October 5 - November 30, 2024
From Sculpture Month Houston:
“We are proud to announce our eighth annual exhibition titled “Solid State – A Celebration of the Material World” from October 5 through November 30, 2024. The location will be at Site Gallery Houston at The Silos, the agro-industrial relic at Sawyer Yards that provides a dramatic architectural background for our participating artists and an immersive art experience for our visitors.
The participating artists are Sterling Allen, Adela Andea, Cody Arnall, Victor Calise Blanchard, Nathaniel Donnett, Garland Fielder, Jeff Forster, Kathy Kelley, Michael Sean Kirby, Alex Larsen, Patrick Renner, Cameron Schoepp, Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher, Fred Spaulding, Carlos Vielma, Stew Vreeland, and John Walker.
Since 2016, Sculpture Month Houston has dedicated its yearly exhibitions exclusively to the exploration and presentation of installation art, mostly by Houston and Texas artists. We just witnessed some fabulous installation art here in Texas by Sarah Sze at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Sarah Sze has been an innovator of installation art for over two decades and created stunning new symbols and images by integrating analog and digital elements. She summed it up in one of her statements: “We are in the middle of an extreme hurricane where we are learning to speak through images at an exponential pace.”
The title “Solid State” refers to matter in its solid-state form, the other classical states being gas, liquid, and plasma. Solid state matter surrounds us everywhere and its solidity and constancy provide assurances of a sturdy world with a stable core. It is our fundamental reality, and we interact with it often without giving much thought to its intrinsic value and presence.
Solid state-based elements provide the classical materials for sculptures such as marble, bronze, and terracotta. This narrow list, however, has explosively expanded recently to include concrete, steel, iron, plastic, found objects, epoxy, LED light sources, even organic materials and much more. The cornucopia of new materials has encouraged a reformulation of sculptural art and stimulated pathways and images we never thought of before.
The artists in this exhibition are experimenting with different materials and probing for unexpected associations. They search for fresh avenues of artistic concepts to assess and re-interpret the reality that surrounds us. Above all, “Solid State” is a celebration of the material world.
Great architecture has always celebrated the material world, the Pyramids of Egypt are the prime example. The industrial age spawned new structures made from iron, like the Eiffel Tower in Paris that signaled the belief in a bright and better future. One of the most curious monuments ever proposed, but never built, was Tatlin’s Tower for St. Petersburg in Russia. It was supposed to be a spiral steel structure of 400 meters in height. Only scale models are in existence today.”
Reception: October 5, 2024 | 6–9 pm
1502 Sawyer Street
Houston, 77007 Texas
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