Mixing It Up at Goldesberry Gallery

Robert Boyd

Summer is the season for group shows in galleries, usually taken from inventory. In the case of Goldesberry Gallery, their summer group show, Mix, consists of work by current residents at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. Like most such group shows, there isn't any thematic unity--but humor was a thread that wound through much of the work shown.


Nathan Dube, (from left to right) Splatter Pin #03 (Kapow!), Splatter Pin #01 (Splat!), Splatter Pin #012 (Bazinga!), 2011, silver, enamel on copper, plastic tubing and bulbs

For example, these pins by Nathan Dube are not only pieces of jewelry, but are designed the spritz unsuspecting admirers who look too close. Everything about the Splatter Pins suggests arrested development. They are expensive toys for the man who won't grow up--a widespread American malady. The images recall comic books of the most juvenile sort--they are the "sound effects" one might find in a superhero fight scene. But added on top of this fairly harmless (indeed clever) bit of nostalgia is the nasty joke-shop squirter. The bulb is filled with water (or maybe if you're the Joker, hydrofluoric acid) and squirted on anyone unlucky enough to take a close look at the pin. They're funny, but I think Dube is also making a bit of a point about men who won't grow up or get lost in nostalgia for adolescent pleasures.



Rachelle Vasquez installation

Rachel Vasquez displayed a wall of crocheted animal skins, displayed as if they were trophies. But according to her website, all of these are deceased pets of hers--gerbils, a lizard, a goldfish, a dog, and mice (I think). She names each one and gives its date of birth and death.



Rachelle Vasquez, Dottie, yarn

Her pets seem to have a high mortality rate, and there is something morbid about displaying them this way. (After all, she could memorialize them as living pets instead of the skins of dead animals.) But the effect is more funny than creepy. 



Rachelle Vasquez, Slash, yarn

When you first see them, before you learn that they were Vasquez's pets, they look like the trophies of an unusually unambitious hunter. A hunter of very small game.  Indeed, a hunter too tenderhearted to actually skin his prey (perhaps too tenderhearted to even kill it)--so our hunter crochets the skins instead.

Viewers will recall Elaine Bradford's knit animal-head trophies, where she creates colorful "skins" around taxidermy molds. It's a bit surprising that there are two artists working in this vein anywhere, much less two in the same city. But the work of Vasquez is different enough from that of Bradford that I don't think you can say she is copying Bradford. But at the same time, one can't deny the similarities. If one more area artist shows up doing work in this vein, we'll have to conclude that it's a new school.



John Zimmerman, Stratified Tire, 2012, glazed ceramic, 24" x 24" x9"

Vasquez's animals look like they may have had an encounter with John Zimmerman's Stratified Tire. Zimmerman takes two common manufactured objects and sculpts them in ceramic. They have heavily textured, irregular surfaces, very unlike the objects they depict. As Zimmerman says, they are "stratified"--literally the textures refer to to strata of rock in the Earth. The ideas of strata and of geologic time are part of Zimmerman's work--he wants to link the brand new to the ancient. He calls this approach "Big History." Whether you are on board with linking a traffic cone with the Big Bang, the result is visually engaging--it turns these mundane things into expressive handmade objects. They become ironically hero-ized in the process.



John Zimmerman, Stratified Cone, 2012, glazed ceramic, 24" x 19" x19"



Melissa Walter, Untitled (teal and black), 2012, masonite, cement, acrylic paint, charcoal, graphite, beeswax

Not all the pieces in the  exhibit are humorous. Melissa Walter's wall pieces are straightforwardly abstract. They are liminal pieces, existing between painting and sculpture. The two oblong parts are familiar in bizarre ways--I am reminded on one hand of Robert Motherwell's oblong shapes in many of his paintings and on the other of steaks. The fact that the oblongs are biomorphic reliefs makes me also think of Jean Arp. But combining that with the geometric blue and black painting on the surface is something I haven't seen before, at least not like this. Like the zips in a Barnett Newman, these lines are painted with a straight edge or tape, but also  with a rough painted edge. The lines are meant to look like they were created by hand. Walker's pieces are small--when I say they look like steaks, they are pretty close to the size of steaks. Despite the relationship they have with abstract expressionism, they feel exquisite--a word I would not associate with abstract expressionism.

The Big Show 2012: Craft

Robert Boyd

In the first installment of my review of The Big Show, I suggested that for a change, painting wasn't the overwhelmingly dominant medium. So if painting is down for the year, was there a category or type of art that was up? Yes. Craft-based art was unusually well-repesented. Usually when you see craft in an art context, it carries along a conceptual underpinning that makes it acceptable within this context. You don't see much craft qua craft, craft judged primarily on its beauty and the skill of its execution. At least, you don't see it in venues like Lawndale.

Rosalind Speed, Textile, 2012, gas reduction fired porcelain clay

So it is kind of exciting that juror Marco Antonini made a point of including beautiful and intriguing pieces like Textile by Rosalind Speed. The grey and greenish colors are produced by iron in the clay through the gas reduction method. This effect, combined with the rough-hewn shape give Textile an unusually organic appearance. Speed isn't using ceramic techniques to tell us some other story--the ceramic techniques she uses are the whole point here. 

