More from the Big Show

Betsy Huete, Dean Liscum and Robert Boyd

I couldn't settle on just five pieces to write about from the Big Show, so I arbitrarily decided that I'd create an "honorable mention" post and forced my co-writers to contribute. Betsy, Dean and I chose five, and then chose a bunch more that we liked. And here they are.


Carrie Green Markello, King , 2013, Acrylic on board, 24 x 18 inches

Why does this boy, held captive in "glamour shot" pose, look so mischievous? What is he up to, and why is he enveloped in a black void? No one knows except Markello, but there is something memorably radioactive about the entire painting.--BH


Chadwick + Spector, Judith with the Head of Holofernes (after Lucas Cranach), 2011, cibachrome print, 45 x 29.5 inches

Getting freaky with it. Hieronymus Bosch-inspired but instead of using fruit, these artists use humans. Look closely.--DL


David McClain, Verlaine & Rimbaud, 2013, Acrylic and pencil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches

I'm not sure which is Verlaine and which is Rimbaud but their love child lives in Austin. Kidding aside, the comics interfere with the brilliant execution.--DL

All those museumgoers that scoff at a Pollock or a Kline, mumbling, “My three year old could do that,” are completely unaware of just how talented three-year-olds can be. In Verlaine & Rimbaud, David McClain convincingly melds an innocent primitivism and severe aggression in a way that exemplifies the poets’ passionate and tumultuous relationship.--BH



Camille Warmington, Unsee, 2013, pencil and polycolor pencil on board, 12 x 12 inches

Camille Warmington's Unsee seems the more conventional of her two paintings (ironically, since Unsee is abstract and her other painting, Setting Yourself Adrift, is a painting of a house). But I love her acidic colors, her handling of paint, and the modest size. It reminds me a little of Howard Hodgkin, but without the comfy feeling of domesticity one finds in Hodgkin.--RB


Jorge Imperio, Elegant #2, 2013, C-print, 13.5 x 13.5 inches

I’m assuming Imperio’s title was tongue-in-cheek, but there is something elegant about this image after all. Situated under an empty, large gaudy frame, it’s the most lavish sick bed I’ve ever seen. Everything in the shot feels completely out of place yet legitimately believable--BH


Galina Kurlat, Deborah, 2012, archival pigment print, 18 x 24 inches

Galina Kurlat recently had a powerful show at the Emergency Room, so I was pleased to see her work here. Deborah is from her portrait series Safe Distance. These photos involve some manipulation of the negative process and deliberate degradation, which can clearly be see here. Knowing nothing about the actual "Deborah," this image, combining the subject's calm demeanor and the intentionally damaged print, suggest some past trauma. The meaning is not in the image, but in the process.


Galina Kurlat, Sanctuary (untitled) 1, 2011, C-print, 16 x 20 inches

Galina didn't create this surrealistic monument, but she had the good sense to photograph it.--DL

Sanctuary comes from a series of the same name showing isolated trees in seemingly harsh and unforgiving landscapes. It's hard to imaging a more unforgiving environment than a beached barge, and yet this one has a tree growing out of it. The image is a large-scale black and white Polaroid, made with a kind of film that is no longer manufactured. One of the appealing aspects of Kurlat's photography is this sense of antiquity. Her photographs look like they were made long ago and survived many vicissitudes before being discovered by viewers in the present. Of course, this is a carefully wrought illusion, but a beautiful one.--RB

Happy Valentine, Code Blue, 2013, Diagnostic images and original music, 1 minute 9 second video

I have no idea what's actually occurring in this video. It's a brain scan of some sort...an electromagnetic lobotomy? Your brain on drugs? Your brain under the influence of a political ad, a Reality TV show, an orgasm? The ambiguity makes it more haunting, more beautiful, and only a little scary.--DL


Kay Sarver, Pollinate Me, 2013, oil on wood, 48 x 32 x 3 inches

Kay Sarver created a painting that is half Alphonse Mucha and half organic honey product label. The nude woman has a circle of bees flying around her head and is pregnant with a beehive full of honey.  She kneels in a field of sunflowers, surrounded by a turtle, squirrel and rabbit. Green and pink predominate. And the title, Pollinate Me, adds a jocose element of sexuality. The image is so over-the-top that my love for it crosses to the other side of my defensive mountain of cynicism and irony. I don't "love" this crazy painting--I just plain love it.



