Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Winners Paint Bridges (Video)


Monday, February 8, 2010

The New Temporary





- Genesis by Terry Suprean
- Vince Shlomi's Bidden Tongueby PERSUASION
- Planed Debris: Texas Noise and Ambient (environment #2)
organized by Chin Xaou Ti Won

the temporary space
1320 Nance
Saturday, February 13th, 7 pm – 11:30 pm
Performance begins at 8 pm
thetemporaryspace.com


the temporary space is pleased to announce their 2nd exhibition project, a collaboration with Chin Xaou Ti Won. Our series of collaborative exhibition projects focuses on visual and experimental engagements; #2 features installations, experimental sound, performance and special projects.

Genesis is a group of multi-faceted works by Houston artist Terry Suprean. Suprean investigates his personal relationship with his father as a discussion of the symbolic presence of “god” in patriarchal society.

Vince Shlomi’s Bidden Tongue is a video assemblage work by curatorial collaborative PERSUASION.

Planed Debris: Texas Noise and Ambient (environment #2) will feature 7 experimental music bands selected by Chin Xaou Ti Won. Planed Debris spotlights ambient, drone and noise musicians creating sound collages and musical environments. Artists include: Zer0-sum, Concrete Violin, Endless Blinding Sunshine, Chin Xaou Ti Won, Bret Shirley, T.E.F and Bonus.

+ Review and critique session will be scheduled for further critical engaging discussions. Please inquire @ thetemporaryspace.com

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Temporary Persuasion

still from Michael Dee's dvd loop, "Song of Myself"
Michael Dee, Song of Myself, still from dvd loop, 2008

Here It Comes Again, still from dvd loop, 2005.
Michael Dee, Here it Comes Again, still from dvd loop, 2005

Persuasion
January 15, 2010
8-10 pm
the Temporary Space
1320 Nance, Houston, TX 77002

About Persuasion:

Hybrid Moments:
“When new creatures rape your face
Hybrids open up the door.”>

We will be displaying works by various artists according to a system of self-applied rules and limitations.

First of all, no begging from corporations, individuals, or institutions.
Begging has put art in a sorry place.
For that reason, original works are de-prioritized. Multiples, copies and bootlegs are ok.
cf., Walter Benjamin “Art in the age of Mechanical Bull-riding.”

We take courage in the samizdat tradition of self-published literature during the Soviet and other totalitarian regimes.

READ MORE

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Is this Hell freezing over?

'cause that frost last week wasn't the end of it...








N [pronounced nnn] gallery debuts its first exhibition Cooler than Usual of frozen works by twelve local artists.

The gallery is a new 3.8 cubic feet at 0°C exhibition space conceived of to provide artists with a colder and smaller venue for experimental exhibition.

Cooler than Usual is a diverse of group of works specifically created to be exhibited in this unconventional space.


Daniel Adame
Elia Arce
Hagit Barkai
Claudia Cruz
Nancy Douthey
Ian Fernandez
Haden Garret
Jack Hukill
Melanie Jamison
Gary Parkins
Jon Read
Tyson Urich

Curated by Aisen Caro Chacin


Join us for a warm opening reception
8:00 PM
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
N
Apartment 2’s freezer,
2005 Vermont St.,
Houston, TX, 77019.


The exhibition will be on view through December 23, 2009 by appointment.


www.Nfreezer.blogspot.com

Monday, December 7, 2009

Fuck Yeah

?ui=2&view=att&th=12569d735f125fbb&attid=0.1&disp=attd&realattid=ii_12569d735f125fbb&zw

New Work By Jack
Project Gallery
Friday, December 11th
6-10 p.m
the joanna
4014 Graustark, Houston
713.825.1803

Thursday, December 3, 2009

That's the Good Shit

YOU ARE INVITED!  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13th, 2009  ITCHY ACRES 2nd ANNUAL OPEN STUDIOS 1-5 pm

Monday, November 30, 2009

Frankly, I Don't Give A Damn

What do Wayne Dolchefino and rancid leftovers have in common?

