Texas Biennial: “Seeding Soil” at K Space Contemporary

An inkjet print of a butterfly rests on a piece of worn concrete the size of one’s palm. Shaped like a miniature concrete divider, or a small ancient granite stele, the piece of concrete is nestled among translucent road safety beads, like a small construction site, or a grave. The butterfly is reminiscent of insects pressed into the grills of cars over long drives, especially with the audio component, which is a slowed-down field recording of highways. Pulled into simultaneously macabre, sparkly, transient, and archeological directions, Adelaide Theriault’s Vicarious Memory (sonic-geo-ecologies of concrete), Sediment and Erosion (1-8 of 8) (2021/2024, 2022) represents the contrasting sentiments, and the sediments, of this exhibition. 

A theme of imagination and play emerges. Hollis Hammonds’ Carbon Collectors (2023) is a mass of semi-transparent drafting films drawn with brown ink, looking like gnarly coffee drips. One can practically smell the musk of decomposing leaves from these mixed media drawings, interwoven with painted branches, and I suddenly recall my own childhood, weaving through sunken piles in the woods. Preston Gaines has created in Rust Garden: A Triad (2023-24) oxidized steel flowers that in their outlines, open up like butterfly wings. His Untitled (2023) takes up a corner space in the gallery, with birchwood that has been malleted to a puzzle-like fit as an architectural partition that reminds me of the playground of my youth. 

Alexis Pye’s Found I and II are a diptych, comprising banners of beautifully textural heavyweight paper washed with gouache, with details filled in through bold applications of oil pastel scribbles. She depicts Black neighborhoods, two women’s gravitational chat along a sidewalk during the daytime, and people standing next to shopping center signage during evening hours, seemingly waiting and wanting, with their West African cloth spiraling into sumptuous contrast against electric billboards. Angela Chen has created an odyssey through a series of quilted inkjet prints on cotton muslin, dyed with acorn ink and showing Houston’s Buffalo Bayou, unfurling as a huge banner in the middle of the installation space. The textile conveys warmth and softness, with delicate and minute wrinkles like veins on skin. The images at the top depict the skyscape and industrial steel and concrete, and move into a middle section weighed down by scrap metal piles at the waterfront. The piece ends by way of pipes, puddles, and moist, green meadows that run down along the floor. My inner child imagines running down, over, and across the barriers and structures toward the greenery. 

Across the gallery is an entrance to Alexandra Robinson’s immersive installation, Mi Tierra (2023-24). The work is a two-channel video projected onto a pile of Texas limestone with a flag of multi-colored quilted strips rising out of the rubble. The two projections cycle through the same videos in different timeframes, sliding past one another with scenes of fields, of dry grass, wildflowers, and green windswept plains. At certain points, the camera moves past these fields in high motion, causing vertigo, and inflicting upon the visitor a sense of displacement and uprootedness. The assembled flag and the strewn limestone speak to a sense of tattered land and identity. 

Back outside, Robinson’s ink and graphite drawings speak to the same themes: “homeland: slumberland,” “motherland: fantasyland,” “badland: no mansland,” and “my land.” For Homeland #2 (Tlaltecuhtli) (2023), amongst blocks of these contrasts and pairs, the Aztec earth goddess opens her mouth, claiming all these forms of her making, abstract or concrete, into her belly. Comparatively, in Homeland #3 (map of 1830 US) (2023), Robinson’s initial graphite sketches of these words were haphazardly erased, the traces of which could be seen more clearly, after they were overwritten with pen and ink. Her homeland is a land encompassing historic Mexico and the US, as a place of her origin combining both regions. Robinson’s uprootedness arises from her identity crisis as Mexican and American. 

Jean Shon’s work is made up of walls of text written over photography, in dual layers. One can see the original photograph’s colors refracted through like magnifying lenses. There are three photographs in the set, showing a building standing and then being torn down. Some legible excerpts state, “Reconstruction-era Black freedmen’s community in Galveston county,” “Greater Bell Zion Missionary Baptist Church, across the street from the auditorium, burned to the ground.” Searching these excerpts, one finds the story of the Historic Lincoln High School auditorium being decommissioned after a fire broke out at the church across the street, which was established by the descendants of the 1867 Settlement Historic District in Galveston County. After the text has been overlaid with the photograph, the image is barely recognizable, representing the dissolution of material history, overtaken by language. 

Finally, at the far end of the gallery, Sindhu Thirumalaisamy’s two-channel video greets visitors, inviting them to let go of geographic attachments. The left side projection displays close-up views of the earth, roaming over shells and sedimentary rocks, and the right side flashes by in highway overpasses, cars, bridges, walkways, and roads. As she enacts a deconstruction of Houston as a physical and conceptual place, the ground beneath suddenly seems complicit in hiding the traces of place. 

Why are there no artists from the Coastal Bend or Rio Grande Valley represented in this year’s biennial? A lingering thought, in an otherwise wondrous exhibition.

 

The Texas Biennial: The Last Sky: Seeding Soil and Mi Tierra will be on view at K Space Contemporary in Corpus Christi through October 4.