Hunting Prize 2015 Finalists

Robert Boyd

Hey, buckaroos, it's Hunting Prize time again, and they have uploaded photos of all the finalists to Facebook. In the past, Hunting has had controversy because of its prohibition of any art that anyone might possibly find offensive. A lesser controversy, but one that bubbles up most years, is that it seems to discriminate against abstract painting (although that complaint surely was silenced by last year's winner, Winston Lee Mascarenhas). But lending credence to this theory is that with this year's finalists, abstract paintings are vastly outnumbered by figurative paintings. That said, we don't know what the general pool of entrants was. Maybe this ratio of figurative to abstract among the finalists reflects what they received from artists entering the contest. Without more knowledge of the first round entrants and of the criteria by which they were judged, I am reluctant to say that the Hunting judges have a bias against abstract painting per se.

Below are a few pictures that caught my eye. Many of these works are by artists I already admire a lot, but the pieces that intrigue me most are the ones by people I've never heard of or are, at best, only slightly familiar with. I love coming across work like that, which is why I like open-call events like the Hunting Prize and the Big Show.


Alice Leora Briggs, Puesto, 2014, sgraffito drawing with acrylic ink and gesso on panel diptych: each panel 18 x 24 inches

Dean Liscum reviewed Alice Leora Briggs' work back in 2012.


Fernando Ramirez, Clouds

I haven't seen that many Fernando Ramirez pieces, but I have liked all the ones I have seen. They have a fearful edge that reminds me a bit of artists as diverse as Vince Locke and Brian Chippendale. But will the Hunting judges go for art that looks like it could serve as the cover of a death metal album? I doubt it, but who knows?



Gina Gwen Palacios, Abel's Lot, 2014, Oil on pane,l 37" x 36"

I was completely unfamiliar with Gina Gwen Palacios, but I liked the way the bleak landscape Abel's Lot collapses in the middle. It suggests sudden violence in a small town, like in a novel by Jim Thompson or Cormac McCarthy.



Harvey Johnson, Didn't It Rain

I'm glad I saw this Harvey Johnson image because it reminds me I need to take a road trip to Beaumont to see Harvey Johnson: A Triple Middle Passage at AMSET. His work is always great. (Why do we have to go to Beaumont to see solo museum exhibits by so many Houston artists?)


 Heather Bause, Honeycomb

I was surprised to learn that this drippy painterly abstraction is by Heather Bause, whose previous work has been pretty hard-edge in my experience.But looking at her recent work on her website shows that this is a direction she's moved into, and I have to say I like it a lot.


Jimmy Houston, Trailblazer

Every now and then I will see a piece by Jimmy Houston in a group show or during Art Crawl. But his work is generally not the kind of work you see in local galleries--illustrational, cartoony, "low brow," etc. But I like his work quite a bit and this particular Disney-crossed-with-steampunk image tickled me. Sure it's illustrational--and I like good illustrations.


Laura Lark, Arena

This is an unusual Laura Lark piece. If done using her typical stipple technique, it must have been rather tedious to create--it's so dark and dense.  I can't tell if it's a collage or if she just drew the male hand projecting from the woman's chest, but that combined with the darkness of the image and the bad surveillance photo quality give Arena a slightly sinister feeling.


Lindy Chambers, Party Animals

I loved Lindy Chambers' use of bold flat colors with clean outlines in Party Animals--it's like a cross between Patrick Caulfield and Hergé. She recently had a show at d.m. allison, which I liked but which also seemed a little heavy on the surreal/pop elements. By eschewing that stuff, this painting is much stronger. It's my favorite of all the finalists for the Hunting.


Matt Messinger, Sperm Whale

I have a silk-screen of three sperm whales by Matt Messinger printed on ledger paper from Dean's Easy Credit (which Messinger presumably acquired from Jim Pirtle). In my print, the whales are the usual black variety, but in this painting he goes for a singular white whale, perhaps a descendent from Moby Dick himself.


Mira Hnatyshyn, Mortal Immortal

I'm not sure what it is about these two monks (?) and their fans that appeals to me. It seems quite a bit different than the work I saw in Mira Hnatyshyn's studio in San Antonio a few years back.  Her work generally reminds me a bit of Larry Rivers--but not this elegant piece.


Seth Alverson, Useless Foot

This is the kind of grotesque work we've come to expect from Seth Alverson. But I also wonder if it's an homage to the foot paintings of his friend (and previous Hunting Prize winner) Lane Hagood. Whatever its inspiration, it's one damn ugly thing. I can't turn away. I love it. (I should disclose that I own a painting by Alverson.)


Terry Crump, Savannah Bridge

A few years ago, I saw a painting by Terry Crump at the Big Show at Lawndale that I really liked. With his splashy, non-local pastel colors, his work feels like the lite-beer version of Matisse. I guess that at best sounds like I'm damning it with faint praise, but I like Savannah Bridge a lot. It's pretty, and while sometimes I love ugly (as mentioned above), pretty's OK with me, too. "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

There's much more. Check out Hunting's Facebook page to see them all.

