"Inversion" It looks like someone shot a giant cannon at the old Art League studio building on Montrose -- you can see straight through it. Called Inversion, it's an amazing, traffic-stopping project; the elderly wooden bungalow has been transformed into a piece of art instead of an art studio. The culprits, Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, took the siding off the exterior of the building and used it to build a giant funnel-like tunnel that organically curves its way through the building. It looks like a wooden mold for a tornado. The site-specific work is up for only a limited time, until the demolition crew arrives to bulldoze the house to make way for a new Art League building sometime in mid-June. If only people had done something this great with the hundreds of other bungalows that have been obliterated in Montrose's town-home-ification. Through sometime in June. 1953 Montrose, 713-523-9530.
"The Orgies Mysteries Theater" Do you faint at the sight of blood? Here's a tip: Skip the Herman Nitsch show at the Station. It presents enough images of blood and guts to make an abattoir look like a paper cut. Nitsch is one of the core members of the Vienna Actionists, a group of artists who had their heyday in the '60s. His performances often use the bodies, blood and organs of food animals -- sheep, pigs, etc. -- that were (humanely) killed. They eat the animal afterward -- waste not, want not. Documentation of the events shows naked women and men blindfolded and/or restrained, with carcasses dripping on them or offal draped over their genitalia. But the sole point of the work isn't sensationalism, although that's an obvious by-product. In Nitsch's case, he presents his work as a link to something primal and base, providing a catharsis similar to that supposedly provided by horror movies. As the theory goes, if you immerse yourself in what you fear and what repulses you, you will transcend it. The work on view at the Station presents photographs, videos, objects and paintings. The spectacle of the artist's performances comes across best in a wall projection of rapidly changing images accompanied by an anarchic, oompah-pah, processional score composed by Nitsch. Sound is a big, and effective, part of the artist's work. The gory images move in time with the music, in such quick succession that you separate from what they actually are and instead focus on the spectacle. Through June 25. 1502 West Alabama, 713-529-6900.
"Terry Allen: Stories from DUGOUT" Singer, songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen has an overwhelming need to tell stories, and he does it through a variety of media. His exhibition at the Blaffer Gallery presents a collection of works that began as a program for National Public Radio. The seeds of the tales originated in Allen's West Texas childhood memories and the stories of his parents' lives -- and the works convey that. Anecdotes and snippets of narrative are typed, scrawled and printed onto his paintings and drawings, coalescing to create a poignant sense of place and people. But overall, the framed paintings, drawings and sculptures that are attached to those words feel too contained and static. Allen's installations in the central gallery are where the work really starts to succeed. He projects video over spare sculptures of domestic spaces -- a blank living room with a white Formica couch, or a wood-framed shell of a house -- and adds audio with stories and songs. The theatrical and dynamic nature of these works is much more effective in achieving Allen's goals. Through June 11. University of Houston, 120 Fine Arts Building, 713-743-9530.
"Virgil Grotfeldt: The Remains of the Hand" They're photographs, they're paintings, they're both...Virgil Grotfeldt's most recent work uses photographs as both point of departure and end product. For the most striking group of images, photographs of nanoparticles brought to him by a student who worked in the science department at Rice University became intriguing grounds for his paintings. Using thinned oil paint, Grotfeldt created gorgeous, undulating strokes of translucent pigment over the tiny dark particles set in the midst of a white ground. He then scanned the finished products and reproduced them on a large scale (47 inches by 37 inches) as digital prints. In another series, Grotfeldt makes use of a collection of aerial photographs in a friend's Amsterdam studio. Taken in the '50s, they presented expanses of landscape in the then-Belgian Congo. There are some lovely images, but an even larger scale would be still more striking. The remnants of the images' past lives -- the numbering from the science photographs and the technical information framing the aerial images -- are distracting. Heightening the mystery of their origins would let viewers lose themselves in visual splendor. Through June 11 at Sicardi Gallery, 2246 Richmond, 713-529-1313.