Tureen is pleased to announce The Dust is Here to Stay, a solo exhibition of recent work by River Shell. Artist, curator, gallerist, sage, Shell is a pillar of the Dallas art community and co-founder of storied exhibition space PRP. Known for both his import to Dallas’ alternative cultural milieu and its home to a pathbreaking, decade-long exhibition history, Shell and PRP together serve as ideals for art for art’s sake.

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Upon entering the exhibition, one might begin to feel a gratifying kind of disorientation take hold. To the left a pair of abstractions abut a figurative painting of someone’s torso, neck sporting a cartoonish dog collar. The former pair, one of which conjures a Cormac McCarthy-esque Texas sky—“the evening redness in the West”—share a palette with the latter work, their viscera undeniably aesthetic kin. The further into the space you move, the more these strange bedfellows volley in your periphery. An actual dog collar clipped to the ear of another figurative painting hangs parallel to a watery, luminous rendition of a sunflower and heart on dish towel, the kind you’d find draped over the handle of a white enameled oven.

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That gratifying disorientation should, by the end of things, feel like freedom, the filmic kind of freedom you get watching, half-drunk, illegal fireworks at a summer cookout or trying on your dog’s collar as a teenager and knowing it’s right. This is the full breadth of life in an outsized, caricature-of-a place, both an ode to and sendup of regionalism’s hold on aesthetics down here. The trappings of masculinity yield to a kind of bodily remaking. The cowboy hat, the gym socks, the dumbbell, all iconography bleeding into a surface shared with those previous hints at submission and the sweetest epigraph: “to be Desired and to perform ACTS of LOVE.”

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And finally the title, “The Dust is Here to Stay,” its own kind of submission, or resignation. This place too vast to either escape or confine has never looked so sublime.

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River Shell (b. New York, NY) Is an interdisciplinary artists and film maker living and working in Dallas, Texas. Their work has been included in solo and group shows at And Now, 2018, Oliver Francis Gallery, Dallas, 2021,  12.26, 2021, Jessamine, Dallas, 2024. River operates the artist run space PRP which received the Nasher Artist Grant in 2025. River is also the founder of DVD films.