Road Trip: San Antonio

by Robert Boyd

This is intended to be the first of a new ongoing feature. Since I got new wheels, I thought I might take a few day trips and overnight trips to see art outside the Houston city limits. So after seeing an article, "Donna Simon's Seeing Art San Antonio Tours," on Glasstire, I decided to sign up for a tour. The big attraction was that it included a studio visit. I can figure out how to get to San Antonio's museums and galleries on my own--but seeing an artist's studio in another city was something I needed some entrée to accomplish. So to take this tour, I had to be on the road by 6:30 am on a Saturday. Seeing Art San Antonio is a small operation run by Donna Simon. I was definitely the youngest person on the tour, and most of the other tour goers were repeat customers. (A tour costs $35 for an individual.) We met at 10 am in front of a modest house up near Fort Sam Houston. This was the studio of Mira Hnatyshyn (pronounced NAT-uh-shin, more or less).

Mira Hnatyshyn, Bus Stop,oil on canvas and mixed media

The house is weird. You walk in and there's her art everywhere--which is pretty typical--but after a while, you start to realize that she works in every room. I wondered how she could live there. And she told us--she doesn't live there. This entire house (which was quite modest, mind you) is her studio. She lives somewhere else. As a studio, it feels very strange. The ceiling is low and the rooms are small--it seems like a tough place to be creating the large scale works she creates. And, indeed, many the works on the wall were crammed floor-to-ceiling.

She works on unstretched canvas in oil. At first, I thought she was painting on unprimed canvas--a lot of her oil is highly thinned and watery. But she explained that she put down clear gesso, so the canvas was protected. Because it was unstretched, the canvases sometimes had folds in them, which she exploited to add a sculptural quality--which she amplifies by adding three-dimensional objects. For example, see the potato-like objects on the floor in front of Bus Stop. They are part of the installation.

She gave us souvenirs before we left--photocopies of drawings she had made of Putin and Medyedev. They were apparently left over from an installation she had done.


Mira Hnatyshyn, Medvedyev and Putin



Our next stop was Blue Star Contemporary Art Center. Simon told us the story of its origin. According to her, back in 1985, the San Antonio Art Museum was working on an exhibit of local San Antonio contemporary artists. However, at the last moment, the curator was fired and the show cancelled. Enraged, the artists located an unused industrial building and hung the show there. That was the start of the Blue Star art center which has become a large, multi-building complex, housing galleries, studios, performance spaces, etc. And now far from being a big "fuck you" to the establishment it started as, it is the establishment. It has 10 $50,000+ contributors (including a couple of multinational corporations), 11 $25,000 to $49,999 contributors, and so on. That's what happens to rebel art spaces if they last long enough.


Blue Star Contemporary Art Center

The main gallery had a show by English sculptor Phillip King. His brightly colored geometric sculptures made me think of Anthony Caro crossed with Al Held, maybe with a dash of George Sugarman. He studied with Caro, so that makes sense.


Phillip King, Darwin 1, painted stainless steel, 2011


Phillip King, Yellow Beam, painted steel, 2011


Phillip King, Pink Bottom, painted foam PVC, painted aluminum, 2011

I like this last one especially. In addition to having a witty title, Pink Bottom seems to be a response if not a rebuke to Donald Judd's metal boxes. The addition of a tilt, of curves, of paint, of pink--all of these seem to say, "Donald, it would have been OK to live a little." You can see King's work at Blue Star Contemporary through February 12.

This was the end of the official tour. Simon has one more tour scheduled for January and two in February. I, however, had a little time before I had to drive back to Houston. I had lunch at the Blue Star Brewing Company then checked out some of the other residents of the complex. The first place I visited was Joan Grona Contemporary Art. Among the work I saw there were these paintings by Jason Willome.


Jason Willome, Visible Inclusions in an Obscure Plane, acrylic, rayon flocking, canvas, 2011


Jason Willome, A Suspicious Milieu, acrylic, rayon flocking, canvas, 2011

The pink bits that look a little like shewed bubblegum are actually little bits of nylon glued to the canvas. What I like is how these weird surface additions to the canvas interact with the picture. Willome is acting as if they are floating on the picture plane, and that the images behind them are affected by them. The nylon bits appear to cast shadows on the figures. The physical reality of these bits of fluff works with the illusion of the painted image. I can think of a couple of other examples of this--Charles Wilson Peale's Staircase Group, in which the first stair in the picture is real, and Max Ernst's Two Children are Frightened by a Nightingale, where the little house and fence are real and attached to the front of the painting. I'm sure there are many other examples.

In a group of buildings behind the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center is the University of Texas-San Antonio's satellite space. Having a satellite space in the Blue Star art complex strikes me as a damn good idea--it really puts the work of its students and curators in front of the art public. It would be as if Rice or UH rented a small exhibition space in the Independent Arts Collaborative building on in the Hive, whenever they get built.

The current show (through January 22), Land Portrait by the Culture Laboratory Collective, was a bit bloodless. But I did like the tiny photographs, collectively called Exit Strategy, by Loren Erdrich. They depict a tall ladder rising out of a field, sometimes with a girl in a dress at the top of the ladder.



Loren Erdrich, Exit Strategy, photos and magnifying glasses


Loren Erdrich, Exit Strategy, photos and magnifying glasses


Loren Erdrich, Exit Strategy, photos and magnifying glasses

The images are nice and big here on the blog, but in the gallery, they were tiny--so tiny that the artist put a magnifying glass under each pair of images to help the viewer see them. The images are a bit surreal to begin with--by making these landscapes (and skyscapes) so tiny, another level of oddness is added.



This is the bus-stop outside the complex. It is also right on the river, so you can bike or walk to it. Even cooler, there is a city "bike share" station there. The Blue Star art complex is well-worth a visit, especially on a nice day when you can also bike or walk along the river.