This article was originally published in Arts + Culture Texas for their May 2014 issue and can be found here.
Kirsten Macy, Untitled, Oil and enamel on linen.
Courtesy of the artist and Art Palace.
Much of Kirsten Macyâs polished work was created for her 2013 solo exhibition Feels Like Forever at Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas. Counterbalancing geometric shapes with controlled splatter-bursts or materials such as enamel with natural linen, Macyâs paintings play up tensions between the natural and synthetic. Seemingly formulaic, Macy created the images as a form of automatic meditation in response to a life-altering car crash. Macyâs control and the paintingsâ sense of forced serenity suggest an internal struggle.
The paintings of Ludwig Schwarz in this exhibition are markedly different from his pattern-based compositions, instead focusing on fading earth tones and slow curves. These images can be viewed as being cropped from or subsets of a larger ideal image. Although Schwarzâs paintings are not conceptually indebted to the color-field painters of the mid-twentieth century, the similarity is jarringly uncanny.
Jamie Davis is the only artist in the exhibition working on paper and the only based in Houston. (We exhibited together in 2012.) Markedly sparse, Davisâ drawings of nearly-invisible text and unfinished graph paper are as much about spatial relations as they are about the practice of drawing. The minimal tendency is a departure from her previous narrative forms, but still maintains a fascination with pattern.
Michael Villareal, Amass, Oil on panel.
Courtesy of the artist and Art Palace.
Central Texas-based Michael Villarealâs oil paintings appear baroque against the other artists. With heavy impasto effects and flauntingly explicit brush strokes, the paintings create effects seen in high-relief sculptures. Villarealâs subject matter focuses on vaguely biomorphic forms, many of which read like still life.
The exhibition can be viewed through strictly formal eyes, but the images donât lose themselves to austerity. Proprietor Arturo Palacios used a light touch in presenting the exhibition, which easily could have succumbed to over-curation and forced âdialoguesâ. Instead, Wabi Sabi offers a pause from hurried immediacy, with delicate images that slowly reveal more of themselves the longer you look.
This article was originally published in Arts + Culture Texas for their April 2014 issue and can be found here.
Nermine Hammam, From the Wetiko series (2013-2014). Audience chez un Khalifat by Eugene Fromentin (1859). Mixed Media 27.56 x 39.37 inches Courtesy of the artist and Rose Issa Projects, London.
In 2012, the BBC covered the Houla Massacre in Syria but mistakenly used a photograph taken in Iraq nearly a decade earlier. Perhaps more alarming is the sheer interchangeability of victim imagery. Either by political will or sheer negligence, images with stripped or repurposed contexts alter the stories that become recorded as historyâinfluencing popular perception and political action.
Hammam digitally inserts figures clipped from news coverage, and takes care to make the figures appear painted on the surface of the image, adopting the palette of the original painter. It would be easy for a casual glance to miss the altered imagery; the collaged photos are executed in a manner that is very painterly. Marines in flak jackets raid an 1860s Caliphâs house; young boys loot computer supplies during an Old West shoot-out.
By juxtaposing images from the two eras, Hammam draws a parallel between the artist-correspondents of our colonial past and the photo-journalists of today. Regardless of the image-makerâs intent, the underlying message can always be shaped by whoever controls the context. It was by no accident that curator Madeline Yale Preston presented this exhibition along with NEWSROOM, an exhibition of photojournalists in the Arab World.
A symptom of journalistic negligence, or perhaps the work of spin doctors with an agenda, this visual malapropism and its colonial overtones is drawn into sharp focus by Hammam. While the level of absurdity in Wetiko yields a lighter tone, the implication remains grave for not only journalism, but for the passivity we adopt as consumers of news and imagery.
This article was originally published in Arts + Culture Texas for their February 2014 issue and can be found here.
Jang soon Im, 2. IMPRISON, 2013
Oil on canvas 60 x 72 inches
Photo: Nathan Sapio
Courtesy of the artist and Anya Tish Gallery
Korean-born artist Jang soon Im has coated the walls of Anya Tish Gallery with the battling figures, electric lemonade mountains, and adolescent nostalgia of War, his inaugural solo show.
In the three-dimensional works, Im collages layers of vibrant cut Plexiglas, creating a miniature proscenium filled with stimulating colors and figures. The forms are borrowed from Korean television programs and Chinese blockbuster movies, juxtaposing the filmsâ warlike protagonists against over-sexualized female shapes from accompanying advertisements. Unlike his Landscape series, which reinterprets historical paintings, the source imagery in the sculptures has already been transformed through the lens of contemporary media. Im instead makes his mark by distilling the movie experience into a single moment.