Henri Gadbois, Three Oysters and Orange and Peel, 2012, earthenware, resin and acrylic

When the artists were announced for the show, Henri Gadbois jumped out as one of the most surprising and pleasing inclusions. I'm sure he is the oldest artist in the show--Gadbois was born in 1930. He is someone who was prominent in the Houston art scene in the 1950s. I was primarily aware of him as a painter, but he has also been a ceramicist since his high school days. And it turns out he has a business, Faux Foods, making hyper-realistic ceramic foods. With these two pieces, Gadbois is showing not only his earthenware food, but by using resin and acrylic, he adds an additional layer of realism. They almost seem decadent, items delivered by room-service to a hotel suite occupied by two lovers. They are quite sensuous. And for me, they represent a link to the art history of Houston, something that is fitfully acknowledged locally. (If you want to know more about Houston's art history, see this video lecture by painter Richard Stout, this online book of interviews by Sarah Reynolds, and this timeline by Caroline Huber and The Art Guys.)

Matthew Glover, Now Is When I Wish It Was Autumn, 2012, knitted leaves

Matthew Glover knitted a small leaf storm for his installation Now Is When I Wish It Was Autumn in the stairwell between the first floor and the mezzanine. His previous work that I've seen was also knitted--large high-contrast black and white nudes. I mentioned the two fuzzy classes of craft--craft with some conceptual underpinning and craft qua craft. I don't want these artists to be stuck in these essentializing categories, but Glover definitely leans towards the conceptual side of the ledger. The myth of autumn is red leaves, brisk breezes and knit sweaters. Autumn in New England is the platonic ideal of the season. (And as a former resident of rural Massachusetts, autumn is what I miss most.) This ideal is a joke in Houston, where autumn is best characterized as a brief lessening of the volcanic heat of summer. In college, I had a leafy tree outside my dorm room. One November morning, I woke up to find that every single leaf had fallen off it overnight. My roommate turned to me and said, "Autumn's here." It wasn't exactly "Autumn Leaves." So Glover, using one signifier of autumn (warm wool clothes) simulates another signifier of autumn (beautiful red leaves). The result is beautiful, but for the full New England effect, he'd need a lot more leaves--and different varieties, too.

Matthew Glover, Now Is When I Wish It Was Autumn, 2012, knitted leaves

Wyatt John Little, Urban Flower Pot, 2012, low-fire cast ceramics, soil and plants

I think everyone who saw Wyatt John Little's Urban Flower Pot was delighted by it. No doubt not a few coveted it for their own hanging plants. This icon of urbanity--shoes tied together like a bolo, hanging from a power line--goes from eyesore to object of beauty here. The ceramic shoes are beautifully made, and each is perfectly balanced so that the plant is facing up. Wyatt John Little had another piece in the show (a collaboration with Julie Lundgren)--a sculptural object made from cast soap. So both his pieces are in media associated with craft, and both are witty and beautiful.

Mari Omori, Time Machine, 2012, soap and platter

Mari Omori's Time Machine is a collection of little geometric soap carvings in the center of shallow ceramic platter. The soap carvings have soft edges, the colors are off-white on white, and the entire piece is quite small. It's cute and clean. Omori has done other soap carvings which she calls soapworks. These parallel other series of works--teaworks and saltworks. These are substances that are simultaneously mundane and elemental. With Time Machine, the shapes recall weathered architecture from the deep past. One object appears to be an obelisk, which could be any number of Egyptian obelisks. Another resamples a specific object--the bent pyramid of Snefru. Assuming all the carvings represent ancient stone structures, the meaning of the title, Time Machine, becomes more clear.

Celia Butler, Sugar Gazing, 2011, C-print

Celia Butler is a former resident at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and she uses sugar pulling, a technique that allows one to create sculptural forms from sugar, to create bows such as the one in Sugar Gazing. This photo, like many more on her website, depict a young woman (I think only one woman, sometimes wearing a wig), wearing a bow made of sugar, either on her neck or in her hair. The photos have the feel of fashion photos--the lighting is professional, the model has a blank, compliant expression and is heavily made up, staring directly at the viewer. Except for the bizarre sugar bows, one wouldn't be surprised to see these photos in an ad or clothes catalog. But the sugar bows are a completely bizarre element, reminding the viewer that she is looking at something deeply strange. The title tells us that this image is for gazing at (and we feel like we are being gazed at). There is an association between sweet and sexually desirable (one might call a lover "sweetie" or "sugar"). And fashion is like candy--something one might crave and never really have enough of. For these and other reasons, there is something about this photo that puts the viewer off-balance. It's funny and slightly creepy. It has an insinuating beauty that sticks with you.

If you took all the craft-based pieces out of The Big Show and made a separate show consisting of them solely, it would be a completely fascinating show. I wonder if Marco Antonini was thinking this as he chose these pieces. He knew he wasn't going to be able to create a unified exhibit--The Big Show is too diverse to permit that. But within the exhibit, perhaps, are several other excellent exhibits that can be put together--curated--in the viewer's mind.