The Bart Book of the Dead

Robert Boyd

The catalog says it best: "Sketch Klubb is a group of friends who get together every other Saturday morning to draw." It was 12 guys, but one of them, Michael Harwell, recently died. 1,000 Crappy Barts for Michael Harwell plus Klay Klubb is a tribute to their lost compadre.



When you walk into the big back gallery of Box 13, there is a vitrine with an open sketchbook. This is Harwell's sketchbook, and the page we see has 16 drawings of Bart Simpson's head. There are a minimal number of lines in the Matt Groening-designed head of Bart, and Harwell deliberately takes them apart.

Starting from this page, the surviving members of Sketch Klubb--Seth Alverson, Rene Cruz, Russell Etchen, Sebastian Forray, Lane Hagood, Cody Ledvina, Nick Meriwether, Eric Pearce, Patrick Phipps, J. Michael Stovall and David Wang--drew 1000 versions of Bart Simpson, which are on the three walls surrounding the vitrine.







They aren't very memorable drawings. The goal was quantity over quality. This may reflect the ethos of Sketch Klubb. They've put together a few zines and a book before, but I suspect the idea is to get together and draw without having an endgame in mind. Doesn't matter if it's "good."



Not that there weren't a few drawings that were clever. Like this Creature from the Black Lagoon Bart.



Or this Bart who looks a little like Hank Hill crossed with Walter White.



How about an airbrushed Bart with 13 eyes?



Or a sweaty Bart with a beard and boobs for eyes. (There were a lot of mutant Barts in the show.)



The work was hung in a off-hand, unprofessional way--pages curled up in the humidity. But that seemed right. After all, they weren't creating something for the ages--this was a temporary tribute to Harwell that no doubt recalled their casual Saturday morning get-togethers.

Slightly more finished work was on display in the front gallery of Box 13. These were ceramic objects made by Sketch Klubb. None of the work was labeled, so for the purpose of this review, just assume a collective authorship for these bizarre ceramic knick-knacks.





(Thank God the "MAN MILK" jug was empty.)










Some of them are pretty funny, and they seem like a natural extension of the artistic ethos of Sketch Klubb.

The individual artists in Sketch Klubb do a wide variety of work on their own, but as diverse as their styles are, I'd say that what they have in common is an element of humor. The question I have is that was it their sense of humor that drew them together in 2005, or is their sense of humor as artists partly a result of their time together in Sketch Klubb?

I saw this exhibit on opening night. The crowd was boisterous and good humored. I wonder what it would be like to see when the galleries are quiet and unpopulated.

Art Thievery, Censorship and Airship Links

Robert Boyd




Art thief in action

This amazing video was posted by the "Queenstown Police," a Facebook page where videos and still images of crimes are posted. They write, "This isn't to report crimes! Its to help catch baddies with photos and videos." This woman went into the Lakes District Museum & Gallery (in Arrowtown, New Zealand) and casually stole a piece of art off the wall. Given the sharpness of the video, I suspect she will be caught pretty quickly. (Hat tip to Matthew Couper.)

 
The Diary of a Teenage Girl - Teaser from Marielle Heller on Vimeo.

According to smart people on Facebook, this teaser is from a movie that has not yet been made. Marielle Heller adapted and starred in a stage version of the harrowing Phoebe Gloeckner graphic novel, Diary of a Teenage Girl, and this film clip is apparently something worked up to raise money for a film version.  She has a diary of work-shopping the film at Sundance. The original graphic novel is one of the most intense comics I've ever read--I can't think of any other that has made me feel so uncomfortable. It was interesting to see in this clip that there is an animated element in it--that recalls the excellent film version of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor.

 
from Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner



art by Charles Dellschau

Charles Dellschau (1830-1923) was part of the wave of German immigration to Texas in the 1800s (why we have so many towns with names like New Braunfels and Fredericksburg). He arrived in 1853 and worked as a butcher his entire life, retiring in 1899. After his retirement, he started compiling 12 large notebooks that chronicled the adventures and inventions of the Sonora Aero Club, a secret society of Californian inventors who discovered a kind of powered flight decades before the Wright Brothers. The notebooks are outstanding pieces of outsider art. They were discovered by Mary Jane Victor in a junk shop in 1969. She was an art student at St. Thomas, and when she showed them to Dominique De Menil, Menil bought them. A local artist, Pete Navarro, bought the rest of them and sold them to various museums. You might have seen a few of these in the exhibit Seeing Stars: Visionary Drawing from the Collection at the Menil. Slate just ran a nice article about the Dellschau, and it turns out that there is a big fat Charles Dellschau book coming out in about a month. (Naturally, I pre-ordered it!) ["Steampunk Before Steampunk Existed: Charles Dellschau's Fantastic Airships" by Rebecca Onion, March 18, 2013, Slate]



UNIT Featured Artist: Sebastian Forray from The UNIT Store on Vimeo.

