Note: the following is part of Glasstire’s series of short videos, Five-Minute Tours, for which commercial galleries, museums, nonprofits, and artist-run spaces across the state of Texas send us video walk-throughs of their current exhibitions. Let’s get your show in front of an audience.
See other Five-Minute Tours here.
Alexander Squier: The Houston Brick Archive at Julia Ideson Building, North Gallery (Houston Public Library Downtown). Dates: January 27 – June 1, 2024.
Via Julia Ideson Building:
“The Houston Brick Archive highlights a large collection of bricks salvaged from sites around Houston by interdisciplinary artist Alexander Squier, over several years. The bricks are studied from various angles: their origins are traced, and their physical and sonic qualities explored. They are treated as invaluable ruins, processed in a way that is pseudo-scientific but also impulsive; walking a line between curiosity and fetishism. Part theater, part research project, the Archive combines sculpture, photography, and other documents focusing on the bricks’ physical qualities and histories; an investigative video reverts the bricks back into terrain, and visitors may make their own rubbings of selected bricks. The almost obsessive approach to the bricks creates an exaggerated sense of their significance, even romanticizes them. By tracing their origins and migrations to become part of Houston, the bricks can serve as a metaphor for change, migrations, and the diverse and dynamic fabric of the world.”