Luna Bella Gajdos, Carnivore, 2013, Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches

There’s something anxious about this painting, as if the irreverent gestures stand on a precipice of falling into complete chaos, held together by a few contour lines. While I normally think signatures on work should be relegated to Etsy and old women painting kittens and lamps, it really works here; it’s situated like a thought bubble coming out of the dinosaur’s mouth, as if it is speaking directly to the artist. Or maybe it’s a self-portrait and Gajdos is introducing herself.--BH

When I saw Luna Gajdos's Carnivore, I really dug the deliberately crude, childlike drawing. When I read that Gajdos is only seven years old, I dug it even more.--RB


Jennifer Ellison, Antique Figurine & the Machine That Made It, 2013, mixed media assemblage, 115 x 23 x 18 inches

Antique Figurine & the Machine That Made It by Jennifer Ellison has the folklore-science-fiction feel that makes it a little crafty, a little quirky, a little cute. I'm willing to bet she's Joseph Cornell and Dominique De Menil's long lost love child.--DL

Kia Neill, Fossilization, Erosion, and Evolution No. 2, 2013, graphite, acrylic, ink and gouache on Yupo, 29 x 40 inches

The amoeba from which I descended (and pretty much controls my brain) just lights up when it sees Neill's work.--DL


Ellen Phillips, Tidal Ice, 2013, acrylic and graphite on paper, 24 x 18 inches

In a show like the Big Show, it's hard to even notice quiet works like Ellen Phillips' Tidal Ice. Phillips is another artist about whom I know nothing (and Google is not helping me out). Which is to say that I know just as much about her as juror Duncan MacKenzie did. What's left are a few pencil scrawls and white brush strokes on a yellowish piece of paper. So what did I like about it? I guess the cool grey against the warm paper appealed to me and the quality of "not drawing" in the pencil marks. It's a work I can just look at and feel pleasure in looking.--RB


John Slaby, The Commander, 2012, oil on paper, 7 x 14 inches

John Slaby's The Commander is the artistic representation of my management and parenting philosophy. It's also really well-balanced, with a lovely color palette...for a psychopath.--DL


Leo Medrano, Strange Friends (left), 2013, architectural scale model pieces, ballast, acrylic, glass, 5 x 3 x 3 inches, and End of the Road (right), 2013, architectural scale model pieces, ballast, acrylic, glass, 11 x 3 x 3 inches


Leo Medrano, Strange Friends, 2013, architectural scale model pieces, ballast, acrylic, glass, 5 x 3 x 3 inches


Leo Medrano, Strange Friends, 2013, architectural scale model pieces, ballast, acrylic, glass, 5 x 3 x 3 inches

Medrano brings kitsch and fear together in a way that my grandmother would snicker at and then use as an object lesson. "Listen here. If a large hairy beast tries to befriend you in the woods..."--DL


Leo Medrano, End of the Road (detail), 2013, architectural scale model pieces, ballast, acrylic, glass, 11 x 3 x 3 inches


Leo Medrano, End of the Road (detail), 2013, architectural scale model pieces, ballast, acrylic, glass, 11 x 3 x 3 inches

I know Leo Medrano as a magazine publisher (Role A|F|M) first and an artist second. What I had seen of his art was painted under the name "Leosapien" and seemed like a mixture of street art and pop surrealism/low brow art. I can't say it ever made much of an impression on me. End of the Road and Strange Friends, however, really impressed me. They seem utterly different from his earlier artistic output.

End of the Road is a tiny sculptural tableau depicting a Hollywood movie-style standoff. A man standing beside a VW Bug is holding a gun to a woman's head and is being confronted by another man holding a rifle. The sculpture is tiny--the figures are less than an inch high. The whole thing is encased in glass. It reminds me of the ship in a bottle sculptures people make. The description says that it is made of architectural scale model pieces, but Medrano must have altered them. I assume you can't get a 1/32 scale model of a guy with a gun to a woman's head off the shelf.

