Resilience - Williams Tower Gallery

Because I work in the Galleria area, one of my favorite diversions is the art gallery on the first floor of the Williams Tower, that lone, lost skyscraper. The current show is called Resilience: Two Galveston Galleries Re-Invent After Ike. The actual show has little to nothing to do with Ike or recovery---it's really just an art show curated by two galleries in Galveston. Well, not "just an art show." It's a rather good show. But if you're either after or avoiding scenes of Ike or recovery, this is not the show to go to or avoid. If you like good, solid contemporary art, you might want to swing by.

The show is curated by Design/Works Gallery and Wagner Sousa Modern Art. Since the lobby handout lists the represented artists by the galleries, I'm just going to arbitrarily go down that list and talk about what I saw. Where I can, I'll link artists to their websites and maybe sprinkle in some pictures if I can find some on the web. (Artists: if you prefer to not have your artwork posted here, please let me know and I'll remove it ASAP.)

First up is Graham Daugherty. Daugherty's art are mostly monochromatic abstracts with geometric shapes. "Muted" is the word that came to mind as I looked at his 4 pieces, not quite pastel, but certainly not bright. I was especially taken with the pale aqua of The White from the Moon and the quiet cool gray-blue of Enter November. In some ways, these are paintings that are made to match the sofa in your living room, but they're more than that. There is a moodiness to the pieces, which, upon reflection, might easily pick up the mood of the observer as much as bring a mood upon her/him. I found The White from the Moon online:

Glass artist Mitchell Gaudet has some sand-cast glass and found object pieces in this show. Sadly, I can't find examples of his work online that look like what's in this show. The link I gave him comes closest. They're fun pieces. The one that stands out is Rifle, with it's found, rusted rifle juxtaposed with a series of glass shooting gallery ducks. If you do more websearches on Gaudet, you'll find his work runs a wide range, from the cast glass to blown glass, rough tiles with a wheel or bunch of grapes (as in this show) to some rather lovely art bowls. Nothing online, that I found in my quick search, represents the whimsy or humor the pieces at the Williams Tower. I mean, that rifle is shooting nothing. The glass ducks have nothing to worry about.

Don Glentzner is an accomplished photographer, having published work in well regarded magazines and even having pieces in the Museum of Fine Art Houston (among other places). So it will probably hurt his career and reputation not at all if I found the three sea-themed pieces in this show to be pretty but not especially out of the ordinary. Probably just not my thing.

On the other hand, Larry Horn has a series of photographs that are evocative and, in the case of his seascapes, a little spooky. Two of his photos feature very bright light at night. The one that I found most interesting is of a house or shack in the country and very light is coming from the windows. What's most interesting about the photo is that I couldn't tell for certain if the light source was actually inside the house or behind the house. It might have been headlights of, I'd guess, two or more vehicles. Unfortunately, googling "Larry Horn" and "photography" gets me inconclusive results. I couldn't find photography that resembled this show's work (although I did find a photographer who will take shots of your events). If anyone can supply a link to this particular Larry Horn, I'd appreciate it.

Abstract artist Larry Spaid has several pieces in this show, all abstract paintings on paper. The series of smaller paintings strike me as sandpaper with geometric doodles on it. (The sandpaper refers more to the color than texture.) The larger ones are similar only with gray backgrounds. His website says he's influenced by several cultures, most recently Vietnam and Cambodia. I'm not surprised to learn that. My exposure to contemporary Asian art is spotty, at best, but I did think of Asia when I saw his work. Here is a piece from his website that is similar to what he has at the Williams Tower, although not an exact piece:


I find them rather meditative.

Saralene Tapley is the last artist listed under Design/Works Gallery. Her pieces are very large, colorful portraits. I'm not entirely sure what to call the style, other than highly stylized. The paint is thick, blotchy, like it's applied with a spoon rather than a brush. The colors are not what you might call "natural." I find the results interesting and I appreciate the skill and technique. I'm not sure I would say I "like" them. But liking them isn't entirely the point. They certainly held my attention and demanded I look at them.

First artist listed under Wagner Sousa Modern Art is Milton Ausherman. His work seems quite influenced by popular culture, or else I'm completely projecting my life experiences on his work. I'm sure it's a bit of each. One quite large canvas, which is officially untitled, I'd call "color field meets Twister." The background could be a Rothko painting, but the precisely round, precisely placed dots on it made me want to pull it off the wall and play a game of Twister. He does a similar thing with a series of paint-by-number sets (which I loved as a kid). Here's one to give an idea:


Of course, the most obviously pop-culture influenced pieces are two silhouette portraits of George Jetson and Jane Jetson. I'm sure many people of my "certain age" would smile at these.

