Walking into Jon Revett’s exhibition Get Your Kicks at CO-OPT Research + Projects, a small artist-run gallery in a small Lubbock neighborhood once-defunct strip mall, feels like stepping into a dream — one filled with forgotten roadside motels, abandoned houses, and the ghosts of big ideas that never quite worked out.
A view of Jon Revett’s “Get Your Kicks” at CO-OPT Research + Projects
The cooperative-run gallery itself, tucked away in a quiet residential area, looks a lot like the diner in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks painting — lonely, glowing, and full of stories — it even mimics the same curving storefront window. At night, Revett’s show takes on that same eerie glow, dimly lit by his video projections and strange, purple grow lights that make everything feel otherworldly.
Revett, an artist and professor from West Texas A&M, is known for his big, bold, pattern-filled murals — large-scale tesselations that ripple and repeat like radio waves in space. But here at CO-OPT, things are more stripped down, more intimate. Instead of a massive mural or sprawling wall of color, this show is about fragments — patterns that don’t quite fit together, objects that feel like they belong to someone’s long-forgotten road trip, and plants growing in places they shouldn’t.
At the center of the space is a grid of 66 empty liquor bottles, each one holding a small succulent, air plant, or the like. 66 is a theme of the exhibition, the famous Route 66 cutting through Revett’s Amarillo. The major roadway connected urban citadels and rural townships all the way from Chicago to Los Angeles, a feat that took acts of Congress. According to the National Parks Service:
“Merchants in small and large towns along the highway looked to Route 66 as an opportunity for attracting new revenue to their often rural and isolated communities. As the highway became busier, the roadbed received improvements, and the infrastructure of support businesses — especially those offering fuel, lodging, and food that lined its right of way — expanded. Even with tough times, the Depression that worked its baleful consequences on the nation produced an ironic effect along Route 66. The vast migration of destitute people fleeing their former homes actually increased traffic along the highway, providing commercial opportunities to a multitude of low capital, mom-and-pop businesses.”
The corridor has a fabled history with military routes, motels, westward expansionism, the automobile, and the American dream, and was decommissioned in 1985.
A work from Jon Revett’s “Get Your Kicks”
Back to the exhibition: bottles are arranged neatly in a wooden case, but the effect isn’t tidy — it’s like a strange little cemetery of past indulgences, a place where something new is trying to take root in the wreckage of old habits. A sheet of clear plastic with a tessellated design covers the case, making it look like a weird science experiment — something between an art piece and a homemade growhouse.
The feeling that this is about both life and decay, survival and failure.
Dim lighting in the gallery makes the space feel like a forgotten roadside attraction, another glow emanating from two videos projected onto the walls. These flickering images fall across a series of propaganda-like posters — another grid of bold, tessellated designs filled with stars and rippling patterns that seem to shift and vibrate. The red posters with silvery inks look like something from an old government campaign, promising a bright future that never quite arrived. The prints feel both calculated and a little off-kilter, their geometric patterns not quite lining up, like a utopia that was planned but never built.
Along with images of rusted-out cars, bar imagery, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), dilapidated houses, and other Americana, a mounted deer head flashes by on the print poster screen. It feels like a silent witness to the endless cycles of life in West Texas — harsh conditions, failed dreams, and the people who keep trying anyway. It also hints at something darker, a reminder that not everything makes it out of this place alive.
Revett’s work always plays with patterns and repetition, but this show feels different — more about things that almost fit together. It’s full of ideas that remind you of Route 66, FDR’s America, and old roadside motels, but instead of celebrating nostalgia, it asks what happens to all the things people once believed in after they start falling apart.
A work from in “Get Your Kicks”
In an artist talk, Revett brought up the Mariposa project outside of Amarillo, an idealistic “community land trust” that is now billed as an eco-village and Airbnb. The failure to become a thriving utopian project came with apparent hardships like access to potable water and harsh living conditions. The Mariposa Facebook page shows a handful of tomatoes and natural-dyed projects as present beacons of success.
Throughout Revett’s image catalog in the videos, there are small, almost-forgotten details. The cigarettes, the yellow rose, a domino. The patterns, the glowing bottles, the bits of dead leaves gathered on the floor of the installation underneath dying plants — they all tell another story of failed plans. Things fall apart, people move on, and time takes back what it can.
There’s a certain FDR-era idealism hovering over the show — the reality of the works here seems to lean close to one of his warnings:
“We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle in order to feather their own nests.”
Revett’s pieces, with their rippling patterns and crumbling relics of the past, feel like the aftermath of that clipping. It seems the eagle has been grounded.
But if there’s one thing Revett’s work suggests, it’s that even in failure, there’s something left behind — ripples that spread, plants that still grow, bottles that once held something, and might again. His show isn’t about finding answers — it’s about sitting in the middle of the mess and recognizing the potential in it.
This isn’t a blurry vision of the past — it’s a sharp acknowledgment of the current painful moment of our foundation cracking wide open, spitting out distortions, wrath, defeat. And, hopefully, perseverance.
Get Your Kicks is on view at CO-OPT Research + Projects through February 20.
