Pan Recommends for the week of October 3 to October 9

Robert Boyd

Quite a bit going on this week, including the Fringe Festival, a big show at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and a new gallery opening up in Houston, The Mission.

THURSDAY THROUGH SUNDAY


 Frame Dance Productions will be at the Fringe Festival

The 2013 Fringe Festival at Frenetic Theatre, The Barn, Super Happy Fun Land and Bohemeo's starting a various times at various venues (see the calendar for details). The Fringe Festival (which actually started yesterday) returns in a more compact form (no longer spread out over multiple weekends) with many dance, music, theater, etc. performances.

THURSDAY


Charles Hutson, A Dry Autum, watercolor, 9 x 13 inches, c. 1920

Natural Wonder: Charles Hutson Memorial exhibition at d. m. allison, 6–8 pm. Charles Hutson (1840-1936) was a Civil War veteran who took up painting in his 60s. This pop-up show (through Saturday) includes an auction of Hutson works, which can be seen here.


Raul Gonzalez

Consider All Things: Hiyme Brummett and Raul Gonzalez at Main Street Projects, 6–9 pm. Raul Gonzalez took his art back to school to get an MFA at UTSA. But now he's back to show something to the barfies at Double Trouble, along with fellow exhibitor Hiyme Brummett.

FRIDAY


Margaret Meehan

we were them: Margaret Meehan at David Shelton Gallery, 6–8 pm. I'm down for any Margaret Meehan show, but how can she top her photos of the bloody but elegant female albino sasquatch boxer?


Melissa Thorne's installation in progress at Devin Borden Gallery

Melissa Thorne: A Wall Around a Window at Devin Borden Gallery, 6–8 pm. Melissa Thorne's installation looks interesting, but the description is kind of a bummer: "Melissa Thorne explores memory, familiarity, history and transformation..."


A lot of stairs to climb in the old lighthouse

Lighthouse in the Sea of Time: Zineb Sedira at Blaffer Art Museum, 6–9 pm. Pictures of Algerian lighthouses and interviews with Algerian lighthouse keepers. (Lighthouse keeper is my dream job.)

 
Ann Stautberg

Ann Stautberg: New Work at Avis Frank, 6 to 8 pm. Ann Stautberg hand-colors black and white photographs. Looks interesting.

SATURDAY


Neil Patrick Harris by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: The OUT List at Hiram Butler Gallery, 11 am – 1 pm. The slick photographer of Latinos, supermodels, artists, African-Americans, fashionistas, musicians, politicians and above all, celebrities, now has a series of portraits of LGBTQ people (especially LGBTQ celebrities).


Beatrice Coron, Chaos City

Sprawl at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft featuring Dylan J. Beck, Kathryn Clark, Beatrice Coron, Dustin Farnsworth, Julia Gabriel, Nancy Nicholson, Sara Pfau, Keith Renner, Paul Sacaridiz, Carrie Schneider, E. Ryan Simmons, Demitra Thomloudis, Norwood Viviano, Ashley Wahba, Dane Youngren and Andrea Zeuner, 5:30 to 8 pm. An ambitious concept, but wouldn't it have been more appropriate to have this in Stafford or Kingwood? The show will also feature a bunch of speakers over the next few weeks,but I would suggest also getting the great old Houston band Sprawl back together for a performance as well.


Inka-Maaria Jurvanen

Inka-Maaria Jurvanen: Laughter Without Laugher at Redbud Gallery, 6–9 pm. I don't get the title of this show by Finnish artist Inka-Maaria Jurvanen. Her art reminds me a bit of Roger Brown's.

 
Mark Hogensen

Draw up a chair, please featuring new work by Mark Hogensen at Ggallery, 6 to 9 pm. Just as the name of the show implies, these are drawings of chairs and tables. Come by and set a spell.

 
Susan Giles, Horizontal CN Tower

The Mission Inaugural Group Show featuring Susan Giles, Jeroen Nelemans, EJ Hill, Erica Bohm, Adam Gondek and Missy Weimer at The Mission, 6:30–8:30 pm. Since gallerist Joan Wich died, her space at 4411 Montrose has been the site for a variety of pop-ups and short term leases. Now it will be getting a long-term occupant, the Houston branch of Chicago's Mission gallery. Scuttlebutt had The Mission specializing in Latin American art, but this inaugural show mostly features North American artists.