Patrick Cronin had a series of miniatures, most if not all made on post cards. On some the post card is completely obliterated, on others, there are bits of the post card peaking through. They're fun, most of them having sort of thick, makeshift structures on them, maybe as if Dr. Seuss had lived in Bedrock. He's another artist that I cannot find online.

Steve Gilbert has three photographs up, all entitled Museum People (#s 1, 2, and 3). Two are photos of people looking at art, which makes for self-referential fun. Art of people looking at art. They're also quite interesting, although the one that sticks with me is a photograph of a stout, older woman, bent with either age or dejection, walking alone outside a cold, gray wall that says Pinakothek der Moderne. Something very lovely yet lonely about it. (I found a photography site that is apparently owned by a Steve Gilbert, but I couldn't ascertain if it is the same Gilbert. I'd welcome a definitive link.)

Sculptor Meredith Jack has three pieces and the handout calls them "stabilized foam." I'm not familiar with what that is, exactly, and of course I didn't feel free to tap on the sculptures to see if touching them would explain anything. (A web search sheds some light, not much.) What they look like are metal. Cast iron would have been my first guess. There are smooth rings, tubes, and a heart which has been stuck in molten, barely formed slag. They're emotionally cool. At least, I didn't have a particular response to them. Skillfully made, but I didn't know how to "read" them.

Another scuptor, Marion Mercer, had several wood constructs on display. They strike me as vertical altar pieces, made of different (and differently stained) woods. They are, overall, tall (maybe 3'-5'?) and rectangular, but made of all kinds of shapes. They would make for nice objects for meditation, and bring your own baggage. Is that Jacob's ladder? Or a railroad track? The fact that I think of altars and meditation already says something of the baggage I bring to them. The visible grain of the wood (nothing is painted) gives this art a nice natural feel, while the smooth, stained, and polished surfaces feels highly crafted. Again, no website for the artist that I could find, but I found a photo of his work:



The prints of David Sullivan are nothing if not full of social commentary. In one, a rifle that looks like a cross between a machine gun and a sci-fi ray gun has a barrel that u-turns back toward whoever would pull the trigger. In another, what I can only describe as a pile of intestines with a mouth is being "fed" by a square-mouthed serpent while logos of companies like GM, Hewlett Packard, GE, and Microsoft float in the background. I'm not entirely sure what Sullivan is saying in these pieces, but I'm doubtful that he's looking for corporate sponsorship anytime soon. All of this is done in story-book colors, big bold images, cleanly created with computer design software. It's fun to stand there and study it a bit, all the layers of images and, hence, meaning.

Finally, we have Kamila Szczesna. The work on display is multiple layers of printed glass, backlit to give it a sense of looking at an old X-ray light box. She appropriates images with scientific information---graphs, chemistry visualizations, etc---and draws on them or layers them with other images. The effect is puzzling but engaging. Here's a picture from her website that'll give you an idea of what I'm talking about.


Overall, Resilience is one of the better shows that I've seen at the Williams Tower. If you're in the Galleria, leave your car parked and walk the block or so over and take a look.

Uncivil Unions, Unhinged Productions, 5.24.10

I finally got around to seeing Uncivil Unions, the locally grown theater production created by Unhinged Productions. I heard about the piece as it was being created, that it was making an effort to give a snapshot of Houston's attitudes about same-sex marriage and I ended up writing about it for OutSmart. You might want to read that article first before continuing.

My main response to the production is that they had a strong cast---I was especially impressed with a couple of the actors who seemed to morph into different characters quite easily---and that as a theater piece, well, they have a good first draft.

It's hard not to like the show. It's pretty well brimming with goodwill and a friendly attitude. It's clever with just enough serious moments to give it some depth, some shadow to the sunshine.

Where it is weakest is in the moments when the actors tell us a little too much about the process of the show. It's almost as if we're seeing a documentary of a show and not the show itself. I felt like they didn't quite trust the audience to go along with the concept and they had to explain themselves or the next segment.

It would be interesting if they might take this draft and edit it a little bit, work on some of the more didactic and explanatory moments, maybe add more material from the interviews they conducted (those segments were really quite strong), and bring it back in a year or two. At the very least, it's successful enough as a theatrical event to hope they create more shows out of community involvement.

