“Red Velvet”

Rudolph Projects fills FotoFest with disturbing domestic-themed images

Comments (0) By Nick Keppler Thursday, Jun 21 2007

“I was looking for anything with a sinister undercurrent,” says Volker Eisele, curator of “Red Velvet.” The title of the exhibit is a take on Blue Velvet, David Lynch’s 1986 film depicting drugs and depravity lurking beneath a small-town façade. While the group show doesn’t offer anything as disturbing as an amyl nitrite-huffing Dennis Hopper slapping around Isabella Rossellini while screaming, “Mommy, mommy, baby wants to fuck!” it does offer some cleverly ominous takes on domestic life.

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John Hartley paints hyperrealistic toy soldiers with prosthetics or missing limbs, an unsettling intermingling of real war and play war. Tim Stokes’s two installations feature all the items found in a typical room of a house (one’s a bathroom, the other a dining area) packed into a tiny space and surrounded by flashing red lights. “The effect is that it all looks like it’s about to explode,” says Eisele. Nancy Lamb’s paintings of suburban cocktail parties have a Norman Rockwell look but the perspectives are skewed, with the focus on the floor, cutting subjects’ heads out of the picture. “There’s a kind of vertigo to them,” says Eisele. “It’s like [the subjects] are falling out of their own world.”

Other work in show, sponsored by the Rudolph Projects ArtScan Gallery and happening at FotoFest during the photography hub’s off-season, includes Whitney Riley’s paintings of supermodels cutting celery and baking cookies, Thedra Culler-Ledford’s kimonos made with pornographic fabric, and Houston Press writer Kelly Klaasmeyer’s oversize diaper and home pregnancy-test boxes. Well, there are times when a pregnancy test is as intimidating as a drug-crazed psychopath who beats and rapes people to Roy Orbison songs.