In the Water Margin series, Imâs subject matter is even further removed from its original source: events of 12th century China inspired a historical fiction novel over a century later, which served as the basis for the 1989 turn-based strategy game that bears the same name (released in America under the title Bandit Kings of Ancient China). The paintingsâ subject matter directly pulls from the images that accompany the set of decisions a player must make when conquering opposing armies: accept (recruit), release, imprison, or execute.
Im, a former Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Core Fellow, faithfully renders the images in all their pixelated wonder, in a manner similar to Roy Lichtensteinâs half-toned paintings from comic book panels. When viewed closely, the images dissolve into rectilinear patterns. When viewed from across the gallery or through the display of a cellphoneâs camera, the figures become obvious. This series marks a change in the artistâs approach: instead of re-creating historic paintings or distilling a time-based experience, Im lets the images stand alone, allowing the viewer to contemplate decisions and consequences.
At first glance the works in War might be mistaken as vacuous, like so much of the pop-inspired work that bombards us. But beneath the saccharine veneer is a thoughtful exhibition that deftly confronts the tension between history entertainment-revisionism.
Mie Olise: Crystal Bites of Dust at Barbara Davis Gallery
This article was originally published in Arts + Culture Texas for their January 2013 issue and can be found here.
Mie Olise, Loading House, 2012.
Acrylic and water from Gowanus Canal.
Courtesy of the artist and Barbara Davis Gallery.
Thin washes and cakey impasto meet to build colossal forms. Shanties and old factories stretch and march through fog. Derelict ships and canoes spot the shore with color. This is the world of Danish artist Mie Oliseâs Crystal Bites of Dust at Barbara Davis Gallery.
The dilapidated buildings almost look like creatures from H.G. Wells, appearing to slowly drift along the field of view. Loading House features a stark three-quarters view of an aging building, lifted on scaffolds that jut out into the space above and before structure. The unreal space created by ashy washes of whites, greys and blues forms a delicacy that counters the power of the giant structure.
Indeed the structures have basis in reality, but as the artist paints she develops a relationship with her subject, often embellishing with whimsical features like stilts, struts, or colorful ladders. By lofting the structures on these stilts, the artist literally elevates her subject matter. Other constructions, like the house in No Wholefood House,simply fade away before reaching the lower edge of the picture plane, creating a ghostly figure-ground relationship. For a more personal bond between the work and her subject, the artist infuses some of the polluted water from the Gowanus with her paint.
Throughout the exhibition, Olise plays with the flatness and physicality of the picture plane. Wide fields of paint occasionally drip or cake on the surface of the images, which are further intensified by the paintingsâ generous scale. The artistâs choice in juxtaposing paints not only by their hue, but playfully contrasting texture and opacity creates an effect
By playfully juxtaposing paints of contrasting hues, textures and opacities, the artist energizes her gestures and implores the viewer to explore the building as she might have. Yet she leaves enough underlying geometry to convince the viewer of the space within the picture.
Crystal Bites of Dust stands as an encouraging reminder of contemporary paintingâs vitality.
Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter
This article was originally published in Arts + Culture Texas for their December 2012 issue and can be found here.
Shimomura Crossing the Delaware by Roger Shimomura, acrylic on canvas, 2010. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; acquired through the generosity of Raymond L. Ocampo Jr., Sandra Oleksy Ocampo, and Robert P. Ocampo.
The latest exhibition to grace the Louisa Stude Sarofim Gallery at Asia Society Texas Center introduces an ensemble of Asian and Asian-American artists exploring such themes as personal growth, home, and broader social complexities of Asian and American cultural confluence. Organized by the Smithsonian Institutionâs National Portrait Gallery, Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter examines identity from a range of cultural perspectives.
Chinese-born Zhang Chun Hong, who is known as Hong Zhang in the U.S., creates large scale drawings of straight, black hair: both a defining characteristic of Zhang and a desirable feature in Chinese culture. Her diptych portrait Twin Spirits #1 includes the locks of both Zhang and her sister, showing similarities and subtle differences. Zhangâs use of chiaroscuro to render her subjects reflects on the philosophy of yin and yang. The contrasting values are not only inseparable, but requisite for defining its counterpart.
Korean video artist Hye Yeon Nam chooses to comment on broader societal pressures and the struggles of adaptation. Her videos in Portraiture Now focus on everyday activities made awkward or nearly futile. In her Self-Portrait: Drinking, Nam perpetually fills and drinks from a cup with a large hole in the bottom. While nearly impossible, Nam faces the challenge with diligence and poise.
The show also includes artists of Asian ancestry who were raised in America either from birth or early age, often exploring identity within an American construct. Born to parents of Japanese and Mexican descent, Shizu Saldamando faithfully renders her figures â revelers at house parties in California â but surrounds them with gold leaf. By removing her subjects from their original context, Saldamando elevates them to a level often reserved for religious icons.
