Review: Texas Biennial: “The Last Sky: Thermals and Thresholds”

by Ronnie Yates January 26, 2025

The Last Sky: Thermals and Thresholds, on view at The Silos in Houston as a part of the Texas Biennial, presents vivid work that engages with the most pressing concerns of contemporary life. This show, by turns tender and tendentious, offers the reclamation and re-presentation of materials and spaces as an address to destruction, work that investigates the “architecture” of the disasters of nationalism, of overproduction, and the cataclysms lost in deep time. Thermals and Thresholds might look to the possibility of transformations, but apocalyptic overtones haunt works that engage with material detritus and bodily displacements resulting from social, economic, and cultural disequilibrium. Indeed, three large-scale installations frame the show in a dark and reflexive way, interrogating our bodily and ethical positionality as residents of politically defined spaces and consumers of culture.

Patrick Renner, “Extraction (ugly tx).” Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

Patrick Renner’s Extraction (ugly tx) looks as if a golem has assembled itself from the debris of a demolished house to lumber out of the ruins and into the park-like backyard of a wealthy art collector in River Oaks to peer through a wall of glass windows at the dumb-founded patron. But Renner’s work is not gimcrack. This sculpture, fashioned from found, painted boards, is sturdily constructed and tightly puzzled together to dress up this giant in a colorfully tatterdemalion style. Extraction (ugly tx) refers to the work’s appearance as a misshapen version of the geographic morphology of Texas. 

A person lies on the ground outside of a movie theater with two posters advertising upcoming screenings while the projection of a drawing cascades across the wall.

Colleen Maynard and Mark Chen, “Crinoid Visits Hobby Center.” Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

A pair of luminescent, alien creatures, twisting stalks like tentacles with heads resembling the branchy crowns of trees, inspect the exterior of a theater at night. One examines a theater poster, while the other absorbs a globe of light. They hover above the supine body of a woman dreaming on the sidewalk below. The ghostly, inquisitive beings in Crinoid Visits Hobby Center evoke the strange delight of science fiction. This photograph is a collaboration between artists Colleen Maynard and Mark Chen. Maynard’s fantastical drawings are projected onto buildings and at other sites and photographed by Chen. Crinoids, however, are not the phantasmagoric inventions of a sci-fi graphic novel; they are instead a species of marine invertebrate, also known as sea lilies or feather stars. Crinoids have indeed fascinated humans, inspiring the slathering, screeching monsters of the sci-fi horror film franchise Alien. During the Middle Ages, fossilized remains of these creatures were once used as beads for necklaces or rosaries. 

A photograph of the Menil in Houston with large drawings of crinoids projected on the walls of the museum.

Colleen Maynard and Mark Chen, “Phantoms Tour the Menil.” Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

The show features several other photographic collaborations by the artists, created from Maynard’s drawings of extinct species (Eurypterids or sea scorpions; Diplocaulus, a horned amphibian resembling a salamander) that are projected at night outside the Menil or near Downtown Houston. Taken from a series entitled The Great Dying, these photographs, which the artists align with the tradition of memento mori, are inspired by the Permian Extinction, an environmental apocalypse that occurred 250 million years ago and wiped out 90 percent of the Earth’s species. Like a giant glowing scorpion, Eurypterid crawls beneath an overpass running above Buffalo Bayou, the brightly lit spires of the skyline rising in the background (Eurypterid at the Bayou). A caravan of these outsized phantoms move their immense bulk outside of the Menil Collection at night; they seem to rise from the deep like leviathans (Phantoms Tour the Menil)

A photograph of the Bayou in Houston with a large drawing of projected on the grassy hillside.

Colleen Maynard and Mark Chen, from the series “The Great Dying.” Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

Projected at this massive scale, these “lesser” organisms rival the lights of skyscrapers. They wander across the grounds of the Menil like sprawling live oaks wrapped in fairy lights. These gorgeous, playful, and moving photographs read like a cinematic tribute to ancient species, some gone extinct, which rise like impossible ghosts to investigate our cities, contemporary monuments, and cultural institutions. Maynard and Chen present them like the lights of a Mothership, bringing tidings, or perhaps a warning, up from the fathomless depths of geological time.