By placing it under glass, Medrano is suggesting a frozen moment in time to be studied, something to be preserved, something fragile. Obviously the image of a ship in a bottle comes to mind, as does the shrunken Kryptonian city of Kandor (and Mike Kelley's many Kandor sculptures). There is something mad-scientist-like about examining these scenes in a glass container, a giant test-tube. The dispassionate presentation of the scene, as if they are specimens under glass, is disquieting.--RB


Susannah Mira, Minature Black Cloud, 2012neoprene foam and wire, dimensions variable

Susannah Mira's "cloud" is simple, repetitive, unobtrusive, but lasting. It hung in my mind through out the duration of my visit and long after.--DL


John Adelman, 32,173 Stitch, 2012, gel, ink on paper mounted on panel, 35 x 48 inches

John Adelman's obsessive-compulsive aesthetic style always connects with that OCD portion of my personality. His work will probably never really change and my enjoyment of it also will probably never wane.--DL

John Adelman's work is the result of an obsessive process. 32,173 Stitch looks like a blue and black shape from a distance, forming a ragged angle at the top and dissolving along the bottom. But when you get close, you see a series of irregular black marks of various sizes with the word "stitch" in blue next to each one. Based on what I know of his previous work, I'm going to guess that those black marks represent some actual thing--perhaps little bits of thread?--that he has carefully drawn. Whatever this thing is, he has drawn 32,173 of them and written the word stitch that many times. And I assume that the process was figured out before he put a single mark on the paper. I've written about Adelman in the past, and what I said then applies to this piece as well. His work is fascinating, rigorous and yet strangely beautiful--RB


John Adelman, 32,173 Stitch (detail), 2012, gel, ink on paper mounted on panel, 35 x 48 inches


Felipe Contreras, Nice Cliff, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 inches

Felipe Contreras also goes by the name Furm. You can see some more of his work under the name Furm at Peveto in its Funkmotor exhibit. Nice Cliff and the pieces in Funkmotor all share a common feature--the white and orange diagonal stripes, the type one sees on roadblocks used by police or road construction crews. It's a simple yet powerful symbol, and Contreras' use of it is playful. In Nice Cliff, he has taken an image of a majestic mountain and rendered it in a faded-back duotone, layering the orange and white caution stripes over it. The Ruscha-like type, written as a hole in the image, adds a flippant irony to the proceedings.--RB


 
Terry Crump, Lucky Day, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60 inches

In Crump, I think I've found one of Paul Gauguin's direct descendants. I want to vacation in Crump's aesthetic.--DL

Terry Crump's Lucky Day includes images associated with luck (good and bad)--cards and dice--but central to it is a large pacing tiger in profile, turning its head to look at us. It (and the other figures in the painting--a rabbit, a frog, a bird) are drawn with a black outline and appear somewhat tarnsparent against a background of splashy, riotous color. It's the color that attracted me to this curious painting. Intense and painterly, I suspect Matisse is an influence. The way the color is laid down behind a line drawing, for example, reminds me of The Red Studio. The large size of the canvas is an important factor in what makes Lucky Day work--it forces the viewer to step back to take in the totality of the image. Crump is one of those people that I love to find at The Big Show--a very interesting Houston-area artist who I have never heard of before. After four years of writing this blog, you wouldn't think there'd be any left, but I'm constantly surprised.--RB

Robert Boyd: Five Pieces from the Big Show

Robert Boyd

Dean Liscum, Betsy Huete and I all agreed to pick five pieces from the Big Show at Lawndale to write about. I found the choice hard to make. I liked a lot of the pieces this year. My first sweep, I narrowed it down to 28 choices. I made another sweep of the show, spending extra time with the ones I liked, drawing stars on the ones I found the most compelling, 15 in all. And that's where I am as I write these words. The final five will be decided in a Benthamite way by paying close attention to my own pleasure--specifically, the five I find most enjoyable to write about will be my final choices.