Korean-born, American-raised artist CYJO frames her work around the Kyopo, ethnic Koreans living in other countries. Now based primarily in Beijing, CYJO photographs full-length portraits of other Kyopo and accompanies each portrait with a blurb from the subject on the topic of immigration and identity their individual relationship with Korean and other cultures.
Nobody addresses cultural friction with the graphic immediacy delivered by Roger Shimomura, who spent part of his childhood during World War II in an Idaho internment camp for Japanese Americans. Often snarky, Shimomura superimposes his face onto Japanese pop icons like Hello Kitty or literally battles racist stereotypes from jingoist American propaganda of the World War II era.
Perhaps his most apt self-portrait is Shimomura Crossing the Delaware. In this riff on the iconic Emanuel Leutze painting, Shimomura retains the familiar composition but uses the visual vocabulary of Ukiyo-e prints to merge Shimomuraâs Japanese and American cultures into a whole. The treatment of the Delaware River harkens back to Hokusaiâs The Great Wave off Kanagawa, and the boat is crewed by samurai straight from prints out of the floating world. The artist assumes the role of Washington, costumed in the traditional uniform.
Deliberately absurd, the image reconciles Shimomuraâs American and Asian backgrounds on his own terms. Of all the distinct practices featured in Portraiture Now, itâs the showâs oldest artist whose work packs the biggest punch.
This article was originally published in Arts + Culture Texas for their November 2012 issue and can be found here.
Joey Fauerso, Seljalandsfoss, 2012.
Courtesy of the artist and David Shelton Gallery
Rich oils and delicate watercolors don the walls of the newly opened David Shelton Gallery. Verdant foliage and cascading waters are juxtaposed against interior scenes. A nude man lounges in a rose colored daybed, looking to the viewer. Joey Fauersoâs Interioraddresses us personally and invites us into a softer, symbolic world.
The waterfall, a favorite motif, is given possibly more precedence in the exhibition than her human subjects. In her diptych Yosemite Fall, the left image is a grisaille watercolor of a waterfall with reticulated washes to describe the craggy mountains, and a soft haze obfuscates the base of the fall. The right image isolates the waterfallâs shape as a white form on a black field, both graphic and stark. Simultaneously passive and dominating, the waterfall embodies the dissonance Fauerso seeks.
However, the artist also blends distinctions between organic and synthetic, interior and exterior. Her nature images reappear within interior settings as pictures on the wall, reminding us that these images are synthetic approximations of nature.
Fauerso creates a clinical space for her model to inhabit â grey-white walls, with a slightly darker floor. This spartan grounding makes every form in this space emphatic. In her diptychSeljalandsfoss, the artist introduces the recurring male figure seated in a blue chair next to a flower vase, a waterfall painting hanging near him. Her subject wears subtle high heels on his daintily crossed legs, a bracelet on his wrist, and a full beard. Fauerso avoids making the scene garish or comedic, instead creating an earnest effect that encourages curiosity.
In the right panel, Fauerso complements this gender ambiguity with a still life of the flower vase. The still life first encourages us to compare the vase forms of the two paintings; then the relationship between the vase and the waterfall image on the left panel becomes apparent. The image of the waterfall painting stands as an intense, but fabricated nature scene, while the flowers are authentically natural, but equally removed from nature.
Subverting distinctions between natural and synthetic, as well as masculine and feminine, Fauersoâs examination sheds light on how arbitrarily, yet powerfully, gender defines our world.
This article was originally published in Arts + Culture Texas for their October 2012 issue and can be found here.
James Brown, Planets: the Distinct Connection IV, 2011.
Oil and pencil on linen.
Courtesy of the artist and Texas Gallery.
Ivory and denseâ black forms dance across the walls at Texas Gallery. Vibrating with stillness, James Brownâs painting series Planets: The Distinct Connectionoffers us a meditation on the cosmic and metaphysical.
While the artist elects to use a limited palette and nearly all of the shapes could be described as round, he creates ample variety by emphasizing the asymmetry of the larger forms and their placement in the composition. Brown uses untreated linen to support his imagery, achieving an organic physicality that complements his biomorphic shapes.
The larger planetary forms allow the artistâs spontaneity to show; areas caked with impasto freeze Brownâs gesture, while some areas have a thin glaze of paint that creates ghost-like sensations. Passages that appear stain-like up close give the larger forms substance when viewed from afar.
The series Planets: The Distinct Connection is actually the ninth group of a larger series of 81 paintings. Brown was inspired to respond to early 20th century English composer Gustav Holstâs composition The Planets, which was derived from the astrological qualities of the extraterrestrial planets in our solar system.
The inclusion of Brownâs earlier studies at the front of the exhibition space brings a welcome look into his process but also raises more questions. The studies are comparatively small, with the same untreated linen, which is occasionally folded â forming a different sort of network. We can see intimations of the planetary bodies seen throughout the space, but the presence of collaged images of snakes and hands prompts us to ponder his meaning further.
