ART INSIDE THE SILOS
Innovative exhibit space goes against the grain
SOME artists dream of showing their work in white boxes. That’s the classic gallery configuration: ample walls with bright, sharply focused lighting. The exhibit space at The Silos at Sawyer Yards is anything but that.
The hive of renovated rice silos in the Washington Avenue Arts District are, well, silos: round, 11 to 15 feet in diameter and very tall — about 80 feet, with funnel contraptions at about 13 feet.
Principal owner Jon Deal deemed the silos too cool to tear down, sensing they’d be a prominent landmark for the creative campus he and his partners are building. Deal, who is converting part of the sprawling silos compound into studios and offices, donated more than $180,000 to turn the cylindrical structures into a unique site-specific art installation space managed by the Washington Avenue Arts District.
What can an artist do in such a windowless, labyrinthian atmosphere — with the caveat that it remains dimly lit and water pools on the floors during hard rains?
That’s the fun of SiteHouston, the first show. Curators Bill Arning and Jillian Conrad chose works that emulate the silos’ spirit or explore their history. The exhibits are open to the public for one more night. The closing party is Saturday.
Some of the installations riff prettily on circular shapes. Tiny discs cut from old photographic slides tumble down the wire of Bennie Flores Ansell’s lightreflecting “1 dip Lens,” while the larger transparent acrylic discs of Lorena Morales’ “Are You in The Loop?” are strung out above viewers’ heads in a dynamic play of color and light.
Quiet but substantial, Michael Crowder’s large cast-glass and wood sculpture, “Some Assembly Required,” depicts a monumental set of Tinker Toys with spools and sticks that might have been left behind by a frustrated kid who gave up on the challenge of responding to such a space.
Trey Duvall’s elegant, elegiac “Passage” has aged intriguingly since the show opened. It involves a coffin-size, 4,000-pound block of white clay that sits under a water-drip rig (in one of the few spots of the building that didn’t have a roof leak); the drip device has kept the clay wet and caused it to crack open in the middle.
“Coasting,” by Shane Allbritton and Peter Bernick-Allbritton, evocatively depicts the not-sopretty issue of rising sea levels in a way that’s simultaneously refined and raw. It contains a dramatically lit column of strips of paper printed with abstracted images of bayou and urban scenery. The ends dangle in a reservoir of water that seeps into them, changing the paper’s colors.
One of the show’s best, most transportive works evokes water with no objects at all: When visitors step inside Lina Dib’s meditative, two-channel “Pool of Sound,” their movements trigger imaginary “waves.” Suddenly, sound seems like a thrillingly palpable substance.
Sound gets really physical in Eric Thayer’s “Les Carillons” installation, where visitors are encouraged to make noise as they plow through a silo chock-full of upended plastic paint buckets that hang like bells from the ceiling. If you ever wanted to
jump onstage and participate in “Stomp,” here’s your opportunity.
Videos adapt well to the silos. Several installations use projected media to incorporate ceiling funnels as well as walls — notably Aaron Courtland’s multiscreen “Space Station at the Silos,” Syd Moen’s surreal documentary “Silos Project” and David Waddell’s “Questions at Bedtime: In Memoriam,” a dreamy marvel of stop-motion animation.
Several artists emphasized the building’s otherworldly aspects. Claire Cusack’s eerie “The Visitor,” made with string lights and a tangled column of fiber, looks like some exotic invasive species: heaven-sent or not so benign? You decide.
Janice Freeman’s massive silk “Silo Flower” invites viewers to sit on mod, vinyl ottomans in a psychedelic environment. Hedwige Jacobs’ hand-drawn “Woven Living Room” contains a rocking chair, TV and shelves of knickknacks all meticulously painted white with black lines — a labor-intensive project. It feels like you’re stepping into the pages of a slightly twisted comic book.
Visitors can also swing a bit in two installations: Seated bodies provide counterweight in Isaac Reyes’ “Melancholia,” causing a bevy of suspended blue balloons to move. In Nadia Pacheco and Andrea Porter’s “Which Way to the Rice?,” the swings suggest more of a pendulum and allow viewers to consider a world of nicely produced graphics about food supply, climate change and population growth.
Playfulness reigns even in the passageways between the installations, where colorful changing lights draw eyes upward along the silo walls.
While not all of the show’s works are crafted with equal skill, this was a cool way to inaugurate a unique — and uniquely Houston — art space. It will be fun to see how the next group of artists responds.