An immersive experience
Sculpture Month Houston shows embracing of installations
Could Sculpture Month Houston be a catalyst for cultural pilgrimages to Houston in a way art fairs have not?
Organizer-curators Tommy Gregory, Volker Eisele and Antarctica Black don’t want to overcommit, but they’re hopeful. Gregory, the former public art program director and curator of Houston’s airport system, moved to Seattle this month to work for the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. But Eisele and Black intend to keep Sculpture Month going and, hopefully, growing.
The potential is there, thanks in part to Gregory’s addition of airport-area installations this year, plus the headquarters show “Peak Shift” at SITE Gallery in the Silos at Sawyer Yards and a multitude of exhibitions at nonprofit and commercial galleries.
Maybe the term “sculpture,” which too often conjures static objects, is a bit limiting for the organizers’ vision.
“Our naked ambition would be to provide a forum for installation art,” said Eisele, who owns Rudolph Blume Fine Art/Artscan Gallery. “You can say painting has been explored to the nth degree. I don’t buy into that. But the installation possibilities are incredible.”
Installation work explores broader space than a typical sculpture, in some ways echoing the land-art movement that began in the late-20th century. Museums have embraced it, even though it is by nature a spaceeater, and installation has also been a predominant “medium,” if you can call it that, at global art events such as Documenta and the Venice Biennale.
Immersive, participatory art may be more emotionally stimulating than your typical white box gallery show, especially to a generation brought up on video games. “People want a shared experience,” Black said.
In the realm of art-as-amusement-park, few attractions have been as successful as “House of Eternal Return,” a sprawling, fantastical environment of seemingly endless rooms created by Santa Fe’s Meow Wolf collective within a former bowling alley. It’s several years old, and still packed. Other cities are clamoring for Meow Wolf environments now, and the group is the subject of a new documentary, “Origin Story,” which opens Nov. 29 in cinemas across the U.S.
In Houston, Sculpture Month helps to fill some of the gap caused by the absence of the much-loved, shuttered Rice University Gallery, which for 20 years was one of the world’s only spaces devoted to site-specific installations. And as Eisele noted, the city has a number of other unique installation spaces, including the Buffalo Bayou Cistern, Project Row Houses and the Orange Show.
Working at SITE is not for sissies, offering artists a dark honeycomb of round, former grain silos that soar more than 80 feet. “This is a very hostile space,” Eisele said. “But the best work has always been site-specific, where the artist wrestles with it.”
In a departure from the 2016 and 2017 Sculpture Month shows there, this year’s artists were invited to claim multiple silos. “We wanted to give the artists more space so they could have that extra oomph and to give patrons the desire to keep peeking around corners,” Black said.
That cut the number of participants. There are 12 installations by talent from across the state. “It’s not that we weren’t getting enough Houston artists, it’s that we wanted to see the bigger cross-section of sculpture and installation art,” Black said.
“There are not that many true installation artists because commercially, what do you do with it?” Eisele said.
One who has been tremendously successful is Chicago’s Jessica Stockholder, who first worked in Houston at Main Street Square a few years ago. After seeing the silos, she wanted to participate this year.
Stockholder’s “Strings Attached Too” hangs at the entrance because it is so long; the building’s interior silos all have cones that drop fairly low. Tommy Gregory and SITE director Trey Duvall climbed 83 feet and dropped cable to suspend the work, which resembles a monumental jellyfish whose tentacles contain a flotsam-jetsam of massproduced plastic crates and dishes, seashells and other organic materials.
The Houston duo Hillerbrand + Magsamen looked no further than their own home to create “Devices for Dwelling,” an installation in the highly entertaining “Suburban Fluxus” style. Imagine an experiment in postapocalyptic survival. Along with video projected on several silos, they have concocted sculptures of white garbage bags that inflate and deflate like breathing apparatus, and a whirling “satellite” that might be seeking signals of life from outer space.
Leticia Bajuyo collected 15,000 compact discs to create the scalylooking skin of “Event Horizon,” a sparkling but poetic installation of tunnel-shaped walls that replicate black holes where all the data history contained on the discs disappears but is not destroyed.
Fantastical visuals also come into play with Ann Wood’s “Fountain,” although it is more sculpture than installation. Running water trickles down her lush, baroque-rococo structure, composed of thousands of pretty pastel parts — flowers, plants and such — that form a grotesque whole. Stand back, and the scene of a pack of coyotes devouring a ram comes into focus.
Kamila Szczesna fully embraces the worst space in the building — and a potential leakage issue — with another work that’s both intriguing and repulsive: Her web of microbial forms weaves through four silos, made of unfired porcelain “balloons” with an iron-oxide coating that is rusting purposefully. Frances Bagley also leads visitors through several silos to experience her anthropomorphic, classically inspired forms.
Other artists stay within the bounds of multiple silos but riff on a theme. Liss LaFleur asserts her female power in two silos that each contain five layers of video “screens” made of pink or yellow filament. She’s present via the projected video, lip-synching digitally manipulated renditions of “Bang Bang” and “You Belong to Me.” Jeff Williams plays with the drawing-and-erasure qualities of pink latex, applied in industrial amounts, with two silos that make up his “Cone Bottom Peel.”
Hills Snyder’s complex, onesilo “Misery Repair Shoppe,” inspired by a Shakespearean text about atoning for sin, has a performance element; he’ll be there again on Dec. 1, grinding chalk at the table. One wishes Jimmy James Canales would also show up and preen in his “Chrome Mirror Suit,” which hangs enticingly in another silo, looking like something Icarus might have worn if he’d been into lowriders.
There’s no visual stimulation at all in James Talambas’ “But the doorway into thanks, and.” Yet it might be the space that keeps visitors engaged the longest. Talambas has filled three separate silos with, well, nothing you can see but something you can feel if you put your hand to a wall. He has literally tapped into the building, recording the hyper-resonance of the cylindrical spaces and combining it with his own, human resonance to compose tones that play and reberbrate ever so slightly in the concrete.
Alicia Eggert and Charley Hoey’s “The Moon” puts a hologram based on NASA imagery high atop a pedestal, projecting the phases of the moon in real time, from four sides.
Gregory added two public venues to this year’s event. The still-raw upper floor of Hobby Airport’s historical 1940 Air Terminal Museum contains “Wild Blue Yonder,” a show of installations by Thomas Glassford, Peter and Shane Allbritton, Nick Barbee, Julie De Vries, David Medina and Christy Karll. More than 200 people ventured there for the opening, which also featured an exterior projection by Pablo Gimenez Zapiola.
Gregory also gave Jo Ann Fleishaeuer a massive solo platform with her “Trapping Time,” on view from a distance through the windows of a defunct control tower designed by I.M. Pei at George Bush Intercontinental Airport’s Terminal A.
Fingers crossed that Eisele and Black can keep their eyes on the sky, and the momentum up.