El Rincon Social, The Social Corner, is one of the most popular and exciting artist-run collectives in East End's warehouse district. It marks a new generation of alternative art spaces that specialize in supporting Houston's burgeoning emerging artist scene. Their mission is to create culturally-rich art environments that nurture the exchange of ideas and experiences through innovative workshops, exhibitions and events that showcase local artists and benefit their community.

The artists in this exhibition explore themes of alchemy and are specifically drawn to the organic structure of an object. This alchemic process acts as a screen to coalesce the viewer's experience through their relationship to the everyday object, usually overlooked as trivial; such as the plaster of our walls, the cement of our streets, post-industrial scraps at construction sites, or the ephemeral chemistry utilized in capturing our memories.

David Salinas, for example, learned to develop his own negatives & establish specific darkroom recipes, thus finding a signature style by manipulating colors with chemistry, usually developing on site using the water from a nearby creek or river. The process is, therefore, a practical aspect of making these works and reflects the intimacy of their encounter with the landscape. Patrick Renner re-purposes discarded material, especially architectural refuse, to construct highly personal narratives, while Dylan Conner's curiosity investigates how architecture may respond to organic sculpture interventions, setting up circumstances in which materials must show their physical properties.

El Rincon Social artist Oscar Rene Cornejo says "The audience carries a politics and history that either places them in a participatory or consumer relationship to the objects they interact with. This "participant vs. consumer" role paints a portrait of our relationship with organic material at its natural state; say a tree, and the objects that are created with it, furniture, paper, houses, etc. It is within this context that these works persist to show the human hand in its construction as a testament to the individual, giving strength to provincial inquiry amidst a mass manufactured world."