Avril Falgout, Black Veil Brides, 2013, paper maché, 75 x 50 x 105 inches

I like discovering new artists at the Big Show. And by "new," I mean artists whose work I've never seen before. I hadn't heard of Avril Falgout before, but I guess that's understandable--the Beaumont artist is only 15 years old.  The Black Veil Brides she depicts in her life-size figure group is a Los Angeles metal band. When I saw this, I immediately thought of "Expectations," the (highly un-metal) song by Belle & Sebastian. It includes the following lyric:

And the head said that you always were a queer one from the start
For careers you say you want to be remembered for your art
Your obsessions get you known throughout the school for being strange
Making life-size models of The Velvet Underground in clay

I recall when I was in art class in high school (I was the "brain" in a class full of "heads") in 1980, a girl named Annette made a brilliant scratchboard portrait of Jerry Garcia.  Depicting your musical idols is something that teenage artists do. But few do it with the level of ambition shown by Falgout. This group has incredible presence in the room--they demand your attention. Falgout was one of the juror's award winners. No one can predict how her life as an artist will unfold, but winning a juror prize at the Big Show when you're 15 is one hell of a start.


Sandra A. Jacobs, Spring Dance, 2013, old photograph, black pencil and black watercolor pencil, 10 x 8 inches

Sandra A. Jacobs is another artist about whom I know nothing. A Google search turns up a Sandra Jacobs who is a teaching artist at the MFAH, but I don't know if Spring Dance is by that Sandra Jacobs. This piece takes a found photograph--it appears to be a professionally made studio photo--and adds two simple drawn elements. This photo of a young girl in a bob hairdo appears to date from the 20s or 30s. One of the black circles partially obscures her face and the other looms in the negative space formed by her sitting body. I don't know why, but I feel a slight sense of dread in this photo with its two obliterating periods. It's as if this girl is being attacked by Suprematism. The obliterating dots are in the process of making her an unperson. The anti-humanist history of the 20th century is weirdly wrapped up in this seemingly simple piece.



Julon Pinkston, Shirtless, Young and Catching Flesh, 2013, acrylic on wood panel, 10 x 7 x 2 inches

I can't be objective about Julon Pinkston's paintings like Shirtless, Young and Catching Flesh. When I saw a show of work in this series at Zoya Tommy Gallery, I was so bowled over that I ended up buying two of them. I'm looking at them right now. I'm totally conflicted to be writing about this, but I like what I like, and I love this painting. Shirtless, Young and Catching Flesh is different from the pieces I bought in the intensity of the color. The blue, green, pink and gray shoot it out from the wall, which compensates for its small size (the size is fine, but in a crowded gallery full of dozens of other works, small pieces can get lost).

Pinkston likes tape and stickers, but instead of just using tape and stickers in his paintings, he actually makes the tape and stickers himself. The strips of blue, green and gray tape in Shirtless, Young and Catching Flesh are actually strips of acrylic paint that Pinkston made on glass. These paintings push the medium of acrylic paint to the limit. He uses in plastic quality (in both sense of the word) of acrylic paint in every way he can think of. The results have a gooey tangibility that I love.



Earl Staley, Bouquet 29, 2013, acrylic collage, 36 x 36 inches

Having an Earl Staley in the Big Show feels like overkill. Here's a little local show, showing mostly work by young emerging artists--and along comes a piece by an artist who was in the American Pavilion of the 1984 Venice Biennale. But what's awesome about Bouquet is that Staley is still daring you to like his work. He combines two despised genres here. Flower paintings, long the domain of watercolor societies, have had little place in contemporary art (although there are exceptions--Andy Warhol, for example). But he goes one further by adding what I take to be a clown face on top. I can't help but think of Bruce Naumann's Clown Torture, and looking at this painting is a kind of torture--it's so aggressive, the colors are so piercing. But it has intensity, humor, and a powerful presence. Ultimately, I fell in love with Bouquet because of its sheer craziness.


