My weekly art tour thoughts

So I've starting going with my friend Eleanor, who by the way is a brilliant art dealer/consultant/patron all-around awesome person, to see art around town. We try to hit up galleries, non-profits, artist run spaces, museums and quirky Houston spaces or projects. This week we went to the Rice Gallery and the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houson; I guess it was University art space day.

The gallery at Rice University specializes in site-specific installation and has done some really memorable exhibitions for me at least, like Tara Donovan, Yayoi Kusama and Jessica Stockholder. This one was done by an artist named Aurora Robson, who takes plastic bottles (trash basically) and turns them into a physically navigable organic cellular-like construction complete with lights and paint job. It's pretty nifty to experience in a natural history/science museum kind of way, but this kind of stuff doesn't do it for me normally. Nor the gimmick of being a "green" artist, although entirely noble, rarely gets me excited. Just seems to me it makes for a good news story. But visually this thing is pretty rad, so it's worth it. Here's a picture from Rice's website below of the installation in progress.











The Blaffer had a group show called Damaged Romanticism curated by the now ex-director, Terrie Sultan along with critic David Pagel and Colin Gardner, both from CA, although a lot of the work I've seen in NY. It's a nice show, very tight conceptually and nicely ranging in practice and career levels of the artists. I've posted an image from one of the artists I'm very attracted to personally in the show, Wangechi Mutu. I normally have a better critical stance on shows like these, but I'm pretty even feeling about it, so I suppose that's a good thing.












Until next week! Let's see if I can stay consistent...