Sensory Substitution, Devices, Perception, Alternative Displays, Bone Conduction Hearing, Parametric Sound, Tactile Visual Displays, HipHop, Gastronomy, Echolocation, Accessibility, Hardware, Physiology, Bionics, Tongue Display Unit, Electrode Vibrotactile Stimulation These are the keywords listed in Aisen Caro Chacin’s MFA thesis on sensory substitution. In the year and a half since she left Houston for The New School, [...]
The windows at 3700 Main Street in Houston have been getting interesting. I live above this building and have grown increasingly curious about the project as I’ve watched the windows fill up with artwork. As I walk to and from my apartment I’ve been witness to photographs by Galina Kurlat, a sculpture by exurb, and [...]
M’Kina Tapscott’s installation New Soil: Tessellations of Dark Matter is part of STACKS, a group show at Art League Houston curated by Robert Pruitt. Tapscott’s installation is refreshingly immersive and cohesive, so much so that this post can’t do it justice: it is meant to let you step in and be saturated. It’s a shame [...]
ZZzzzzzz by Nathaniel Donnett was the result of his one-week residency at Art League Houston as part of the group show/mini residency STACKS, curated by Robert Pruitt. On opening night for STACKS, the five participating artists—Phillip Pyle II, Nathaniel Donnett, Jamal Cyrus, M’kina Tapscott and Autumn Knight—were clad in gray hazmat suits while they inventoried, announced, axed [...]
“Walking, in particular drifting, or strolling, is already – with the speed culture of our time – a kind of resistance…a very immediate method for unfolding stories.” – Francis Alÿs Lots of folks walk all the time and don’t call it art, but some of them do. In many parts of Houston, walking is so bizarre [...]
This letter appeared in Raid the Archive: The de Menil Years at Rice. I was told it would make me cry with disappointment at what could have been. At the Rice Media Center that evening I also saw Chris Sperandio, who I know I can count on for untempered criticism of art in Houston, but he also [...]
I had an eyeball exhausting fun-filled weekend at this year’s Cinema Arts Festival. Because there was so much of it, and because I don’t have credentials to know much more than my own gut reactions, the good and the bad quickly separated for me. The first film I saw was The Connection, and this was [...]
The videos curated by Sally Frater in There is no archive in which nothing gets lost at the Glassel School of Art speak my language: repetitive gestures performed by women across time. In this post, I describe the videos through my eyes, then I interview Frater about her process. You can hear more from her [...]
City Council Meeting is a participatory performance work created by Aaron Landsman, Mallory Catlett and Jim Findlay. For the past few weeks, I’ve been working with them as a “staffer” for the piece and it has given me even more questions than I started with. Carrie Schneider: Can you give us an overview of what City [...]
Stir is a visually cohesive, materially investigative group show at M Squared Gallery as part of Print Matters. Rabéa Ballin, Lovie Olivia, Delita Martin and Ann Johnson also showed together last year with The Roux at the Houston Museum of African American Culture. This year, the catalog sold out right away so hopefully what this [...]
I’ve never met Stephen Kwok, but I was drawn into the work on his site enough to go visit his solo show, “Walled Garden” at Fresh Arts (formerly Spacetaker) until June 22. While “Walled Garden” is not the best remix of his work, it is one of the more cerebral and contemporary shows I’ve seen [...]
It’s a Phase, curated by Divya Murthy, features work by Lina Dib, Ned Dodington, Tobias Fike, Allison Hunter, Barna Kantor, Gabriel Martinez, Abinadi Meza, Emily Sloan, Annie Strader, Raishad JarBar Glover and Matthew Weedman, each of whom have inserted their art in Russ Pitman Park in Bellaire, TX, in acts that are somewhere between intervention and [...]
First off, let me just say that El Rincón Social is where it’s at. It’s my answer when people talk about the glory days of Lawndale, or how underwhelming the Joanna is. Patrick Renner is in good company at El Rincón with Matthew Sullivan, who works at Third Ward Bike Shop and makes perpetually seductive [...]
Three years ago when I returned to Houston from art school, I went to a talk for Project Row Houses’ Summer Studios. While there, I saw this tortilla press for tortillas in the shape of cartoon white bread and it made me happy to be back home and excited about the art being made here. [...]
The new permanent installation at Montrose’s busiest intersection, Montrose and Westheimer, is a laudable example of public art that truly reflects the ethos of its surroundings as well as trends in contemporary art. “Untitled” consists of two jack-o’-lanterns situated at the tip of a median. One balances atop a bucket of Tidy Cats cat litter, [...]
DiverseWorks‘ State Fair feels like a version of “Now THAT’S What I Call Social Practice!” As you walk through, you are beckoned to participate in an idea barter booth, to ask an artist about his role as a shrimp salesman, to chat with a gossip swapper, to play a carnival game with candlemakers, to [...]
In terms of size, concrete and consumer culture, Houston is a hyperbole of a city. Every time I return to it from another place I am shocked at the exorbitant much-ness of Houston. Somehow, though, Houston is also a hub of visionary art made from recycled materials and an especially fascinating place to look for [...]
In a 2006 interview with Nancy Spector, Marina Abramović told the story of a Tibetan devotional tradition in which a worshipper uses a mold to carefully make one hundred thousand and one clay models of the Buddha, counting each and every one. The danger, however, was that the worshippers would tend to fixate on [...]