Immanuel Oni, “Beyond Memorial, Sacred Tool I.” Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

Immanuel Oni presents the cylindrical, haloed Beyond Memorial, Sacred Tool I as one of many light poles of futuristic design that have been installed, we learn from information accessible through a QR code, in “unsafe or underutilized spaces” to commemorate victims of gun violence. These light poles, used to “reclaim and memorialize space,” watch over “dark and unsafe” street corners like ancestral guardians come from the future. Videos accessed through the QR code show light poles that use colors to suggest themes that arise from the areas where they have been installed. One light pole set up near an old movie theater is tinted yellow to suggest popcorn. A warm, candid, civic spirit animates this project. In the videos, we hear moving testimony from mothers who have lost children to gun violence and follow groups of young people as they visit the light poles and discuss the aims and significance of the project with local members of the community, reminiscing and sharing stories about the history of neighborhoods suffering through decline or gentrification, recalling the landmarks and rituals — like games of “skully” revived by one group to the joy of a local pastor — of vanishing cultural histories.

A collection of photographs of different sections of the border wall installed with razor wire in a gallery.

Tere Senyase Garcia, “The Architecture of the Wall.” Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

Tere Senyase Garcia’s photo installation The Architecture of the Wall makes use of a sort of inverse mise en abyme as actual razor wire terrifyingly unspools over a series of photographs of the U.S./Mexico border wall, a barrier that draws a hard line through migratory space. This series of photographs that frame sections of the wall reconstructs its architecture as a kind of mismatched puzzle re-presented here on the wall of the gallery. The photographs of bars, wire screens, and sections of steel coping, all of it laced with razor wire, borrow the language of abstraction. The viewer is both drawn in by the cool aesthetics of the photos and simultaneously pushed away by the wire snarling out into the space of the gallery. Images of the vertical iron posts adorned with razor wire create a kind of screen. The wire and wall make it difficult to see what lies beyond. The wall becomes a way of seeing imposed on us. The violence reaches toward us, quite literally, in this gallery on the U.S. side of the border. Rather than feeling protected, Garcia warns us, we should feel harried. Beyond the bars, we see sections of sky, cropped views of a river, curtains of foliage, and images of barren landscapes. But no, something is there, just there. A soldier standing near a water cooler. Fragments of structures that become swathes of geometric planes we glimpse with difficulty through the bars. The architecture of borders troubles what we see and how we visualize what lies beyond it. 

A collection of photographs of different sections of the border wall installed with razor wire in a gallery.

Tere Senyase Garcia, “The Architecture of the Wall,” detail. Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

When viewed through the lens of abstraction, these serialized images of the wall become aestheticized, strikingly so. One notes the patterns, shifts in light, color, and texture. But the razor wire in the photographs spins out into our physical reality, into the gallery, the installation bares its teeth like the maw of an abstracted geometric monster. The razor wire in Garcia’s installation not only physically incarnates the very real danger migratory people are exposed to but also reaches out coldly toward us, scintillating with violence, physical and ideological. The installation suggests the threat these barriers pose, in different ways, to people on both sides of the wall: blindness, ignorance, and apathy on one side of the wall, physical mutilation and destitution on the other. How, we should ask, does one become the other? We are not, Garcia shows us, unassailable behind the wall. We are exposed to the alienation from ethical responsibility that it unleashes.

A collection of photographs of different sections of the border wall installed with razor wire in a gallery.

Tere Senyase Garcia, “The Architecture of the Wall,” detail. Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

The gallery space is a relatively safe one for the viewer. We may recoil but could also inspect the wire as if it were a curiosity, though one tinged with danger. We cannot leap through to these photographs. The viewer cannot, of course, physically touch them or the reality they screen from our vision. We are fenced off from the real meaning, the actual subjects, behind the photographs, which the photographs themselves purposely obscure or leave out: the bodies that are refused, denied, behind the violence of the wire. 

A collection of photographs of different sections of the border wall installed with razor wire in a gallery.

