“Mel Chin: Rematch” For the next few months, Houston-born and raised Mel Chin will be taking up practically the whole art atmosphere of the city with his 40-year retrospective. It’s a progressive art feast so big that it takes four museums to hold it all. And as a special treat for hometown folks, there’s even an added bonus of Chin drawings not included in previous stops in New Orleans and Saint Louis. Due at least in part to this retrospective, Artnet named Chin as one of only two Houston artists on its list of “The 50 Most Exciting Artists of 2014.” Pick a nice day to see the show because you’ll be driving all over town. And go with an open mind because your preconceptions about what art is will likely be soundly shaken. Chin has been called a “provocateur, environmentalist, activist, political subversive, community organizer, showoff and occasionally an artist; news maker, civic problem solver and a dreamer.” Did you notice “artist” almost lost somewhere in the middle of all that? And you thought this was just another artist career retrospective. Wrong. This is not your granddad’s idea of what makes art. Unless your granddad was Marcel Duchamp. But is Chin’s work art or something else? Or does it really matter what we call it? As long as it helps us see things we might not otherwise see, goads us to think outside our usual box, motivates us to move in (positive) directions we might not take on our own? It is what it is — whatever that is, and you should take this opportunity to see it. Which is probably about as much as a prudent review should say. “Mel Chin: Rematch,” Blaffer Art Museum, The University of Houston, 4800 Calhoun Road, 713-743-2255, blafferartmuseum.org; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 5216 Montrose, 713-284-8250, www.camh.org; Asia Society Texas Center,1370 Southmore, 713-496-9901, asiasociety.org/texas; Station Museum of Contemporary Art, 1502 Alabama 713-529-6900, stationmuseum.com; and “Paper Trail and Unauthorized Collaborations”, Art League Houston, 1953 Montrose, 713-523-9530, www.artleaguehouston.org. Check each venue for exact dates and times. — RT
“Nature Studies” Propaganda can kill, and one famous example is the story of New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who, in 1931, regurgitated Communist propaganda about Joseph Stalin’s rule over the Soviet Union. While a misinformed America slept, Stalin forced individual farmers to work on collective farms and fulfill impossible government quotas. Unable to consume their own grain, almost seven million persons starved and died as the result of a 1932-33 famine in Ukraine. This is a very personal story for artist Lydia Bodnar-Balahutrak, whose parents escaped the famine. Her paintings, drawings and collages, interspersed with newspaper clippings and photographs, are a graphic cry for help. On display now at Hunter Gather Project, her work draws attention to the current crisis in Ukraine. During a visit to Chernobyl, Bodnar-Balahutrak became fascinated with the idea that, over time, nature will reclaim the evidence of horrific acts, and people will begin to forget. Will the Grass Grow Over It? is a beautifully layered collage, with the base consisting of photographs of hungry people, sometimes lying dead in the street, and news clippings about the hunger-extermination. She has painted blades of grass, some dead but newer growth as well, interspersed with the words of Soviet Russian writer and journalist Vasily Grossman. “And what has become of all that awful torment and torture? That all will be forgotten…? That the grass will grow over it?” The exhibit includes several important pieces, cleverly incorporating Soviet coins, rubles, maps and animals. What Balls! gets to the heart of the fact that Ukraine should stop waiting for leaders to emerge in the West and that the country can only depend on itself.Through March 7. Hunter Gather Project, 5320 Gulfton, Suite 15, 713-664-3302, huntergatherproject.com. — ST
“New Work: Group Show” A collective of ten artists, most of whom have shown at Zoya Tommy Gallery in the past, represents the swan song for this location but not for this gallery, which will reopen at 4102 Fannin on March 6. Marco Villegas’s Long May She Wave was a standout, with its multidimensional layers of blacks on white and a thoughtfully placed breaking-waves stencil effect. Lindsey Nobel’s Liquid Line offered a study of white-on-white fibrous synapses resting on top of the canvas with an almost organic floral portrayal of brain connections. Felipe Lopez invoked a hook theme with mixed results. White Degrees showed an architecturally perfect deep-blue sea with a solo hook riding the calm ocean waters. Between Then and Now featured a cobalt-blue hook suspended by filament, hanging like the sword of Damocles over a mirror. It was only Le Crochet Floraison that seemed unfinished, with its crudely painted double-stemmed flowers affixed to the wooden hook base with messily applied plaster. Thirteen pieces by the late Laurent Boccara, arranged horizontally and ranging in size from 7×5 to 10×8, collectively told a story of a man fascinated by maps, geography and ancient labyrinths. It was only later when I realized he also had worked as a field archaeologist. Eric Sall’s Slice portrayed a futuristic Picasso-like organism with an embryonic dark center, rendered with meticulous edges and overlays of multisize leaves and resting on a smeared base of red stars. His three other pieces used the similar technique of dark under painting, with an over-painting of oil, then a peeling away of patterned diamond and geometric shapes. Through February 26. 4411 Montrose, 713-523-7427, zoyatommy.com. — ST
