Showing posts with label William Betts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William Betts. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Robert Boyd's Favorites of 2012

Robert Boyd

Here are some of my favorite exhibits and performances from 2012. I won't say "best." "Best" implies an Olympian certainty about my own tastes that I don't have. In fact, I'm continually changing my mind. It also implies that I saw everything, which I most certainly did not. "Favorite" is better.

Of course, as you read this you may find you disagree with my choices. Indeed, I hope so! It would be a dreary world if everyone agreed with me. That's why I have a poll up that you can take: tell me what you think was the best art show and the best performance, this year.

The exhibits/performances below are listed in alphabetical order by artist or by title in the case of group shows.

Debra Barrera, Drive Me There And Back, 2012, 1986 Pontiac Firebird

Drive Me There and Back Again at the Blaffer Window into Houston and Kissing in Cars, Driving Alone at Moody Gallery, both by Debra Barrera. For her installation in the windows of 111 Milam St., Barrera created the best artwork featuring a Firebird/Camaro since the Dead Milkmen sang "Bitchin' Camaro." That was followed with a great show of photos, drawings and sculpture at Moody Gallery. The promise she showed in her Lawndale show was perfectly fulfilled with these two automotive exhibits.


William Betts, Untitled III, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 18" x 24"

Recognition by William Betts at McClain Gallery. This small exhibit blew my mind. Betts used surveillance photos from CTV cameras as the basis for his images--in short, automatic, random images made without regard for art. Then using software turns them into a spots of color that can be applied by machine dot by dot onto a canvas. Get close to the canvas and the images dissolve into dots. And despite the unartly origins and robotic execution of these pieces, there is something perversely moving about them. They really stuck around in my mind.


The Bridge Club, Medium, August 4, 2012, performance

Medium by The Bridge Club at Art Palace. People wandered in and out, chatting, clomping loudly across the floor, drinking beers in normal time. Meanwhile, The Bridge Club barely moved, sitting on chairs mounted on the wall, existing in slow time. This was a meditative, unearthly performance, and I loved it. I look forward to seeing their new project, The Trailer.

 
Christopher Cascio, Mushroom Mound, 2012, acrylic paint, colored pencil and toner transfers on paper

 Spring Break at Cardoza Fine Art and an exhibit at Front Gallery by Christopher Cascio. These two shows overlapped so I am going to lump them together. They gave viewers the breadth of Cascio's work--large-scale pieces and installations at Cardoza with smaller collages at Front Gallery. In both shows, Cascio deals with obsessions, benign and otherwise.

 
Hillerbrand+Magsamen, eState Sale, 2012, video installation with random suburban detritus

eState Sale by Hillerbrand+Magsamen at the Art League. Stephen Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen are a team of video and photographic artists whose work often deals with the absurdity of modern suburban life. Perhaps because I am a lifelong resident of the suburbs (with a few years living in the country, the city, and out of a suitcase), I really relate to their work. Much of it deals with the absurd accumulation of stuff that we suburbanites manage. A video of their daughter buried in a closet-full of stuffed animals, for example. This installation was notable for its combination of four large vertical videos and piles and piles of garage-sale-ready suburban detritus.


Perry House, The Vase (Intrusion Blue), 1989, acrylic on canvas, 48" x 48"

Elegant Violence by Perry House at the Art Car Museum. I had seen a couple of Perry House's shows at Nauhaus/d.m. allison, and I liked them, but his show at the Art Car Museum which covered 30 years of his work was unexpectedly full of surprises. What I really like is his rich, muscular painting and breathtaking, somewhat spooky coloring. The work, as the title suggests, has an air of menace.

 
Miao Jiaxin, Mom's Suitcase (still), 2012, video

Chinaman's Suitcase by Miao Jiaxin at Box 13. This collection of videos, stills from live performances, and images were hilarious and naughty and said something about the transnational world we inhabit, connected by jets and live chat with one another. The highlight was a somnolent live performance by Miao Jiaxin called I Have a Dream, in which he slept while engaging in Chatroulette. Never has Box 13 seen so much wanking.