Tere Senyase Garcia, “The Architecture of the Wall,” detail. Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

If architecture here disorients, the aesthetics of abstraction allow us to sublimate our encounter with the abyss of the real, which the wall structures and reifies. By bringing the wall into the gallery, Garcia stages a further provocation. As we are tempted to identify with these unseen bodies, our bodies now standing in for them, perusing brutal realities become an enlightening cultural activity that can end up either deferring or disguising the very real threat the wall poses to the bodies of migrant workers. The wall, Garcia’s installation finally impresses on the viewer, is mobile, it proliferates in the current culture as migrant bodies become invisible, obscured, and hidden (in plain sight) behind screens erected either in (moral) fantasies of identification or current ideological imaginations both blind to immigrant labor and characterized by fear of the (unseen) bodies that perform it.

The bodies of migratory people, looking for safe passage, slippage in discourse, an opening in the edifice, should press us with more than the pathos of identification, Garcia’s work implores. We should be gripped with an urgency to act to bring down these “protective” structures which many so blithely abide. The threat to all of us the wall poses, its threat to the survival of the human commonwealth, despite our afternoon at the gallery, is presented in Garcia’s installation as palpable and very real.

Near a stairwell a wooden platform hosts a table with flowers and menus above a pile of rubble.

Ryan Sandison Montgomery “Self-Titled (God is Under the Rubble No. 2).” Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

A sense of our impotence, the doomed sense that our cultural products might be powerless to affect any real political results, is enacted with a presiding irony in Ryan Sandison Montgomery’s Self-Titled (God is Under the Rubble No. 2). A pile of debris on the gallery floor rests beneath a temporarily constructed deck, which at first seems to act as a kind of frame or shelter. The raw wooden structure has the air of a scaffolding, something temporarily erected to facilitate the repair of the facade of a building or some other physical structure. However, this scaffolding has been erected over something that seems to have been destroyed beyond repair.

Debris piled up underneath a platform in an art gallery features cinderblocks, photographs, damaged paintings

Ryan Sandison Montgomery “Self-Titled (God is Under the Rubble No. 2),” detail. Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

We learn from text posted nearby that, for this project, artists were invited to destroy a work and add it to the growing pile of scraps of plastic, metal, wood, and a host of materials seemingly ground up by the maw of an industrial trash compactor. Still, the pile of trash looks to have been arranged: a photograph of a man and a woman with black marks struck across their eyes and a small jar containing blue packets have been set inside cinder blocks piled there. A steam iron with an image of Christian iconography and the word “Fragile” printed on its face sits among scattered stones, charred wood, broken picture frames, shreds of paper and plastic, sprays of dirt and dust, a colorful, composed mess. 

A table top with menus a vase of flowers and a large plant in the background.

Ryan Sandison Montgomery “Self-Titled (God is Under the Rubble No. 2).” Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

A set of stairs allows gallery visitors to climb atop the deck and sit at a cafe table, upon which instructions on how to participate in the project have been placed like menus, complete with plastic menu covers trimmed in red vinyl with brass corners. A vase of roses sits on the table, and a tall plant attractively strung with lights has been placed nearby. The space is cramped, and one feels a certain slight vertigo sitting in the outdoor chairs perched on this temporary veranda. But the pile of detritus hides beneath. God might be below the rubble, but we sit here above it. The visitor can contemplate their participation in the project from their clean, relatively safe place at the table. They can even survey other works of art nearby. This work seems self-reflexive, which is echoed in the name Self-Titled. It seems to recognize as it enacts its own privilege of destroying work to show solidarity with those who have experienced the mass destruction in Gaza. It seems to recognize, even as it engages in, an antiseptic fantasy, despite the mess, of identifying with such brutal destruction of bodies and homes and public buildings. The ersatz cafe setting confirms that the project itself is a deferral of direct political action, and it seems to know this, even as it calls on us to participate.

Debris piled up underneath a platform in an art gallery features cinderblocks, photographs, damaged paintings.

