So The Story Goes

May 16, 2026 - June 20, 2026

From Mothership Studios:
"Mothership Studios is proud to present So The Story Goes, an exhibition of work from Ryan Richey, Spider House Studio (David Bae and Nate Ratcliffe), Josiah Brown
Curated by Jenn Wilson
In So The Story Goes, storytelling is not a linear act but a recursive one, an orbit around truths that resist direct articulation. The works assembled here mobilize humor, folklore, painterly tradition, and participatory play as strategies to destabilize inherited narratives and reconstitute them through personal and collective memory.
For Richey, humor becomes both a disarming mechanism and a critical lens. It facilitates self-reflection while permitting a measured sentimentality, capturing moments of wonder embedded within quotidian banalities. His paintings, built through accumulations of gesso and oil paint and incised with a kitchen knife, occupy a liminal space between abstraction and figuration. Reduced forms and suggestive compositions evoke the textures of Midwestern Americana, including its nostalgia, its awkward intimacies, and its formative dissonances. Sardonic yet earnest titles act as entry points, anchoring otherwise elusive emotional registers.
Josiah Brown engages the historical weight of Baroque painting, a tradition steeped in the authority of narrative and the centrality of the figure. By erasing and destabilizing figuration, Brown redirects attention toward the dualistic drama of light and dark, transforming narrative into atmosphere. His sweeping, gestural abstractions do not simply negate history painting but reconfigure it, prompting viewers to question the structures through which meaning has traditionally been constructed. In their place, Brown offers a self-contained visual cosmos, one in which mark-making itself generates new mythologies.
For Spider House Studios (Nate Ratcliffe and David Bae), storytelling unfolds through the logic of play. Drawing from the visual language of folklore, particularly Grimm’s tales, alongside principles of game theory in video game design, they construct intricate, hand-painted worlds rendered in gouache and watercolor to build the game. These interactive systems embed subversive puzzles that reintroduce the unsanitized brutality of their original source material. By doing so, they interrogate the cultural impulse to soften narratives for contemporary audiences, revealing the pedagogical and moral complexities that once defined these cautionary tales. Their work situates itself at the intersection of fine art and independent game design, challenging distinctions between participation, authorship, and narrative control.
Curator, Jenn Wilson Shepherd, extends this participatory ethos into the exhibition space itself. By inviting audiences to inscribe their own stories directly onto the walls of Mothership, she asks the audience to transform the site into a living archive. This gesture foregrounds the voices of an emergent artistic community in San Marcos, collapsing the boundary between artist, curator, and audience, and positioning storytelling as a collective, evolving process.
Across these practices, narrative emerges not as a fixed structure but as a mutable, contested terrain. Each work proposes that storytelling, whether through humor, erasure, play, or inscription, is a means of circling toward the unspeakable, of giving form to the latent, the inherited, and the unresolved.
Please join us for an inspiring and interactive exhibition So the Story Goes !
This event is sponsored in part by the City of San Marcos Arts Commission and our amazing sponsors like Rogelio's Restaurant, San Marcos Film Lab, Spellerberg Projects and Texas State University. Complimentary drinks will be offered from our sponsors Austin Beer Works, Tito’s Vodka, Cara Buena Tequila and Rambler Sparkling Water. In addition to the opening reception on Saturday the 16th, 6-9pm, open hours will be held Saturdays 12-3pm, by appointment.
Exhibition Dates: May 16th - June 20th, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 16th, 6-9pm
Exhibition Open Hours Saturdays 12:00 - 3:00 pm, by appointment.

About The Curator
Jenn Wilson Shepherd (b. 1981 Galveston, TX) is an artist, art historian, and curator that lives and works in Austin, Texas. She has shown nationally and internationally with Corbett vs Dempsey (Chicago), Beca Gallery (New Orleans), Packer-Schopf Gallery (Chicago), Eggman & Walrus (Santa Fe), Thomas McCormick Gallery (Chicago), American University of Beirut (Lebanon), University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center Gallery, and Kohler Art Museum in Wisconsin. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008."

Reception May 16, 2026 | 6:00 - 9:00 pm

Mothership Studios
20027 San Marcos Highway 80, Bay 5
San Marcos, TX 78666
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