It's very much worth seeing, so hurry up and get your tickets for the last three performances this weekend.

Vault 6 Degrees 5.21.10

This performance at DiverseWorks was something that I intended to write about before I went. I had been anticipating it for months. Toni Leago Valle is one of the dance artists I've been following since I came to Houston over 6 years ago, and I'm always ready to see new work from her. That this was the debut of her first company, 6 Degrees, only sweetened the anticipation.

Amy Ell is a choreographer whose name I've heard a lot, but I've only really seen her work in festival/mixed company programs. She, too, debuted her company, Vault, with this performance. Amy uses trapeze arts in her choreography, which is becoming a bigger thing these days, even making it into the mainstream pop music world with Pink.

Vault was first on this two-company bill, with a piece call Blau. Let me first say, I'm a total sucker for floor work. I am almost always captivated by watching dancers find new ways to move across the floor without being on their feet. So, of course, when Blau opened with an extended section of several dancers, moving in unison, all on the floor---I admit it, I was mesmerized. I literally was on the edge of my seat for the entire section. I saw new ways for dancers to roll and sit up and sink back into the floor. That it was all done in unison made it all the more mesmerizing.

But of course, the use of the trapeze is what make Vault unique among Houston dance companies and here's where I stop and ponder. I've seen aerial dance here and there for the last 8 years or so. It can be beautiful, but so much of it looks similar to me. Whether using actual trapezes (as Amy did here) or "silks" as in the Pink video I linked earlier, there are certain limitations, or so it seems to me.

First of all, the venue was not great for aerial dance. DiverseWorks doesn't have the fly space in its theater for much height. There are probably dancers who can jump higher than these trapezes took the dancers. Second, once the dancer is off the ground, there is only so much space they can cover and it's all vertical. They lose the horizontal movement of the floor (unless you're Pink and have cranes to move you left and right, etc.). Also, there is a tendency to have a pattern in aerial choreography, a sort of "move move move pose" pattern. I'll give Amy this, there were moments on the trapeze that I would actually call moments of stillness, which I also find very arresting in a dance, but there were also moments that felt more like simply poses, a "ta-da!" moment. It seems the trapeze really wants "ta-da" moments.

So I have to say for all the "circus wow" that a trapeze injects, I'm not thoroughly convinced that it's a medium for profound artistic expression. No doubt there are plenty of people to argue with me. Obviously, Amy would be one of them.

Still it's on the ground that Blau really held me captive. I won't go on much more about it, but there was one section when a dancer had on what I'll call an "onion dress." It was a clingy blue number that was really several clingy blue numbers that the dancer peeled off, layer by layer. It occurred to me later that this might easily have come off as a striptease sort of thing, but it didn't feel that way in the moment. It felt like someone exposing more and more layers of herself. Very effective.

Moving on to the second part of the program, I come to Toni's piece, Baptism. I've thought a lot about this piece because my immediate response after the final blackout was, "wow, that was different for Toni."

Here's the dangers of talking about an artist in relation to her large body of work. Each work is someone's first exposure to an artist. At the same time, here is the blessing of finding artists to follow throughout their career. You see a trajectory and/or shifts in the trajectory.

Baptism often felt like a collection of smaller dances by a single choreographer, but not necessarily a single long piece, as the single title suggests. This lack of continuity between the sections was felt most when there were costume changes that felt radically different from what we'd seen before.

Even so, there was a consistent movement vocabulary that I'd only seen in Toni's solo work. It was very interesting to see her put some of that movement on other dancers and how that played out. It's a vocabulary that is somewhere between avian and entomological. Jerky, angular, quick.

And of course the visually unique thing about Baptism is the use of water---artificial rain, really---onstage. The movement vocabulary didn't look dangerous and all the dancers seemed secure in moving in and out of puddles of water on the stage. In that regard the movement worked exceptionally well.

All of which perhaps sounds like I'm ambivalent about Baptism. I am a little bit. Almost a week later, I'm still processing it. Out of Toni's larger body of work, I feel like this isn't one of her more successful pieces.

But because I know some of Toni's larger body of work, I find this piece all the more fascinating. Toni took some risks here. Her work tends to have a strong narrative drive, often using text to help with the storytelling. Here, text is completely absent and whatever narrative there might be was abstracted, allowing us to either see the narrative or not. She also risked with this movement vocabulary that isn't traditional modern dance, certainly not ballet, but somewhere around performance art territory. (It's really somewhat inspired by Butoh, but it's also removed from Butoh enough to not call it that, either.) Moving from a more literal storytelling to a more abstracted presentation is hard, scary work, and I'm excited to see Toni tackle it.

