Drive-by art with poetic intent
Pablo Gimenez-Zapiola, a lanky and loose-limbed Argentinean, had a bit of a mad scientist vibe going on outside the raw, industrial-looking East End artists’ compound El Rincón Social.
Cheerfully disheveled in a paint-splattered T-shirt and orange pants, he was waiting for the sun to go down while tinkering with an unusual contraption inside his 2007 Toyota Yaris.
On a board propped across the front passenger’s seat he’d fastened a video camera, a still-image camera and an
old-school slide projector that was connected to a laptop.
He was preparing for a rehearsal run of his art project “Eastext,” a collaboration with five Houston poets that involves three events, including the final one this Thursday at Box13 Art Space.
Each “Eastext” event starts with a “projection performance” — which means Gimenez-Zapiola cruises around the neighborhood for about 45 minutes, projecting text from about 20 poems, one line at a time, onto everything he drives by.
He’ll provide the audience with maps so they can follow him or wait at several sites where he’ll make repeat passes. For those who prefer their art stationary, Gimenez-Zapiola also is creating floor-to-ceiling fabric installations at each venue where he’ll project the poems at different angles, in letters and broken-up text that won’t be legible.
“It’s not the point to read the poems there. That’s just an installation — a totally different thing,” he said. He’ll also talk about the project, and poets Eloísa PérezLozano, John Pluecker, Vanessa Torres, Holly Lyn Walrath and Gwendolyn Zepeda will read their work.
Gimenez-Zapiola positioned his car so he could calibrate the text, projecting onto El Rincón’s metal facade through the passenger’s window before the night’s rehearsal drive.
“I’m an architect, so I like straight lines,” he said. “I was trained in modern movements, Bauhaus style. It gave me a great platform to work.”
I sat in the back as Gimenez-Zapiola drove slowly through the neighborhood.
“I’m going 24,” he said. “Very safe.”
The projector and camera click-clicked, random staccato notes in what seemed an otherwise still night as Gimenez-Zapiola punched a remote-control button with one hand.
“I like that analog component. I like to have a connection with the poem myself,” he said.
He had no idea what his cameras were recording, but he expected he’d find “little treasures” in the digital files the next morning. That documentation is what he exhibits and sells. It’s not something he could ever reproduce, even if he knew where, exactly, the photos and videos were taken — the light wouldn’t be the same, or the position of his car.
“I like that. I don’t want to have any control of the project,” he said. “The only control is just shooting and driving. I’m not looking for something specific in the area, but I have a dialogue with it.”
Some of the poems are written in Spanish, some in English, reflecting the makeup of the East End.
As we crossed McKinney Street I kept my gaze on the spectacle as the lighted text flickered across buildings, fences, doors, light poles, empty space — sometimes fractured, sometimes disappearing.
Even as slow as we were going, I couldn’t follow much word logic. This was a different kind of poetry, fleeting, eerily voiceless and kinetically thrilling.
“The words are dancing. They have life in themselves,” GimenezZapiola said, as if he were reading my mind.
A few other drivers navigated around us, seemingly oblivious.
“Very few notice it. Or if they see the words, I don’t know if they relate the words to me,” Gimenez-Zapiola said.
He first came to Houston in 2000, fleeing Argentina’s troubled economy and political environment. With a wife and three children, who are now grown, Gimenez-Zapiola has been employed for years, off and on, as a graphic designer.
“I came looking for a job, not to become an artist,” he said.
But Houston’s long freight trains fascinated him. Endlessly. “We don’t have anything like that in Argentina,” he said.
It was like facing a mountain he couldn’t resist climbing: He wanted to make art with them and somehow came up with the idea to project words from the dictionary onto the moving trains.
Just one problem: His slide projector needed a power source.
A few years later, he found a house with electricity next to some active tracks, and he produced a body of photographs that he eventually took to a portfolio review at the FotoFest Biennial.
“It was the first portfolio review in my life. A very strange project — projections onto trains,” he said. But he was quickly chosen for a “Discoveries of the Meeting Place” show, and suddenly, life as an artist started looking better than his other options. He’s been laid off more than once by oil and gas companies.
He won an individual artist grant from the Houston Arts Alliance to create “Eastext.” And his market value may be rising.
Gimenez-Zapiola recently finished his most plum commission yet: projections for elevators at the soon-to-open George Hotel in College Station, which also bought his photographs for many of the guest rooms.
“That will bring exposure,” he said. “I feel glad this year, but it most likely won’t happen again next year, so I have to keep the ball rolling.”
He sent me a few photographs the next morning from our ride. None of them looked familiar, but they were beautiful and evocative.