 
Nic Nicosia, Four Rectangles, NuVoile scrim material, cotton rope, site specific installation, 2012

Space Light Time by Nic Nicosia at Hiram Butler Gallery. The first Nic Nicosia photos I saw were part of a group show at FotoFest, and they were photos of rooms. He continued that approach in Space Light Time, except he photographed small boxes that looked like rooms, and made room-like installations, including Four Rectangles. I like the way he constructs an environment in order to take a photograph. But the way he makes these photos would be beside the point if they weren't so strange and beautiful.


 
Aaron Parazette, Flyaway, 2012, acrylic wall painting, 7' x 56'

Flyaway by Aaron Parazette at the Art League. Two walls of the large gallery at the Art League became two receding focal points made of intersecting lines and planes of green, blue and black. They sucked you in in the room, and curiously recalled the most famous Art League installation, Inversion by Dan Havel and Dean Ruck. The selection of small paintings that accompanied Flyway were quite choice as well. The feeling of motion and unbalance make these geometric pieces work for me.


 
Emily Peacock, Teenage Couple on Hudson St., NYC, silver gelatin print, 10" x 10", 2011-12

You, Me & Diane by Emily Peacock at Lawndale Art Center. When I heard about this, I was worried that this was going to be another empty gesture of one artist appropriating another artist's work. But instead, Emily Peacock's restaging of photos by Diane Arbus with her family came off as humorous and full of heart. Instead of a cold intellectual exercise, these photos were beautiful, playful and highly personal--the best kind of homage.


George Romney, Emma Hart as "The Spinstress", ca. 1784-85. oil on canvas, 68 5/8" x 50 5/8"

Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London at the MFAH. You go to a show expecting one thing (a collection of masterpieces) and sometimes you get something altogether different (a window into 18th century English art). Seeing the Reynolds and Gainsboroughs was fantastic, but for me the real discovery was George Romney, particularly his paintings of Emma Hart (later Lady Hamilton), the sexiest, wildest celebrity of the late 18th century. See England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton for more.


 
Patrick Renner, chamber #4 (bounded operator), dirt, sand, rock, gravel, window panes, plywood, found objects, cloth, 2012

 chamber #4 (bounded operator) by Patrick Renner at El Rincón Social. Patrick Renner had two wonderful shows at Avis Frank this year, but his most exciting piece was a complicated sculptural installation at El Rincón Social. The subject was time--geological time and personal time as represented by memory. It seemed to be an especially Houston piece, reflecting a city full of geologists and geophysicists. He also produces small sculptural works that are similar to core samples. chamber #4 (bounded operator) seems related to that.


Carrie Schneider, Dress (stills from the video, part of the Care House installation), 2012, multimedia installation

Care House by Carrie Schneider. This complex work about Carrie Schneider's mother used her old house in Katy as the setting. Individual pieces occupied most of the first floor rooms. Visitors could wander the room seeing videos, objects, and installations about Schneider and her mother and her mother's struggle with cancer. The superimposed videos were cleverly done and quite moving. It was the most personal piece of art I saw all year, but it was one I could relate to. I lost my dad to cancer in 2001.

 
Larry Burrows, One Ride with Yankee Papa 13, 1965, Photo Essay

WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath at the MFAF. This sprawling exhibit was arranged sensitively around 26 distinct sections, including "Training," "Prisoners of War," "Refugee," "Civilians," "War's End," etc. Some of the images in this show are almost unbearable to look at, but they must be seen. Some are quite familiar, but most were new to me. The exhibit is a remarkable achievement. It's up through February 3, so if you haven't seen it, you still have time. The photo above is from a photo essay that appeared in Life--you can see the whole thing here.

