From small show to ‘The Big Show,’ exhibits offer more than eye candy
You can count on more than heat and humidity during a Houston August. More pleasurably, the city’s galleries mount group shows that offer a glimpse of a wide range of talent.
Though these exhibitions can feel like a free-for-all, several of this summer’s thoughtfully organized shows provide more than random eye candy. They illustrate how good curators can work a room of any size.
‘Objectively Speaking’
Artist Margaret Smithers Crump’s Hunter Gather Project features the wildly different works of six Houston artists who have a special affinity for objects as materials. (Full disclosure: Crump also has hung mixed-media work by my husband, Don Glentzer, in an adjacent room.)
Given the intimate space of the L-shaped alternative gallery, the walls have a surprising amount of breathing room, although on opening night, the crowd kept stepping on Samara Rosen’s floor installation, a ruglike puzzle of tree bark. She didn’t mind — the artist likes to watch things dissipate — but thankfully her framed constructions of nutmeg slivers were safely framed.
Also organic and exploring the passage of time, Rebecca Braziel’s bigger bark fragments are jewellike sculptures. She turns detritus from wildfires into a canvas for tiny beads — giving the burned wood a sparkly sense of regeneration.
Rix Jennings taps into his unconscious as he works with everyday materials. He has a nice Zen thing going with a large sheet of handmade paper that hangs above a snakelike bit of carved wood. Shelley Scott makes shelftop objects inspired by her studio tools.
Delaney Smith’s sophisticated hanging pieces are based on metaphors about gravity. They remind me of the upholstery samples you might find in a furniture store, but they also hold a rich history, incorporating strips of deteriorating curtains from Bayou Bend.
All the earthy business gets a nice jolt from Fari Rahimi’s mini-installation of steel and glass structures, which are about strength and vulnerability.
34th annual Juried Membership Exhibition
The Houston Center for Photography accepts members from around the world. Many join so they can enter the annual group show juried by a prestigious curator.
This year, Yasufumi Nakamori, who recently left the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for the Minneapolis Institute of Art, selected works by 40 artists whose styles range from gritty documentary, surreal compositions and landscapes to video and experimental works.
The show holds together because they’re grouped somewhat thematically. The best evoke a sense of mystery, regardless of technique. The fairly straightforward images that won their makers $1,000 Beth Block honoraria suggest that traditional photography is still alive and well.
Photojournalist Petra Barth’s mugshot-like black-and-white portraits of deported migrants in a Mexican shelter, from a series called “The Backpackers,” echo Richard Avedon’s famous 1980s portraits of characters in the American West but engage viewers with their sad, weary and yet defiant eyes.
The black-and-white images of Eli Durst’s “Connecticut Community Center” series look like they could have been captured in the 1950s or ’60s, with melancholy, surreal elements — an apple with a big shadow on a conference table, and pigeons flying through a windowless meeting room — that leave room for a viewer’s imagination to roam.
Stacy Platt’s “Waterlogged” series finds the poetry in ruined, waterlogged books with runny text and warped pages in color images whose interesting composition sometimes renders them almost abstract.
‘The Big Show’
Any artist practicing within 100 miles of Houston can enter Lawndale Art Center’s popular annual open-call show. Opening a door to selftaught newbies as well as academically trained professionals, “The Big Show” is always fun to see.
It looks great this year because jurors Apsara DiQuinzio, from the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Tina Kukielski, who directs New York’s digital-media-focused Art21, noticed themes and perhaps chose the show accordingly.
Sifting through a marathon of nearly 1,400 submissions, they selected 105 works by a record 87 artists. They awarded the $3,000 top prize to a work you could easily miss amid the many large canvases: the dark and layered ink drawing “First Cause” by Katya Vassilyeva. It’s one of the smallest pieces on a wall whose works all have graphic, black-and-white drama.
Elsewhere across the huge O’Quinn Gallery, it looks like a lot of Houston artists have been taking classes in Cubism and Surrealism. Some very retro stuff there.
The display in the Grace R. Cavnar Gallery spotlights figurative work that ranges from meticulous to loosely expressive and barely there. David P. Gray’s “The Calder” engaged me with its luminous realism. It depicts two men sitting in a retro diner, deep in conversation, with a small Alexander Calder print inexplicably propped on their booth.
I also lingered at Rajab Sayed’s “Daydreamer,” which feels Andrew Wyeth-like: Its husky, plaid-shirted figure gazes at a gray landscape through the window of a white room.
Upstairs in the Horton Gallery, I was mesmerized by the dangling bodies of Daniela Antelo and Clay Zapalac’s one-minute loop video “Hanging” — and quickly saw parallel tracks in the lines of the room’s other works, especially the crocheted yarn strips of James Kerley’s “Agility Text (Difficulty Level 5),” on the floor; William Dixon’s “Wait Right There,” a large photograph of a line of blue plastic chairs; and Cassie Skelly’s “Stand Tall,” a close-up photograph of human feet whose ringclad toes splay out as they try to elevate a body.
But then I got enthralled with Christy Karll’s “More than Enough,” a three-minute video whose digitally altered imagery led me down a road in a bright, dreamy haze.
More than enough, indeed.