EUTOPIA

Teresa Serrano

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Teresa Serrano, La pinata_3

Teresa Serrano, La piñata, 2003, video projection, Dimensions variable, running time: 5 minutes 45 seconds, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Elizabeth Díaz-Soto in honor of Gilbert Vicario. © The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Teresa Serrano
La Piñata, 2003
Video, duration 5:45
Contingent Beauty, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston [link]

Using a common childhood game as a metaphor for the murders of young women in Juarez, Mexico, Serrano’s graphic, polemic video depicts a man brutally bashing a piñata shaped like a young woman. The male protagonist takes perverse pleasure as he calculatingly taunts his paper mâché prey. With only her head remaining, he plants a tender kiss on her face, before striking the final blows. However, it was the sound that haunted me for weeks—five long minutes of escalating grunts of exertion and heavy breathing mingled with the sound of the bat making contact, followed by silence.

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston

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Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller

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Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Infinity Machine, 2015 (detail). The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: George Hixson

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, “The Infinity Machine,” 2015. The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: George Hixson

 

The Infinity Machine
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller
Byzantine Fresco Chapel, The Menil Collection [link]
January 31, 2015-February 28, 2016

Inspired by Pythagorean theory Cardiff & Miller’s latest collaboration features a large-scale, kinetic, audio mobile. Suspended from the ceiling over 150 antique mirrors revolve, casting shadows throughout the darkened gallery. Sounds referencing space vibration echo in the Chapel, paralleling the tilting movement of the mirrors as the layers transform the environment, evoking an ominous rather than meditative space. The stark, disorienting experience reminds me of Kusama’s Infinity Rooms or Alice trapped in a myriad of looking glasses. One questions the work’s connection to the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, however the installation’s immersive quality provides the infinite atemporality promised.

~ Colette Copeland
images by George Hixson and George Bures Miller,
courtesy of the artists and the Menil Collection. 

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Nick Barbee

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Nick Barbee
Ask Forgiveness [2015]
galleryHOMELAND, Houston [link]

Part pastiche, part living history, Nick Barbee’s Ask Forgiveness alloys his most beloved museums, scaled as a dollhouse. Everyone is a curator now, but need this be endorsed? Some of Barbee’s miniaturized galleries focus on artworks recreated from memory (Jacques-Louis David’s Emperor Napoleon? Let the sleuthing begin…), others on architecture: Menil’s hidden gardens, Hirshhorn’s dominating curves. Influence is always embedded in a work of art – Barbee just cites his sources. Models are proposals for real space: this is proposal as think piece, conditioned by idiosyncrasy, re-inscription, and the (not undue) demand that our art institutions do more, be more.

~ Kelly Montana
 images courtesy of the artist

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Eric Zimmerman

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Installation view, elegy for left hand alone (2015)

Installation view, elegy for left hand alone (2015)

Eric Zimmerman
Elegy for Left Hand Alone
Art Palace, Houston, TX [link]

Unequal partners despite symmetry, Zimmerman offers the neglected left hand as a sympathetic narrator. Speaking in rare fragmented imagery –an ancient hand tool, Houdini magic tricks, plunder mined from the Voyager Golden Record, or a Werner Herzog screenshot– the selection is an eclectic imbalance, muted icons with remote poetic value. However, the deftness of the paintings belies a dexterity bordering on photographic, the hand over-compensating to remove touch from sight: a hand in absentia. Though manifest in sculpture, an impotent amputated clasping, more compelling are the Beuys basalt replicas*: a paper-thin pretense of heft, an embodied grasp at gravitas.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of Art Palace and the artist.

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Haegue Yang

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Haegue Yang
Mountains of Encounter (2008) [link]
Double Life, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas [link]
Through March 15, 2015

Haegue Yang’s large-scale, kinetic, sculptural installation resembles a meditative moving Carlotta Capron photograph. Red Venetian blinds suspended from the ceiling project shifting formalist shadows, as roving spotlights illuminate their form. Referencing secret meetings between Korea and China that took place in the mountains of Northern China in the 1930’s, the conceptual undertones contrast this peaceful, abstract, visual specter. The blinds and spotlights acquire sinister connotations, alluding to surveillance, and covert military intelligence. Following the light, the viewer is led through the mysterious labyrinth, never fully able to capture the fleeting apparition or remain furtively hidden in the shadows.

 ~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of Colette Copeland

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