The UNIT Store, Houston's own online shop for inexpensive art (yes, you can afford art) has been making videos lately, including this one (above) of Sketch Klubb member Sebastian Forray.




Is this too graphic for seventh grade eyeballs?

How do you get middle school students to read a book? Ban it. That's what Chicago Public Schools  clumsily did with The Complete Persepolis, the great graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi about growing up in Iran before, during and after the Islamic revolution. Schools in the CPS received instructions to remove the book from their libraries by the end of the day on March 15. That was later superceded by an instruction not to remove the book, but not to teach it because "it contains graphic language and images that are not appropriate for general use in the seventh grade curriculum."What specifically bugged them were images of torture experienced by prisoners of the Shah's regime. But this lead to protests by students and loads of bad publicity (and backtracking) for the Chicago Public Schools. Satrapi expressed indignation, but her publisher must be smiling. ["CPS tells schools to disregard order to pull graphic novel" by Noreen Ahmed-Ullah and Lolly Bowean, The Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2013]

Pan Recommends for the week of March 7 to March 13

Robert Boyd

Here are just a few of the art events this weekend happening in Houston and Galveston.

THURSDAY

 
Bas Poulos, Arcadia Vista 'A' (Large Version), 2012, 48x60 inches, acrylic on canvas

Bas Poulos: The Arcadia Vista Landscapes at Meredith Long Gallery, 5 pm. I saw these in Poulos' studio when he was still working on them, and am looking forward to seeing the completed series. Based on certain Greek landscapes, former Rice University painting professor Poulos simplifies and abstracts them in these intensely colored paintings.

Tetramorph: The Mavis C. Pitman Award Exhibition at the Rice Media Center, 6–8 pm, featuring work by Trey Ferguson, Lisa Bileska, Jessie Anderson, and Alexandria Fernandez. I know nothing about this except that these are Rice student artists, and I was one of those once. I bet they are less clueless than was. (Thursday is the night for Rice artists, it seems.)

FRIDAY



Kodachronology featuring work by Shannon Duncan, Donna Fernandez, and Tere Garcia at the Caroline Collective, 7-10 PM [show runs through April 19th]. Even though Kodachrome film was officially discontinued in 2009, these photographers still had some of the color film that "give[s] us those nice bright colors" and "the greens of summer," according to Paul Simon. They developed the film in black and white chemicals, and this show is the result of that experiment.

SATURDAY



Akin Forray Ledvina: Art Show at Domy Houston with work by Chris Akin, Sebastian Forray and Cody Ledvina at 7 pm. I'm informed that this art exhibit will feature free beer.


Chris Akin, Sebastian Foray and Cody Ledvina (not to scale)



piece by Teruko Nimura

The Bridge Club; Christa Mares, Marianne McGrath, Teruko Nimura; and Jared Wesley Singer at Box 13, 5 pm. The Bridge Club performs (5 to 8 pm) and other artists have work on display in conjunction with the NCECA conference later this month. The Bridge Club's hypnotic performances are always worth checking out.

UH MFA Thesis Exhibition part 2: Seven Years Bad Luck

by Robert Boyd


Cheyanne Ramos for Sebastian Forray, Seven Years Bad Luck, pt. 2 (Kerri Green and the Living Unicorn), 2012, acrylic on canvas

The weirdest part of the UH MFA thesis show was a little sub-show by Sebastian Forray called Seven Years Bad Luck. I didn't understand it, but I loved it. But I was troubled by my lack of analytical ability. I'm an art critic, dammit! I should be able to create an explanation for any art I see, even if I have to make something up whole cloth. So I broke down and asked Sebastian Forray about the show. I'm still not sure if I understand it, but at least some questions have been answered.

First of all, the show consists of five paintings and the contents of a vitrine. The paintings are numbered, and none of them are painted by Forray. They all have titles like Seven Years Bad Luck, pt. 2 (Kerri Green and the Living Unicorn). According to Forray, "Some are straight commissions, others are collaborative, and one was made with almost no input from myself."


Seth Alverson for Sebastian Forray, Seven Years Bad Luck, pt. 4 (The Slaying of the Blair Witch), 2012, oil on canvas

His collaborators/hired guns include some of the best-known young artists in Houston. And generally they are painters (one piece is mixed media) who exhibit a high level of craft in their own work. Seth Alverson and Cheyanne Ramos are virtuosos in their own paintings. I'd say they held back a bit for these paintings. Ramos in particular seems to have deliberately given her painting of Goonies star Kerri Green a "thrift store painting" awkwardness (that hot pink "glow" on the right of the figure, for example), and the same could be said of Seth Alverson's The Slaying of the Blair Witch. The fact that both these highly skilled painters did work that feels somewhat awkward and amateurish makes me think that this was a request on the part of Forray.