 
Geoff Winningham, Jerdy's Barber Shop, Port Arthur, Texas 2004, Fuji Archive print (2007) from a 4x5 film negative, image size 15.25" x 19.75", uneditioned

Words and Pictures: Photographs 1971 - 2012 by Geoff Winningham at Koelsch Gallery. It's hard for me not to be sentimental about Geoff Winningham--he was my photography professor in school. But this show was a revelation to me. In the choices made, it showed a clever kind of post-modern sensibility, especially in his photographs of other people's collections of images, which I called "naive curation" in my review of the show.

 Honorable Mention. there were lots of shows in the Houston area this year that I liked. Here are are some of them:



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Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Art I Liked at the Houston Fine Arts Fair


Robert Boyd

I was pretty down on a lot of the art I saw at HFAF this year. But I did see art I liked. The thing is that good art takes time. It requires contemplation. And an art fair is an environment antithetical to that. The bad art tends to be unsubtle. It screams at you from the walls. It's like a spotlight shining on your face. It makes it hard to see anything else.

But I made the effort. I spent five hours going from booth from booth, trying my best to screen out the glare from the loud, bad art to see what I could see that was good.  And the good is the subject of this post.

One note--I liked a lot of local art. Does this mean that I think local art is better than art from other places (on average)? That I am a chauvinist for art produced in Houston and vicinity? In my defense, I think the reason that I favored the local is because when I see a painting be, say, Geoff Hippenstiel, I am not seeing that painting in isolation. I am seeing the latest stage of a painter whose work I have been observing for a while now. I don't have that privilege for most out-of-town artists. If I am perplexed by what they are doing, I don't have any idea what their concerns as an artist are or how they reached this point. If I was living in Chicago or Seattle, I'd have similar experiences with their local artists. Familiarity breeds understanding and that ironically leads to what is effectively a local bias.

You'll also see that I like a lot of old things--Latin American Constructivists pieces (well represented at HFAF), abstract expressionist work, and surrealist objets. And there is a lot of photography on my list. I've tried to group similar works together, as if I were curating an exhibit. Hopefully that will help reduce the noise of such divergent work. As I said in my post on the art I hate, your mileage may vary.



Melitón Rodríguez, Carolina Carballo, Medellín Colombia, 1899, silver gelatin print at FotoFest

This cheesy studio portrait by Melitón Rodríguez from over a hundred years ago is made unexpectedly surreal because of the the rifles held by the young women.



Pía Elizondo at Patricia Conde Galería



Federico Gama at Patricia Conde Galería



Cannon Bernáldez at Patricia Conde Galería

One can't look at this piece by Cannon Bernáldez and not think of the Wicked Witch of the East in The Wizard of Oz.



Alejandro Cartagena, Carpoolers #20, photograph, 20” x 17.25”, Paul Kopeikin Gallery



Alejandro Cartagena, Carpoolers #21, photograph, 20” x 17.25”, Paul Kopeikin Gallery

I imagined Alejandro Cartagena sitting on an overpass, camera ready, for many days to get this series of photographs.  I found the series quite powerful and timely.



Aaron Parazette, Color Key #6, 2009, acrylic on linen at McClain Gallery

For me, it's the two tangent ellipses and the small green stripes separating the pink and orange stripes that make this piece by Aaron Parazette work. And the concentric circles radiating out from the tangent point. 



Dion Johnson, Helium, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 72" x 144" at Western Project

Dion Johnson's shaped canvas and overlapping colors initially struck me as a bit chaotic, but spending some time with it leads me to believe that the geometries here are no less deliberate than those in Aaron Parazette's painting.



Joseph Cohen, Proposition 357, pigment, diamond dust and varnish on birch, 29 1/2" x 23 1/2" at Avis Frank

The diamond dust in Joseph Cohen's works at Avis Frank gave these monochromatic and bichromatic paintings a rather unearthly luxe flavor.



Cathy Choi at Margaret Thatcher Projects

I was struck by the similarity between Cathy Choi's work and Joseph Cohen's.



Heidi Spector at Margaret Thatcher Projects

Lots of the work at Margaret Thatcher Projects featured artists working in brightly colored resin or plastics, as with this piece by Heidi Spector. The booth had a playful feel.


