Notes on Super 8

by Robert Boyd

I've been to plenty of art events at Winter Street Studios and Summer Street Studios, but I had never been to Spring Street Studios. (There is an Autumn Lane and a Fall Street in Houston, but no art studios on either as far as I know.) Group shows at art studios tend to be mixed bags (at best) because the artists working in those places are so varied, both in style and in quality. Super Eight at Spring Street seems to have made an effort to mitigate this. The number of artists on display was limited to eight, which permitted a deeper selection of work from each artist, as well as some quality control. Beyond that, it's hard to see what the selection principle was. Most of the work is painted, but there is a large variety of styles and subject matters. And there is some sculptural work, including an installation. I don't think it's important that I know how the artists were chosen and by whom, but it does make me wonder what these particular eight artists have in common. Perhaps they are all friends, which is as good a reason to display work together as any.

For the most part, Tito Fabian's art did nothing for me. It was political in the shallowest, most obvious way. The thing that struck me about his work (positively) was its construction out of triangular facets of plywood, which gave it a relief quality.

Micah the Artist, Good Times

Then there was Micah the Artist [sic]. His paintings for the most part weren't memorable, but Good Times caught my eye. What is being depicted here? A burrito? The ambiguity (and the resemblance to food) make this piece amusing. Placing this enormous food item in front of a vaguely-defined tan plane with pale green filigree just adds to the over-all strangeness of the painting. Good times indeed.

Kelley Devine, The Diary, book pages, charcoal, acrylic medium on canvas, 48" x 36"

The woman in Kelley Devine's The Diary is pensive, almost anxious. Like most of Devine's women, she has big eyes and a tiny cupid's bow lips. She doesn't look at the viewer. And the image rests on a ground of printed pages.

The pages are from a book called Anaïs Nin: An Introduction by Benjamin Franklin and Duane Schneider.I thought it was interesting that she didn't use pages from Nin's actual diary. Instead, the pages are from a scholarly book by two men. Given the nature of what Nin wrote (such as her works of erotica that were published as Delta of Venus and Little Birds), there is an ironic perversity, a kind of voyeurism, in using pages of a book about Nin as the ground in this piece. It puts the woman in the picture one-step removed from being on an actual diary. Does this suggest that Devine is deliberately keeping something revealed? Given that the women in her paintings often look something like her without quite being her, I think maybe there is a sense that her works aren't really diaries--or that they are diaries that are locked shut.

Lucinda Cobley, Interval 4, 2012, monoprint on plastic, 50" x 40"

Lucinda Cobley usually works on glass (and some of that work was in Super Eight). The glass sometimes gives her work a' "artsy" feel, as if announcing that it's precious. Glass feels decorative (and I don't mean to disdain the decorative, but it makes her work seem a little less serious). I have to admit, the glass rubs me the wrong way. Which is why I liked her three Intervals, which are monoprints on plastic. They feel very matter-of-fact compared to the glass paintings. I look at something like Interval 4, and I see ink rolled onto plastic with a crappy roller (the roller part of it appears to not have been perfectly round, or else the ink wasn't applied to it evenly, which is why there are vertical stripes in each horizontal band of blue). The beauty comes out despite the materials. And this appeals to me.

Sarah Whatley, Sliced, 2012, mixed media

Sarah Whatley's pieces were made of X-ray photographs of human bodies. Most of the pieces displayed showed the Xrays cut into the silhouetted  shapes of women's clothes, and I found them a little cutesy and clever, but obvious. Perhaps they were saying that clothes are just a covering for the biological organism, the animal, beneath.

Sarah Whatley, Sliced, 2012, mixed media

But Sliced is a different story. This installation was in a darkened room. The "bed" is constructed of clothe draped over a metal frame. Inside the bed is a light source. And Whatley has constructed two lifesize "paper dolls" out of Xrays. They are depicted having sex with one another. One of them is a woman wearing what appears to be lingerie and high heels (who wears high heels to bed outside of porn films? Or am I just being naive?). The piece, glowing in the blackness of the room, is quite arresting. And much more than her other pieces here, this is very successful in foregrounding the biological underpinning of the erotic.

Kevin Peterson, Rocket, oil on panel

With graffiti and street art becoming such an important aspect of contemporary art, Kevin Peterson seems well-positioned to benefit. But his use of street art is highly eccentric. He paints highly rendered realistic paintings of objects and walls covered with graffiti.