The progression of image size through the exhibition implies a sense of hierarchy. While the studies inform the Planets series, they are actually the preparation for a grand culmination in a tenth painting: The Realm of Chaos and Light: The Soulâs Distinct Connection. With the same vocabulary as the Planets paintings, this piece allows Brown a stunning eight-by-23 feet to show larger relationships between systems of forms. However, the title of this dominating piece suggests the previous nine paintings are part of a larger, heavenly system.
While it could be easy to retreat into formalism when viewing the exhibition, Brown implores us to consider the grander pleroma of what is simultaneously empty and infinite.
View the images on Texas Gallery's website.
This article was originally published by Arts + Culture Texas for their July 2012 issue and can be found here.
David Katz,Suburban Trap, 2012, Ceramic, Glaze, Wire and Unfired Clay.
Spindles and webs of organic shapes span the hallway like an alien garland, interlinking peculiar bulbous nodes. Hard ceramic cages squinch and shape the interlinked tumorous forms. The bone-like lattices that festoon the hallways of the Artists Gallery at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft comprise Systemic Expansion, the latest installation from David Katz, a sculptor and installation artist who works primarily with ceramics.
Further, the larger, lumpier forms appear as large roots or tumors that grow around the rectangular shapes much in the way a vine may latch to a support, or when a root encounters an obstacle. Itâs as if a gardener or architect previously trained the organic shape to the mold of the boxes, but through their absence, we now witness some sort of entropic reclamation.
Katz produces these installations by creating ceramic hard-lined prism forms that are interspersed along the walls of an installation space. The artist suspends wires between the rigid forms which makes an armature to hold the unfired clay. Katz applies clay around his armature while still pliant, and sculpts it into recognizable biomorphic forms.
While the shapes are too abstract to ascribe to any specific forms exclusively, the relationship between Katzâs organic and rigid forms prompts the mind to relate to the outside world.
Indeed, Katz directs us to contemplate manâs desire to fabricate structure to control or influence the natural, and how this superficial structure may create dependencies in the future. Readily the mind ponders how arbitrary any infrastructure really is, from physical roadways or urban planning to the internet or the social mores that dictate how we interact.
This article was originally published by Arts + Culture Texas for their June 2012 issue, and can be found here.
Ariane Roesch runs UNIT, an online store selling limited-edition prints, out of the back of Gallery Sonja Roesch.
As PrintHouston continues through the summer with its sprawling calendar of events, one canât help but notice how many galleries started as print-only dealers that diversified as their markets grew. It stands to reason that many new art dealers might appreciate prints not only for their quality, but that they can exist in multiple. The new art-dealing venture UNITÂ started with this in mind, but is focused on creating a simple, accessible platform to buy and sell art with a strong online component.
Roesch came up with UNIT to sell prints after inheriting a framing business from her late father. More specifically, Roesch inherited the task of generating a market in the US for the modular design frame HALBE. Popular in Europe but widely unknown in America, HALBE frames are front-loading, reusable frames that are suitable for rotating collections. However, itâs hard to make a case for just buying a fancy frame.
Roesch, a cofounder of Skydive Art Space with a Cal Arts masterâs degree and experience working in Gallery Sonja Roesch (her motherâs respected Midtown venue), decided to add her art-scene connections and curatorial cachĂŠ to the framing business. The idea is to sell prints from artists she handpicked along with the frames as a complete unit. (Collectors also have the option of buying unframed prints.)
Because UNIT deals in multiples only, the cost of each object is spread throughout the edition, making original works more accessible to new and first-time collectors. An edition refers to artwork that exists in multiples, and can refer to prints, sculptures, photographs, or any process that can repeat an image. In the fine art world, editioned works retain value through a presumed scarcity, which is preserved by any edition containing a finite number of copies. Generally the mold, matrix, or plate is destroyed or altered after an edition is produced to ensure that no new copies can be created.
UNIT has a set of loose guidelines to ensure all works available are editioned originals, but leaves the language broad enough to include more than prints alone. Everything listed online is editioned between 10 and 100 and must be hand-pulled or hand made in some way. While this decision excludes giclĂŠe reproductions and monoprints, UNIT may include small-run books, LPs, cast sculptures, hand-drawn xeroxed zines, and variable editions with one-of-a-kind touches such as found objects.
Nearly all manner of traditional printmaking like relief, intaglio, lithography, and serigraph techniques are included if the print is editioned. Artists interested in being featured in the store can contact Roesch through the website to be considered.
Notwithstanding its online emphasis, UNIT makes occasional forays into the brick-and-mortar gallery scene. Roesch is teaming up with her mother to present Whatâs in Store, a group exhibition opening July 14 at Gallery Sonja Roesch as part of PrintHouston. The show features everything available on the UNIT website so far this year. Other plans include building the UNIT website into a resource that features an advice blog for starting or maintaining a personal collection and information about editions and printmaking.
