“Someone took in these pants
Somebody painted over paint
Painted wood
And where he stood, no one stands.”
The remnants of a performance by Seneca Garcia. Photo: Alex Barber
So begins the song “Shoot the Singer (1 Sick Version)” from the album Watery, Domestic by 90s indie rock band Pavement. A recent group show at Basket Books, sensitively curated by owner Edwin Smalling, takes its name from this album, whose first track is titled “Texas Never Whispers,” playing on the outsized mythology of the state but also inviting one to listen for what does whisper beneath this (increasingly exclusionary) mythology, beneath complex cities like Houston (diverse, neoliberal, a boom and bust, environmentally deleterious economy), built on a swamp. The exhibition’s title references not only the humid atmospheric conditions of Houston, including a hint at built, domestic environments that require the all-pervasive air-conditioning units to ward off the heat, and the filtration and (re)circulation these systems enact, but also, through a nod to Pavement’s album, creates a poetic nexus of hints and rumors surrounding the ideas of process, circulation, and doublings. The lyrics above point to recycled clothes obtained from thrift stores and the actions bodies might have performed in them, including the act of “taking” (to appropriate, confiscate, steal, grasp, clutch, remove, extract, etc.) and further refer to the “painted over,” the hidden, the screened. Taken together, these lines invoke the processes of re-marking, re-cycling, and, by extension, the idea of originality, reference, and even pastiche. As these lyrics might suggest, the work in the show variously meditates on the status of the original — subject, object, text, etc. — and its traces, whether or not its position, its “standing,” is unassailable behind this referencing, this re-making. What is re-marked might, in fact, take up a place that cannot be occupied so that there is always a “no one” where the “original” stood; this sets up an incessant deferral of any privileged positionality, which might have political and aesthetic ramifications. Our returns, in other words, might have nothing to do with the nostalgia of reactionary cultural politics but might be a return from the future, a recovery of something new.
The cover of Pavement’s 1992 album was itself famously recycled or re-marked. The cover art was created by defacing the cover of a self-titled album by another band, Ambergris, that group’s only recording. Artist Seneca Garcia directly references this process by un-masking Pavement’s de-faced album cover: he presents an exact replica of Ambergris’ original cover. A performance Seneca staged in the gallery continues to reverberate between the album cover, the empty chair, and a scrap of paper that marks the space as a site of “what-has-come-to-pass.” The two guitars, left side by side as a trace of the performance, very simply display the idea of doubling, which is echoed in different ways throughout the small, intimate exhibition. In a broader sense, the work in this show uses the interplay between the abstract and the figurative, a re-contextualizing of inanimate materiality and static documentation to sift, filter, reflect, and refract the profluent and the transitory.
Isela Aguirre, “Light Waves,” 2024. Photo: Alex Barber
Isela Aguirre’s Light Waves, suspended “invisibly” from the ceiling like a banner welcoming the viewer into the gallery, is a study in reference and doubling. This mixed media composition, made from two sheets of plastic, hangs like a diaphanous pair of curtains framing and echoing a window set high in the wall several feet behind it. Each sheet has been doubled and fixed with grommets, forming a “batting” space between the layers. Inside the sheet to the left (as you face the window behind), Aguirre has situated scraps, strips, and rectilinear shapes of colored plastic, along with three colored plastic folders and a jagged, saw-toothed piece of mylar silver packaging. In the upper left quadrant, two rectangular sheets of blue plastic form what appears to be a vertically hoisted flag. Just to its right, the plastic folders are stacked in a column and layered so that their colors blend to make new colors (a yellow folder overlaps a red one to make an orange panel and so on). In the upper right-hand quadrant, the mylar and colored plastic shapes are heavily layered in a dense accumulation. In the lower right-hand quadrant, the viewer sees, fixed inside the curtain, another transparent plastic sheet upon which a yellow semi-circle has been painted, irresistibly viewed, along with a mirrored semi-circle painted on the sheet a few inches away, and with the window just behind it, as the sun, or a crude image of the sun.
This collaged, semi-abstract composition of the left-hand plastic sheet has been reproduced as a painting on the right-hand plastic sheet so that the painting mirrors the collage, acting as a monoprint, a unique copy of the original, which in this instance means the work contains a distinct, unique copy of itself. The two curtains form a split in the larger composition, including the sun halved in two, forming a gap, an opening, which invites the sense of day — dawn or sunset in the window behind it (though the window is faced so that it receives little direct sunlight). This doubling of the day both accentuates and stands in for it. The sheets of plastic float toward you, acting as screen, filter, and abstracted representation. But the veil has been rent. An artificial or arted surface has been split open, allowing the world behind it to be seen. Like curtains, the day (both an abstract and figurative depiction) has been parted to reveal the day behind it.
Installation view of “Watery, Domestic.” Photo: Alex Barber
The delightful primary colors and “bricolage-like” assembly of materials and shapes of Light Waves make for a variety of bodily sensations and cultural associations. One has the sense, for instance, of viewing a proclamatory banner bereft of any didactic or inspirational motto. The reclaimed materials (mylar, folders), along with the figurative gestures of the flag and sun, signify things such as office work, electronics, the emotive force of flags, or a childlike drawing of the sun. But Aguirre’s arrangements work to unmake or remake some of these tropes and associations while highlighting others. The jagged mylar bespeaks a mechanical action rather than a digital one so that the plasticity of the object once housed within is invoked; the flag seems ghostly, as if its planes of color coalesce tentatively, floating there together and only implying the middle plane. The sun, however, does preside, though distinctly aware of itself as a representation.