Emily Halbardier for Sebastian Forray, Seven Years Bad Luck, pt. 3 (Fresh Loaf '92 in Hooker's Green), 2012, oil on canvas

Emily Halbardier's work, by contrast, has been described as coming across "as under-skilled or shallow in its processes," but as an artistic strategy. "Deskilling" in other words. And we see this in Fresh Loaf '92 in Hooker's Green, but I think we also may be seeing a deliberate attempt to create an artwork as if it were created by another person--in this case, a teenage boy. The fantasy motifs, the raised knife, the cartoonish sexualized female figures (including one with approximately 46 boobs), the scatology, etc., all seem like the creations of another persona. (This strategy reminds me a bit of Jim Shaw's work. Coincidentally, Shaw has also long been interested in thrift store paintings.)


Graustark Gang for Sebastian Forray, Seven Years Bad Luck, pt. 5 (A Painting by the Graustark Gang), 2012, acrylic on canvas

Does A Painting by the Graustark Gang fit in with my "fake thrift store paintings" theory. I would say yes because all paintings of Alf are by definition thrift store paintings. But who are the Graustark Gang? They are Jessica Ninci, John Forse, Sam Ackerman and Michael Harwell. I liked the notes "taped" (painted) to the image.

The last piece (pt. 1, if you're keeping track) is by Cody Ledvina. It's the only non-painting.


Cody Ledvina for Sebastian Forray, Seven Years Bad Luck, pt. 1 (Life with Four Hundred Thirty Two i's), 2012, mixed media on panel


Life with Four Hundred Thirty Two i's really kind of screws up my thrift store painting theory. First of all, it's not a painting, and in my experience, thrift store art tends to be paintings. They may have absolutely bizarre imaginations, but thrift store artists seem to be quite conservative when it comes to materials. In any case, the whole thrift store painting idea wasn't really going anywhere, anyway. Maybe I should defer to Forray instead of trying to think up ideas about this art on my own.

So I asked him, what do parts 1 to 5 represent? He replied, "Each one represents a seven year section of my life (which began in 1977). There are plaques on each painting identifying the years. I am turning 35 this year, so I split my life into five seven year sections, each contributor got one section to make a painting for. Again, depending on who it was and what they wanted, I provided brief or detailed biographical information (or instructions), but also encouraged the other artists to incorporate their own memories/details from the same seven-year period." Damn, that was simple. So Ledvina's piece represents a period in either Forray or Ledvina's life when one of them was a red, three-headed man. Seven Years Bad Luck, pt. 2 (Kerri Green and the Living Unicorn) represents the years 1985 to 1992, and The Goonies came out in 1985. Maybe Forray had a crush on Kerri Green. Halbardier's part 3, with its teenage boy imagery, happens to coincide with Forray from age 15 to 21, so that fits. Part 4 covers the years 1999 to 2006, and The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999. But what Alf has to do with Forray's late 20s and early 30s--well, that one I don't get. But that's OK. The point isn't to puzzle these paintings out.

But I did wonder about the lack of art from the artist himself. Was this some kind of arch conceptual statement about authorship? But the answer is simpler and more straightforward. "Painting grads have to produce two shows during their graduating semester. One in the small projects gallery, and one for the MFA show. I did all my own work for the small project gallery where I defended my thesis. Curating is also part of what I do so I decided to base the MFA show on this aspect of my 'practice.'" As a curator, Forray is being highly interventionist. I mean, the usual conception of a curator involves a degree of deference to the art. Not here--he is the ringmaster, the architect, and the show is about him.


Sebastian Forray, The Vitrine of Ancillary Failures, 2012, vinyl records, books, buttons, brochure and television monitor in a display case

Hence this display case and its various mopey, dyspeptic objects. "The Vitrine of Ancillary Failures is a collection of failures, missteps, underdogs/antagonists that have caused an impact on me in some way," Forray writes.


Sebastian Forray, The Vitrine of Ancillary Failures detail, 2012, vinyl records, books, buttons, brochure and television monitor in a display case

So we have this James Elkins book, Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students, that calls into question the whole project of teaching art in a college setting, next to campaign buttons from the disastrous Modale-Ferraro 1984 presidential run. We have Self-Portrait by Bob Dylan, widely considered one of his all-time worst records. And we have a copy of Studies in Pessimism by by Arthur Schopenhauer.


Sebastian Forray, The Vitrine of Ancillary Failures detail, 2012, vinyl records, books, buttons, brochure and television monitor in a display case

All in all, the vitrine is almost a caricature of student disillusionment. It's over-the-top, and its presence in a MFA thesis show is humorous. There is something inherently optimistic about a show like this. A bunch of students are about to graduate, after all. And this is their best work, the product of two years of studying.And here's Debbie Downer with a vitrine full of bad vibes. What could be be more perfect?