While the future remains unclear for the arts market during this recession, Roesch is gambling that her unconventional approach to the gallery model provides the right framework for success.
This article was originally published by A+C Magazine Houston (now Arts + Culture Texas) for June 2012, and can be found here.
Peveto may be the new kid on the Colquitt Gallery Row, but thereâs no kidding that Heavy Hitters packs a wallop. Featuring more than 60 artists including Bill Fick, Jenny Schmid, Kurt Kemp, and Tugboat Press (Paul Roden and Valerie Lueth), the exhibition is overwhelming in the breadth and quantity of prints represented â from stone lithographs and intaglios to complex screens and relief prints. Hung salon style, the show strikes a rhythm between quiet, highly nuanced works with graphic in-your-face styles, forcing the viewer to stagger and stare.
OâMalleyâs curatorial approach is decidedly open, electing to include nontraditional or challenging processes alongside works with academic appeal. Major standouts include Jenny Hager-Vickery and Emily Arthurâs imposing installation, which features a chariot with a life-sized horse covered in prints, and Sideshow, a 20-foot-long woodcut banner from the Brooklyn-based Cannonball Press (Mike Houston and Martin Mazzora). The banner covers nearly the entire gallery wall and features a sultry carnival theme with sword swallowers, thrill seekers, and other gritty novelties caricatured on a grand scale.
The sprawling hodgepodge of content, backgrounds, media, and creators opens a robust conversation on the nature of image making through print processes. Heavy Hitters is a promising start to the festival of ephemera we know as PrintHouston.
This article was originally published by Arts + Culture Texas for June 2012 and can be found here.
Seth Mittagâs installation Weâre Still Here⌠in Prospectors. COURTESY THE ARTIST & LAWNDALE ART CENTER.
Lawndale Art Centerâs, Prospectors show features the three latest residents to complete the Artist Studio Program. While the artists each work according to their independent visions, a common thread emerges in a humanâs relationship with the natural world.
In his video installation, Surfside shows a television set looking out on a crashing tide, which is broadcasting the same setting. Seagulls enter the frame of the video, and again the frame of the television within the video, and finally exit.The television commands the viewerâs attention more than the nature in which it resides.
Anne J. Reganâs objects explore music in the context of memory, idolatry, and macabre Americana. Regan created many of the objects over a pilgrimage across the South and West, visiting sites of spiritual and musical importance. In a nod to both music and hoodoo traditions, Lightninâ Wand is a conductorâs baton that Regan had buried in the soil above Lightninâ Hopkinâs grave for seven days, presumably imbued with spiritual power.
Most interesting was Billieâs Fridge, a mini-fridge with a glass door stocked with everything, including a 1946 grocery list made by Billie Holiday. On opening day, the work acted as an invitation to live like a celebrity. The tone slowly changes to a meditation on the temporal, as the produce withers with time, but other foods are seemingly immortal â preserved by additives or packaging. While music is a difficult subject to encapsulate completely in the visual arts, one is left wondering if Regan intended to expose how disquieting obsessive fandom can become, or if her rituals were entirely in earnest.
Exploring the plight of the Gulf Coast average Joe, Seth Mittagâs medium is stop-motion animation and sculpture with a subtle jab of realism. Electing to exhibit models and stills from his animation work, Mittag parses and fractures two narratives focused on how a man deals with natural disaster and a predatory housing industry.
Weâre Still Here⌠introduces the viewer into this world with a model of a large, dilapidated trailer wrapped around a tree, as if demolished by a hurricane or tornado. The story continues through a series of printed stills that function as a storyboard. Coming full circle, Mittagâs work culminates in Hurricane Allen Newscast, an understated model television. The tiny television impressively uses a hidden rear projector to play a stop motion video using audio from an actual 1980 San Antonio newscast.
However disparate the works may seem, the three artists appear to converge on the dilemma of our relationship with the natural order. Whether to control, cooperate, or live at the peril of the forces that be.
This article was originally published by A+C Magazine Houston (now Arts + Culture Texas) for June 2012, and can be found here.
Carlos Pozo, Towers and Splines, 2012, Serigraph. On view in the PrintHouston exhibition NEXT. COURTESY CARLOS POZO.
Printmaking is gaining attention in Houston again. June marks the celebration of PrintHouston, a summer-long festival exhibiting printmaking and print processes across the city. In its second year, PrintHouston has just under thirty galleries with participating exhibitions across the city and into Galveston, exhibiting artists from Houston and elsewhere alike.
Crucial to printmakingâs revival in the city is an environment that has the right blend of general interest, collaboration between artist-printmakers and artists, accessible studio space, and a market of collectors to help sustain new work. So where is this all coming from, and why are we only hearing about it now?