They're both unwelcome finds a week after Thanksgiving.

http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/dolcefino.jpg

VS

http://www.houstonmasterworks.org/Houston_Arts_Alliance_logo_op_800x184.jpg

http://images.chron.com/blogs/artsinhouston/Water%20Museum_Lipski_2.JPG
Donald Lipski (photoshopped, not really there)





Wayne Dolcefino (aka Dolcefinko) has a penchant for taking on the artworld in late fall. What can explain his perennial Houston Art Alliance bashing that sprung up last year? At first it seemed like an easy target, a populist lashing of an intellectual group known for muddying the waters of progress. Then it looked like a limited-government outburst, lamenting money being spent on art in such a dire economic climate. Hell, it wouldn't have been out of character for the art expose to simply be a potshot at Jonathan Glus, HAA director, after clocking him as a mark. The whole time I defended the artworld as above this kind of dressing-down at the hands of a slack-jawed yokel.

This time around, as Dolcefino searches for fodder for his grist mill, I have a change of heart to admit. He's right. We're spending too much money on crappy art. In this town, if you can hang around long enough, wear the right clothes and make the right friends then you too can receive an HAA grant and embezzle all the money. The real problem lies in the selection committee, who continues to make bad decisions.




The Water Pump civic art piece at the Sabine Street Pump Station is a travesty. It is ugly as hell and rather obtusely useless. Yes, you can take a quick shower after you go skating at the Jamail Skatepark next door, but skaters don't take showers after skating. You're thinking of swimmers, douchebag. No one at HAA thought this was an impractical and boring art project? WTF?


Bush monument
Bush sculpture at the airport


Airport art is a stupid idea in the first place. All those sculptures at IAH? Last time I was there I only saw one- unlit, in the dark at 6 pm- and it was pretty boring. The best airport art in Houston (sorry Art Guys) is the Jim Love airplane at the arrivals gate at Hobby Airport. Let's just make 100 of those twice as large and throw 'em everywhere.



http://offcite.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/police_englestein_horses.jpg
no, not that horse.


Sharon Engelstein's curt response to Police Chief Harold Hurtt weighing in on the aesthetic tip ("he cares little and knows even less about art. Let the experts do their job.") does little for her cause, but I do hope that the project is built. Even if the whole HAA project is a bust in the eyes of the money counters at least it supports a group of artists who add a lot to the artworld with their presence. One benefit of the organization not in dispute is the amount of times their employees and associates are in the society pages, raising awareness of all the artists who don't get grants in the eyes of the gentry. Ha ha.


I couldn't even watch the videos, Dolcefino's voice is a little too acid for me, but I did read the articles on 13 Undercover. Last year I was with the HAA and the artists involved, as Dolcefino went after morality issues, Glasstire, the Performance Art Lab and, indirectly, me. This economic impact survey is still a version of the "Where's the Beef?" meme that Dolcefino operates in, but this sequel is definitely better. With a lack of ambition, taste or decision-making skills the Houston Arts Alliance has bumbled millions and will probably continue to do the same. Microloans and technology grants would be a step in the right direction, actually showing up to see other shows in town and talk to people could lead to a new perspective, and installing public art in accessible residential and commercial centers would let people know that you exist. Britt was too nice with his assessment of the Lipski sculpture.



Watch this clip of Annise Parker promising to revive the Westheimer Street Festival and praising the art scene as the best part of Houston's cultural landscape. She led the Dolchefino expose in 2008, but this year she's no where to be seen. Will Parker gut the HAA and still be able to tout the art world's success in Houston?


