Timothy Harding (b. 1983) makes sculptural paintings and installations that meld traditional painting and drawing practices with technology. Harding’s artistic practice begins on the computer creating individual lines, squiggles, and shapes. Using these digitally created forms, he creates vinyl stencils that are strategically transferred onto a canvas and utilized to create layers and layers of paint until a fully realized pattern emerges.

Harding’s works merge the gestural nature of Abstract Expressionism with the flatness of Minimalist painting to explore how a traditionally two-dimensional object can visually and physically occupy a three-dimensional space. He purposefully stretches his finished paintings across ill-fitting supports or builds a substructure under the canvas to make the surface fold, buckle, or protrude, “sculpting” the painting into a unique shape. Harding disrupts our understanding of painting—as he makes the once two-dimensional canvas into a three-dimensional object. In this way, Harding creates a new type of medium, as he combines sculpture with painting.

Timothy Harding lives and works in Fort Worth, Texas. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Tarleton State University. Harding received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Texas Christian University, and his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Texas Woman’s University. In 2018, Harding was a visiting artist at the Center for Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art. He has received grants from the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Dallas Museum of Art. Harding has curated four exhibitions, and he was also involved in an artist collective titled Homecoming! Committee. He held residencies at 77Art, the Wassaic Project, and the Vermont Studio Center. Harding has exhibited nationally in Texas, New York, Vermont, and more.

Generously sponsored by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, McGinnis Family Fund of Communities Foundation of Texas, and Kathy Webster in memory of Charles H. Webster, with additional support from Jay & Barbra Clack, Joe & Susie Clack, Jenny & Rob Dupree, and Dr. Larry Wolz

Patrick Kelly, OJAC Director and Curator, interview with artist Timothy Harding (August 2025)

PK: Can you briefly describe how your work has evolved over the last few years—arriving at the work you are currently creating?

TH: Play and experimentation is a driving force for my approach in the studio. Things are always rooted in painting and drawing, bringing these traditions into conversation with sculptural or architectural space. I generally think of my work as having a set of ingredients that I tweak in application, always searching for new modes of exploration. Everything from the stretcher frame, canvas, and imagery depicted is open for use.

Over the past few years, I have been using an ever-growing digital database of drawings, geometric forms such as grids or loose gestural marks for example. These have been used to compose paintings, act as templates for the construction of sculptural objects, or otherwise serve as units for site-responsive installations. I’ve explored how elements of a painting can expand from the traditional boundaries of its frame to interact with the location around it. Coupled with this of late is an interest in adding illusionistic qualities to the paintings themselves, layering information to produce fields of ambiguous depth within what is otherwise largely non-representational imagery.

The work for OJAC continues these interests. Here singular paintings are cut into multiple units through gestural erasures and situated in the cells in a manner that establishes a relationship between object and setting. The erasures appear as lines defined by the underlying architecture of the space.

With the new work there is a flexibility with how they can be composed depending on the scenario.  The multiple units producing a whole allow for a variety of arrangement possibilities. I am interested in these not being fixed objects but something open to different outcomes. The two works installed here contrast with one another in how they are situated, each being deliberate in the final placement relative to the setting.

PK: So, you are creating a library of “drawings” to be used in more complex works. What informs those digital drawings? Are they calculated, arbitrary, or derive from some other source?

TH: They come from a variety of sources. Some derive from earlier works of mine, for instance, a series of bulging or collapsed sculptural paintings. I make flattened-out depictions of the original. These are present as distorted imagery found in recent work. Other times, drawings come from happenstance observations in the world. For example, I came across a street light illuminating a cast iron window cover. The streetlight cast a gridded shadow along the underlying window curtain. So, you had this gridded shadow waving across these curtains. Various architectural components of structures new and old can also serve as inspiration. Other times the drawings are more intuitive, using a stylus or trackpad I will scribble or otherwise make marks in a spontaneous way.

I began using subjects such as grids because I thought of them as universally recognizable. The grids serve to engage the viewer through visual means of something familiar, often presented in a manner where it has gone awry, but otherwise avoiding any direct narrative. The other gestural marks and forms I use are intended to recall mid-century abstraction.

Using this library of drawings to build from is a continuation of earlier processes. I would accumulate components to build installations from, and this stockpile would be re-used in each iteration coupled with new elements added over time. The working methodology remains but has largely shifted from physical components to digital, using all the above methods to compose.

PK: Do you have a preconceived notion of how you want a finished work to look or do you allow them to develop intuitively?

TH: The process of developing ideas is very intuitive. I might have a loose idea of what I want to happen, or a set of parameters to work within, but otherwise there is a lot of play. Once something is sketched out and the work in the studio begins there is less likelihood for major changes, but things can shift here and there.

Regardless of what I am producing, be it painting, installation or something else I always consider the viewer and their visual experience with the work. Elements apparent only through direct visual study, such as changes in surface sheen, are used intentionally to establish a relationship between the object, viewer, and environment.

PK: I’m not sure some people understand the processes (concept through execution) that an artist must go through to create an installation—specifically one in the OJAC’s cells. Can you briefly describe your process starting from the initial site visit through the creation of work?

TH: When I first visited the cells, I went in with an open mind. Walked through the space, noted the scale, nuances of the environment and building. I was immediately taken with how one enters the room from the stairwell below and rises into the space, how that differs from a more traditional gallery setting. The brick floor producing an order and repetition. How the name inscribed on the wall of the interior room, and the initials carved on the exterior of the building are features that recall mark making. I took these observations and my experience of the space itself, built out a set of blueprints to establish scale, and began to play with possibilities. I continued my on-going studio interests and developed new work that brings qualities found within my work into conversation with qualities of the cells.

OJAC presents over 75 works by Dickson Reeder in the Texas Moderns series. The series provides insight into creative mid-twentieth century visual artists whose works were often inventive or experimental, yet not fully accepted by the general population in Texas more accustomed to traditional forms or styles of art.

Dickson Reeder (1912-1970) was born in Fort Worth, Texas and graduated from Fort Worth Central (later Pascal) High School in 1930. It was then his talent in portraiture became apparent. To further his skills, he relocated to New York City to study with several artists known for their work in the genre. By 1934 he had established his own portrait studio back in his hometown. In 1936, the artist Sallie Gillespie urged him to travel to Europe where he eventually settled in Paris and worked with the Russian theatrical designer Alexandra Exter. Exter made use of non-objective abstract forms for her innovative sets and costumes. It was while working with Exter that Reeder met artist, and future spouse, Flora Blanc. Flora introduced him to the English artist and master printmaker Stanley William Hayter. At Hayter’s Atelier 17 print studio, Reeder discovered his passion for experimental printmaking, creating non-objective abstract prints that were unlike his more formal and traditional approaches to portraiture. Yet, from that point, he developed work in abstraction alongside his more formal and traditional portraiture pursuits.

Dickson and Flora Blanc Reeder married in 1937 in New York City, returning to Fort Worth in 1940 where they became active in the contemporary art community through the Fort Worth Art Association. Eventually, both became associated with a core group of like-minded artists—the Fort Worth Circle. Reeder continued to pursue portrait commissions with many of these works being included in numerous exhibitions and awarded prizes which elevated his reputation as a visual artist. After World War II, Dickson and Flora established the Reeder Children’s School of Theatre and Design in Fort Worth, recruiting artists and musicians to collaborate and assist in producing the school’s plays. For the next 12 years of the school’s existence, Reeder designed all the stage sets, along with hundreds of costumes, masks, headdresses, and props.

Reeder returned to Paris to study with Stanley William Hayter in 1959. During this period, he was developing and creating new work for his 1960 retrospective at the Fort Worth Art Center that would demonstrate the diversity of his artistic skills and interests. He continued to work and exhibit his work throughout the US and Europe until his death in 1970.

(Bio information derived from Intimate Modernism: Fort Worth Circle in the 1940s, by Scott Grant Barker and Jane Myers.)

Generously supported by The Charles E. Jacobs Foundation, Doris Miller & Don Fitzgibbons, Scott Chase & Debra Witter, John & Ginger Dudley, and Margaret & Jim Dudley

On loan from the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, the OJAC presents a series of short films by multi-media artists Liliana Porter and Lenka Clayton. Though their approaches to making films are far from similar, both utilize what’s at hand to make truly curious works that incite a gamut of emotions for viewers—ranging from angst to joy.

Argentinian artist Liliana Porter has often explored the use of everyday objects in her prints, paintings, and conceptual installations. Over time, Porter began to favor readymades with a toy-like appearance, which she represented isolated or in groups in the midst of the empty, undefined background that has characterized much of her work. Porter’s photographs and assemblages shift from still-life arrangements to miniature portraits that endow the depicted figurines, knick-knacks, and vintage toys with a sense of inner life. Through straight-forward stop-action animation, this cast of recurrent characters comes to life in videos such as Solo de tambor, where they perform in humorous, absurd, and sometimes moving vignettes.

In 2013, British artist Lenka Clayton attempted to objectively measure the furthest distance she could be from her toddler son in three environments: a city park, the alley behind their Pittsburgh home, and the aisles of a local supermarket. The trio of videos humorously underlines the challenging judgment calls that parents make about how much autonomy to give their children. Clayton produced these videos as part of a larger project, An Artistic Residency in Motherhood (ARiM), a grant-funded residency she created out of her own home “to explore the…upheaval that parenthood brings and allow it to shape the direction of my work, rather than try to work ‘despite it.’”

Stills from:

LILIANA PORTER, Drum Solo [Solo de Tambor], (still), 2000, edition 53 of 100, 16 mm film transferred to digital video, 19 minutes, 6 seconds. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Archer M. Huntington Museum Fund, 2003.106

LENKA CLAYTON, The Distance I Can Be From My Son, (still), 2013, edition 2 of 5, digitized single channel video, 4 minutes, 35 seconds. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of Lora Reynolds and Quincy Lee, 2018.40