The Fall of the House of Grain: “Dry Place” at SITE Gallery, Houston

“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

—Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

“Our management lies at the core of humankind’s transformation. As grain, we have wrought taxation, we have become currency, we have made possible the expansion of the ghostly energies of your economies, and in return, we have received enclosure. You owe it to us, there is a debt. So listen, now. From this site of consciousness over our own capacity, we now declare ourselves in resistance against death.”

—Marina Azahua, The Grain Speaks

For an exhibition called Dry Place, it has been a surprisingly wet affair. When I went to the opening reception, which took place about one week after Houston was struck by a severe wind and rain storm, I felt as though I was entering a dilapidated fallout shelter. Puddles of water pooled in the dark corridors that weave, maze-like, within and between 34 circular concrete silos, alternately known as SITE Gallery. Lit by little more than the occasional lamp and demonically glowing red exit sign, the space itself practically hummed with life as scurrying cockroaches, chirping crickets, flapping pigeons, and sprouting mushrooms thrived among the water-logged ropes, graffitied repositories, dangling wires to nowhere, and other forgotten remnants of prior human activity. 

The silos were built in 1960 and used to store rice grain for the Mahatma/Success company; however, defunct for decades, they have become their own post-apocalyptic ecosystem-cum-gallery as part of the Sawyer Yards complex. If you have never been inside the silos, the current exhibit, curated by the artist Saúl Hernández-Vargas, is a good introduction to the space. I say this, primarily, because Hernández-Vargas smartly gives space to the space allowing its entropic flotsam to become part of the overall experience.

As I crossed the threshold of the entryway to the silos, my first encounter was with a choice to either explore straight ahead, to the right, or to the left, but an eerily dissonant drone that throbbed like a death rattle from somewhere in the southeast corner of the complex piqued my curiosity and lured me in its direction. Before I could detect the source of the sound, I discovered, nestled between two silos and lit from above, a suspicious spread of rice on the floor accompanied by a neat cluster of withered leaves. As if conjured by the building itself, the grain seemed ghostly, a haunting reminder of the silos’ former function as a keeper of sustenance. The leaves (save for one real one) were made of copper by Hernández-Vargas but could have easily been overlooked, so subtle was the artist’s intervention. 

Once my attention adjusted to the diminutive scale of this artwork, I noticed other slight additions to the space: copper spoon-like instruments held up precariously by sticks, or dangling from the façade of individual silos, glistened in the lamp light as they carried in their tiny dippers a few precious grains of rice. Like a warning, some of these silent sentinels waved black flags or formed an “A” shape, symbols, no doubt, of a rice grain resistance — in anarchist fashion — to the march of economic progress that rendered their home obsolete. 

When I did finally make it to the source of the pulsing drone, I found it originated from a projected animation by Yifan Jiang of what appeared to be a cross between Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus and a non-player character from a video game set in a dystopic future. This figure, which emitted a glowing white light from the core of its liquid-silver body, hovered, larger than life, above us mere mortals while it rained down white pellets of virtual rice upon the ground. Graced by this angel of grain, I moved on through damp and dim corridors to see what other strange treasures lay in store. 

Circling back to the main artery of the complex where the light was brighter, I found on the ground a ring of Gatorade bottles, each filled with salt water, a copper plate, and a zinc plate, and connected by wires that resulted at one juncture in the creation of tiny blue lights. Although I smiled when a friend pointed out the play on words that the artist Tanya Brodsky seemed to be making, by turning energy drinks into electro-“lights,” I couldn’t help but notice my mind drifting toward more disturbing plot points. Struck by the fact that this sculpture was in effect a battery made from common household materials, I thought about the survivalist instincts of the individual who might make this, the dire straits that might lead to its necessity, and the reasons for doing so from within a desolate and windowless chamber like this one. Perhaps Brodsky’s joke is on us as we star in John Carpenter’s latest sci-fi horror movie, Escape from Houston.

The artworks on view in Dry Place appeared at times like artifacts of a prior inhabitant, vestiges of some former function that now exist, imaginatively, one step removed from the world as we know it. When I encountered larí garcía’s sculptures, with their uncanny materiality and subtly anthropomorphic presence, my perception of reality began to slip into a realm less constricted by empirical knowledge. With all the purposeless purposiveness of art, garcía’s sculptures retained an animistic quality, and I found it challenging not to see them, like the rice grain, as inhabitants of the silos. The one nearest the entryway displayed garcía’s knack for juxtaposing textures and materials to polarizing effect. A squat sculpture with a grid-like bone structure made of steel rods blended in with the industrial scenery as it casually leaned against a silo. Carefully balancing, however, upon its metal framework were tufts of poison hemlock; delicate yet deathly, these poison flowers granted an otherwise emaciated-looking sculpture a secret power, like an apotropaic amulet it wears to ward off evil. (García also hung a hemlock garland over one of the passageways; I’ll let you see if you can find it). 

Also within the central chamber, I found another of garcía’s sculptures, one that formally rhymed with the funnel-like shape of the silos. Once again, however, garcía’s juxtaposition of materials evocatively opened the form to a range of unexpected associations. I am thinking here of the sago palm fiber that rested within the sculpture’s inner steel ring and the petals of dragon’s blood strewn across its base, both of which enlivened an otherwise inert industrial substrate with the transformative possibilities of senescent biomatter. As I moved toward the northwest corner of the complex, a third sculpture by garcía blocked my path, its rattlesnake tail of a tongue jutting out as if in defiance. Its poor body, a torched wagon wheel, looked as though it had been through the wringer, but its neon green wedding tow imbued it with a feisty and indefatigable energy as though it had just been ejected from the belly of a deep-sea creature that couldn’t stomach its taste. It certainly belonged here alongside the other misfits hiding out in this tomb of forgotten dreams. 

After passing a graffiti-covered silo, I was about to round the northeast corner when I heard a plaintive voice quietly singing, low and slow, from underneath a stairwell. Crouching down, all I could see was an abyss as vacant as the black void of a Eugène Atget photograph. I was prepared to move on, but Hernández-Vargas approached and motioned for me to crawl into the cavity. Sure enough, deep within, a tiny virtual figure the size of a grain of rice appeared and slowly swayed from side to side. I found out later this dancer was the artist Umico Niwa, who had planted a Pepper’s ghost within this dingy nook. The physical contortions required to experience Niwa’s rice-like form seemed, by design, to bring me intimately in touch with the inner recesses of the silos.

What makes Dry Place a successful exhibition lies in the way these artists work with, not against, the space. So thoughtfully do the artworks merge with the environment that the space itself and its former grain-sized inhabitants become active participants, if not leading protagonists, in this exhibition’s environmental theater. At the silos the grain not only speaks, it sings.

Dry Place is on view at SITE Gallery in Houston, through July 6, 2024.