Kevin Peterson, Keep Out, oil on panel, 40" x 28"

Much of the graffiti he depicts is "tagging." I haven't seen tagging referred to as art (unlike the more ambitious variations of "wild style"), although one could make a case for it in terms of being a kind of vernacular calligraphy. But he will sometimes paint "wild style" graffiti, as in the pieces on the dinosaur in Keep Out.

Kevin Peterson, Inked II, oil on panel, 57" x 46"

But Inked II suggests that Peterson is not interested in graffiti per se, but redrawing art in situ. So art on a piece of playground equipment, art on a wall, art on a dinosaur sculpture--or art on a blonde woman. Of course, the art he repaints in his paintings is art that arises from (and is often created by) the working class. It's not the art of MFAs (more and more ambitious graffiti artists are getting MFAs these days, though). Tattoos and graffiti art have only impacted bourgeois and elite sensibilities after spending many decades as the art of ghettos and sea ports.

But it would be interesting to see Peterson branch out a bit. What if he did paintings of art installations? Highly rendered realistic paintings of, say, a Cildo Meireles, an Ernesto Neto, a Daniel Buren, or a Tara Donavan installation. Particularly of ephemeral installations. I, for one, would find that pretty excellent--painting paying homage to post-painting.

 Kevin Peterson, Chipmunk, oil on panel, 32" x 21" (with actual playground "chipmunk")

With Chipmunk, Peterson displayed both the painting and the subject, which begs the question. Did Peterson acquire this worn, graffiti covered playground ride like this, or did he buy a relatively clean one and cover it with graffiti himself? Is it a found object, or a found object that he manipulated after the fact?

several small piece by Matt Messinger

One of Houston's most under-rated artists in Matt Messinger. He recently started showing at Devon Borden, which may change his status a bit. But here he was, selling great work cheap. (Full disclosure--I bought one of his whale prints, which you can see above roughly in the middle of this photo.)

Matt Messinger, Pluto

Messinger uses found images, often from 30s-era animated cartoons. That by itself is interesting (why such old images, redolent of the Depression and its rich popular culture?), but the way he combines them with drippy paint and ink and deliberately distressed painting surfaces adds another layer. They don't feel like they were created--they feel like they were excavated.

Matt Messinger, 3 Bears Button Stack

His sculptural works also have a nostalgic feel.  The ceramic collectible that form the basis of 3 Bears Button Stack is like something your grandmother might have bought.

Matt Messinger, Fox

Another subject matter that pops up in Messinger's work are animals. Fox has an illustrational image of a fox, which may or may not be appropriated. But the patched-together ground and drips of white paint or gesso give it the damaged look that typifies so much of Messinger's painted work.

Matt Messinger, #9

In this exhibit, there are several pieces where the figures are white and the ground is black. In addition to the painted images, he has written on these black paintings. In #9, he is tallying something up. There are columns of hashmarks, marking every five things (whatever he was counting). This kind of casual note-to-oneself right on the canvas reminds me a bit of Jean-Michel Basquiat. There a lot of artists in Houston influenced by Basquiat, and I guess Messinger falls into that category to an extent. But his work has its own vocabulary and style.

David Hardaker, MM-Destroyed #1, 2012, oil and household paint on canvas, 40" x 30"

David Hardaker also gives his paintings a deliberately damaged look. His paintings are appear damaged by violence, usually by pouring house paint over a highly-rendered image, instead of by wear and tear (as Messinger's appear to be). The images under the house paint are paintings of high-fashion models, presumably taken from magazines or catalogs. (Although I guess it's possible that Hardaker hires models.) The notion of throwing paint onto these images of women is disturbing. Because they are elegant, fashionable and sexy, it could be interpreted as a violent fear or disgust of women's sexuality. They might be seen as a metaphor for acid attacks, which are sometimes perpetrated against women in Pakistan and elsewhere by jealous husbands or religious fanatics. If interpreted this way, they are very disturbing images.

David Hardaker, JS-Destroyed #2, 2012, oil and household paint on canvas, 40" x 30"

In a piece like JS-Destroyed #2, the house paint covers the figure's entire face, erasing her identity. As an image of a model posing in kimono-like dress with a plunging neckline, there was already objectification taking place. But in JS-Destroyed #2, she is completely dehumanized.  Now another way to interpret this is that Hardaker is pointing out that this kind of high-fashion image is inherently dehumanizing. Pouring paint on it could even be thought of as a protest of this kind of commercial vapidity.

