Sunchaser, Lauz Bechelli’s first solo exhibition at the Liliana Bloch Gallery, is an eclectic menagerie of works whose melody is as material as it is conceptual. Her canvases manipulate both real and psychic substances to toy with the edge of identity, pointing to the moment one thing flips to become another.

Bechelli, who lives and works in Austin, utilizes recycled and local materials. The cedar stretcher bars are rejects from a furniture maker, the canvases are filled with scraps from an automotive upholsterer, the textile is a mixture of worn clothing, other artists’ canvases, and discarded plaster casts. The painting material is from a soup retailer’s leftover bones, white clay from a lime quarry, charred pine trees from recent Bastrop fires, and cochineal scraped-off Texas cacti. These overlapping histories highlight a preoccupation with impermanence and transformation.

The exhibition urges us to see ourselves as scavengers before innovators and as listeners before storytellers. Bechelli sees this as both an environmental imperative and a political one, highlighting the pitfalls of reason, certainty, and progress. Instead, logic is highly mutable, bodily, and ultimately imperfect (perhaps even catastrophic!) Sunchaser is a world-affirming effort where the visceral, repulsive, and ugly are vital components, existing in harmony with more traditionally desirable qualities. Chaos and wreckage beget creativity and evolution. The show plays two notes simultaneously – it basks in lush painting play, while materiality pounds a constant beat.