Paisaje Roto / Passage Rot: Jorge Galván Flores at Fresh Arts, 5–10 pm, in association with the Winter Street and Spring Street Studios open house. Jorge Galván Flores's exhibit has something to do with topiary, which means it will be awesome, but even if it's not, there will be a ton of open studios to check out at Winter and Spring Street.

 
David Polizter, Sea Cliffs, Boothbay Harbor, 2012

Emily Peacock: You, Me & Diane and David Politzer: When You’re Out There at Galveston Arts Center, 6–8 pm. If you missed the initial run of Emily Peacock's You, Me and Diane at Lawndale in 2012, here's your chance to see these surprisingly heartwarming recreations of Diane Arbus photos. David Politzer's work has also been shown at Lawndale--his ironic images of national park dioramas and gift shops will take on an extra poignancy now that the Republicans in Congress have caused all the national parks to close.


MONDAY


Hillerbrand and Magsamen and co.

Hillerbrand and Magsamen: A Fluxus Practice in Suburbia at Alabama Song, 7:30–9:30 pm. AKA "Getting your children involved in amusingly absurd artistic antics before they become teenagers and start rolling their eyes with disgust whenever you say, 'Hey, kids--wanna make some art with mom and dad today?'"

WEDNESDAY


Gerardo Mosquera: all art critics should wear hard hats

Gerardo Mosquera: "Infinite Islands: Art, Internationalization, and Cultural Dynamics", lecture at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 4:30–5:30 pm. The Cuban curator and critic speaks. If you happen to be free in the afternoon on Wednesday (unlike me), this should be quite interesting.

Hasta Luego Raul Gonzalez

Dean Liscum

Raul Gonzalez is leaving me. He's leaving you too, but you may not have realized that. His gallerist, Jack Meir Gallery, figured as much and so he hosted The Farewell Show on Friday, August 10, 2012.

Raul's a local artist and an activist. He's the founder of Montrose Art Society, and  he's just been plain active in the arts community. I asked him, "why?" Damn selfishness! Of course this break up is all about him. Something about going to get a Masters in Fine Arts at UTSA. He says that he plans to concentrate on painting and public art, which I interpreted as his way of assuaging his guilt by hinting that he might come back and make it up to us with something big on the bayou.

Whatev. HAA and I will see.

Robert Boyd praised Gonzalez's last show. I don't have much to add other than I really enjoy Gonzalez's range. One of the small pleasures of following the local art scene is that I get to see artists find their aesthetic identity. Of course, there is a lot of mirroring the masters as artists hone their skills and find their vision. Some of it's "bad" in that it's more of a copy than an exploration, but in the end, it's all good.
Raul isn't co-opted by the styles he adopts. I hope academia doesn't excise the explorer in him.

These are a few of his forays that I enjoyed.


Raul Gonzalez, Sunburst (Flower Series), 2010, acrylic and marker on canvas


Raul Gonzalez, Deconstruction Jeans, 2011, acrylic, marker, recycled paper, canvas and jeans


Raul Gonzalez, Organicity, 2011, acrylic, paper various fabrics and ink on canvas


Raul Gonzalez, Music and Art in the City, 2009, acrylic and marker on canvas

Raul Gonzalez, Crape Myrtles, 2012, ball point pen, marker, and house paint on canvas
 

Raul Gonzalez, Butterfly and Color Spectrum, 2012, house paint and stone (2811 Washington)


Raul Gonzalez, Brendon Urie (Panic at the Disco), 2011, acrylic and marker on canvas




Raul Gonzalez, Somebody's Gotta Do This, 2010, acrylic on canvas

Pan Recommends for the week of August 9 through August 15

Here's what's on tap this week that we noticed. But keep in mind, we miss things. If there is something you are looking forward to, feel free to mention it in the comments.

Jane Alexander: Surveys (from the Cape of Good Hope) at the CAMH, opening reception 7 pm, Friday, August 10. I know nothing about this artist, but just looking at the images that pop up when you type "Jane Alexander artist" into Google make me really want to see this show!

Raul Gonzalez's farewell exhibit at Jack Meier Gallery, 6:30 pm on Friday, August 10th. Raul Gonzalez, whose work we've praised in the past, is leaving for San Antonio to go to grad school (because as everybody knows, you can't be areal artist without an MBA). See his art before he goes!