David Hardaker, Head Like a Hole, 2012, oil on canvas, mounted on board, burned, 16" x 16"

But it's hard not to conclude that Hardaker likes putting the women he depicts through hell; he douses them in house paint, and in Head Like a Hole, he burns a hole through his subject's forehead. No matter how you interpret them, they are unsettling.

The space, Spring Street Studios, turns out to be a pretty ideal place to display work, especially flat work. Four very wide hallways (built to accommodate a forklift, it seems) form a square. Each artist had plenty of space. There was very little salon-style hanging of works. I hope there will be more shows like this there.

Use Your Illusion at Colton & Farb

by Robert Boyd

This show was kind of a big sprawling mess. Pretty much every square foot of the gallery was used here to display art, often not to its advantage (there was a lot of art shoved into narrow hallways). It was hard to detect a theme or organizing idea in Use Your Illusion, which was curated by artist Paul Horn. But the thing about a big group show like this is that if the whole doesn't work, well, some of the parts might.

What hit me hardest was a gallery mostly full of work by Daniel Johnston. Daniel Johnston is a musician and kind of an outsider artist. For a few years, he was lionized by the alternative rock community, who loved his bizarre-but-heartfelt songs and saw in his mental problems a kind of authenticity. I highly recommend the documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Visual art has always been a major part of Johnston's work. But Horn doesn't just show a bunch of Johnston art.



installation view, Daniel Johnston Gallery at Colton and Farb

When I showed up at the gallery, Daniel Johnston music was playing. His plaintive voice, singing a song full of longing, was what I was hearing when I walked into this gallery. I almost had tears in my eyes.Seeing all this art and all this pop-culture detritus (from Johnston's home) was a highly emotional experience. (Then the music changed to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the spell was broken.)



Daniel Johnston's comic rack

I had a shock of recognition when I looked at Johnston's comic book rack. I had bought many of the same comics from my local UtoteM when I was a kid. (Johnston is a couple of years older than me, so I suspect he did the same--the difference is that he kept them all.) You can see a predominance of Captain America comics here--Captain America is a character who figures prominently in Johnston's work.



Daniel Johnston, drawings



Daniel Johnston, untitled

The three-eyed guy also figures pretty prominently in his work. I'm guessing that Johnston has some story about this guy; that he means something in particular to Johnston. For an artist who wears his heart on his sleeve, though, understanding Johnston is not easy. His mind is operating in a different place from ours. But this strangeness didn't prevent me from being very moved by this installation and the artwork here.



Daniel Johnston, untitled

But the crowded gallery issue played out here. In this small gallery that should have been devoted to Johnston alone was this work by John Paul Hartman.



John Paul Hartman, Amerimou5e (44), mixed media, 2011

I like Amerimou5e (44); it's funny and clever. But why is it in a room with Daniel Johnston's work? Horn should have edited the show a bit so that unnecessary juxtapositions like this could be avoided.



Matt Messinger, Popeye, Black and white gesso and charcoal pencil on found linen on canvas

One of the artists in the show is Matt Messinger. I have a gut-level reaction to artists who use comics characters in their work, and it seems like a lot of Houston artists do this for some reason. (The reason I have this negative reaction is complex, and probably deserves its own blog-post.) It's for this reason that I have resisted Matt Messinger's artwork for so long, even though whenever I see it, I like it. Popeye, with his ultra-windmilling arms, done on a surface that looks old and worn, is awesome. I earlier described his work as a combination of Cy Twombly and E.C. Segar, but another comparison I would make is with cartoonist Al Columbia, who draws in a deliberately old-fashioned style on damaged, torn paper.

You might notice this picture has abright yellow area in the upper center. That's not on the painting. One of the annoying things about the hanging of this show is that it was lit by track lights with narrow, strong beams. They tended to burn a "hot spot" in the middle of many of the works, which really shows up in delicate compositions like this one.



Matt Messinger, Lover, oil and black gesso on canvas, 2011

Not all of Messinger's work involves appropriated 30s cartoon characters. He goes deeper into art history for this image--it feels prehistoric.A spooky silhouette of a deer with a human (?) head makes me think of pre-classical Greece and the chimera they created to explain the world. The writing and glyph-like figures in the upper right add to this feeling, and the red spot in the lower left is just devastating.