Sunday, November 29, 2009

Spiritual America and the Immeasurable Distance

http://cache.boston.com/resize/bonzai-fba/Globe_Photo/2009/05/21/1242951416_3028/539w.jpg
pic via Essdras M Suarez/Boston Globe




Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
5216 Montrose Boulevard
Open Tues. – Saturday (10 am – 5 pm), Thurs. (10 am- 9 pm), and Sun. (12 pm- 5 pm)
Through January 17, 2010




With a bushy russet beard, wearing disheveled clothes and riding a BMX bike, Matthew Day Jackson pedaled back and forth across Marfa. His brown eyes cast a friendly glow on any face he came across in the windswept West Texas town. As he went from house to house meeting, greeting, drinking and laughing, Jackson built up the kind of goodwill that usually follows gurus, gamblers and ice cream trucks. Five years after those sun-parched days in the desert his mind is ensconced here in Houston at the Contemporary Arts Museum as “The Immeasurable Distance”- a fitting title for his collection of resin-soaked memorabilia by an earnest mind let loose.


Overtly curious, with a wide-ranging appetite for pop culture, Jackson’s work toes the line of conceptual art without engaging in the pretension that plagues esoteric aristocrats like Vanessa Beecroft and Matthew Barney. At first glance Jackson’s artworld bona fides are firmly intact, but his childlike guile keeps even the most mortifyingly informed insiders on their toes spinning bullshit into gold thread. Composed of readymade elements, each with their own set of innuendoes, Jackson’s work is sculpture, painting and installation- a coherent context holding various disciplines together. Within his mind pulsating like a thick bass line, everything moves together. Gone are the days of the categorical museum, Jackson is bringing back the reign of the wunderkammer.



http://www.decordova.org/art/exhibitions/current/images/oldweird/full/jackson_1.jpg
Garden of Earthly Delights (Spiritual America), 2008


Matthew Day Jackson’s work came to town in 2008 as a part of Toby Kamps’ “The Old, Weird America” and returns this year as a solo show courtesy Bill Arning, who first arranged for “The Immeasurable Distance” to be exhibited in Boston at MIT while he was the director. Both curators see his work as a call for social progress, a break from the cyclical nature of human existence. In “The Old Weird America” Jackson’s Garden of Earthly Delights (Spiritual America) was an edgy, dark take on fallibility and legitimacy. Tenuously based on Hironymous Bosch’s triptych of the same name and a recent exhibit by the king of art thieves Richard Prince, Garden consisted of a group of black-framed modified posters and a snaking vitrine filled with oddities. An Evil Dead poster is cut into a psychedelic landscape, zombies cheering on Sputnik in grey wool suits. The title character from the 1977 film Sasquatch becomes Joseph Beuys scaring a caravan of cowboys forwarding a river. Hopper and Fonda from Easy Rider roll upside down across the USA. Fake taxidermy fairies, Wally Wood’s Disneyland Memorial Orgy, astronauts and the ’68 Olympics all make appearances in this sprawling installation. Without a serious leap of faith the elements may remain inert but with the right mix of faith and paranoia the aesthetic experience becomes a reprieve from heavy handed messages and a DIY journey to one’s own sense of understanding.



http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/imgs/titles/matthew_day_jackson.jpg


“The Immeasurable Distance” is that experience writ large, and I must recommend getting really high on weed before attempting to fully enjoy the virtuoso stonership that the exhibit displays. If nothing else you’ll need to do it just so you can see the human visages on rock faces across America that Jackson spent months and thousands of miles documenting. Conceived as a response to the artist’s residency at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Distance” looks at science as a layman, far enough from the content to appreciate the aesthetics of categorization, preservation and simulation. Study Collection is a long steel shelving unit with a series of series; mock-ups of American missile systems from Fat Man and Little Boy to Cruise missiles, skulls morphing out of geometric forms and crude human limbs fused to tree branches. It is an amazing work to take in, the viewer walking back and forth examining objects, measuring differences, making references and noting new elements. Looking to the past, August 6th, 1945 documents Hiroshima and Washington DC on the last day of WWII, when atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. The streets are paved in lead, and buildings are nothing more than charred stumps in jagged geometric patterns. Through reversals and reexaminations Jackson takes on the legacy of the American 20th century from a myriad of perspectives.


