Friday, September 30, 2011

Three Installations at Rice

by Robert Boyd

Ana Serrano
Ana Serrano, Salon of Beauty (detail), cardboard, paint, 2011

Rice VADA (Visual and Dramatic Arts) got its act together last night. Mostly. Instead of having a Rice Gallery opening that existed in a kind of void, they had two other simultaneous openings in Sewell Hall--a Matchbox Gallery opening and an installation by Seth Mittag upstairs in a tiny glassed-in space called EMERGEncy Room. (I say the mostly got their act together because if you visited the Rice Gallery opening, you wouldn't have necessarily known about the other two--there was no signage linking the three events, and Sewell Hall is a big building.)

Ana Serrano is a Mexican-American artist whose work deals with urban environments (particularly Los Angeles). In Salon of Beauty, the new installation at the Rice Gallery, she has created kind of a walk-in diorama of an L.A. barrio. Unlike a natural history museum, however, she doesn't try to make her diorama particularly realistic. Both is scale and color, it is highly stylized. She also employs a highly original typography which doesn't look like any store signage I have ever seen. The whole effect is like walking into a cartoon, which makes me wonder if this is something that chief curator Kimberley Davenport feels a particular affinity for--Ana Serrano, Andrea Dezsö and Wayne White have each brought a cartoon/alternative comics esthetic to the gallery with their installations over the past three years.

Ana Serrano
Ana Serrano, Salon of Beauty (detail), cardboard, paint, 2011

It's a large and impressive piece of work, but part of me wants to say, "so what?" The whole seems to add up to less than the sum of the parts. There are lovely and amusing details, but the combination of them doesn't strike me as particularly insightful or revelatory. The size of the piece is meant to overwhelm you a bit, but I actually think it would have been better if she had made it smaller--something on a table-top instead of something you walk through. Then the wholeness of it--and its representation of a community--would have been stronger.

Ana Serrano
Ana Serrano, Salon of Beauty (detail), cardboard, paint, 2011

But as I said, the details were great. These little blue and green boxes for example, or the lettering on the strip joint.

Ana Serrano
Ana Serrano, Salon of Beauty (detail), cardboard, paint, 2011

(By the way, to give you an idea of the scale of the installation, here's a person standing in front of the strip joint.)

Ana Serrano
Ana Serrano, Salon of Beauty (detail), cardboard, paint, 2011

Serrano has a blog where she details the building of the piece, as well as a side trip to see the Charles LeDray show at MFAH. (As you may guess, she loved it.)

Seth Mittag
Seth Mittag, We're Still Here, mixed media, 2011

Seth Mittag's piece is oddly parallel with Ana Serrano's. They have both made reduced-sized dioramas of buildings. Here we have a lavishly detailed, tiny mobile home, post-tornado. Placing it in this glass case and including a painted horizon give it the feel of a natural history museum diorama, and in that way is is quite different from Serrano's work downstairs. (Given Mittag's prodigious skills at creating a realistic scale model, it was something of a surprise to learn that he commissioned a mural painter to provide the back-ground painting. It was even more of a surprise to learn that the muralist was Robynn Sanders, who has work up at the Art Car Museum right now and was one of the subjects of a recent, slightly controversial post of mine).

Seth Mittag
Seth Mittag, We're Still Here (detail), mixed media, 2011

This piece is not really a stand-alone diorama. It's actually a movie set--for an animated movie that Mittag is working on. So the best way to look at this is as a work in progress.

Seth Mittag
Seth Mittag, We're Still Here (detail), mixed media, 2011

Still, it stands up as a piece in its own right. The detail is amazing--and amusing, as in the case of this lilliputian pair of underwear hanging on a tree branch.

Dolly Li
Dolly Li, Repurposed (with the artist sitting on it), plastic bags, 2011

Down in the subterranean sculpture courtyard of Sewell Hall is the student-run gallery Matchbox. For their opening show of the year, the co-directors of the space decided to collaborate on an installation. But it really feels like two distinct works that occupy the same space. On the floor is Dolly Li's carpet made of old plastic bags. Hanging from the ceiling are cut up photos taken by Elliot SoRelle.

Dolly Li
Dolly Li, Repurposed, plastic bags, 2011

Elliot SoRelle
Elliot SoRelle, Repurposed, photographs, thread, 2011

The two elements don't interact with one another conceptually or visually (you have to look down to see Li's and look up to see SoRelle's). While Li's piece works fine on its own, SoRelle's is lacking--indeed, it makes me think of the half-assed artworks that certain art students would put together the day before they were due because they had procrastinated all semester. With the help of weed. I'm not suggesting SoRelle did this; it's just art student behavior about which I have some personal knowledge, yaknowhatimean?

Elliot SoRelle
Elliot SoRelle, Repurposed, photographs, thread, 2011

So it doesn't quite jell. That's OK--they're undergrads. I like that they did it. And I like that Matchbox Gallery, EMERGEncy Room and the Rice Gallery got together on one night to show their stuff.


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1 comment:

  1. A most entertaining read about disparate works, people and skill-investments.

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