It's impossible for me to put myself in this position, but I imagine that if Baptism was the first piece of Toni's you saw, it might be difficult to process.

Again, there are blessings in finding artists to follow and watch as they grow, mature, shift and change. My second thought after the lights came up in the audience was, "this is a more introspective, quieter piece for Toni." I feel like there is some subtle line between autobiographical and introspective, and Toni crossed it with this piece. Toni has always drawn on her own experiences for her work, so that is not new at all, but what is newer is that she's exploring them in a way that is much quieter than I've seen her do in the past.

All of this makes me all the more excited to see what Toni cooks up next. Far from discouraging me from seeing more of her work, it makes me excited to see where she goes from here. In that regard, I guess I feel Baptism is a transitional piece. I can see she's been moving toward this, but it's far from the end of her journey.

It's fun to see two new companies debut with two experienced choreographers. They played to sold out houses. The next time they announce a show, get tickets early. Despite my stated misgivings about both of these pieces, I very much recommend getting in line for their next shows.

Alone, Alone with KDH Dance

This is a late reaction, but it is only appropriate that I inaugurate this new blog with a post about the dance company that I've followed the longest and, really, has influenced me the most.

I drove up to Austin last month to see Alone, Alone, the latest evening-length show by the Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company. I had listened to Kathy talk about it and it felt like it was going to be something . . . well, let me back up a bit. A little history.

I've been following KDH nearly as long as it's been in existence. When I first encountered the company, they did these large, evening length works, usually quite fun and quirky with just enough weight to keep them from being completely light fare. There were colorful costumes and big props (and lots of them). I particularly remember a cake that got passed around among the dancers that kept getting larger with each appearance. Great fun.

Then I went to Columbia College Chicago for a little grad school work. While I was there, I took in some dance and thought most of what I saw was on par with what I'd seen with KDH. So, toward the end of my Chicago life, I secured a space and worked to bring KDH up to Chicago for a show.

What I saw in that show was a revelation. They brought a piece of a recent work, Brief Histories in Three Acts. It was as athletic as always, but there was a new depth there. In the two years since I'd been around the KDH company regularly, they'd grown in their artistry. If I were to make broad, arguable statements, I'd say Brief Histories was the start of an intense period of creative growth. Another highlight from that period is a piece called Framed. Listening to Kathy talk about Alone, Alone, I started having the feeling that she was reaching into whatever place those works grew out of.

Of course, in between, Kathy has been making dances, and I've seen a good number of them and I'm always delighted to see what she's up to. But artists have growth spurts and then they have maintenance periods. I'd say the last five or so years have been maintaining her standards, but not particularly growing.

Alone, Alone changes that and ups the ante (no pressure Kathy!). I saw new movement vocabulary on the stage. After a long period of exploring partnering, I saw dancers separated by space and relating in different ways (expected, I suppose, given the title of the piece). Even the costuming was a little different; sleeker, with a more subdued color palate.

Having discussed the piece before hand with Kathy, I knew that this piece was coming from a personal place in her life. Her company had just celebrated 10 years of existence. She had just turned 50. Both of her kids are out of the house. Her grandmother (also inspiration for Framed) died. Her husband had a serious health scare. And she was exploring all the ways being alone is blessing and curse. How her grandmother lived alone in rural east Texas. How much she longs for some alone time now and then. How being alone with her husband, without kids, changed (and improved) their relationship. Did I see all this in the piece? Not specifically. Modern dance isn't pantomime or even storytelling in a traditional sense. But I think I could have guessed that Kathy was working with something very dear to her. The emotional content there.

I should say something about the music. Kathy worked with the ambient rock group, Hill Ma on this piece. Part of the emotional content could very well have come from Kathy working with her son, who is part of the group. Having them play live, behind the dancers, behind a scrim, added a layer. I'll just be that cranky old guy that says I'm not a big fan of ambient rock music and, well, those kids played too darn loud (I think if you're handing out ear plugs for a performance, one might consider simply turning down the volume of the amplifiers---but again, I'm being a cranky old guy). But it worked. It made sense. The music and the dance were of a piece.

Again, no pressure, Kathy, but I'm really anticipating the June show . . .