Omar Chacon at Margaret Thatcher Projects

I think people were quite taken with Omar Chacon's paintings last year, so Margaret Thatcher Projects brought back more Chacon pieces for an encore.



Luis Cruz Azaceta, Urban Jungle, 2011, serigraph, 36" x 41"

Of course, for intense color, silk screen is a venerable, low-tech medium, as Luis Cruz Azaceta demonstrates.



Al Souza, Blinky, puzzle parts and glue on wood, 2002 at Pavel Zoubok Gallery

Al Souza had this brightly colored puzzle piece in the fair. I always wonder with his puzzle pieces how quickly the colors fade, given that puzzles are printed with cheap inks on offset litho presses.



Joaquin Torres Garcia, Constructif dedique a Manolita, 1931, oil on cardboard at Sammer Gallery

It was astonishing to see this early constructivist work by Joaquin Torres Garcia at the fair. But Latin American constructivism seemed to be a theme this year.



Lolo Soldevilla, untitled, 1959, collage on cardboard at Arevalo Gallery

Like this angular collage by Lolo Soldevilla.



Manuel Alvarez, Pintura, oil on canvas, 45 cm x 70 cm at Sammer Gallery



Juan Mele, R783, 1999, oil, wood blocks at Arevelo Gallery

I especially liked this wood contruction by Juan Mele.



Theodoros Stamos, Morning Wind, 1957, oil on canvas, 70 3/4" x 57" at Hollis Taggart Galleries

And North America's abstractionists were not left out, as with this handsome Theodoros Stamos.



Norman Bluhm, untitled, oil on paper mounted on masonite, 41" x 28 3/4" at Hollis Taggart Galleries

But my favorite abstract expressionist painting in the show was this untitled piece by Norman Bluhm.



Robert Motherwell, Hollow Men Suite, lift-ground etching and aquatint, chine colle (one of seven prints), 11 1/4" x 12" each at Jerald Melberg Gallery



Robert Motherwell, Hollow Men Suite, lift-ground etching and aquatint, chine colle (one of seven prints), 11 1/4" x 12" each at Jerald Melberg Gallery

And there was a beautiful suite of tiny etchings by Robert Motherwell.



Francisco Larios, Doppelganger Delirium, 2012, mixed on canvas, 78" x 70" at Drexel Galeria

Francisco Larios creates a more modern abstraction with Doppelganager Delirium where recognizable graphic elements are mixed with a painterly textured surface. It makes me think a little of Lari Pittman.



Geoff Hippenstiel at Devin Borden Gallery

What jumped out at me in this painting by Geoff Hippenstiel was the black bar--it felt like a new element, something I hadn't seen in his work before.



Antonio Murado, Black Bear, 2011, oil on linen, 83" x 63" at Holly Johnson



Antonio Murado, untitled (1003), 2010, oil on linen, 31" x 37" at Von Lintel Gallery



Antonio Murado, Untitled (956), 2010, oil on paper, 11" x 15" at Von Lintel Gallery

Antonio Murado had work in two different galleries at the fair, and I was struck by all of it. Unlike Hippenstiel's thick impasto, Murado works with very thinned-down paint, creating transparent layers which he employs to various ends. The effect is subtle and sneaks up on you--therefore making it difficult work to see at an art fair.



Alexander Calder, untitled (Spoon), c. 1940-43, sterling silver at Schroeder Romero & Shredder

In addition to this delightful Alexander Calder spoon, Schroeder Romero & Shredder had a selection of gorgeous Man Ray photographs.



Annette Sauermann, No. 4 Kopie, 2012, sandpaper, white cement & light filter on board, 40 1/2" x 39 3/4" at C. Grimaldis Gallery

Pieces like No. 4 Kopie by Annette Sauermann, with its subtle shades of grey, seemed destined to be overlooked in the visual cacophony of the art fair.



Retna at New Image Art

Likewise the inkwash calligraphy of Retna.



