EXHIBITION
Two-person art show was two-and-a-half years in the making.
A leasing agent who brought potential tenants to the rapidly developing Sawyer Yards complex recently was surprised to find a couple of artistic squatters in the empty space she was showing.
Artists Preston Douglas and Grace Deal were just as shocked. But nobody balked, and the agent and clients went about their business.
It brought back shades of Lawndale Art Center in the 1980s, when many young, restless artists set up shop in abundant, vacant industrial spaces across Houston’s inner city. That kind of space isn’t so easy to find anymore. Douglas, however, is also a savvy and persistent entrepreneur; he has a friend in the real estate business who lets him stage art exhibitions in transitioning spaces around the Washington Avenue Arts District.
Likable and with a boisterous laugh, Douglas projects a kind of goofy innocence, and he doesn’t hog the spotlight. In August he shared “A Little Pill,” an ambitious, addictionthemed show, with a newish pal, Tyler Swanner, at a much larger warehouse.
The current show, “Two (And a Half ) Years,” includes paintings by Deal, Douglas’ girlfriend. The title refers to the amount of time they’ve been a couple. Yeah, it sounds significant when you’re in your early 20s — although they also appreciate irony.
“Even though we almost look like the same person, we couldn’t be more different,” he wrote in a press release for the show. “Grace is Free People and I am Rick Owens. She took the academic route and I took the DIY path. Grace adores Macklemore and I love Shy Glizzy. She absorbs energy from being around people all of the time and I have to watch Fortnite videos alone in my bed to recharge my emotional batteries.”
They met at the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business, a program Deal quickly abandoned. She will graduate with a BFA in painting and a minor in art history next spring, but has her own studio at school. With an internship plus a job at Anthropologie, she’s wrestling with what to do next. Everyone tells her she needs to go straight to grad school and earn an MFA to launch her career.
“Other students in the program think I’m crazy,” she said. “They’re not doing anything like this.”
He said he’s done with academia, after graduating last May with degrees in marketing and entrepreneurship from the Bauer Honors program. “However,” he added, “part of me wishes someone would pay for me to go to Yale’s MFA program or CalArts or something, so I could feel validated.”
He planned to be a fashion designer until Deal introduced him to the art world — then he was all in, inspired by her painting and finding a creative community that suited him. He lives in his parents’ garage and works several “partpart time” jobs: He assists the famous artist Mark Flood (an impressive mentor to have), builds websites and runs his smallscale fashion company. “I have to hustle to break even,” Douglas said. “But the more people I meet, the better my work becomes, I know that it will become financially successful. I want to be a fulltime artist.”
Deal gave him a nudge. “Here’s your DIY, selftaught, crash-course artist right here,” she said. “I’ll come home and talk about my art history class, and he’ll go, wow, that’s so interesting — and he’ll go look up every detail and know more than I do by the end of the day.”
Douglas claims he’s just obsessive. “It takes a certain type of sadistic person to do this,” he said. “There are so many things involved with putting on a gallery show with a tiny budget, it’s just a matter of how badly do you want it? How many times are you willing for people to tell you no?”
He and Deal have found some important validation. Flood bought two of her paintings. The former Contemporary Arts Museum director bought one of his during the August show. A few insider-type art magazines wrote about “A Little Pill.”
At this point, the young and restless ones can’t imagine being anything but artists.
Deal’s “Messy” series paintings, which also have layers of mark-making, simulate Photoshop processes. “I like the idea of putting an image into a space and not confining it to the rules of gravity or shadows or whatever,” she explains. “So it’s plopping things in, moving them, taking them out, adding more things. My content is oriented toward my hometown, Dayton, Ohio, the opioid capital of America. The Rust Belt. I really like old, forgotten swimming pools. I like the gross parts of everyday life.”
It’s advanced work evoking the blur of urban decay, home life, family drama and feelings of inadequacy. Her artist statement nods to “James Rosenquist’s composition, Cecily Brown’s beautiful layering, Gael Stack’s subconscious scribbling, Willem de Kooning’s color palette and Alice Neel’s use of the outline to highlight a subject’s emotional dissonance.”
Douglas’ work exudes a more haphazard, almost manic energy with a mishmash of found images. His large paintings on loose canvas look intentionally unpolished alongside traditionally stretched paintings and sculptures made of masses of plastic tubing on tripods. For all that, his palette is restrained — usually no more than four colors. “That’s the fashion designer coming out,” he says. “I can go overboard, so I have to limit myself sometimes.”
His “Raverface” jams mid-2000’s cyber-goth industrial dance culture with Rococo art history. Fragonard is a favorite — not for the subject matter, but the historical artist’s backgrounds, he says. “I’ve always been attracted to trees, especially when it’s raining or damp.”
His “Beauty Is Violence” series is about the inevitability of emotional pain that comes with being in love, a violent family history, tribal sculpture, Picasso, Cy Twombly and Sigmar Polke’s blue paintings. “It’s up to the viewer to decide if they see flowers or gunshot wounds,” he writes in his statement. “The ‘whores in my head’ reference comes from The Pixies’ song ‘Hey ,’ which comes full circle because Grace’s aunt, Kim Deal, was one of the band’s founding members.”
Is any of it good? Yes, but that’s not necessarily what sells art these days. If it takes more emails, more social media, more needling of collectors who’ve never heard of them to get noticed — well, Douglas is pretty good at that, too. And determined.
“I wouldn’t show with Grace, even though she’s my girlfriend, if I didn’t 110 percent believe in her work; and I’m sure she wouldn’t want to show with me if she didn’t somewhat like some of my work!” he says.
Whether you like the work or not, you have to be impressed by the ingenuity of the raw-looking installation at the center of the room made of plywood, buckets and trash. All of that was debris that had nowhere else to go when they took over the space. Deal and Preston couldn’t throw it away because they didn’t own it. But they did make it their own, adding small paintings and prints to the pile.
“I guess they could be called junk, depending on who’s looking at them,” he says.