Hear Orna Feinstein talk at Box 13, 2 pm, Saturday, August 11. Her Box 13 installation Multi-librium recycles leftover postcards from galleries and museums into baroque patterns on the floor. Go and ask her what she plans to do now that everyone's switched over to email announcements?

Emily Sloan reprises her hit portrayal of Carrie Nation at Darke Gallery, 2 to 4 pm, Saturday, August 11. You must see this if only for the eyebrows, which Sloan borrowed from Nestor Topchy.

Robert Boyd's 2011 Honorable Mention

All of the shows listed below were excellent, and on a different day, I might have placed any one of them in the top 10.

Lisa Gralnick: The Gold Standard at Center for Contemporary Craft. This was a very interesting show that included sculptures made of plaster and gold--where the percent of gold was determined by how much gold it would take to buy the thing depicted.




Stephanie Toppin's couch in Jim Peterson, Jr.'s garage

Stephanie Toppin's couch. Of all the things associated with the Art Car Parade this year, this is my favorite. After the parade, Toppin's couch was lost for several months until I happened to find it at Jim Peterson, Jr.'s house. Mystery solved!


The Time Travel Research Institute Presents by Patrick Turk at Art League. Instead of his usual dense psychedelic collages, Turk made these pieces have a sense of physical space and even added motion to some. Mindblowing.

Jim Nolan, Today is Tomorrow at Art Palace. Jim Nolan's art is what happens when minimalism goes downscale. Made often from items purchased at 99¢ Only stores, it is the perfect art for our belt-tightening times.


Jim Woodring, Lazy Robinson, charcoal on paper

Jim Woodring and Marc Bell, Walpurgis Afternoon at Lawndale. I'm picking a show I curated, which is a bit unfair. What can I say? I thought it was great--two cartooonists/painters whose work I've admired for decades, and between whom I felt there was a connection. It seemed natural.



Raul Gonzalez, More Work Ahead, ink and spray paint on floor laminate, 2010

Raul Gonzalez at the Caroline Collective. Raul Gonzalez is a real street artist--and by that, he paints Houston's streets and uses as motifs street signs. Indeed, the colors of street signs pervade his work. He has created the vision of Houston that seems most true.


Myke Venable, MV 25 Silver/Scarlet Red/Black, acrylic on canvas, 2011

Myke Venable at Sonia Roesch. The only way these paintings could be more minimal would be to turn them from two or three color paintings to one-color paintings. As a consequence of their minimal content, they lack autonomy--they collaborate, in a sense, with the room they're in. And that's what I like about them.

Southern/Pacific at Lawndale. Really lovely show filled with interesting pieces curated by recent transplant to Houston, Paul Middendorf. This was road-trip art--he picked up art in Portland, Oregon (where he used to live) and Marfa and finally Houston. It was a fine way to introduce Houston art viewers to some interesting out-of-towners.

 
Hagit Barkai, Aisen and Tyson, Oil on canvas, 2010

Hagit Barkai, Resistance at Nau-Haus. Hagit Barkai's paintings linger in my mind. It's not the extreme one, the ones showing highly distressed people--although those are good. It's piece like Aisen and Tyson and Home More or Less that stick with me.


Dennis Harper and Friends, iPageant at the Joanna. This show was a giant performance extravaganza. Dennis Harper constructed some of his patented oversized paper sculptures--this time of a 60s era television soundstage. It was within this construct, aided by multiple closed-circuit televisions, that Harper staged his variety show. I only hope it wasn't a one-time event.

Ward Sanders at Hooks Epstein. San Antonio artist Ward Sanders has had four shows at Hooks-Epstein, but for this one, he added a new element. In addition to his mysterious, lovingly-created boxes, he has a piece of text. It turns out his writing, at least in these short fragments, is excellent. The world of visual art could lose Sanders to the literary world.

Ibsen Espada, Reformulaciones at New Gallery. One of the original Fresh Paint artists, Espada has apparently laid low for a while. This show was a powerful (and hopefully triumphal) return. Muscular abstractions.


Sharon Engelstein's Green Golly got its own room at Pan Y Circos

Pan y Circos at PG Contemporary. Curated by yours truly. We had a huge space for this group show, and it turned out great. I am especially proud to have brought El Dinersito by Jorge Galvan to the attention of Houston's art crowd.