Carol Young, Untitled, 2012, ceramic installation, 78.7" x 30.7" x 11.8" at Beatriz Esguerra Art



Carol Young, Untitled (detail) , 2012, ceramic installation, 78.7" x 30.7" x 11.8" at Beatriz Esguerra Art

I was quite taken by Carol Young's ceramic installation, which suggested themes of memory and age. It felt deliciously out of place in this venue with so much concentration on "the new." I was reminded a little of Ilya Kabokov's installation School No. 6 at Marfa.



Johannes Girardoni, Exposed Icon 62, 2012, C-print with commercial paint mounted on aluminum, 60" x 40" at Tomlinson Kong

Johannes Girardoni also approaches memory in his work-or specifically forgetting.

 
Sarah Frantz at David Shelton Gallery

Sarah Frantz likewise deals with forgetting or eliminating. Young, Girardoni and Franz all showed work that felt mature and wise, in contrast to some of the more typical art fair work which is brash (which is not a fault) and/or imbecilic.



Sarah Frantz at David Shelton



Erick Swenson, Sketch for Dressage, 2011, urethane resin and paint on MDF, 15 1/4" x 4 1/2" x 10 1/2" at Talley Dunn Gallery

The octopus lost, I guess.

 
John Adelmann at Darke Gallery

John Adelman had a great selection of paintings at Darke Gallery. These works are the result of an obsessive process, and it is the process that interests Adelman, but the results are quite beautiful.

 
Leandro Erlich, Neighbors, 1996 at Core Factor (MFAH)



Leandro Erlich, Neighbors (detail), 1996 at Core Factor (MFAH)

Not surprisingly, some of the best work at HFAH was at the CORE Program exhibit. Neighbors by Leandro Erlich had a feeling of loneliness and paranoia. I was reminded of Edward and Nancy Kieholz's Pedicord Apartments or even certain Edward Hopper paintings.



Maritta Tapanainen, Eye of the Beholder, 2010, paper collage, 15" x 17 1/4" at Pavel Zoubok



Mark Greenwalt, Large Synthetic Head, 2012, acrylic on panel, 59" x 43 1/2" at Hooks-Epstein Galleries

Mark Greenwalt has a great show up right now at Hooks-Epstein Gallery.



Richard Colman at New Image Art

There is something slightly disturbing about Richard Colman's painting at New Image Art. Trying to understand what is being depicted (beheadings?) within this setting that seems simultaneously ancient and science-fictional. The work grabbed my attention and held it.



Robert Pruitt, Up Up in the Upper Room, 2012, conte and charcoal on hand-dyed paper, 73" x 61" at Hooks-Epstein Galleries

This is the first time I've seen Robert Pruitt depict a group scene (as opposed to an individual portrait). The two viewers (connoisseurs? casual art fans?) look at the sculpture (or ritual object) being shown by the third woman. In a way, it could be a depiction of an episode at an art fair!


  Robyn O'Neill, Symbiosis, 2008, graphote on paper, 36" x 44" at Talley Dunn Gallery



Rodolfo de Florencia, Madame Chocolat, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 56" x 43" at Drexel Galeria

Rodolfo de Florencia caught my eye with this genuinely bizarre image of auto-cannibalism. The richness of the painting combined with its utter eccentricity were what appealed to me so much about it.



Trenton Doyle Hancock, Friends Indeed, 2000 at Core Factor (MFAH)

There were several Trenton Doyle Hancock pieces at the fair, but this one, with its skein of roots and words, appealed to me the most.



Wayne White at Westen Projects

Wayne White is always welcome.



William Betts,View from the Standard, NY, 2010, acrylic paint on reverse drilled mirror acrylic, 60" x 40" at Holly Johnson Gallery

As is William Betts. This was one of his pieces where a photographic image is placed into a mirror by drilling out tiny holes and filling them with acrylic paint (presumably some computer-controlled machine actually does this--I don't see how human hands could accomplish it). Because it's an image on a mirror's surface, it is quite difficult to photograph--an effect that Betts may have deliberately sought.




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