Opening Reception: Friday, August 22, 2025, 6–9 PM
Open Studio: Saturday, August 23, 2025, 12-4 PM
New Location: 1114 W 5th St, Suite 202, Austin, TX
McLennon Pen Co. is pleased to announce Nathan Anthony and Selina Wagner as our Summer 2025 Artists-in-Residence. Their five week residency will culminate in a collaborative exhibition, Ortland Leathe, that will be unveiled for two days only with a public reception on Friday, August 22, from 6–9 PM, and an open studio event on Saturday, August 23, from 12–4 PM at our new location on West 5th Street.
Working in drawing, sculpture, and installation, Anthony and Wagner use the gallery as both studio and exhibition site, blending their sensibilities into a body of work that is equal parts bodily, playful, and process-driven.
Created within a condensed timeline, Ortland Leathe explores themes of mutation and adaptation. Sculptural forms droop, stack, and clot; largescale graphite drawings refract imagery in response to the architecture of the space. Embracing impulsive decision-making, the exhibition leaves traces of process visible: sketches, equipment, failed experiments, and materials occupy the back room of the gallery, framing the show as both finished presentation and ongoing laboratory.
The title itself emerged from the site: a window in the gallery reveals a sign for Portland Leather that, from certain angles, reads as “Ortland Leathe.” The accidental wordplay echoes the artists’ shared approach—humorous, responsive, and rooted in splicing visual language.
Nathan Anthony is an artist from the UK currently living in Austin, Texas. His work utilises sculpture, print and moving-image to hotwire, hijack and redirect the conventional associations of everyday objects and materials for poetic reconsideration. He completed a joint MA (Hons) in Fine Art & Art History at Edinburgh University in 2014 and an MFA in Studio Art at The University of Texas at Austin in 2025. He was included in the 2016 - 2017 Jerwood Drawing Prize, and had a solo exhibition at Generator Projects, Dundee in 2017. He was Artist in Residence at Christ’s Hospital School, West Sussex from 2017 - 2019, and Artist in Residence at Eltham College in London from 2019 - 2022, where he made an exhibition of artwork called ‘Muscled Memory’ at the Gerald Moore Gallery in 2021. In 2023 he received a Gilbert Bayes Award for early career sculptors from the Royal Society of Sculptors.
Selina Wagner is an artist from Florida living in Austin, Texas. Her large-scale graphite drawings explore corporeality, girlhood, sensory experience, and perceptual confusion. Wagner has exhibited both nationally and internationally, with recent shows at Kunstraum Kreuzberg in Berlin, The Pack in New York City, and the Visual Arts Center in Austin. She is a recipient of the American Austrian Foundation’s Seebacher Prize, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, a Continuing Fellowship from UT Austin, and Best in Show at the University of Montana’s Anything That…Moves. Wagner holds a BFA in Drawing from the University of Florida and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Texas at Austin.
For press inquiries or to request a preview, please contact: info@mclennonpenco.com