Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.
For last week’s picks, please go here.
A work by Luis Valderas, on view at Artpace
1. The Sacred Portal of Amazctli (place where the waters split) – 2022
Artpace (San Antonio)
September 8, 2022 – January 1, 2023
From Artpace:
“The fall Main Space exhibition features local artist and City of San Antonio Department of Arts & Culture 2022 Individual Artist Grant Recipient Luis Valderas. In his exhibition, The Sacred Portal of Amaxactli (place where the waters split) –2022, Valderas creates an installation inspired by ancient portals opened by Mesoamerican shamans.
The exhibition includes figureheads made of Styrofoam, a shipping material that protects wares from being damaged while being shipped thousands of miles across many borders and discarded upon arrival. This packaging is engineered to keep the objects safe but has also created aesthetic forms, which Valderas has integrated into his visual language. By repurposing the Styrofoam and encapsulating it in brown shipping paper, the artist has transformed these shipping materials into a new deity of cardinal status that has traversed multiple borders in this reality.”
Sarah Sudhoff, “Line of Gravity,” 2022.
2. Sarah Sudhoff: Material Witness
Ellio Fine Art (Houston)
September 30 – October 29, 2022
From Ellio Fine Art:
“Material Witness is comprised of two different series: Point of Origin, created in 2019, and Line of Gravity, created in 2022. In both series, we are confronted with human trauma, as well as human perseverance.
Point of Origin depicts in a series of photographs and kinetic sculptures an interpretation of medical data recorded from patients in critical condition aboard Life Flight, life-saving helicopters used by Memorial Hermann Hospital to try and save the lives of the most urgent cases. In her most recent series, Line of Gravity, the artist employs self-reflection through video, photography, and performance to explore the subject of domestic violence. Based on a series of personal experiences from Summer 2021, the series seeks to portray the internal and external struggles one faces on the way to reclaiming a self-lost to abuse.
Through this experience of movement and sound, the artist intends to show how the stories of our lives are recorded and imprinted on our bodies. In return, the audience is invited to share in the artist’s journey toward understanding and, ultimately, a reclamation of one’s power.”
Christopher Blay, “Blueprint for America and SpLaVCe Ship,” 2022, cyanotype on hahnemuhle paper.
3. Christopher Blay: SpLaVCe Ship
Barry Whistler Gallery (Dallas)
September 10 – October 15, 2022
From Barry Whistler Gallery:
“With his newest and slyly powerful exhibition, Christopher Blay brings together threads in his work dating back for well over a decade. His through-lines are both apparent and subtle, but if you know his art, you intrinsically understand how what he’s making now is a culmination of years of delving into consistent themes around history, time, space, place, grief, constriction, and freedom.
What’s so breathtaking about this newest work is its confidence to ask questions, and leave the narrative open-ended. As we get older and wiser, we start asking more questions than ever before. Here, Blay pulls from both his Liberian roots and his endless love of science fiction to create a new sort of speculative fiction that may not be as fictional as it seems.”
4. Adrian Aguilera: How Soon Is Now??
Co-Lab Projects (Austin)
September 17 – October 29, 2022
From Co-Lab:
“The shape of tentative futures is the cone /
La forma de los futuros tentativos es el cono.”
How Soon Is Now?? consists of found videos exploring occurrences of a single year, 1997, projected on a cone-shaped screen, along with an assemblage of playlists, light-based work, human-scale text, and print works. Together, these pieces might function as non-explicit information retrieval systems.
Devising an invitation to interrogate a rigid, limited window of one year of phenomena is an intimate quest: any research found in the work is about the subject of 1997 and the investigator himself. Stressing cultural artifacts and remnants of late 90s production show us where and to what the artist was anchored at the moment. Viewers will simultaneously locate themselves in the timeline and do their own calculations of relatability.”
“Common Occurrences-Four Korean Artists Living in the US,” on view at Nancy Fyfe Cardozier Gallery.
5. Common Occurrences–Four Korean Artists Living in the US
Nancy Fyfe Cardozier Gallery (Odessa)
September 14 – October 31, 2022
From Nancy Fyfe Cardozier Gallery:
“Through the application of diasporic viewpoints, four Korean artists critique the everyday. Housing, food ways, and subtle moments in living come to life in the works of Sang-mi Yoo, Mizin Shin, Ray Im, and Yuna Kim. Sang-mi Yoo’s architectural print works reference public built spaces and personal memory. Using French Fries as an example, Mizin Shin’s large digital prints make food ways and systems tangible. Ray Im’s work combines ceramics and photography to make everyday colors more visible. Yuna Kim’s repetitive GIF animations reflect the uncertainty and mixed feelings during the thick of the COVID 19 pandemic. What we may perceive as common occurrences become unfamiliar.”