The issue of immeasurability comes to the fore in Tensegrity Biotron, a large cube divided by mirrors and lit by neon tubes. Casts of the artist’s bones hang suspended in the case and as one looks through the box mirrored angles extend into infinity, multiplying bones and bright neon lines into the thousands. Keep staring. Further and further into space. All things considered, Jackson may search for the long look that carries us into the future but inside his earnestness is a clear grasp of the here and now, the disjointed realities of contemporary life that keep us tied to this earth and our own problems. The artist’s intent fades into the subconscious as the viewer’s context adds meaning to the objects and ideas presented to it. If the new century of art has anything to bring to the table, it is a better sense of our selves instead of any single narrative striving to lift humanity out of the mire of boom and bust, truth and lies or right and wrong. Jackson brings it to us today.











Monday, November 23, 2009

What'cha Been Doin'?

I've been making crepes.







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melangecreperie


Monday, November 16, 2009

Like The Ear Cut Off: A Tribute to the Life of Jacob Scanlan

A Tribute to the Life of Jacob Scanlan








A Tribute to the Life of Jacob Scanlan
Like The Ear Cut Off

Opening Friday, November 20th
6 – 9 pm

On View by Appointment November 20 – 29, 2009

Apama Mackey Gallery
628 East 11th Street
Houston, TX 77008





Join us in celebrating the life of artist Jacob Scanlan this Friday, November 20, 2009, from 6 – 9 pm at Apama Mackey Gallery, curated by Sean Carroll and Mark Hougham from the collection of the Scanlan family. Through Scanlan’s poems, paintings, origami and photographs we hope to reveal the intense zeal and creative mind that touched his family and friends.

Untitled



Artist and writer Jacob Scanlan, aka JKOP, was born in Houston on November 29, 1979, and studied philosophy and poetry at the University of Houston. He delved into street art and public paintings that were bold, bright, and passionate. As a regular on the punk scene and with a keen ear for early hip hop, he quickly immersed himself into a chaotic lifestyle, making friendships with the most infamous graffiti writers in downtown Houston. Gaining insight and experience, he set out to make a name for himself on many fronts. He folded intricate origami and painted graffiti-influenced expressionism. He took thousands of photographs of his life, his friends and his environment. After a near fatal bout with Encephalitis, writing was one of the many catalysts he used to express the turmoil he felt deep inside. All of his poetry was written during the aftermath of his illness. An avid reader, he was influenced by the works of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Riding-Jackson. His studies in philosophy have given his poetry and art a rare and vibrant perspective.


Untitled (Burning Bible)


For Scanlan art was an emotional force. He viewed artistic creation as the freeing himself from society. He felt that art was rooted in daily experience; that it grew into something beautiful and personal. This collection portrays Jacob’s life; full of love and romance. Scanlan was a guest poet on The Spoken Word, a Rice University radio show and had poems published by Our Time Is Now, Poetry Motel, Rag Shock, Lone Stars magazines, and Poetry Junction website. His poems "Physiognomy" and "Equation" were featured in the anthology The Great American Poetry Show by Muse Media Publishing.



Self Portrait with Twombly

Scanlan died on Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at the age of twenty-eight, of residual complications of encephalitis. During the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, the stress of living in those conditions and the strain of his medications took its toll on his body, and he succumbed. A friend found him the next morning. Over the next several months his parents gathered dozens of poems, paintings and delicate origami sculptures along with thousands of photographs that detailed his life in the past decade. At the opening we will release Scanlon’s book of poems and essays, The Grammar of a Nightmare. A portion of all sales will benefit a fund set up at the Menil Collection in Scanlan’s name.

at the CC

Chiahui Nahui-Aztec Art & Performance



Youre invited! Come out!

When:
This Sunday Nov. 22, 2009
1pm - 6pm


Where:
The Ripley House
4410 Navigation
Houston, Texas 77011

Admission: Free!

Please help us spread the word for our show by forwarding to other friends!

Thanks & Peace be to you!

www.skeez181.com
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