Weekly art thoughts 2

So we only got around to seeing one show this week. It was an exhibition by an artist from Texas who was living in New York and I believe is living in Houston again, Susie Rosmarin at Texas Gallery (go to their website for images). I don't have much to say about Susie's paintings except it makes my eyes hurt but is technically quite a feat in the op art way. She also has a bunch of photography of sunsets, which was jarring against the super tightly painted semi-grided canvases. The only correlation I could come up with was color studies? Whatever. She's a big deal in the painting world, and rightly so, for these things look crazy labor intensive. For me however, they are really formal and kinda boring.

However, since I didn't get to see a lot of art I do want to talk about the gallery a bit. Now, Texas gallery is a little different than most galleries because of its weird location in a ritzy River Oaks shopping center but quietly tucked in the back so you have to know it to find it. I think galleries are really indentified here in Houston by location, but come to think of it, most cities function that way. Anyway, it is totally old school and very involved with art types like Robert Rauschenburg and Dave Hickey which gives them major cred. Fredericka Hunter, the part owner/director with Ian Glennie, also does an amazing DVD series called ArtPixthat if you've never seen or heard of before, shame. The space is a shot gun with an entrance gallery, one larger main exhibition, and a room with offices and rotating stock in back. The shows are always well considered and nicely edited for viewing. Its a little like a New York gallery where if they don't know you or are on the phone, they ignore you, but hey, that's why there's a buzzer on the front door, to make you feel like you just got let into an exclusive club. Its nice, and I very much respect Fredericka and Ian for being great trail-blazers and influences in this city.

We can figure this out, we went to college.

Grad school is keeping me busier than I had anticipated. I'm teaching two sections a week and reading Deleuze's Cinema 1 and Bergsonism at the same time. Both have provided me with some significant insights into our perception of the moving image and the use of montage. They're both difficult, heady, and abstract texts that require reading and re-reading. Calling them "dense" is a significant understatement. I will agree with my professor, that if you're at all engaged in the production of still or moving images they open a significant critical dialogue with both practices. After this post I will go back to reading the same page over and over for ten minutes.

A second year grad told me yesterday "you have to choose between being a good student, or getting your work made." I still haven't decided which side I'm on. I have also learned that Wikipedia is a total failure when it comes to philosophy and critical theory.

I am glad I am doing this.

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...

Box 13 is cool

I went to their opening last Saturday night and was expecting good stuff but all the shows and the space itself exceeded my expectations. There were basically four exhibitions, that included work you don't see very often like site-specific installation and a lot of video. There's an entire "box" devoted to video which is awesome and I feel that is way overdo here in Houston. The work by Heather Boaz is also very good and nicely presented. It's non-narrative performance based video, which I have a proclivity towards and thought was very sophisticated in concept.

Box13 Artspace itself is functioning like a replacement Commerce Street Artist Warehouse, complete with artist studios and exhibition space all run by an artist board of occupants. These particular exhibitions were all curated by occupants, and approved by the board. Needless to say, they are opening up this opportunity to curate exhibitions at the space through proposal submissions.

Included in the other artist curated/executed exhibitions were lots of installation, sculpture, drawings and more video! Teresa O'Connor curated a show entirely of work she could get on the internet. Elaine Bradford curated a show surrounding ideas of architecture and space, and the show was really thoughtful and good looking.

I'm really excited about this space and feel like it's a much more mature approach to artist run spaces that we've seen here in the past. Hopefully others will notice too.