Camille Warmington, Setting Yourself Adrift, 2013, pencil and acrylic on board, 12 x 12 inches

Camille Warmington is another artist with whom I was not familiar when I encountered her two paintings at the Big Show. What appealed to me about Setting Yourself Adrift was the muted palette, which suggests a faded photograph (as does the "1969" on the right margin) and the handling of the paint. I assume this is painted straight from an old photo of folks sitting on the front porch of an old house. The deliberate vagueness of the image reinforces the feeling of distance and memory.

The painting looks like a "paint by numbers" painting--flat colors laid out in a kind of speckled pattern. But the watery brushstrokes are completely visible, which makes it look "deskilled" and amateurish. I realize as I write this that it sounds like an insult or a criticism. To avoid any Bill Davenport-style misunderstanding, I love the quality painting here. It totally undercuts what we expect from this kind of subject matter. Those blotchy flat areas of watery brushstrokes are beautiful and fascinating. Warmington undoes her subject while somehow sinking the viewer into a memory.

Dean Liscum: Five Pieces from the Big Show

Dean Liscum

My five (ok six)

In a very random order, here are my favorites.


Saralene Tapley, Flourish, 2013, acrylic on watercolor paper

The flourish of this piece by Saralene Tapley is ambiguous (artistic? fanciful? fey?) but the rendering isn't. The nuance, control, and subtle use of color are superb.


Julon Pinkston, Shirtless, Young and Catching Flesh, 2013, acrylic on wood panel, 10 x 7 x 2 inches

Julon Pinkston's work is one of those that I could have made in high school art class. It's got a haphazard, found object feel but sophisticated, balanced composition. Plus, he made it and neither I nor you did.


Chantal M. Wnuk, The Six Pound Weight in the Pit of My Stomach, 2012, charcoal, graphite and colored pencils on paper, 22 x 30 inches

Mix a little Francis Bacon with a little Chaim Soutine and it's guaranteed to stick in my gut.



 
Cintia Rico, Pod (Series Pod), 2012, Stoneware, soap, pigment and nylon fibers, 15 x 11 x 11 inches and 12 x 9 x 9 inches

Freud.

Plain and simple genital envy/lust. 'nuff said.

 
Mari Omori, Fieldwork: 2007-2012, 2013, 1 minute video loop

Mesmerizing. I'm not sure if it is mesmerizing because of the vertiginous stop-action photography, the scope of the work (the world as held by the artist's hand), the individual objects displayed, or the altered or want-to-be-altered state of the viewer. Nevertheless, my doubt is irrelevant. It's simply mesmerizing.


JooYoung Choi, Sacrifice of Putt-Putt, 2013, acrylic and paper on canvas, 75 x 70 inches

There is a part of me that longs for the regal, narrative mural style paintings that span time and place in illustrating a cultural icon's trials, tribulations, and ultimate sacrifice. This painting by Joo Young Choi appeals to that part of me, even though I'm clueless as to who Putt-Putt is other than the inventor of the only type of golf I can play.

Betsy Huete: Five Pieces from the Big Show

Betsy Huete

The Big Show, Lawndale Art Center’s annual juried exhibition, is a platform to showcase some of the year’s most exciting and innovative work coming from artists residing in or near the Houston area. Duncan MacKenzie, writer and co-founder of Bad at Sports out of Chicago, IL, was this year’s juror. His selections had an over-arching tone of irony—a way of thinking about art and curating that, quite frankly, I find to be played out and irritating. But to be fair, this is coming from someone who hasn’t seen all the submissions (although I believe we will all be able to soon at BLUEorange Gallery). Thematics aside, out of the eighty-three works by sixty-seven artists, there was a broad spectrum of media and subject matter, making it easy to find a handful of work that was exceptional. With that being said, here are my top five picks.


Kari Breitigam, Horn Head, 2012, Stretched embroidery, 12 x 24 inches


5. Kari Breitigam, Horn Head (2012)

As I ascended the stairs, I noticed at the top a spritely, youngish embroidered man floating mid-canvas, although we are led to believe he is firmly lying on top of something. With a bright orange shirt and appropriately titled conical head, this piece is obviously whimsical. But the refreshingly rigid line work gives the character a strange feel, as if Breitigam ripped him out of some fantastical instruction manual. His candy-colored horn head falls somewhere between a hardened weapon and TCBY soft serve, conjuring an image that lies in the transitory phase of fantasy to nightmare. Yet there’s something all-American and trusty about this guy: after a long day of swimming, hiking, and horseback riding, he’s the man a tampon ad girl’s dreams are made of. He looks like a Jeff.


