Sculptural strength
Artists take up challenge of transforming imposing silos into intriguing installations
Joseph Havel, the sculptor who directs the Glassell School of Art, was reticent to participate in Sculpture Month Houston after Hurricane Harvey.
He told the show’s organizers it was not the time for magic.
But artful sorcery is sometimes required at the 34 old grain silos of SITE Gallery in the Washington Avenue Arts District.
Cobbled from cavelike, insanely tall concrete cylinders that have funnels for ceilings, the silos are such audacious and unforgiving installation spaces you have to wonder if artists from cities other than Houston would have bothered to embrace them.
“The space almost rejects art,” gallery director Trey Duvall says.
During the Sculpture Month Houston show, artists from Austin, San Antonio, Dallas and Arkansas have tackled the silos with intriguing results.
Curators Volker Eisele and Antarctica Black debated canceling “Tensile Strength” after the storm, instead delaying the opening a few weeks.
Black sensed that artists were happy to be creating again.
“It was almost a necessity, being motivated to get back to work,” she said. “We needed to produce, and we needed to talk about what happened.”
The show’s best installations transport viewers, at least mentally, with visual magic, whether working with the silos or against them.
Longtime Houston collaborators Jeff Fisher and Jon Shore take the latter route, building a black-curtained theater around a screen for one of their signature real-time audio-video contraptions, projecting the movement of tiny, motorized props. Their presentations are usually about transparency, with the devices exposed and displayed like sculptures. This space’s sleek wooden doorway sets a more intriguing stage, and you have to laugh at the precociousness of taking a silo all Hollywood.
San Antonio’s Mark McCoin exposes the guts of a piano — its 500-pound harp structure —for an experiment with accoustical ambience. The suspended harp spins above visitors’ heads while robotic arms strike the strings, creating chords that reverberate through the silo’s architecture to create a rich, sonic experience.
The huge lasercutting machine driving the installation of Houstonians Alex Goss and Alexa West could be fascinating anywhere. It’s a big, ambitious, mysterious and silent thing unless performers are present to step onto a “stage” of foam core as the path of their movements gets carved into the material — a dance between man and machine.
The most poetic work of the show, San Antonio artist Jill Bedgood’s “Even Song,” honors its site almost mystically. Incorporating the wall’s water and rust stains, human marks and operating windows, Bedgood adds a layer of drawings that look like Renaissance diagrams of constellations, illustrating a lunar cycle. That tour de force pays off for those who look up, where the artist has hand-applied 1,000 goldleaf sheets on the ceiling funnel — a silo as a Byzantine chapel.
Two of the show’s participants lost homes and studios to Harvey’s floodwaters.
Keliy Anderson Staley responds directly with “Diving into the Wreck,” a display of abstract photographs made without a camera but using her signature wet-plate collodion chemistry. One of them sits on the floor in the doorway, submerged under a few inches of water in a darkroom tray, so visitors can step in and leave their wet footprints on the floor. Gimmicky.
Patrick Renner lost his home, too, and a viewer could read ideas about being displaced into his “Apparition.” But his sculpture also speaks eloquently to the silo space, created from a large ring of flexible tubing that floats just above the floor, like a halo, suspended by thread from a late grandmother’s sewing basket.
Havel eventually found an elegaic solution to his conundrum: He created a simple tower of mattresses collected from the massive piles of belongings that lined Houston’s streets during the hurricane’s aftermath, then surrounded that essentially readymade sculpture with a slightly mournful soundtrack of passing trains.
It’s the quiet magic that stays with you.