Another artist who dealt with the "primitive" is Solomon Kane. (I laughed when I saw his name because Solomon Kane was also the name of pulp hero created by Robert E. Howard of Conan fame.) His work in this show consists of maximalist wall reliefs.



Solomon Kane, Mother of the World, African ostrich egg, Baule mask from Africa, African kudu horns, wooden orchid from Indonesia made of hibiscus wood, female torso form, wooden mannequin hands, polyurethane intermediate, calk, glue, car paint, acrylics, inks, watercolors, glass paint, ceramic paint, fabric paint, fluorescent and iridescent paint, industrial car sealant, on wooden panel, 2011

(This is another piece that had an overly narrow spotlight on it.) These highly encrusted works typically involve African masks--in this case, a Baule mask. (The Baule people are a populous ethnic group in Ivory Coast.) He then adds bodies to the masks, using body forms that seem to be parts of shopping dummies. Then the whole thing will be encrusted with stuff and paint. The surfaces are highly irregular, dark but richly colored.



Solomon Kane, African Gothic--Correcting Historical Misconceptions, Chokwe and Baule tribal masks from Africa, African kudu horns and skull plate, male and female torso form, male and female mannequin hands, wooden flowersm polyurethane intermediate, calk, glue, car paint, acrylics, inks, watercolors, glass paint, ceramic paint, fabric paint, fluorescent and iridescent paint, industrial car sealant, on wooden panel, 2011

I don't totally understand what Kane is trying to say, but these are such striking pieces visually that I'm not sure it matters. Maximalism is about presenting an overwhelming collection of inputs, which Kane does. Yet despite the super-encrusted surfaces of  these pieces, the whole is never lost.



John Bruce Berry, Return 6, resin and bicycle parts, 2010-11

John Bruce Berry has been exhibiting art in Houston since 1965 (!) and, weirdly enough, is a practicing physician as well. (There seem to be several doctor/artists in Houston, for some reason.) I liked these bicycle parts in resin--especially the way they were lit from below. Of course, one thinks of prehistoric insects preserved in amber. One could imagine intelligent beings, scraping carefully on the ruined surface of Earth 65 million years from now, finding one of these and puzzling over it. They have a kind of permanence to them, to be sure. And if you had to preserve one technological object for future archeologists, the bicycle would be one of my own top three choices.

Berry's art was crowded into a hallway, but because it was compact, I could photograph it. Not so with Paul Horn's own work or the paintings of Kevin Peterson. I couldn't get enough distance from their works to take a good photo. Horn's work resembles Kane's in the sense that they both deal with maximalist information overload. Horn's works are dense three-dimensional paper collages, often employing a lot of comics/cartoon imagery--because of this, you can see where he was coming from with a lot of the choices in this show. Peterson paints very realistic pictures of urban, often graffiti-covered spaces with figures of children in the scenarios--specifically well-dressed, prosperous-looking white children. I assume he is going for a degree of irony by posing them in front of gritty, graffiti-covered urban walls. But on a formal level, he is placing a volume in front of a carefully painted flat surface. He plays with this formal aspect even more in Waiting, where a young girl is standing in front of cruddy curb and wall. There are six holes cut in the canvas and sewn open, and the viewer can see another layer, about two inches behind the canvas. I'm not sure it works, but it's an interesting concept.

Not all the work worked. I could have done without Dandee Danao's work. His work really feeds into my antipathy towards artists who appropriate comics. Whatever interest his work has is because of the inherent power of the images he stole. There is no there there. Unlike Messinger's work or Johnston's, the viewer has no feeling that the artist feels anything towards his subjects. It's art barely worth a smirk.



Dandee Danao,Batman, Superman and Apocalypse, acrylic and ink on canvas

(For all you non-superhero fans, the toothy fellow on the right is Apocalypse, a lame X-Men villain.) If the show had left out Danao, all those artists hanging in the narrow hallways could have had a better exhibition space for their work--and the show overall wouldn't have felt so crowded. But that's a small complaint--whatever its faults, there is a lot to like in Use Your Illusion.

The Big Show at Lawndale

As I understand it, Lawndale has been doing "The Big Show" every year for the past 30 years. I don't know if the format has always been the same though. This version of it featured works by a whole bunch of artists from the Houston area. They were chosen by a guest curator from St. Louis from works by 409 artists who entered works (and paid an entry fee for the privilege). The show on the walls is what Laura Fried picked. You can see it until August 8.