“Portraits of Denial & Desire” In his current exhibit at Rice University, “Portraits of Denial & Desire,” activist artist John Halaka focuses on displaced indigenous Palestinians and their stories of exile, resistance and survival. He has enlarged his photographs, stripped them of color and printed them as triptychs on blankets, which serve as both a symbol of protection and an illustration of the temporary nature of refugees. Ibrahim Essa is flanked by the crumbled ruins of structures overgrown by vines. His family had lived in the same village for 700 years, tracing their connections back to the early Christians of Galilee. Elias Wakim stands in front of a church, between images of fragmented bones and overgrown cacti. He watches over the cemetery, where once-decorated mausoleums are now desecrated. He is unable to leave, since the bones of his father are here, now mixed with trash and the strewn remains of other graves. Umm Aziz displays a poster of her sons, who disappeared in 1982 when hundreds of men were herded into trucks and taken away. She still searches for her boys, who would be middle-aged by now, she herself trapped in the unknowingness of their fates. Hamed Moussa, with piercing, alert eyes, was born around 1910 and lived more than 100 years. He was one of the few Palestinians who was not displaced from his homeland and who was permitted to farm his ancestral land. He never felt that the land belonged to him but rather that he belonged to the land. Through March 13. Rice University, Department of Visual & Dramatic Arts, Media Center Building, 6100 Main, Campus Entrance #8 (University Boulevard at Stockton), 713-348-4882, arts.rice.edu. — ST
“The Reductive Landscape: Paintings & Drawings by Jack Boynton and McKie Trotter” Prepare yourself for a journey into darkness at William Reaves Fine Art with its current modernist exhibition. Boynton’s Blind Beast, a monstrously large side profile of a flat-nosed mythical creature’s head with coarse hair and yellow mouth against a somber gray background, is incredibly powerful. Dissection is almost certainly representative of the demise of this same creature, with the lightning-cleaved halves showing the fading heartbeat on one side, the empty void of life on the other, and a cataclysmic background of iridescent green. Boynton continues the macabre theme with the riveting Reflections, a darkly ominous creature with a caged face, fiery embers for eyes and brush strokes of chaos on its torso, backlit by an emerald-green glow. Trotter and Boynton met at Texas Christian University and evolved their relationship from teacher and student to professional colleagues. They introduced a reductive form of landscape painting by reducing the light to its simplest terms. Many of Trotter’s works are dark, but I favored the brighter Earthscape With Sea (Fields) and Earthscape #14, both relying heavily on the orange and russet tones, but to different effect. Fields portrayed a stormy turmoil-filled sky, with the lower two-thirds composed of vertical crops of teal, green, gold and yellow, expanding in their growth off the canvas, while the other promised peace and calm in spite of its red cloud sky. The gallery is offering a lecture on Saturday, February 28, from 2 to 4 p.m., with Sarah Beth Wilson, who once worked for Boynton as a freelance curator. Through February 28. 2143 Westheimer, 713-521-7500, reavesart.com. — ST
“Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist” The title is formidable and the four huge 17th-century tapestries, made for a convent in Madrid and now on the walls of cavernous Cullinan Hall at MFAH, are indeed spectacular, but the real stars of this show — six small panel paintings from the Prado Museum, by Flemish artist/diplomat Peter Paul Rubens, used as designs for the tapestries — aren’t just spectacular (such a Barnum & Bailey-sounding word), they’re magnificent. There are lots of highfalutin’ reasons to take time from your busy modern life to see this old stuff that isn’t even French or Italian, reasons having to do with art history, religious history, political history — yada yada yada. The real reason is that the paintings are just so damn gorgeous. They are proof positive that “rubenesque” doesn’t refer just to plump pink allegorical ladies showing a bit too much. Here the colors are lush; the brushwork is fluid; the compositions and foreshortenings are marvels. And the details — amazing: a cockatoo in the place where you might expect to see the dove of the Holy Spirit; a horse in the midst of turmoil biting his own leg (to scratch an itch?); an amazing celestial chorus line of angels and horses; a dark contorted bug-eyed head being crushed beneath chariot wheels that looks like the sketch for a Goya black painting. Ever since Rubens, artists have been looking closely at his work, and this is our chance to do so, too. Through May 10. 1001 Bissonnet, 713-639-7300, mfah.org. — RT
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2015.
