The Texas Biennial at DiverseWorks and the Blaffer Art Museum

Ian Gerson, “For our dreams to carry as mirrors, 2024. Photo: Francisco Ramos

A loosely woven mesh of ropes, strips of mylar emergency blankets, plastic bags, zip ties, Mardi Gras beads, and other detritus forms a colorful banner in the Blaffer Art Museum’s section of the current Texas Biennial. Ian Gerson’s For our dreams to carry as mirrors (2024), is displayed in the ground-floor gallery; the weaving hangs at a short distance from the wall, and the lighting re-creates the object’s tangled grid as a cast-shadow line drawing on the adjacent wall. Together the object and shadow are reminiscent of Gego’s “drawings without paper” from the mid-1970s to the mid-80s. In Gerson’s work, two threads of green plastic ribbon dangle furtively to rest on the gallery floor, and here as this object is linked to its architectural container — it is hung from the ceiling, its shadows mark the wall, and the ribbons gently touching the floor — one thinks of a broad history that connects modernist artwork to architectural support to the space of the viewer. Still further, Gerson’s work is made of discarded material collected from urban waterways — Galveston Bay, the Houston Ship Channel, and the Mississippi River – and as a result emphasizes the entwining of embodied spectatorship with plastics, geology, and a range of marginalized contexts and bodies. Among the many axes the biennial touches, this — a multifarious engagement with marginalized bodies and spaces — is crucial to Texas and its place within the Americas.

Guadalupe Hernandez, “Con Cariño (Fields of Hope).” Photo: Carolina Rios Robles Kelleher

Installation view of “The Last Sky.” Photo: Carolina Rios Robles Kelleher

The Blaffer exhibition is titled The Last Sky, and, as a wall panel offers, it “encourages viewers to look up and see the interplay between skies, oceans, shores, and land across the artworks in the gallery space.” Indeed, much of the work at the Blaffer is hung high. Guadalupe Hernandez’s Con Cariño (Fields of Hope), a papel picado made of kozo paper, is almost to the ceiling. This position, of course, echoes the traditional height of the Mexican decoration (typically hung from ceilings, high on walls, or over streets), and the work’s subject and crafting is an homage to Hernandez’s parents’ labor as well as their migration. Placed so high, it is difficult to inspect the handmade details of the work — a critical rejoinder to the way immigrant labor often goes unseen. Moreover, the elevated position of this and many works in the exhibition creates a push and pull between the intimacy of making and the distance of analysis. On an adjacent wall, Antonio Lechuga Jr.’s St. Christopher, Patron Saint of Travelers Guiding River Crossers is a tableau in the vein of history paintings that brings together St. Cristopher with the perils of contemporary immigration. The work is made of fleece blankets (cobijas), which are often sold streetside. One senses the soft warmth of the fleece simultaneous to the cold fatigue of long uncertain foot travel, and again, hung high on the wall, the work shuttles back and forth between proximity and distance.

Antonio Lechuga Jr., “St. Christopher, Patron Saint of Travelers Guiding River Crossers,” detail. Photo: Carolina Rios Robles Kelleher

Returning to the exhibition title’s invocation of “sky,” these artworks-cum-clouds productively disorient spectators — one is asked to look up for much of the exhibition, rather than to the museum standard 58” on-center hang height. Sara Ahmed describes a queer phenomenology wherein disorientation is a critical step in delinking from normative embodied modes of interacting with the world. The Blaffer exhibition display might invoke something of a queering, in Ahmed’s disorienting terms, to the standard gallery-going experience as do the works themselves. In fact, Gerson describes their woven work as incorporating discarded materials — or “centering what’s been refused” — as a project of “queer longing” and “trans consciousness.” The disruption of normative art materials in this work extends to the marginalized subjects of Hernandez’s papel picados and Lechuga Jr.’s cobijas and the non-normative displays of the exhibition itself, and together the show puts pressure on standardized modes of representation, of display, and ultimately of being.

Brandon Ballengée, “Abyss,” detail. Photo: Carolina Rios Robles Kelleher

If the Blaffer’s exhibition asks viewers to look up, another Biennial venue, DiverseWorks, asks one to look down: Brandon Ballengée’s work Abyss brings materials from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico — fish, squid, crabs, coral — into the gallery in glass jars. The arrangement of underwater specimens points to the unseen non-human bodies impacted by resource extraction in the Gulf, and to the ways these impacts extend to the gallery-goers looking at them. Zuyva Sevilla’s Sink, also at DiverseWorks, uses a thermal camera and projection to image temperature as it changes in relation to viewers’ bodies, moving in front of or touching the steel sheets where the thermal images appear. Embodied spectatorship here is related to the broader ecological focus of the show to insist that one recognize the inseparability of humans and geology.

Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud, “Mapping Riverbanks & Plantations.” Photo: Carolina Rios Robles Kelleher

Much of this might be described as a type of mapping, which indeed plays a significant role throughout the DiverseWorks portion of the Biennial, titled River on Fire. In Heather L. Johnson’s The Brio Memory Project: Extraction, Erasure, and the Power of Remembering, the artist creates a series of drawings and video displays to re-map the impacts of the Brio Superfund toxic waste dump in southeast Houston. Part of the project incorporates the voices of those impacted: spectators are invited to share their own stories, which will be incorporated into the work. In another project of re-mapping that links earth, bodies, and sky, Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud’s Mapping Riverbanks & Plantations depicts in a semi-abstract manner waterways in Harris County and parts of Montgomery, Liberty, Chambers, Galveston, Brazoria, Fort Bend, and Waller Counties, and recognizes that most plantations which enslaved people were located along these riverbanks. These works and the many projects of re-mapping at both the Blaffer and DiverseWorks sections of the Biennial disrupt conventional ways space and bodies have been carved up, mapped out, and pinned down. Again, thinking with Ahmed’s encouragement to disorient, these works do not offer a singular map; instead, they embrace a polyvocal and abstract set of constellations.

Zuyva Sevilla, “Sink.” Photo: Carolina Rios Robles Kelleher

Further reading: Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006).