First, a little history lesson. American printmaking as an art form came to the forefront in the 1960s and 70s with the new Tamarind Institute, (a lithography workshop now located in Albuquerque) churning out its first graduates of highly trained and often collaborative artist-lithographers. Universal Limited Art Editions in Long Island began attracting up-and-coming artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and others to work in a collaborative print environment â all in the fallout of abstract expressionism.
Between these two institutions and others, printmaking became much more than a means of production and suddenly had a fresh generation of artist-printmakers ready to open their own studios across the country, collaborate with one another, and seduce artists from their primary disciplines into making prints.
The roots of printmaking in Houston as we see it now started with two key individuals: Suzanne Manns and David Folkman. Manns, arguably the godmother of printmaking in Houston, has taught at the Glassell School of Art since the 1970s. She is responsible for introducing a large swathe of Houston artists to printmaking and curated 35 Years of Printmaking at Glassell, on view June 21-July 3 at Tradition Bank Gallery.
Folkman, a Tamarind-trained printmaker, moved his studio, Little Egypt Enterprises, from southern Illinois to Houston in the early 1970s, shortly before Manns arrived in the city.
Houston was accruing that golden combination of skilled printmakers, experimental artists, and accommodating studio space that could edition prints for collectors. A poster child for this ecosystem is Penny Cerling. She developed a penchant for intaglio processes under Manns at the Glassell and further developed Little Egyptâs etching endeavors through the 1980s before starting her own independent studio.
Printmaking blew up in the 1980s with the firm establishment of the Museum of Printing History by a coterie of letterpress printers, effectively bridging the dialogue between the printed page, graphic design, and printmaking as an art form. Little Egypt continued to boom, creating works like the Art Against AIDS portfolio in 1988, the Glassell, and other endeavors, while universities continued to educate new printmakers. Even Southern Graphics Council, the international academic pillar of printmaking, had its traveling conference at Rice University in 1985.
However, by the mid-1990s, the print scene in Houston appeared to be falling to its own inertia. Little Egypt dissolved in the early 90s, and printers generally gravitated to their own presses, yielding a more fractured, insular environment. Perhaps the average Houston art collector developed a predilection for âone of a kindâ artworks, not fully recognizing the value retained in the presumed scarcity of a limited edition and the ability to represent a large amount of artists within a collection.
Over the last five years, the environment has become much more amenable for printmaking, thanks to the efforts of bootstrapping artists across the city. PrintMatters, the organization behind PrintHouston, formed as a collective-minded nonprofit composed of printmakers that promotes print processes and print collecting while working to further the professional careers of its members, who include transplants educated outside the region as well as artists trained at the Glassell and other local institutions.
Another key player in the new printmaking ecology is the fledgling studio, Burning Bones Press (BBP). Founded by former Flatbed Press master printer and current University of Houston print professor, Patrick Masterson and graphic designer turned renegade printmaker, Carlos Hernandez, BBP exists as a cooperative studio environment for many printmakers who find themselves orphaned when leaving the academic setting. BBP functions as a petri dish for printmakers in Houston â many of them PrintMatters members â but also editions prints or works in creative projects and serves as the current laboratory for the University of Houstonâs new print-editioning program.
Recently, BBP produced mono-prints for the Glassell in a week-long visit with the sculptor, Albert Paley, and produced an Art Car with Dennis McNett for the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, with more activity on the way.
The currents above just scratch the surface of Houstonâs network of private presses and studios. While itâs impossible to fully glimpse the direction of the Houston arts scene, prospects are improving for printmaking. PrintMatters appears to be taking a more public direction and growing.
Other projects like the recently launched UNIT are broadening the perception of editioned works by including artist books, sculptures, and photography into the fold; all with a curatorial eye and an entrepreneurial spirit. Moving forward, the public will find printmaking hard to ignore, and perhaps the international printmaking community will find Houston harder to ignore as well.
This article was originally published by A+C Magazine Houston (now Arts + Culture Texas) for May 2012, and can be found here.
This exhibition ran at the Rice Gallery from April 13 â June 24, 2012.
Nebulous Mountains hover in space. Yawning caverns glow supernaturally as they sway in the air. Yasuaki Onishi transformed Rice Gallery into a perplexing, organic space with reverse of volume RG.
The viewer first sees reverse of volume from the outside through the large Rice Gallery windows: a seeming terrarium for the glowing landscape within. Black spindles of a hairlike substance climb from the form, appearing as tangled vegetation before anchoring into the near invisible suspension above the work. The skeins of black threads create an atmospheric effect, much like rain or mist stuck in time.
Within the gallery space, the form is a clear and dominant force that implores the viewer to walk inside. The viewer enters a glacial cave peppered with black, tadpole-like spots lit from below with diffused light. From the inside, the once hazy structure appears falsely rigid. The craggy, luminous substance vaults from near-knee-height to high above the viewer. However, the structure delicately trembles with minor disturbances in the air. The form interacts just as sensitively with the light pouring in from the windows, revealing touches of green and reflected light from other viewersâ clothing.
