The Big Show Opens Tonight

Robert Boyd


Pan's gonna be at the opening tonight, and we look forward to seeing as many of you folks as we possibly can. Look for the big bald guy in the crazy paisley shirt. The opening is at Lawndale Art Center on Main St., just a few blocks north of the MFAH. And don't worry if you miss the opening--it'll be up through August 11.

We've already done extensive coverage of The Big Show here at Pan:

• Brian Piana's personal Big Show history
• What happened when Piana entered a piece this year
• A preview of some of the artists in the show. 

(And over at Glasstire, read Rachel Hooper's account of volunteering at The Big Show for the day of judgment. )

And if you are feeling nostalgic, we covered The Big Show in 2011, 2010, and 2009, as well.

The Big Show 2011


David P. Gray, The Question, 2011, oil on canvas

• Retina Burn
• Braniacs
• Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Weird
• Epilogue

The Big Show 2010

 
Hayden Fosdick, Sorrow and Despair Grip the Moon, 2010, collage

• Part 1
• Part 2

The Big Show 2009


Mindy Kober, Contemplating the Universe, 2009, crayon and gouache on paper

• The Big Show at Lawndale

See you at there!

New Acquisitions--two small collages and a purple crown

Robert Boyd

If it seems like I have been buying a lot of art lately, it's sort of true. Mostly it's just that I've received a lot of art lately and also that I finally have some time to write about art I bought earlier.

For example, this small collage by Hayden Fosdick (who has one of the best names I have ever heard). I actually got this at Gallery 1724 several months ago, but forgot about it until recently! What made me remember it was his excellent collage in The Big Show.



Hayden Fosdick, untitled (?), collage, 2010

I know nothing about Fosdick, except that I am fairly certain he bears no resemblance to this man.

I also recently bought another small collage. Cheyanne Ramos had a show at McMurtrey Gallery which featured paintings with realistic setting, but where a central figure or object had been blanked out as a silhouette and replaced by a bunch of overlapping images of processed food products. Along with these paintings, she was selling a bunch of tiny collages, where she had taken postcards, cut out the central image, and replaced it underneath with a bunch of cutouts of food product photos, perhaps from the Sunday paper coupons.



Cheyanne Ramos, untitled, collage, 2010

Her collages seem almost like "sketches" for the paintings--or at least where she worked out her basic ideas for them. Cheyanne Ramos is another artist with a cool name about whom I know little. I've seen her work at The Joanna and Box 13, as well as the McMurtrey Gallery. I know she studied to get an MFA at UH, but that's about it. You can see more of her work here.

Finally, in a drastically different medium, is this purple crown by Virginia Scotchie.



Virginia Scotchie, untitled (Purple Crown), ceramic, 2010

This I got at Goldesberry. She had shown several months ago, and I really liked her work. She made cool textures and shapes. There were a number of similarly sized pieces that were all good. It was hard choosing. I finally picked the purple crown because it seemed so absurd. It's beautiful and makes me smile. (You can see a lot more similar objects on her web page.) She is also a professor at the University of South Carolina.

The Big Show at Lawndale, part 2

(Continued from Part 1)

The ubiquitous Emily Sloan plays a little game with the whole format of the show. Her Kenmore piece is, in itself, a curatorial act. It's as if she is staking a claim for curation as artistic act. And she is playing on the tradition of tiny art spaces. (Think of Sharon Engelstein's Gallery One Three Seven or most famously, Duchamp's Box in a Valise.) In presenting the refrigerator as an art space, she "smuggles" in all the artworks on it and in it.

Valerie Powell, Outdoor Sculpture Garden, plastic and magnets, 2010 (?)

So Valerie Powell's magnets, which are similar to other work she has done, become the "outdoor sculpture garden" for this lilliputian art space. Inside, you have things like this tiny minimalist sculpture made of butter.

Loli Fernandez-A, Homage to Judd, butter, 2010

(Its geometric regularity recalls Judd, but its material recalls Beuys.)

There were a few abstract paintings I liked. I mentioned Joseph Cohen, or course. I also enjoyed these two very different pieces.

Myke Venable, Violet/Rose/Silver, acrylic on convas, 2009

John Tapper, Sure, acrylic latex paint, ink and paper on canvas, 2009

The angled geometries of Myke Venable's piece  appeal to me like a Robert Mangold painting, and I like the Philip Guston-like mark-making in Tapper's.

I'm going to close with a few disparate, unrelated pieces that I like from the show. There is not story that can be told here--and that is essentially true for the exhibit as a whole. Themes, tendencies, stories that emerge (naked ladies!) are countered or undermined by other tendencies (abstractions, feminist art). That's what you can expect from The Big Show. The work offered to the curator doesn't allow him to tell a story (beyond a story of plurality or chaos), even if he had any inclination to do so.

Hayden Fosdick, Sorrow and Despair Grip the Moon, collage, 2010

I bought a piece of Fosdick's from a show at Gallery 1724 earlier this year. His collages are simple and clever. This one really exemplifies "simple" and "clever"--but I want to also call attention to the excellent design that looks almost like early Russian avant garde design.

Joel Hernandez, Carmelita, archival inkjet print, 2008

Joel Hernandez had two great photographic portraits in the show. His subjects are shown in their own environments (I assume) and really come through as real people with constructed identities. The photos play in the fuzzy space between authenticity and artifice.

Anthony Day, Total Life Saver, floats and airbrush, 2010

Anthony Day, Total Life Saver, floats and airbrush (from above), 2010

This last piece looks like the classic "shit, the deadline's tomorrow and I haven't even started!" piece. (I did a few of those as an art student.) Still, sitting on its clean white plinth, it looks really good. And that's all ya need.(I have to say I like this better than his styrofoam pieces.)