Robert Pruitt, You Are Your Own Twin at Hooks Epstein. Every time I've seen Pruitt's portraits, I've loved them. There seems to be a rising generation of artists and intellectuals who are heavily invested in African American identity and history and simultaneously into science fiction and gaming and other nerdy pursuits. For example, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. And Robert Pruitt.

Kim Dingle at Front Gallery. The Front Gallery is Houston's newest gallery, and its smallest. The inaugural show, full of oil-sketches of hyper-active girls, was a fantastic beginning.

Lisa Qualls, absence at Koelsch. Here is a highly conceptual show (portraits of an ancestor who left behind no visual image) that is simultaneously highly personal. I found it quite moving.

Mary McCleary Selects

by Robert Boyd

Mary McLeary was chosen by The Art League as Texas Artist of the Year. That meant she got a nice retrospective exibition at the Art League, but also that she was obliged to be the jury on the 2nd annual Gambol show. There were 400 artworks submitted by Art League members, and McCleary chose 39 of them. These were displayed in the back gallery. The other works were displayed salon-style in the hallways and studios of the Art League.

So what we end up with is an interesting opportunity--we see not only the works selected, but also the works rejected. As I looked at Gambol, I was first struck by how many of the works had something in common with McCleary's own work. And that makes sense, that an artist would pick work that came from a similar place as their own. For example, McCleary does a lot of landscapes (or people in landscapes). And this show is full of landscapes.



Daniel Brents, DEPOT



Cary Reeder, Left Behind



Fran Fondren, Morning Glow

These more-or-less traditional landscapes by Fran Fondren, Cary Reeder and Daniel Brents are intriguing in part because you rarely see this kind of work at the Art League (or Lawndale or Diverse Works or CAMH). It's too old-fashioned. And that's regrettable. I find these landscapes quite beautiful and moving in a way. There is something about lone buildings, devoid of human presence (although human presence is always implied by any picture of a building). That lack of people is kind of a blankness onto which viewers can project their own stories, their own memories. That blank screen produces a nostalgia of sorts--at least it does for me. When we think of Edward Hopper, we think of his many pictures of people-less buildings and that feeling.



Nicola Mosley, Falmouth Harbor #1

While Reeder, Fondren and Brents come out of a tradition of matter-or-fact landscapes that includes Hopper and Charles Sheeler, Nicola Mosley is a bit more abstract. It reminds me a little of Richard Deibenkorn, although Mosley doesn't push the abstraction as far as Deibenkorn. But one can view this image as a place or as an arrangement of colors and textures; neither is dominant.

But another aspect of McLeary's art is that it is collaged. The collaged elements are little bits of tubular material (I'm not sure what the stuff is) that she attaches to the canvas. In fatc, I'm not sure whether it would be more appropriate to call it a mosaic or a collage. Either way, it creates a visual density. Even though there is a large image, each McCleary piece is also a collection of tiny elements. And in Gambol, there are several works that fit that description.



Patrick Turk, These Serpents Squeeze Tighter

Patrick Turk is famous for his super-dense collages of repeating fragments of images. These are intense, psychedelic images. The tension between the whole image and the elements is something I can imagine appealing to McCleary.



Fernando Ramirez, SURFIN' USA



Fernando Ramirez, SURFIN' USA detail

I liked these dense, detail-packed drawings by Fernando Ramirez. They remind me of punk artists like Gary Panter. The lack of polish is an expressive tool in such art.



Fernando Ramirez, SHIPPING

I checked out Ramirez's website and came across this statement:

Fernando Ramirez is a post-objectivity- painter, declaring his current body of work exceeds the romantic ideals, and self-involvement of traditional art making. He’s chosen to create “matter-of-fact-ness-drawings”, focused on developing an alter-world- that represents a- simulacra to our living world. 

I don't understand quite what he is getting at here. These drawings are, however, anything but matter-or-fact. In his desire to create an "alter-world," he is creating a bizarre and exotic alternative to our world. Matter-of-fact is the landscaps of Carrie Reader and Daniel Brents above. His work of world-creating reminds me more of Brian Chippendale and Mat Brinkman in both style and content. It's quite impressive.