Onishi shaped this form by creating an irregular ridge of cardboard boxes on scaffolding and laying plastic sheeting over the boxes. He then dripped black hot glue from the support on the ceiling down to the sheeting, anchoring the work. The artist can only drip the glue from an armâs length at a time, requiring regular readjustment of the boxes and scaffolding. This incremental assembly takes a painstaking three weeks. Onishi cleared the boxes away after the glue had set, leaving only a loose mold of the boxesâ topography suspended by thousands of tiny filaments.
Onishi arrived at working in this fashion through his study of sculpture and casting. As he worked with the process, the artist found himself more interested in the mold than the cast object. Emphasizing the ephemeral and negative on a grand scale, Onishi departs from traditional cast-making techniques and arrives at a meditation on landscape, architecture, and sculpture.
This article was originally published by A+C Magazine Houston (now Arts and Culture Texas) for April 2012, and can be found here.
This exhibition ran at the Peel Gallery from March 2âApril 30, 2012.
Tendrils, tentacles and vesicles writhe in absolute stillness. John Webbâs pale forms mark their respective territories on the Peel Gallery floor. These are not monsters, but sculptures.
The works of wood belie their medium by appearing molded, cast or extruded as if from clay; only the natural color of birch and telltale striations of plywood indicates the material. Despite the imposing scale of these sculptures, there is lightness about the work. Webb forms large cavities within several of his pieces, allowing the shapes to breathe and provides the viewer several layers to peer through. Other pieces attain this effect through a nest-like construction.
While all of Webbâs work in âPileâ has a playful, organic sense about it, many of the sculptures have an austere element to impose an order. Piercing and penetrating rods counter rounded forms and add structure; others use carefully interlocking forms. Some of the more wild sculptures are made from stacks of smaller curvilinear pieces. Held together by gravity and tension alone, Webb creates synergy out of seeming chaos.
Webb designs his sculptures on a computer the way an architect might design a building â in fact, Webb is an architect! In this way, the artist is able to plan and craft the wood to create the complex shapes in the exhibition. Webbâs background as both a sculptor and an architect impart a certain earnestness when addressing the materiality of his work. He respects the intrinsic qualities of the plywood and features the natural finish proudly.
The awareness and delicate treatment of the material imparts a quality of reversion to the sculptures. The creation of these fluid forms from rigid plywood acts as a foil to the nature of plywood: a form of life that was forced into a building material. Not quite returned to a natural state, the sculptures exist in a state of tension.
Within the context of architecture, the viewer is allowed to question the sense of scale in these life sized sculptures: are we viewing the model of a building or a scaled up bone structure? Perhaps a little of both. The viewer is left to reconcile the similarities between the organic form and the built environment.
This article was originally published by A+C Magazine Houston (now Arts + Culture Texas) for March 2012, and can be found here.
This exhibition ran at The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft from February 4 â May 13, 2012.
The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft revealed their participating exhibition for FotoFest 2012 with giant photographs hanging in hazy glory. However, these photographs aren't prints: theyâre woven fabric. Trading pixels for thread, Lia Cook weaves photography and neuroscience to create objects of emotion and reflection.
The exhibition samples from three of series from 2003-2010, but the predominant subject matter is closely cropped faces. The calm, knowing faces haunt and allow contemplation on memory, tactility, and time.
The qualities of weaving over regular photography grant a different viewing experience that is rewarding from many distances. From afar, the images appear as photographs. Close up, they dissolve into seemingly random stitches of light, dark, and occasional color. Cook utilizes pattern as value and creates a halftone by interpolating threads of different value or hue, which allows the work to blend optically like a pointillist painting. Itâs easy to find oneself lost in the abstraction of pattern within the warps and wefts. Some works are displayed free-floating, and the curious observer will note the image in negative on the opposite side of the plane â an artifact of the weaving process.
Viewing the image as cloth seems to affect the emotional response as compared to photography. Cook collaborated with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in a residency to determine how we view cloth images differently. Using an array of EEG machines, eyetracking apparatuses, and fMRI, the team confirmed that viewers respond differently to the fabric compared to photographs. The results beyond this confirmation are not immediately clear in the exhibition, but the study continues into the gallery space.
Relax! There are no cumbersome apparatuses required here.
The three most recently made works on display are informed by this experience and achieve a charming, and honest level of self-awareness. The work âTracts Remindâ has a thoughtful take on memory and youth through portraiture. Traces of yellow and red fibers branch through the image like roots â a representation of Cookâs white matter â tangling and grasping a childhood image of the artist. We are presented not only with a fabric image for ourselves to reconcile, but overlaid is the cognitive process of viewing.
