Looking twice at Beautiful Freak /(and) Nature's Bastards

by Dean Liscum

(All images in this article are from the artist's website.)

Maybe it's just the lighting at Houston Arts Alliance's space125gallery, but when I approached Leigh Ann Lester I could swear that she had an impish gleam in her eye. As I asked her about her exhibition, Beautiful Freaks/Nature's Bastards, it only seemed to get brighter.

Mutant Spectre - Detail
Hunting Art Prize Winner 2011
Graphite on Drafting film, 2010, 33 x 41 inches

The show consists of renderings of plants in the form of sculptures, needle work, carbon drawings, ink and pencil drawings. From 10 meters away, it's could easily be mistaken for 19th century floral etchings or the obsessive compulsive homework of a botany student. It's when I stepped closer that I began to appreciate the incredibly minute detail and precision of each piece and the subtle biological incoherence in them.

Crocboleaparsempeustusgiaervivum  Zpnaluriaspetecttusduraorum Realized
Silk on Silk Embroidery, Antique Victorian Frame, 2008,
20" x 18"

Like a naughty, nerdy botanical illustrator Lester's very subtly blended different plants to create a series of Frankenflora as she refers to them in her statement for the show. As my eye travelled from flower to stem to flower, I slowly began to notice botanical disharmonies: completely different flowers on the same plant, different stalks and stems issuing from the same root system, various leaves from the same stem.

They're only subtle if you don't pay attention. I'm not a plant person and I could easily identify the incongruencies.

Imitatia perfecta 2.1 - 2.4
  Carbon paper on paper, 2010, 24 x 30 inches

Lester's Imitatia perfecta series furthers the theme of playful disunities. The visual format (carbon paper adjacent to traced image) indicates that these are identical, but the title states otherwise. I fell for it completely and had to look at the pictures twice to get it. And then of course there are the names, which are a Latin torture game in and of themselves, but botanist will recognize that all the roots are authentic. For example, Crocboleaparsempeustusgiaervivum  Zpnaluriaspetecttusduraorum.

The gleam in Lester eye might be attributable to the fact that she won the Hunting Art Prize for 2011. However, I think it's because she knows that in this game her work makes the viewer look twice.

Recent Acquistions: Two by Lane Hagood

 Robert Boyd

The Hunting Prize has attracted a lot of controversy, but I think the winners have been pretty good. This year, Lane Hagood was the surprising winner--the youngest winner they have ever had. When it was announced he won, he was having an opening at Gallery 1724. I got there before Hagood did, and the discussion was about the prize. Weirdly enough, a former Hunting judge was present at the party. He thought that they went about the prize all wrong. He thought that there should be more than one winner (right now it is a winner-take-all thing) and that some thought should be given towards how much the artist needs the money. He had some other complaints as well, but he was pleased that Hagood won.

When Hagood walked in, he had a glow of triumph tempered with a slightly sheepish look--as if he were questioning whether this was really happening! He said he was surprised and that he thought others deserved the prize more.

Anyway, I liked the art in the 1724 show a lot. There were two pieces I really liked, and I kept weighing them. Should I get this one or that one. Instead I went for broke and bought them both. I picked them up last weekend.



Lane Hagood, The Collector, watercolor, pen and pencil on paper

I like the fact that the collector displays his paintings salon-style, and that among his treasures is a Philip Guston.



Lane Hagood, Diseased Writer, Acrylic, watercolor, googly eyes, and a pencil

Despite the way they are displayed on this blog, Diseased Writer is much larger than The Collector. So, I guess it has to be asked: what does it say about me that I picked these two works... That my next purchase should be a real-life "Portrait of Dorian Gray"?

Hunting Prize Up to Its Old Shenanigans

Last year, you may recall that there were at least two artists who entered work for the Hunting Prize only to have the work disqualified at the last second. Now this wouldn't be such a big deal except for the shitty way Hunting did it. The artists had submitted the work digitally. It made it past the first round of judging. Then the work was mailed (at the artists' expense) to the Hunting Prize--at which point it was disqualified for not being two-dimensional. But there was also a feeling that the subject of the work might have been deemed too controversial. The rules state "Any artwork that includes the use of bodily fluids, degradation of religion or government, and/or depiction of sexual acts or any other medium, presentation or topic objectionable to Hunting PLC will be automatically disqualified.." Last year's disqualified works might have offended some sensitive soul.

So anyway, on to this year. Given what happened last year, I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of artists didn't submit work. Still, the $50,000 prize is worth trying for.

Now it appears that the same thing that happened to Joan Fabian and "Carlos" has happened to an artist named Devon Grey.



Like Fabian and Carlos last year, Grey was disqualified after he sent his piece in and without explanation.

So why might he have been disqualified? His piece appears to be a drawing, and as far as I can tell from the photo, it is not covered by glass. That's against one of their rules:

2-D Drawings must be created with traditional drawing medium(s) such as pencil, pen and ink and charcoal or a combination thereof and should be drawn on paper, panel or board and must be framed with glazing (glass or Plexiglas); no loose, exposed or unprotected paper works will be accepted.