This Weird Place between Pixels

by Dean Liscum

Two realities that inform This Weird Place, which was curated by Sebastian Forray, are the tension between abstraction and figuration and the digital marketplace of images that is Flickr.

In his gallery talk at the Cecil Horton Gallery at Lawndale, Forray chose not to discuss the theme that unites the artists and their works, but the virtual space in which they can be found, Flickr. This virtual meeting space allows artists to mix and mingle ideas without sharing a physical space. This new reality (new in the history of art making) is integral to the show because three of them: Lane Hagood, Alika Herreshoff, and Cody Ledvina are from Houston and three of them: Lee Piechocki, Anthony Record, and Eric Shaw, are not.

Sebastian Forray and Cody Ledvina discuss This Weird Place at Lawndale

The blurb on the exhibition website provides more insight into each of the six artists works.

Anthony Record’s images are wrung from the awkward pixels of primitive computer drawing programs, and re-rendered with fastidious care into paintings and needlepoint rugs, which both counter and exalt their origins. Both Eric Shaw and Cody Ledvina work impulsively, in an elemental and pseudo-psychedelic re-examining of the familiar figure through rhythmic amalgamation and deconstruction. Lee Piechocki and Alika Herreshoff’s work serves as a counterbalance, meditative and responsive to the inherent concerns of painting, color, and line (and hinting at, rather than blatant in relation to figuration and intent). Lane Hagood’s approach is scholarly, and rooted in cavernous literary reference which leads to work that both contradicts and acknowledges the post-modern paradox of inescapability from quotation and never-ending intellectual reiteration.

The works that caught my eye and what I immediately felt was...

De Stijl meets De Koonig in a dark alley.

If I Call You And You Pick Up It Will Kill You
Acrylic on canvas
Anthony Record

I imagine Francis Bacon painting dolphins and snowmen until he had an "aw-fuck-it" moment and went all heavy on the brush work.

Lights Out Still Life with Dolphin Posters
oil, acrylic, enamel on panel
Lee Piechocki

I'm pretty sure I spent way too much time playing this video game in the late 80s and at one point the figure in the middle told me to get a degree in liberal arts...

3 Abstract
Gouache on paper
Eric Shaw

 ...and after playing said video game for 18 hours straight, I decided to rearrange my room to reflect my psyche.

Art for Sebastian's Show at Lawndale in Houston...Let's Get Drinks After the Show
Mixed Media
Cody Ledvina

For reasons that I can't even begin to explain, this one reminds me of a lewd send up of Brancusi's "The Kiss".

In the the Fold
Acrylic on canvas
Alika Herreshoff

However, the truly "weird place" in this exhibition may not be the familiar field between figuration and abstraction through which many artists have traipsed, but rather the virtual space in which they collaborated.

Get Flickr with it.

Last Day to See Dis, Dat, Deez, Doz at the Joanna

by Robert Boyd

I wrote about one piece in the Joanna's current show--the Exurb four projector piece. But there is so much more. Unfortunately, the show come down tonight at 8 pm, according to Joanna co-director Cody Ledvina. So if you haven't seen it, try to see it today! Here's a little of what you will see, if you go--this represents only a small percentage of all the pieces in the show.



piece by Emily Link




I don't know who did this stalactite, but I like it.


 
painting by Jordan Johnson

Jordan Johnson sure likes four-letter words.



detourned comics page by Harry Dearing III

Peter Parker has a conversation with himself, but disappears for part of it.



painting by Mark Flood



painting by Lane Hagood



wall painting by Lane Hagood



painting with hanging cloth by "Isabelle"



Vinyl painting by Sebastian Forray

This Sebastian Forray painting was just outside the front door to The Joanna, demonstrating their keen commercial acumen.



watercolor drawing by Daniel Heimbinder



watercolor drawing by Daniel Heimbinder



computer, Fleshlight and vibrator by Nick Beradino

Mark Flood pointed this one out as a piece he really liked. When I asked "What is it?," he looked at me incredulously and said, "Like you don't know what that is!" Then it clicked. At first, I thought it was a bong because of the way it was put together. But it's actually a futuristic self-fucking machine. I predict ever American will own one by the end of the decade.



Nick Beradino's sculpture in action. The future of sex, right here.



collage by Chris Cascio

When I saw this, I thought the shoes were part of it. They look like they are, don't they? But I saw Cascio a few days later and he said he has no idea how the shoes got there, but they aren't part of his work.



bread and mayonnaise by Nick Merriweather

I think I accidentally stepped on this homage to Carl Andre by Nick Merriweather



carved plywood by Jack Ericksson



painting by ?????

I think this anonymous giant period is a good way to end the post.