The nuances of this exhibition unfold as the viewer is beckoned to contemplate the images on a personal level, and then examine the work on functional and conceptual levels â revealing a new quandary to explore.
Review: âNew Formations: Czech Avant-Garde and Modern Glass from the Roy and Mary Cullen Collectionâ
This article was originally published by A+C Magazine Houston (now Arts + Culture Texas) for December-January  2011, and can be found here.
This exhibition ran at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from November 6, 2011 â February 5, 2012
âNew Formations: Czech Avant-Garde and Modern Glassâ examines a new chapter of early 20th century art once occluded by the iron curtain. This exhibition focuses on the artists flourishing within this brief period of freedom to establish a national identity within the international avant-garde, but eventually succumbing to totalitarian censorship.
The avant-garde portion of the exhibition features creations from an array of artists, but closely follows three influential figures in the Czech vanguard: Karel Teige, Jindrich Styrsky and Toyen.
Teige appears as a key founder of the Devestil Association of Artists, a collective that sought to set itself apart from, yet flirted with international influences of cubism (French), expressionism (German), and constructivism (Russian) â a reflection of the Czech populous forging a new identity. Teige collaborated internally with Devestil poets, dancers, artists, and designers, playfully innovating book design typography.
Toyen, Styrsky and others found a second home in Paris, aligning with surrealists like Andre Breton and disseminating ideas back in Prague. However, the reality of censorship encroaches midway through the exhibition. Surrealist and Freudian ideas of the subjective unconscious were met with censorship, which ratcheted further with Nazi occupation that forbade surrealist expression branded as âdegenerate.â
In reaction and witness to Nazi occupation, Toyen created three cycles of photograveurs (31 in total) from 1939â1944 that parallel Francisco Goyaâs âThe Disasters of War,â albeit through a surrealist lens. Haunting allusions of war pepper dreamlike deserts, as farm animals and toys fall into states of damage and disrepair. In later images, the dessert is polluted with smog, a skeleton dog, and other macabre projections from life during wartime.
The glass portion of the exhibition allows the viewer to meditate on design rather than the prevailing politics, and hones in on the rapidly changing styles of glass from 1908â1935. Renown for engraving and enameling techniques for decades, the collection shows artisans skilled in cold-working techniques adapting to prevailing styles from classicism through art-nouveau and deco. Influences from Italy and abroad crop in with lighter and fanciful shapes, and closes with a more traditional bohemian treatment of glass like a carved stone.
This exhibition is as much about ideology and subsequent intellectual reactions as it is about a particular art movement. Grounded in a geopolitical context, the exhibition reveals free thinkers and the glass industry altering under the shifting and threatening political climate of the early 20th century.
This article was originally published by A+C Magazine Houston (Now Arts + Culture Texas)  for November 2011, and can be found here.
This exhibition ran at Spacetaker's Artist Resource Center from October 1-28, 2011.
Mark Masterson brings an exhibition to Spacetakerâs ARC steeped in 16th century style, but the egalitarian subject matter is both timeless and timely.
Working in the style of 16th century Flemish painter and printmaker Pieter Bruegel, Masterson editorializes and reworks Bruegelâs satirical compositions to create a unique voice that rallies against opulence and greed.
In 2009, long before Occupy Wall Street and satellite movements, Masterson quietly created a triptych that details the division between the (haves) and the (have-nots). The center panel âThe Battle of the Strong-Boxes and Money Bagsâ is economic warfare incarnate; anthropomorphic treasure boxes and money bags are tangled in a war scene with their gold pieces spilling across the battleground. This is the starting point for an exhibition exploring themes including the healthcare crisis and housing market crash.
The majority of the exhibition is oil painting on folded and crinkled linen paper, which adds a sculptural quality that looks akin to a fresco rediscovered or a specimen recently exhumed. Valleys and ridges on the surface invite the viewer to examine the image from multiple vantage points. However, this uneven surface forces a break from Bruegelâs style, resulting in more generalized anatomy and gestural brush strokes. Masterson further emphasizes physicality in his images by leaving the edges of the paper exposed.
Masterson includes three lithographs in the exhibition, which allow the eye to rest and enjoy more subtle drawing and use of chine colle.
All of the lithographs were editioned with the assistance of his twin brother, Pat Masterson, at Burning Bones Press. In âThe Big Fish Eat the Lil Fish,â the concept of the corporate ladder moves to higher levels of absurdity with peasants cutting house-sized fish open, allowing smaller fish to spill out from the incision. Masterson includes literal ladders that climb to surreal and indeterminate heights, and embellishes the quantity of fish in the landscape.
While one might consider âUnder Repairâ to be academic, or an artifact of an institution out of touch with todayâs problems, the exhibition commands the older visual language to convey a message of once-quiet vitriol.