But then again, it is a religious image--the last supper--populated by Lego men. Could that have been construed as offensive? And if so, why not tell him when he sent the digital image in?

Well, we don't know. The Hunting Prize people didn't tell Grey why he had been disqualified. Which is pretty shitty behavior on their part.

Has anyone else out there been disqualified? I'd love to hear from you. Also, if anyone from the Hunting Prize is reading, I would like to hear your side of the story, too. I promise a fair hearing and promise not to divulge anything anyone prefers not to have divulged.

Hunting Prize Update

No further news about the disqualified artists, but the winner has been announced. The winner is Wendy Wagner, a multi-media artist from Houston. She won for painting, of course--that's what the prize is all about. But I'm more familiar with her as a really cool animator. You can see some of her animation on her website. I first saw them a few weeks ago at Diverse Works. Here's one of her paintings:


Perchabirdability, mixed media on birch panel, 2005.

Congratulations!

Joan Fabian and the Hunting Prize

The Opposite of Peace, 2007, by Joan Fabian

This painting by Joan Fabian was entered into the into the Hunting Prize, where she was one of the artists on their "short list." As I understand it, that means she made it through the first round of judging, in which she had sent them a digital image of the piece, they decided they liked it, and asked for the original to be sent. She sent the piece to them, at considerable expense. At this point, she was disqualified. Why?

I contacted one of the jurors, who were going to chose pieces by viewing the actual works, and he said they never seen my piece. I called a representative of Hunting and she told me that they had nothing to do with the disqualification process and that it was the jurors that did the disqualifying because it wasn't a "painting".

Way to dodge responsibility guys! Now this is admittedly a grey area. On the other hand, artists have been painting on shaped canvases and shaped pieces of wood for a long time, and if such a work was not a painting as far as the Hunting Prize is concerned, it should have been either 1) more clearly spelled out in the rules, or 2) disqualified when she sent the digital file in.

What is the Hunting Prize? It's an art prize given by Hunting PLC, an English oil services company. From 1981 to 2005, it was given in the U.K., but moved to Texas in 2006. The prize is astonishingly generous--$50,000.

So what's the big controversy? It has been suggested that the shaped wooden nature of the painting is not the problem, but the subject. In the jaundiced opinion of local art blog B.S. Houston, Hunting is a prize that exist for the purpose of "impressing very-very wealthy oil executives and their wives." He also points our that the sign up sheet requires you to acknowledge that

Any artwork that includes the use of bodily fluids, degradation of religion or government, and/or depiction of sexual acts or any other medium, presentation or topic objectionable to Hunting PLC will be automatically disqualified from the competition.

So here's the possibly nefarious disqualification. Maybe the Hunting Prize people didn't see the word "WAR" when they got the digital file (I didn't see it at first, either), and when they opened the crate . . . whoops. (Why the word "WAR" should be offensive is another issue, but Hunting seems pretty damn sensitive about potential offense.)

What do I think? Well, whatever their reason for disqualifying the work, they did wrong by Joan Fabian, who went through a lot of expense to have a crate built for the piece and to ship it, at the request of the Hunting Prize. Also, the Hunting Prize folks need to loosen up a bit. And finally, impressing oil executives and their wives (and husbands) is worth doing--also educating them about art. If you are an artist trying to make a living from art in Texas, these people will be among your customers. So as an artist, you need to reach out to them in some way. They don't all have bad taste after all--Jean and Dominique DeMenil proved that.

For me, as a disinterested observer of this scene, I got introduced to an interesting artist. Joan Fabian's work reminds me of a stew of Jim Nutt, Lari Pittman, Elizabeth Murray, and Frank Stella. So on that note, let's close with another one of her paintings.


Playtime, 2005

Update: In the comments, an artist named Carlos tells a similar story:

I have also been given the boot by the HAP folks. The word that I got was that my work was too-3-D...

Yes, it is made up of objects and brakes the plane of the 2-d format. Yes,I did include all dimensions and materials used. Yes, I did spend a large amount of money to ship the work to Houston, Yes, I have to spend more money to get the work back.

This suggests the problem they had with Fabian's work was its three dimensionality, not its politics. But it also suggest the Hunting Prize folks didn't pay much attention to the digital files and information the artists submitted about their pieces. I wonder if any other painters who submitted "non-flat" works were rejected?

2nd Update: You can see Carlos Cuevas' rejected piece here. It has a bit of an Ed Kienholz/Michael Tracy vibe, though without either of those two artists' intensity. B.S. Houston still thinks it was the "offensive" nature of the works that got them rejected. Cuevas's assemblage has some religious elements, but doesn't seem particularly offensive to me. (But the Hunting Art Prize people may be exceptionally sensitive to possible offense, for all I know.) At the same time, HAP must have been blind not to see that this was essentially a mixed media three dimensional work when they got the slide. Curiouser and curiouser!

(Welcome Glasstire readers!)