Installation view of “Time-Line”
Josh Pazda Hiram Butler Gallery is currently celebrating its fortieth anniversary with the exhibition Time-Line, curated with an intellectually rigorous aesthetic imagination by Josh Pazda. Lush grounds surround the small gallery, with its several sliding glass doors that allow fans of foliage and splays of light into the gallery rooms, providing an intimate and meditative space to view the spare, minimalist, and minimalist-inspired sculptures, paintings, photographs, and other media. In conversation, Pazda revealed the thematic overtures that loosely inspired the curatorial decisions of the exhibition, a set of poetic and compositional “ruminations” that guided him in selecting the works for each of the gallery’s three rooms.
Nancy Brooks Brody, “20 feet 2 1/2 inch Line,” 2018-2024, embedded lead at 64 inches height,
1 5/16 x 242 1/2 inches. Photo: Paul Hester
Pazda sees the works in the first room as circling around the terms “Endless, Indelible, and Elegiac.” Nancy Brooks Brody’s 20 feet 2 1/2 inches references drawing and the line with the somewhat droll use of lead, which is embedded into the wall to form a line or bar that stretches across the gallery wall at the height of 64 inches, the height of the artist. The heavy line crosses the corner walls of the gallery and extends a few feet. The effect of the line is to flatten the corner walls into one continuous plane, a kind of illusionism that minimalism purports to eschew. But the use of the artist’s height invokes the body, and Brooks Brody’s comment that when the piece is installed the walls of the gallery become like the folded sheet of a drawing suggests the space of the gallery, which the works, and the bodies, of the artist, of the viewer, inhabit, measure, expand and circulate through.
Tony Feher, “Untitled (Morning Glories),” 1993, yarn, plastic flowers, marbles, ball bearing, glass, paper clips, 144 x 29 x 81 inches. Photo: Paul Hester
Tony Feher, “Untitled (Morning Glories),” detail, 1993, yarn, plastic flowers, marbles, ball bearing, glass, paper clips, 144 x 29 x 81 inches. Photo: Paul Hester
Tony Feher’s Untitled (Morning Glories) also maps the gallery. Three lengths of yarn hang from the gallery ceiling and are weighted at the bottom by three ordinary sets of objects: glass prisms from a chandelier, a bag of marbles, and a ball bearing. During the period this sculpture was made, Feher had been diagnosed with HIV, so time and mortality haunt the work. Artificial flowers are strung along the yarn, which suggests ephemerality but does so by using the relative permanence of the material of the plastic flowers. A passing moment is arrested in these flowers that will not soon fade. The elegiac that Pazda imagines is tenderly entwined along tensile lines that seem to reverberate with the sadness of our passing lives. The yarn, which seems as if it might extend through the gallery ceiling and into the heavens, instead angles back into the gallery wall, so that wall, ceiling, and floor are touched, outlining, again, the very real material spaces we inhabit and pass through. The ball bearing, this mute charge, will most likely outlast us all. The glass prisms of the chandelier rest on the floor rather than hang from the ceiling, and the bag of marbles suggests a playful mobility. Feher’s ordinary materials become markers of space and time, frailty and memory, and the stability of the ordinary objects that moor us as we pass through our transitory lives.
Joseph Havel, “Ghost Library,” 2024, cast polyurethane and silicone, 72 1/2 x 12 x 12 inches. Photo: Paul Hester
Joseph Havel, “Ghost Library,” detail, 2024, cast polyurethane and silicone, 72 1/2 x 12 x 12 inches. Photo: Paul Hester
Nearby, beloved Houston artist Joe Havel’s Ghost Library suggests, in conversation with Feher’s material mediations, the spiritual and material composition of our lives. Ghost Library, a stack of books from Havel’s personal library cast in polyurethane and silicon, acts, according to Pazda, as a kind of abstracted portrait. Havel’s selection of books, stacked here to Havel’s approximate height, suggests the artist’s physicality, the physical space he occupies, as well as the history of the development of his ideas. What constitutes us, according to this sculpture, is, to a very real extent, what we read, the ideas we explore, debate, and develop — the knowledge we, by writing and reading, collectively produce. Havel has said that the sculpture responds to recent book-banning legislation. Ghost Library suggests the spiritual figure inhabiting us invoked by all we’ve read and learned. Its reference to the recent threat to our freedom to liberate ourselves through learning echoes the elegiac.
Robert Wilson, “Parzival: a chair with a shadow,” 1987,
birch wood with lacquer, 41 3/4 x 15 1/4 x 15 3/4 inches. Edition of 15. Photo: Paul Hester
Pazda has organized the second room of the exhibition according to the idea of “Liminal Doubles,” which is suggested most evocatively and physically in Robert Wilson’s Parzifal: a chair with a shadow. Wilson, also known as a theater director, designed the chair as a prop in his production of Parzifal and it seems to enact the very thing that critic Michael Fried, in his landmark essay “Art and Objecthood” decried about Minimalism: theatricality. The beautifully offset, yet carefully balanced lines of the chair, double into chair and shadow, both distinct and as one. The liminality Pazda imagines hauntingly appears as the chair steps away from itself and yet remains held fast by the articulation of recurring angles.
Matt Magee, “Analogue,” 2024, oil on panel, 48 x 48 inches
The final room, “Sequence, System, Season,” explores the idea and practice of sequencing, seriality, and repetitions — operations at the heart of systems, including the turning and returning of the seasons. Matt Magee’s Analogue, a series or sequence of rows of marks, suggests both the human and the mechanical. Though similar and sequential, the marks are unique, made by the artist’s hand, yet the sequencing becomes reminiscent of a (crude) system like the marks made by a prisoner to strike out the days. The painting could serve as a makeshift calendar or an abacus. The red line scored around the edge of the canvas frames what might be an alien, even humorous, digitized space, turning the painting into a curious computer, perhaps one found in the recent science fiction of Yuri Herrera. Analogue could represent human mark-making that is analogous to technology. The methodical, tremulous scoring of Analogue has an arresting quality of contemplative calculation.
Bill Jacobson, “Background Study #110,” 2024, pigment print,
56 1/2 x 39 3/4 inches. Edition of 5. Photo: Paul Hester
Bill Jacobson’s photograph Background Study #110 uses the technique of blurring to suggest the passage of time, the blink of an eye, in which the trees of a forest path turn through the seasons. Viewed in terms of a scale shift, the strokes of light describing the trees become wonderfully vascular or vegetal, like stems, blades of grass, or even the pricks of a thorn. Jacobson’s image renders the space dream-like. But we are not absorbed. The embodied eye moves through space and what we see at a distance transforms into startling detail.
Time-Line, through Pazda’s careful and exquisitely inquisitive curation, allows a striking visual and material experience of the vagaries of time through the objects and bodies produced, and reproduced by human mark-making. We peer into dimensions that we visualize, inhabit, and imagine, which seem to go on and on, as space and time will go on and on without us.
Time-Line will be on view at Josh Pazda Hiram Butler through January 25.
