Capsule Reviews

Ayanah Moor: Word! It seems like anything can be deemed a
work of art once it’s been placed on a gallery wall, and Ayanah Moor’s
work on view at Lawndale is a classic example of this phenomenon. For the A
to Z Like Me series, Moor silk-screened definitions of African-American slang
on black paper and provided her own sample sentences for the use of these terms.
No doubt her work makes a serious comment upon how African-Americans have transformed
and recontextualized American English, but the exhibition makes us wonder why
it wouldn’t have worked just as well in book form. Perhaps the Pittsburgh-based
artist felt her message would be better received in a hushed gallery than on
a messy coffee table. Interestingly enough, she also silk-screened an image
of her own face behind words that, she says, apply to her, which allows us to
assume that she’s (in alphabetical order) a dyke who’s always
fronting like she’s hot shit, perhaps because she wears her
hair natural, just like a real sister should. Uh-huh, yo.
Through March 27 at Lawndale Art Center, 4912 Main, 713-528-5858.

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey: Green Brick Greenback Ackroyd
and Harvey’s works are a form of photographic print that uses chlorophyll
and grass instead of photographic chemicals and paper. Before the opening of
Green Brick, Greenback at Rice University Art Gallery, they turned the gallery
into a darkroom, projecting photographic negatives onto grass hanging on the
wall. The result is two large, site-specific images, which the artists chose
because of their relationship to the exhibit space and its environment. One
is a room-sized photo of bricks outside Rice University’s Sewall Hall,
and the other is a smaller enlargement of the back of a folded dollar bill.
Ackroyd and Harvey say that the notion of using the dollar bill occurred as
they were driving into town from the south on I-45, viewing and smelling the
Ship Channel refineries. It seems like they could have tried a little harder
to find subject matter relating to Houston. Their medium itself evidences more
imagination than that. Through April 4. 6100 Main Street (use entrance no. 1
or 2), 713-348-6069.

Home/land: Artists, Immigration, and Identity If you’re
the type who bemoans the current trend in contemporary art where novelty is
given preference over skill, then you should give contemporary craft a second
look. The Home/land exhibition at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft
showcases several artists with some serious chops, including Vesna Todorovic
Miksic and Dinh Q. Lê, two artists whose work reflects their experiences
as immigrants in this country. Born in Serbia, Miksic has crafted several garments
from road trip-friendly materials, including $1 bills, Yugoslav currency, financial
documents and water bottles. The über-practicality of her clothing line
is a flagrant metaphor for the difficulties of the long immigrant journey. Exploring
similar themes are Lê’s photo-tapestries, consisting of two pictures
of his homeland woven together by means of traditional Vietnamese grass-mat
techniques. In Persistence of Memory #16, he has woven a historical image
of the Vietnam War with a movie still about the same subject, thus blurring
the line between image and reality. The sheer conceptual and technical complexity
involved in the creation of these works proves that contemporary craft is about
far more than macramé doilies and macaroni place mats. Through March 28.
4848 Main, 713-529-4848.

Jim Richard: Recent Work At Inman Gallery Jim Richard is
pursuing a program of crackpot interior design. Richard scavenges room interiors
from magazines and creates collages, pasting in incongruous elements like out-of-scale
light fixtures and clunky modern objets d’art. He makes paintings of these
redecorated rooms, rendering them with campy, self-consciously cartoonlike flair.
All the works have a fantastic, over-the-top sense of color and pattern. Some
focus on the forms and patterns of the rooms and use them for their formal,
abstract qualities. Others are more fixated on the lush, crowded and oddly furnished
interiors. You sense Richard’s vicarious thrill in redecorating these found,
often vintage, environments. But there’s also an uneasy feeling — equal
parts claustrophobia and Twilight Zone — that runs through the otherwise visually
engaging images. You want to look at Richard’s paintings and collages,
but you sure as hell don’t want to live in them. Through February 28. 214
Travis Street, 713-222-0844.

Matthew Ritchie: Proposition Player Matthew Ritchie has built
his body of work around his own constructed cosmology. In 1995, he made a list
of everything that interests him — solitude, color, DNA, sex — and created
a grid of characters. The results: a system for making art about everything.
But if Ritchie really wants to make art about everything, he needs a container
to hold it. His installation at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston has too
much stuff going on: drawings on the floor and gallery walls, paintings, a tablelike
sculpture, an interactive gaming table, projections and 3-D transparencies,
a room of delicate drawings and a diagram of Ritchie’s map of characters
transformed into a card deck. Most of the works are satisfying in and of themselves,
but overall, the exhibition seems torn between conventionally presenting paintings
and drawings and fully embracing the potential of installation. Through March
14. 5216 Montrose, 713-284-8250.

The Passionate Adventure of the Real: Collage, Assemblage
and the Object in 20th Century Art Seriously mundane objects (discarded toys,
wrecked cars, worn shoes, packing crates, burlap, seashells, wallpaper, animal
skins, dolls, dirt, twigs, rusty nails, bottle caps, porcelain birds, pictures
of rap stars) sometimes become sublime in the hands of the artists featured
in The Passionate Adventure of the Real. And sometimes they remain mundane.
Machine parts are turned into flowers; a plaster Venus de Milo is adorned
with thorns and a feathered serpent; smashed auto body parts are twisted into
precarious balance. Wallpaper and upholstery fabric tell the stories of an Argentinean
prostitute. Memorials to children lost in the holocaust and immigrants suffocated
in a boxcar stand next to one another. Epoxy flies are embedded in a large abstract
painting. And motors, pulleys, belts and tubing are combined into elaborate
machines which seem to do nothing at all. As an assembly of assemblages, the
show is more like a pile of jigsaw pieces than a connected puzzle. Featured
are works by artists in Italy, Paraguay, Hungary, Argentina, New York and even
Houston. Through March 7. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1001 Bissonnet, 713-639-7300.