All of the above works, as heterogeneous as they are, feel connected in my mind to McCleary's own in one way or another. I didn't feel that with Magid Salmi's pieces.



Magid Salmi, GMO Quarentine 5 and GMO Quarentine 6



Magid Salmi, GMO Quarantine 5 detail

Salmi's work is also included in a Peel Gallery show that is currently up. Obviously there is a political component--the titles refer to genetically modified organisms, in this case foods. For those who oppose such foods, one word used to describe them is "frankenfood." Food created in a lab. (This is as opposed to genetic modification through selective breeding and cross-pollination, which has been going on for at least 10,000 years, if not longer.) Our visual image of Frankenstein is Boris Karloff, with bolts coming out of his neck. Salmi has used that visual idea here, putting electronic parts on pieces of fruit. This uses the idea of a cyborg organism as a stand-in for the idea of a genetically-modified organism.

But beyond the political meaning, the work looks great. She gives it an ironic high-tech gleam. The colors are perfect, too.



Kelly Alison, The Falling Man

Kelly Alison is a fixture on the Houston art scene, having been part of Fresh Paint, the 1985 survey of Houston's painters at the MFAH.The image refers to 9-11 (the skyscrapers, the jet, the suit on the man) and perhaps particularly to a photo by Richard Drew of one of the many who jumped from the World Trade Towers to escape the fire of the burning buildings. I is loathe to call this work political (although Alison hasn't shied away from politics in her work in the past). Instead, I see it as a history painting--one of those academic genres that was the most highly esteemed in the 17th and 18th century. (Landscape, along with still-life, was one of the least esteemed genres by the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture.) One thing that can be said about the genre of history painting is that there are certain events in history that deserve to be painted. This is, in a way, saying that these events should not be forgotten. (And, of course, doing such a painting allows a painter to put his own spin on the event. A Flemish painter would have had a highly different gloss on The Surrender of Breda than Velázquez did in his famous painting, for example.)



Raul Gonzalez, Self-Portrait

Almost equal in size to Alison's painting is this self-portrait by Raul Gonzalez. It was hung directly facing Alison's painting, creating a kind of twisted mirror image. Gonzalez appears to be standing in his studio, with the elements of his painted work behind him, including a "No Trespassing" sign. His work frequently incorporates signage as part of the composition, including using the colors of street signs as the under-painting.



Emily Sloan, Farmhouse Architectural Object I & II

Emily Sloan's two pieces are the only sculptures in the show. I don't think this shows a predilection on McCreary's part for two-dimensional works necessarily. There simply weren't all that many sculptures submitted. (This tends to be the case as well with the Big Show at Lawndale.) These pieces relate to work Sloan has done in the past, like Black and White Picket Fence and Riffle. You know what? I want to see a whole show of these twisty little fences. I like them--I like the subject and the size (about knee-level) and the curviness of them.

And what about the work McCleary didn't select? As I wandered the halls and studios of the Art League, it was obvious that a lot of the works weren't chosen because they weren't very good or very original. And that's OK--a lot of members are members to take classes and hopefully become better artists. They can't all be accomplished artists yet. But there were pieces that were quite interesting to me but that McCleary ultimately eliminated.



Curtis Gannon, Closure Grid

What Curtis Gannon has done with this collage is to take a group of comic book pages, cut holes in them, and layer them on top of one another. But what's interesting to me is that he deliberately chose pages with very conservative panel layouts. Panels are the boxes in which each picture in a comic is contained. Drawing them as squares or rectangles (paralleling the edge of the page) is considered a fairly undynamic way of arranging them. (Panels can, for example, be angled, overlapping, curvy, free-form, or even non-existent.)

For the purpose of this collage, the panels had to be square or rectangular. In each panel, he has cut a hole in the page that mimics the shape of the panel but is a little smaller. The viewer then sees overlapping rectangles, with the content of each panel mostly erased. That said, you can still see a lot of the text--this is because dialogue and narration is usually placed on the edges of a panel. This is especially true in assembly-line created super-hero comics (which are Gannon's sources), where the letterer places the words on after the artist has drawn the picture in each panel.



David Haberman, In Search of the Big Bang

McCleary may have found David Haberman's antic geometric abstraction, In Search of the Big Bang, a little too whimsical to choose. But I liked this fun piece of art.