Formally, the painting on the right-hand plastic curtain, which duplicates the collage of the left-hand curtain, relegates the layered objects to a single surface, flattens them, transposes them into an abstracted continuous form, a design, which both unifies the collaged elements into a more “composed” surface even as it thins their material depth. The field of materials on the one side interacts with their painted representation on the other in such a way that each slides between the symbolic and the semiotic: a culturally defined meaning versus a more formal aesthetic perception. The effect of the curtain is to, as well, make a loosely defined space between the curtain and the gallery wall/window, which one can walk into, so that it invites not just the eye to traverse the gap, the break in the composition and travel visually into the world beyond it, but the embodied eye can locate itself in the space before, behind and around the curtain.
Light Waves is a kind of celebration of itself and of what it reflects, refracts, and openly heralds: the space beyond it, the day within which it rises. In these ideologically pernicious times, this wordless banner, broken open, its layers that become surfaces, nicely performs a play of light waves, an illumination that doesn’t seek some final revelation but allies the provisional arrangements of its shapes and colors with its unifying representation in a depth of reference and counter-reference among surfaces. In Iselas’s playful and demotic composition, she gives us both a representation and its source, refusing to privilege either.
larí garcía, “while you were out,” 2024. Photo: Alex Barber
Directly referencing Houston’s climate and atmospheric conditions, a set of found objects, evaporator coils from air-conditioners or other refrigerant units, have been encased in heavy plastic and set on the floor, stacked against the gallery wall. Just above them, a smaller evaporator coil, also encased in plastic, hangs like a relief or a wall sculpture, though it has the surface flatness and the “framed” dimensions (due to the plastic) of a painting, and in fact, has sprays of light blue paint on its surface. larí garcía’s while you were out directly manifests circulation and the material traces or deposits that accumulate in a mechanical apparatus designed to condition our environment. Mold and bacteria often collect in evaporator coils, and the condensation that has formed inside the plastic makes visible the invisible — the air we breathe and the way air-conditioning units circulate the “watery, domestic” substance we move through. garcía’s sculptural enactments are material markers of circulation, extraction, and emission produced by and for bodies. But the title of the work also gives the sense of human absence, the coils themselves seem to breathe inside the plastic. There is an uncanny sense of the inanimate radiating an existence on the outside of human-being, the world for us, and without us, a nexus of materials — those built and deployed by humans, but also natural materials and processes that outstrip us — that move through their own cycles, witness and amanuensis to the larger animate and inanimate world. These objects, as has been said of garcía’s sculptures elsewhere, not only “hum with their own incapacitation” but also radiate their own stark and striking materiality — a tangle of tubes atop the wall-hung coil, the feathery “gills” crushed in places on the hulking surfaces of those below — as markers of the human world but also of the uncanny, the object that looks back at us, or turns away into the depths of the inanimate.
Abinadi Meza, “Parangolés (01 and 02),” 2023. Photo: Alex Barber
Finally, along with Aguirre’s Light Waves, Abinadi Meza’s work frames the show, bringing it full circle, back to reference, doubling, and the energies that erupt between what is being re-presented and the means, modes, and containers of that representation. The title of Meza’s work, which includes both the paintings displayed here and the films they are based on, directly references Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s work of the same name: Parangolés, a slang term that means, “What’s Happening?” For Oiticica, this sparked a politically radical, improvisatory disruption of repressive conventions. Oiticica fashioned cloaks, capes, and canopies using found materials, which were used to propose and enact fluid and performative experiences that would resist repressive aesthetic, cultural, and political structures. Meza’s series of films distill the disruptive and liberatory energy that animates the performativity that Oiticica’s Parangolés were meant to incite into a frenetic, cinematic dance — explosions, and agitations — of colors, scratches, and stains, which also creates, in Meza’s films, an unvarying field, a Dionysian hum that consumes singular articulations — including a participatory mobilization of, the “longing for,” the body (to which Oiticica may or may not object). The paintings presented here, records of Meza’s moving images, display strips of film as a container for this “criminal” dynamism presented “statically” as an insinuation and record of time and mobility. The rationalization and organization of time structured by the grid and “frame” of the film is belied by the brilliant splashes of color applied as an aleatory record of both the environment, through Meza’s use of re-claimed “pigments,” and the body (of the artist), through the “hand-made” labor used to construct the film. Meza’s paintings enact a tension between static record and “locomotory frenzy.”
In this exhibition, one thing is often a “cover” for an “original,” including the void of the Real, an “original” that can’t be symbolized. The artists help us to the question of what lies beneath the screen of material apparitions as things themselves are in process, pass away, the world mutating and liquifying, reflecting surfaces onto new surfaces, mirroring, refracting, assuming or even refusing impositions. The works in Watery, Domestic articulate states of passing through, leaving an impression; they haunt, record, and even celebrate the world with and without us.
Watery, Domestic was on view through February 9 at Basket Books & Art, Houston.
