Ringers at ‘The Big Show’: Can you spot them?
Eyebrows lifted when juror Toby Kamps invited A-list veteran artists to participate in the annual, open-call “The Big Show” at Lawndale Art Center.
One of Lawndale’s oldest traditions, “The Big Show” has always been about equality, giving opportunities to Houston-area artists who aren’t part of the academic or gallery system mainstream. That covers a wide swath, including people who’ve toiled for years at what they do, emerging talent and amateurs.
Though, viewing the show this week, I wondered if someone who didn’t know better would be able to identify work of the A-listers, such as David McGee’s deliberately crude-looking “Tomber en Rose Abstraction,” a large canvas with thick layers of pink paint and a few well-placed dots of contrasting colors that suggest an obese, tragicomic figure with a telltale golden comb-over.
McGee is one of Houston’s most provocative Alisters, and I can’t wait to see where he’s taking his newest body of work. But another observer might look at that painting and think, “Yech, who let this guy into the show?”
There’s no mistaking the expert hand of a consummate painter in Rachel Hecker’s realistic canvas “Cigarette Arrangement #2” or in Aaron Parazette’s superbly lined “Trilobyte.”
So, short answer to that earlier question about recognizing the A-listers’ work: Yes, probably. Houston’s veterans, most of whom have also taught for years, are very, very good.
Still, one could make a fine sport of finding their work among the show’s 187 pieces, which were selected from a record 549 single entries. I identified more than 40, but it would be easy to miss a few, given the salon-style hanging that fills every wall in the building, and then some.
Not all the A-listers who participated got in. And not every work Kamps chose from the lesser-known talent is great, or even good.
But as always, “The Big Show” has its eyeopeners.
Antonius Bui, whose hand-cut paper piece “My Brown Skin” displays insanely good craftsmanship, was new to me. I also fell into the spellbinding detail of “Atlas Metamorphosis Stage 4 of 4: God Beatle,” an ink drawing by another emerging artist who was a “Big Show” winner in 2015, Vincent Fink.
If I’d had to pick a favorite that day, it would have been Trey Duvall’s video “If you were me, then I’d be you, and I’d use your body to get to the top.” I know Troy as a sculptor who likes to expose raw clay to the elements. This video, which runs less than three minutes, captures the failure of a motorized pully contraption with a heavy element — a Duvall invention, I suspect.
He filmed the thing’s awkward spinning and failure. The motor is still clicking a bit at the end, reminding me of a dying cicada on its last legs. It just summed up how I felt at that moment. It made me laugh out loud.
The show’s three $1,000 prizes seem equitably chosen.
Kathy Drago’s loose, figurative painting “I Am So UPSET!” won one. Another went to a process-driven piece, Renata Lucia’s “New vs. Nature (Inquiry),” made by crumpling and “burning” a page from a newspaper with acrylic and a reducing agent. The other was awarded to an experimental photo project that may have involved a major time commitment, Zachary Gresham’s “Channeling Is Possible/Twelve Months of Auras,” a series of 12 small, unframed Polaroids that show a guy surrounded by colorful lights.
Kamps, the new director of the Blaffer Art Museum who has worked in Houston for years as a curator, didn’t select the winners, exactly. Working from out of town, he gave Lawndale director Stephanie Mitchell a list of 10 favorites he chose mostly by instinct and let her be his “eyes on the ground,” he said by phone from London.
Most of the veterans didn’t want to be considered for the awards.
“I was looking for people I didn’t know and artists for whom it could be a real shot in the arm,” Kamps said.
Mainly, he wanted to create a snapshot of Houston’s art scene at this moment.
“We have these digital denizens, and street-art people and academic philosophers of abstraction,” he said. He wanted to see how they came together “and introduce Houston’s art worlds to each other.”
He gave the show a theme for the first time because an “organizing principal” made the open call seem less of a free-for-all. Although the theme, “Rate of Change,” can mean just about anything. Good luck trying to see how some of the works in this show apply. I guess one could argue that any new work by an artist constitutes some kind of change.
“The only constant is change,” Kamps quipped. “We’re living in a culture of whiplash. At the end of the day, ‘solidarity’ came to me. Solidarity and power in numbers. All these people are thinking about power and meaning and beauty and truth.”
Every visitor will find something different to appreciate. That is the real beauty of “The Big Show.”