Ryan Sandison Montgomery “Self-Titled (God is Under the Rubble No. 2).” Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

Still, Sandison Montgomery’s invitation to reflect on the “role and purpose of creating art” during times of political upheaval and mass violence can lead us to ask productive questions. For instance, what does it mean to assume the role of destroyer? In a hand-scrawled anecdote posted on the deck near the pile of debris, novelist, poet, and art writer Eileen Myles describes their experience destroying a piece of art, which they do with difficulty. A beautiful lavender box upon which they have written a politically sensitive message. It had wandered from room to room. They had misplaced it, forgotten about it. Now, they try to burn it but fails. They grow distracted, naps, and so on. Eventually, they cut it into pieces and deposit it at the dump. But drop their cell phone, which they used to document the process, in the toilet. “Success!” In a koan-like postscript, they write: “I also feel that the destruction of this particular piece of art meant it was going to keep destroying. It is not light.”

A grid of letter-sized sheets of paper cover a gallery wall floor to ceiling.

Veronica Ibargüengoitia, “Untitled.” Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

Veronica Ibargüengoitia’s Untitled performs a stark accounting of immeasurable loss against the failure of universal accountability. In this large-scale installation, sheets of plain, white, printed paper have been tacked to the gallery wall in rows — 18 across, 10 deep. Most of the pages have been printed with the names of the dead killed in Gaza. On the far right, this becomes text taken from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The lists of names merge into the text of the Declaration. The sheets of paper bearing the names have been turned upside down and backward, away from the viewer, so that they are hard to decipher as if the names are ashamed of themselves, have been rendered abject by an inhuman accounting that either inflates or denies the number of the dead. The dead don’t quibble over numbers. These names stand in for bodies lost, burned, and brutally dismantled. In places, the sheets of paper hang limp from the tacks. The pages with text from the Declaration of Human Rights have been printed or photocopied over and over so that the ink is heavy — difficult but not impossible to read. The clotted print of the text, the wash of bold type, becomes an emphasis and repetition that has chided us to no avail. 

A sheet of paper with names printed in reverse.

Veronica Ibargüengoitia, “Untitled,” detail. Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

This direct and unaffected display avoids even the officious, institutional design of bureaucratic forms which reduce us to the statistical information used to “populate” these forms — Kafka’s nightmare of an anonymous bureaucracy shuffling bodies like papers. Instead of official documents of a mind-numbing system with no beginning or end, we encounter the bland materials of a home office. A rumor, a murmuring spreading beneath the calamity and our worn-out idealism, beneath our impotence and silence. 

Sheets of paper affixed to a gallery wall outline the Declaration of Human Rights.

Veronica Ibargüengoitia, “Untitled.” Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña

Bare facts of names of the dead encountering measures that were meant to save them, a quiet pathos in the fluttering sheets of paper hanging limply from the gallery wall as we wander past. A murmuring, a droning that never dies down. Debates over what counts as genocide fall silent amidst these quietly rusting pages, with no birth dates, addresses, affiliations, or anthropometric data. Only the barest of Personally Identifiable Information: The names are accompanied by the gender of the deceased and a single number: 57, 23, 62, etc., the ages of the dead. Countless names have the number “1” next to them. Countless more show “0.” 0s and 1s blink from the pages, like eyes opening and closing. 

These stark pages might not stir us like the gore of a video justifying a brutal incursion, nor do they seek a reckoning for the violence of a desperate, ill-fated attack. Instead, we are given a plain and direct accounting of death in the face of our idealism. The failure of the Declaration of Human Rights can also be seen as a failure of nationalism.

The sheets bearing the names of the dead appear as if they have been recycled, taken from a ream of used printer paper to be re-used on the still, as yet, blank side, to save paper, to avoid waste, to save the trees, signaling our small, daily attempts at doing “our part.” The plain material belies the bodies, the ones and zeroes that are simply recycled in a public imagination that veers madly toward cynicism. More bodies, more discarded sheets of paper — the Declaration of Human Rights, with its reliance on a divisive nationalism, repeatedly printed is a droning that our territorial, irredentist debates ignore. It looks as if some of the sheets of paper have been spattered with archival ink, a material noted in the “tombstone” information. A residue, a stain. A pinprick. The names of the dead turn away from our universal refusal of ethics. And so, guilty before all and for all, we are closed up in our isolation from the Other.

Rather than compensate for destruction, the work in this show helps us to think through the impossible towards the possibility of transformations.

0 comment

You may also like

Leave a Comment

Funding generously provided by: