Houston’s FotoFest reimagines what a photography festival can be
Blink and you’ll miss the first exhibit of this year’s FotoFest. Rush into Silver Street Studios and you’ll surely pass part of Tay Butler’s moving monument installation, “Florence Gale Davis Bus Depot,” roughly 50 yards away from the building’s entrance.
The unassuming structure, a former gas station pump, is unmarked, unlisted in program materials and a must-see. Named for the artist’s late mother-in-law, “Bus Depot” advertises departure times to Milwaukee, Tulsa, Detroit, New York, Phoenix, Miami and New Orleans; ice-cold whoknows-what for 99 cents; and a $15 perfume. The latter is spray painted in hot-pink letters and misspelled on a wooden sign — Butler found it on the street in Third Ward.
Perhaps the greatest connection between “Bus Depot” and the 80-plus works inside FotoFest is the absence of photography. Compared to previous years, few of the pieces on display are framed or even one-dimensional.
“None of the artists would describe themselves as photographers,” says associate curator Max Fields after some consideration. He smiles slightly, amused at the revelation.
“In Place of an Index” is a group exhibition featuring the works of 12 “Texpats,” a term coined by Fields and his co-organizers, Ryan Dennis and Evan Garza, to describe artists native to or currently working in Texas.
For the first time in its eight-year history, FotoFest is presented in conjunction with the 2021 Texas Biennial: “A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon” curated by artistic directors Dennis and Garza.
In total, the collective includes 51 participating artists across five museums between Houston and San Antonio from Aug. 21 through January 2022. In the Alamo City, Artpace, McNay Art Museum, Studio at Ruby City and the San Antonio Museum of Art are host venues. From Sept. 2 through Nov. 13, Houstonians have FotoFest.
‘Potential history’
“In Place of an Index” is derived from writer Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s notion of potentiality and “potential history.” Each of the dozen featured artists essentially asks “what if ?” or suggests an alternative outcome when confronting an imperial event, personal experience, contemporary culture and colonial institution through the camera lens.
“It’s the notion of revisiting or reimagining the past,” Fields explains outside of Ja’Tovia Gary’s “The Giverny Suite.” Like its title implies, the artist arranged a parlor-esque vignette partially hidden behind a wall partition. A trio of screens streams her three-channel film simultaneously.
“It’s the Texas premiere,” Fields notes. “She’s not a photographer, but she is a celebrated filmmaker.”
Gary, a Dallas-based artist, spent the summer of 2016 — during which two Black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, died at the hands of police — abroad in northern France through a residency program. Scenes from Claude Monet’s verdant garden outside of Normandy unfold in the center; archival images of notable Black figures Nina Simone, Josephine Baker and Fred Hampton flash on one side, documentary-style footage of Gary interviewing Black women in Harlem plays on the other.
“I stood at the corner of Malcolm X Boulevard and 116th and asked them, ‘Do you feel safe in your body?’ ‘Do you feel safe in general?’ ” Gary says. “The bucolic gardens are juxtaposed with violence of the past and of that summer.”
A pistachio green love seat completes her scheme. It’s tilted and faces the audience.
“A settee disrupted, I hacked one of its legs off,” Gary says. “What Black grandma doesn’t have a sofa like that in her living room?”
Remembering Selena
Nostalgia plays into Travis Boyer’s work, too. As does a healthy Selena obsession. Around the corner from Gary’s “Suite” is a sextet of framed memorabilia; five pay homage to the late “Queen of Tejano Music,” one is a remastered photograph of her contemporary, Alicia Villarreal.
There’s an “Original Selena photo,” “Original Selena Phone Cards,” “Original Selena Vending Machine Stickers, set of 2,” “Original Selena Etc. Makeover Coupon” and “Original photograph of Selena Etc. Inc. location in Corpus Christi, Texas.”
Across a hallway, Boyer’s shrine to Selena continues — this time, in textile form. A quartet of colorful equestrian blankets, handwoven in Oaxaca and hung carefully on wall-mounted saddle racks, depicts the late pop star’s iconic fashion. A rhinestone cowboy boot slung over a “Days Inn” logo pays tribute to her murder in a Corpus Christi motel room, while “Astrodome Hustle” celebrates the singer’s purple bell-bottom jumpsuit from her final concert at the 1995 Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
Above it all hangs “taxonomy (of pansies)” by Ryan Hawk, via a 65-inch flat-screen. A slow-motion video, produced using a liquified photo-transfer process, distorts the garden flower into a “viscous goo” as it falls through chain-link fencing.
The trance-inducing loop illustrates the artist’s critique of masculinity. The term “pansy” is often directed at queer or effeminate men, Hawk explains.
Back in Black
Deeper into the exhibition is his six-part collection of “impossible erasures (of the impossible),” a commentary on the recent blackout tattoo trend and the more than 28 million black squares posted on Instagram immediately following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020.
In both instances, Hawk argues, the black boxes are meaningful and utterly meaningless. And forget about photography. To bolster his case on the simultaneous erasure and appropriation of Black culture, the 29-year-old Houston native affixed tattooed, silicone rubber, complete with synthetic hair, inside of shadow box display cases. One resembles the flayed flesh of a human arm.
“In Search of an Index” doesn’t shy away from shock value, though there are plenty of hopeful notes, too.
Adam Marnie and Aura Rosenberg’s joint venture, “A Photo A Day” is a sequential set of 367 photographic diptychs snapped over the course of one year and two days, from 2016 to 2017. What began as a simple game, evolved into a daily ritual of documenting their respective settings: Marnie’s kitchen table in Los Angeles and the exterior view of Rosenberg’s homes in New York and Los Angeles.
“It’s probably the most grotesquely fascinating work in the show,” Fields offers.
“Meesh,” by Autumn Knight, intercuts Michelle Obama quotes with song lyrics as a video camera follows the artist ascending a never-ending staircase in heels. How’s that for inspirational content?
Fields, Dennis and Garza embrace the uncomfortable. This year’s conceptual artists dare viewers to broach challenging subject matter, including war, slavery, deportation and Black maternity mortality.
Maybe Butler’s “Bus Depot” stands in as a detour down memory lane. A chance to revise history en route to the final destination: “A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon.” And take some photos along the way.