Arts
The piece: “Promise You Will Sing About Me”
The artist: Robert Hodge
Where: In his show “The Low End Theory,” through Feb. 9 at David Shelton Gallery
Why: Even in the crush of an opening-night crowd in a modestly sized gallery, it was hard to miss the irony of two found objects Robert Hodge has affixed to his show’s largest mixed-media assemblage: At the top, a model of a tall-masted sailing ship, the kind of vessel that might have been designed to carry slaves across the Atlantic Ocean. Hanging directly below it, on the bottom of the support, is a globe with the phrase “World Tour” scrawled on it, like a logo for a pop star’s concert.
The support in between holds two shelves with a black vase of black flowers and some of Hodge’s favorite books about the black experience. If you imagine it as a room, the wall is stitched together from vinyl album covers, with a bit of peeling wallpaper made from a jagged collage of newspaper articles showing protesters for Black Lives Matter. Lyrically draped black fabric frames the scene, adding to the funereal sensibility.
Hodge used his signature cut-out technique to repeat the word “Stereo” near the base. That brutal-looking technique is usually the first thing a viewer notices, along with a powerful message. It involves gouging through many layers of distressed, found paper that the artist sometimes leaves outside for weeks or months to weather, so it expresses the entropy and tactility of urban environments. (The piece “Too Legit to Quit” was even left out through Hurricane Harvey.)
“Promise You Will Sing About Me” is deliberately different, more complex and riskier. Hodge said it’s his first attempt to create wall sculpture in the vein of Robert Rauschenberg. He borrowed the title from a Kendrick Lamar song — music still informs his practice — but wanted to take his work in a more narrative direction. There could be dozens of stories in the piece, but it’s partly about honoring his ancestry, and it’s also a memorial to a bipolar friend who was killed by constables when Hodge was in his 20s.
All of the show’s works gave him a fun, formal challenge: He wanted to riff on the so-called “Black Paintings” of Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt and other members of the New York School in the late 1940s who experimented with the expressive qualities of black paint. As a person of color working in the 21st century, Hodge had more to build on.
But he found it hard to cover every piece in black paint because he loves color so much — as some people might recall from his 201415 solo show “Destroy and Rebuild” at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. So he couldn’t resist letting some reds, yellows and blues bleed through. And he kept the titles of the books on the shelf recognizable, “so people could look them up if they want to,” he said.
Look for more work from Hodge soon: He shares a two-person show with Nathaniel Donnett this spring at the Houston Museum of African American Culture, and he’s preparing for another solo show in June at Lawndale Art Center, where he’s an artist in residence.