As the holiday season arrives, we all have a little reprieve from the busy slate of art openings, lectures, performances and other events. I have used this mini-break to do something I started this past summer, which is to branch outside of my immediate Montrose/Rice Village area. My trips started with an attempt to work [...]
Joshua Fischer
Cinema Arts Festival Preview … An Eye Toward Documentary
The Cinema Arts Festival begins this Wednesday, November 7th and will continue through Sunday, November 11th. To kick off the festival, several video installations are already on view in the Cinema on the Verge exhibition in a gallery space in the 4411 Montrose complex. Fellow Glasstire contributor, Peter Lucas has lent his expertise and eye for the experimental film, video installation [...]
Art League: Texas Artist and Patrons of the Year 2012
To accompany the honor of being selected the 2012 Texas Artist of the Year by Art League Houston, Aaron Parazette has transformed the Art League gallery space with a dynamic, site-specific wall painting. FLYAWAY extends across two adjacent walls with converging lines of shifting, checkerboard perspective. The genius of the work is its placement in [...]
The Island: “Robert Pruitt: Recent Drawings” and “Mapping Galveston”
Two just-opened Galveston exhibitions are definitely worth the trip: Clint Willour’s exhibition of drawings by Robert Pruitt at the Galveston Arts center and a group exhibition of artists riffing on Galveston and the theme of mapping at the Galveston Artists Residency. Pruitt’s drawings are stoic and sensitive portraits of his friends where markers of SciFi, contemporary [...]
The Art of the Olympics
The Olympics are approaching, and my mind has been wandering in eager anticipation. Will David Beckham be shot into space at the opening ceremonies to light a lunar torch symbolizing the union of all galatic beings? Will the US team wear their made-in-China outfits? Or has Harry Reid already burned them? Will the world rejoice at [...]
Watching Paint Dry with Gerhard Richter
Recently, I went to a screening of the documentary Gerhard Richter Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Going into the film, I was downright scared that I would have a repeat experience of being completely bored out of my mind, which unfortunately was my experience with another recent documentary about Anselm Kiefer, a [...]
Nostalgia for the Light
This past weekend I went on a film binge and took in a documentary a day for Houston’s Cinema Arts Festival. The highlight for me was Chilean director, Patricio Guzman’s documentary, Nostalgia for the Light, and the accompanying question and answer session with Guzman himself at Rice University’s cinema. The explosion of do-it-yourself documentaries has [...]
The Big Slushy Apple
Over October 26 – November 1, I visited New York to trudge through an early snowstorm (and the resulting slush and sludge) to see a round of recently opened gallery shows and ongoing museum exhibitions. Here’s a snapshot of my trip in pictures…