. Freeman said their favorite paintings within their solo exhibition were made for their senior capstone project, called “Revolution 909.” Developed over the course of five months, the set of five paintings explores musical and fashion aesthetics from the ’90s.
“It’s supposed to be this big house party where it’s a condensed form of everything that made that era iconic,” Freeman said. “At the same time, the police arrive and people walk out on the sidewalk in front of the house as if it’s a runway, but of course it’s supposed to be a revolution, so it’s a little violent. I just wanted to get really insane with that and make it look really visually interesting, more than make it make sense.”
“The Horror” itself, though displayed at UTD, is composed of artists that are not alums or affiliates of the university, including both Dallas-based creators and those from other cities. Anika Jeyaranjan, a Chicago-based sculpture artist, said she had first heard of SP/N when they reached out to her over Instagram about displaying her work in the exhibition.
“When they first brought this up to me, I was a little bit hesitant,” Jeyaranjan said. “I know textually and visually my work does fit within a horror lens because it is kind of disturbing to look at … But then when I think about these pieces and when I think about the physicality of the body, I see them as normal and I see them as something real. Then putting them within the world of horror media and things like that, it’s like, what does that mean for the context of my work? … Is this gonna be seen as a prop or something like that? … I think [my pieces ultimately] kind of ground the show in a little bit more reality, and I really like that aspect of it, and I don’t think it really takes away from what I’m trying to talk about, which I’m happy for.”
Jeyaranjan said her sculptures explore themes like the relationship between body and psyche without relying on depicting human figures. Instead, she communicates flesh and other physical markers of human bodies through materials like bio-leather, which she creates herself. One of her two pieces in “The Horror,” called “self swallowing self,” uses silicone, fiber techniques and tea-staining to portray a pillow that a body melts into, while her other piece, “from head to grout,” uses biomaterial synthesized from the ingredients in human sweat to blur the boundaries of a body standing on shower tiles.
“I went to school thinking I’m going to stay in painting, maybe drawing and go into animation, but a lot of the work that I was making was in reference to the body and I was always just craving creating a world, creating something super immersive, more than a window,” Jeyaranjan said. “The way I view painting is very much like a portal, but I wanted to be inside. I didn’t wanna be in that transitory space.”
A common trope throughout the exhibition was Halloween iconography, from multiple works depicting pop culture icon Ghostface to a curated selection of clips from horror films. Daniela Flint, an artist from New England who currently practices in Dallas, created a set of three paintings focusing on Halloween costumes for “The Horror.” Flint said her artwork does not typically align with traditional horror aesthetics or topics, so the exhibition’s theme gave her a challenge.
“I know my work is not considered beautiful and I wanted to explore the other emotions my work could evoke, specifically the emotions of unease and even fright,” Flint said.
Flint’s paintings include a self-portrait of herself in a devil costume and human eyes peering out from a Mickey Mouse mask, both of which are items she owns. Flint said the devil self-portrait is one of many she has made in the past, intending to explore the labor that goes into creating paintings, while the Mickey painting draws on Flint’s experience growing up Brazilian American, masking her cultural identity with an iconic American symbol. The final painting in the set — portraying human eyes underneath a quilt cut to look like a sheet ghost costume — focuses on the labor that goes into creating a costume.
“As a child, I had all my costumes for Halloween homemade,” Flint said. “I had a team of very crafty women who were capable of making costumes, but as a child you didn’t see the value in that, you just wanna look like everyone else, so I wanted the store-bought costumes. As an adult, I was trying to dissect the value that comes from something handmade with love versus something that has an already established value that can be purchased at a store.”
The SP/N Gallery hosted a gallery talk Oct. 17, inviting “The Horror’s” artists to discuss their pieces and meet gallery attendees, and will be screening “Song of the Cicada” and hosting a Q&A session with its directors Nov. 7 at 7 p.m. at the University Theatre. Any UTD student or faculty member interested in a solo exhibition of their work at the SP/N Gallery can submit a proposal through its website.
The SP/N Gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays and 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays.