CURRENT Exhibition

Year Zero

By TJ Lemanski & Seth Relentless

Exhibition Dates: September 26- October 25, 2025
Artist Reception: Friday,September 26th 7-10pm
Third Thursday East Austin Arts District hours/ Artist Talk: October 17th 6-9pm (artist talk at 7:30pm)
Open Hours: Fridays and Saturdays, 12-6pm or by appointment

Exhibition Dates: September 26- October 25, 2025
Artist Reception: Friday,September 26th 7-10pm
Third Thursday East Austin Arts District hours/ Artist Talk: October 17th 6-9pm (artist talk at 7:30pm)
Open Hours: Fridays and Saturdays, 12-6pm or by appointment


Rat race. Don’t say rat race anymore or maze or anthropomorphize, generally. It’s infantilizing and out-moded. The direction is not horizontal but vertical in the negative. Say cross-platform degenerative integration. Chase the wheel tumbling down the hill. Sisyphus is there, grinding, but the cheddar has already reached the bottom. Or gouda. Maybe a tasty wine-soaked manchego. Murcia al vino. So down we go. We have to reach the bottom to start up again. Reset. Year Zero. But it’s not so fresh-faced this go round. More miles on the engine. Color’s a little faded. Knees creak like they didn’t use to but we better go anyway. It sucks down here, we hate it. So climbing. Building up muscle, sweat. Isn’t that Sisyphus up ahead again? Almost made it. Building back better muscle memory memory this time. Right? Fix up, look sharp. Pose heroically. Childhood dream. Yet despite our best efforts, we may still be re-cast. We are looking to go in another, more youthful direction, but thank yall for coming in. Say, there may be a cameo in the future, so chin up and don’t change yall’s number. It’s a reboot, new canon, but everyone loves a call back, given enough time and distance. We eat it up. Red meat to go with that manchego from before. Building up, climbing up, building down. The city too has declared that its former self must go, the old one was just too old, the carapace is to be cast off, but please don’t forget to recycle. No one will be happy but progress is a wheel of cheese rolling down a hill. On the way down, let’s not forget to drive our cart and our plow over the bones of the dead.
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In this exhibition, Seth applies the concept of Year Zero as a cultural reset, dismantling the exhausted superhero archetype and rebuilding it from the ground up. Using unconventional yet familiar materials, he deconstructs the polished, commodified hero and exposes how it functions as a template for masculinity. Rather than accepting this ideal as inevitable, the work tears it down to create space for new, more honest forms of strength that are messy, vulnerable, and evolving.

For Year Zero, TJ expands two existing bodies of work which for him ride the line of history museum and folkart altar; two bodies of work that wonder what is worth saving and what is worth remembering. Collecting building rubble from demolition sites, TJ treats both beloved buildings and quotidian architecture the same, mounted in shadowboxes as incomplete puzzles, echoing the flat files of an archive or an archaeological dig. Rhyming with those works are the Cenotaph series, which memorializes dead trees and plants by casting them in concrete and burning them away. The dead thing, now consumed, leaves its mark, its impression, carving its own name in its gravestone.
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TJ Lemanski (b. 1984 Milwaukee, WI) TJ’s practice is a simple one of observation then preservation and presentation. He often collects non-precious materials— discarded cardboard, debris from demolition sites, the limbs from fallen trees — things both of man and of nature, and tries to morph them into mysterious objects. He thinks of his practice like a kind of backwoods and scavenging archaeology, less concerned with forensic exactness and scientific rigor but more focused on curated presentation and reverence. An incomplete archivist, a chronicler. These objects all have their own history and meaning, and he tries to capture some of those inherent qualities, subvert some of them, and transmute the remaining. TJ has been based in Austin, TX since the Bastrop County Complex Fire of 2011 (no relation) and has been a member of Icosa since the fall of 2024.

Seth Rich (b. 1979 Mountain View, AR) Seth Relentless is an Austin-based artist whose seven-year studio practice spans sculpture, painting, and mixed media, exploring memory,
culture, and identity through bright colors and unconventional materials. Drawing on influences from television, the internet, fast food, and the cultural landscape of his Middle American upbringing, his work often combines a playful, childlike aesthetic with an unsettling edge to evoke nostalgia, curiosity, and surprise. Themes of pop culture, science fiction, subcultures, and childhood toys intersect with his investigations into masculinity, the American dream, and the myth of the hero, revealing how societal ideals often diverge from lived reality. His work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Austin.


Exhibition Dates: September 26- October 25, 2025
Artist Reception: Friday,September 26th 7-10pm
Third Thursday East Austin Arts District hours/ Artist Talk: October 17th 6-9pm (artist talk at 7:30pm)
Gallery Hours: Fridays and Saturdays, 12-6pm or by appointment
ICOSA Collective Gallery
916 Springdale Rd, Bldg 2, #102, Austin, TX 78702
www.icosacollective.com