I don't have any idea what was rejected from the show, but I was surprised by the number of paintings (as opposed to sculptures or video or installations or mixed media work). I was surprised by the number of basically realist paintings, or paintings that used elements of realism within postmodern contexts. It seems like a really conservative show over-all. That's OK. I was impressed by the painting prowess of Houston.


Kevin Peterson, Hope, oil on canvas, 2009

Like this amusing painting byt Kevin Peterson. The artist assures us that the man on the left is not meant to be Obama, and that indeed both men are white. He made this statement at a slide show given by the artists. Not all the artists spoke, though. I am pretty sure we didn't hear from Michael Arcieri, for example.


Michael Arcieri, Nation Builder, acrylic and oil on canvas, 2009

The idea here is kind of cheesy, juxtapozing a baroque style painting with grafitti. I think he may be suggesting that the two modes of expression are both highly coded in ways that their intended audiences would understand easily, even if they are opaque to 21st century gallery goers. I just like the contrast between the flatness of the grafitti and the depth and roundness of the baroque figures.


Michael Arcieri, Slave, acrylic and oil on canvas, 2009

Grafitti played a part in several pieces. Street art has come a long way since I was doing pieces in the early 80s. I like the way David Cobb painted an illusionistic depiction of basically flat grafitti here, and I like the feel of the railyard.


David S. Cobb, Blue Camel, acrylic on board, 2009


Mindy Kober showed slides of her work over time (as many of the artists did). Her work began being done mostly with gouache but she recently changed to using crayon.


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

The reason she gave was simple--crayons were cheaper than gouche. The recession has hit everyone hard, hey.

Jed Foronda was one of the slide show artists. He showed a lot of older work that seemed fairly loud and colorful, a little like Ben Jones, but now, as he put it, "painting wasn't working" for him anymore. What he was doing now was excavating magazines with a sharp knife, creating these debossed objects that, in contrast to the earlier work in his slides, seem quite elegant.


Jed Foronda, Glory Hole No. 8, primer, wood, excavated Artforum, 2009

I like how they look like colorful, terraced open-pit mines.


Jed Foronda, The Wheels Keep On Spinning, primer, wood, excavated Artforum, 2009


Jed Foronda, The Wheels Keep On Spinning, primer, wood, excavated Artforum, 2009 (seen from an angle)

Foronda said the best magazines to use for this kind of piece were art magazines and porno magazines--because they both have really good colors.


John Runnels, From the Series: Whisky Tango Foxtrot - For Ultimate Carnal Knowledge, encyclopedia and bookends, 2009

There are a couple of punks in the show. This by John Runnels piece amused me. It was also one of the few sculptural pieces in the show.

Jasmyne Graybill managed to get three sculptures in the show. Well-deserved--these pieces are astonishing (and really disgusting in a totally surprising way).


Jasmyne Graybill, Specklebelly, steamer basket and polymer clay, 2008

Yech, right?


Jasmyne Graybill, Citruspur, lime squeeze, polymer clay and plastic, 2008

This is art you can almost smell--musty, gag-inducing. The craftsmanship is astonishing.


Jasmyne Graybill, Crested Buttercream Polyps, muffin pan and polymer clay, 2008

I love them. Perfect art for the kitchen!

Over all, the artists seemed too smart. Lots of references to other art and to art history were worn too close to the surface. When the artists spoke, they often spoke of "exploring issues around" this or that. I kept waiting for someone to say, "I paint X because I like X." For all the skill shown here, I didn't feel much. Even the political pieces seemed old hat. I saw reflections of art from New York and elsewhere, filtered through BFA and MFA programs. This may be unfair because I know not all the artists come out of that world of university art education. And I liked a lot of the work! I just wasn't blown away by much, and maybe part of the reason for that was hearing the artists speak about their work. Maybe that was a mistake.

The earnest, intelligent artist statements perhaps gave me extra appreciation for Jim Nolan's slide presentation. He described his work as post-minimalist, and name-checked one of my least favorite artists of the 80s, Joel Shapiro, but in contrast to so many of the artist here, he felt free to declare, "I try to stay away from craftsmanship as much as possible." After all, he added, "if you spend a lot of time on something, does it get better?"