Melinda Laszczynski, Hold On, 2013, Watercolor, acrylic, tape, wax, beads, 16 x 16 inches

4. Melinda Laszczynski, Hold On (2013)

Melinda Laszczynski clearly follows the mantra “less is more” in her piece Hold On. A framed work on paper, there isn’t much going on with the surface except in the bottom right corner, where she abstractly applied watercolor, acrylic, and glitter, to name a few materials. But for all of its abstraction, the work is surprisingly narrative-driven. The lava-esque pool of watercolor bumping up against the lower edge of the frame reeks of isolation, like a tectonic plate floating off into oblivion. Laszczynski cleverly uses blue painter’s tape to clamp what appears to be a peeled off scrap of glitter-laden acrylic to the right edge of the paper—a quiet gesture that transforms a potentially glazed-over two-dimensional work to a striking three-dimensional object. The sharp reds and decadent glitter read as a material hangover, shamefully trying to hide itself as it desperately clings to the side.

 
Eva Martinez, Shapeshifter, 2012, Fabric, stuffing, and plastic notion, 9 x 15 x 9 inches

3. Eva Martinez, Shapeshifter (2012)

I would hate to be Eva Martinez’s child. I could see her sneaking into my bedroom at night, stealing my teddy bear (creatively named Teddy), and restitching it into a figure that’s completely drained of all of its anthropomorphic qualities. But it’s this kind of perverse removal (except the eyes) that makes the piece as compelling as it is. The title Shapeshifter may be a little dramatic, but there is something oddly sinister about the unassuming figure. And on the other hand, it somehow feels wildly optimistic—as if Martinez is advocating for the tactility of the material—instead of hitting us over the head with the personified facial features that typically come along with a stuffed animal.


Bryan Forrester, Imogene, 2012, C-print, 24 x 36 inches (courtesy Lawndale Art Center)

2. Bryan Forrester, Imogene (2012)

There’s a reason Bryan Forrester was one of three to win the Big Show juror’s award: the work is excellent. Imogene is a fairly straightforward image of a run-of-the-mill Heights or Montrose area bungalow kitchen. But the framing of the shot enhances the kitchen to a narrow, claustrophobic corridor, and the lighting makes every banal object in the shot seem dense and luxurious. Unless Forrester can vomit on cue and is quick with the camera, the shot is clearly staged. Nevertheless, between his vulnerability and girlfriend/wife/overly comfortable roommate Kerry’s tenderness, the image feels overwhelmingly sincere. The butterflies are heavy-handed, and I wish they would return to the springtime floral wonderland from whence they came. Regardless, this is a photograph I could stare at for hours, although I might feel a little pervy for doing so.


Chantal M. Wnuk, The Six Pound Weight in the Pit of My Stomach, 2012, Charcoal, graphite, and colored pencil on paper, 22 x 30 inches

1. Chantal M. Wnuk, The Six Pound Weight in the Pit of My Stomach (2012)

Ambling clumsily through the dense and increasingly drunken crowd opening night, I was immediately magnetized to this charcoal drawing hanging near the base of the stairs in the John M. O’Quinn Gallery. The loose gestural lines of charcoal coalesce centrally into a ghastly, aggressively scrawled face. The smeared ball of fleshy Pepto Bismol hue wholly embodies the sense of dread and anxiety that the title probably too literally explains. While the date written somewhere near the top right of the blob seems redundant and unnecessary, the tight graphite drawings interwoven with the charcoal are formally dynamic and incredibly satisfying to look at. They read as abstracted ears and stubby fingers, simultaneously being ripped off in a whirlwind and compressing the head into unbearable density.

Pan Recommends for the week of July 18 to July 24

Robert Boyd

Last weeks was all about commercial galleries and big institutions. This week shifts the focus somewhat to alternative events and venues: performance, artist run spaces, unjuried shows, etc. Here are a few of this weekend's events.

THURSDAY



The Art Guys "Never Not Funny" at NotsuoH, 4 pm to midnight. The latest of the Art Guys' celebration of 30 years together is a durational performance--8 hours of stand-up comedy. (Will there be any young whippersnapper performance artists simultaneously doing 8 hours of heckling?)

FRIDAY


Forsman & Brodenfors, with Evelina Bratell (stylist) and Carl Kleiner (photographer), "Homemade Is Best," 2010

Graphic Design-Now in Production at the CAMH, including but not limited to Albert Exergian, Jürg Lehni and Alex Rich, Anthony Burrill, Pedro Fernandes, and Irma Boom, 6-9 pm, running hrough September 29. Well, this is something quite different--a show full of things that are designed to be visually interesting conveyers of information. It's nice to see this kind of artistic production acknowledged by art museums every now and then.


James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl -- this masterpiece was in the first Salon des Refusés

Salon des Refusés 2013, part 1, with Le'Ann Alexander, Jim Arp, Missy Bosch, JB Carrillo, Monica Chhay, Sarah Cloutier, Felipe Contreras, Jenna Jacobs, Rachel Jahan-Tigh Vines, Bartz Johnson, Jeremy Keas, Peter Lucas, Rob McDonald, Tracey Meyer, Lorena Morales, Michel Muylle, Christopher Olivier, Donna Perkins, Kelyne Reis, Will Schorre, Robert Sennhauser, Brian Sensabaugh & James Scott, Herbert Shapiro, Rosalind Speed, Alexine Stevens, Kamila Szczena, The Human Tour - Carrie Schneider & Alex Tu, Donna Villarreal, Dandee Warhol and Mary Beth Woiccak at BLUEorange, 6 pm. For the past few years, some gallery someplace has shown work that was not accepted for the Big Show. This year it's BLUEorange, and they are splitting their Salon des Refusés into four 1-week exhibits, starting this weekend.

 
VILD's sculpture made of test tubes was shown at the Matchbox Gallery at Rice

VILD, Submerged: origins of a Species at Fresh Arts, 6 pm. VILD are a pair of Rice undergrads, Vinita Israni and Linh Tran Do, and this installation involves a combination of art and science which is the kind of brainiac art you might expect from Rice students (at least Rice students who, unlike me, aren't spending their undergraduate years in a haze of alcohol and THC).

 
I have no idea what this is, but it was on the Error Forest Facebook page...

Error Forest with Jonathan Jindra, Sandy Ewen, Pablo Gimenez Zapiola, Y.E. Torres, Robert Pearson and Marisa R. Miller at El Rincón Social, starting at 8:30 pm. Performances, projections, sound installations and musical performances. The invite suggests dressing lightly--El Rincón Social is an unairconditioned space, if I recall correctly.

Art As Sacrifice featuring over 100 artists at Hardy & Nance Studios, 7 pm.  This event, organized by Pete Gershon, Stephanie Darling and the Hardy and Nance Studios is a giant art swap organized as a tribute to the late art scenester Anthony Palasota.

SATURDAY



CC∞ aka Countercrawl 8, starting at Market Square Park (300 Travis St.) and leaving at 11:30am sharp, wandering thence to various locations and featuring Thien, Bryan Lee, Renee' Cosette, Jacqueline Jai, Emmannuel Nuno Arambula, Traci Matlock, Linda Cornflake, Noah D. Clough, Unna Bettie, Hilary Scullane, Y.E. Torres and more. Music, art, poetry, performance and bicycles combine for the 8th time for an afternoon/evening of fun.


Jason Villegas, I think...


Jason Villegas: Nouveau Jersey at Settlement Goods, 6–9 pm. The master of the polo shirt returns, this time not at a fancy art gallery like McClain but at a fancy clothes and stuff shop, Settlement Goods. Being irremediably unfashionable, this will be my first time stepping foot into this place of business.