Unit B (Gallery)

by Michelle Gonzalez Valdez May 2, 2006

Reconstructing the Mundane breaks open quotidian objects and traditional spaces to introduce three artists to San Antonio. As you enter Unit B (Gallery), Brian Dettmer's dissected volumes of once-forgotten encyclopedias greet you within perfectly placed shadow boxes. The Chicago artist marks favorite pages in each book, then proceeds to excise everything extraneous that surrounds each image, phrase or peculiar shape. The end results look like textual dioramas or dusty encyclopedias eaten by booklice.

Brian Dettmer's volumes...


Dettmer explains himself in equally precise language as the lines he cuts to get through these books: "When an object's intended function is fleeting the necessity for a new approach to its form and content arises… Through meticulous excavation or concise alteration, I edit or dissect a communicative object or system such as books, maps and other media." It's this excavation that creates completely baffling connections and twisted textual inferences. My notes from the show read like a Dadaist glossolalic manifesto: Canopic jars, camel, castanet, Cassat, Cuttlefish, Conceptualism, bull-beaver-balloon, the Ocellated Blenny, sloth, Ecuador and fuselage.

Comic books undergo the same artistic surgery, but aren't as strong as the encyclopedias. Colorful, expressive eyes end up in the necks and spines of unsuspecting characters in previous chapters of "Commandos" and other Mexican comic books. A hot crotch on a baldhead emerges from the tunic of a stranger brushing up against The Virgin of Guadalupe. Someone gets sucker punched by a thug with a third eye and a cowboy gets a handful of a strawberry blonde's right breast while the rest of the characters slip in and out of fisticuffs. Funny stuff from an artist with a high-speed optic nerve.

Installation shot...


Austinite Destina Olivares pulls visitors into the kitchen with her disembodied soft sculptures. Three thin costumes cling to hangers strategically poised to play a traditional, familial role. Each features an image transferred to fabric, offering bright embroidery to label each respective wife, husband and child. Somehow the works evoke ideas of sexless drones, hovering in a space reserved for Stepford wives or the members of the Witness Protection Program.

Video placed in the corner of the main room fills the space making it somehow civilized and soothing. Matthew-Noel Tod takes viewers on a blurry tour of Berlin while carefully placed text gives a fragmented narrative. Jezt Im Kino, created in 2003, plays at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this year. Text plucked from the video gives thoughtful quips such as "We all need a witness. Someone who will see and listen to us without necessarily saying a word. Absence of sound." Tod succeeds in his attempt to take the mundane and give it a reconstructive jolt.

Curators Kimberly Aubuchon and John Mata take their time thinking about concepts and combinations of artists to occupy their unconventional contemporary art space. Listening in on one of their conversations is akin to watching two best friends bicker, philosophize and taunt each other into joyful fits of laughter. Both artists in their own right, Aubuchon and Mata met while sitting through art classes at San Antonio College in 1997. Mata seems to give terrible first impressions and Aubuchon wasn't initially keen on cultivating a friendship with the gregarious and vocal "guy that always sat at the front of the class."

Installation shot


Today, the two compliment each other precisely because they can disagree in ways that resolve inchoate concepts for future shows. Unit B began as a dwelling/art gallery space in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago four years ago. The first show featured photography by Megan Carr. The space occupied an area of Chicago similar to Spanish Harlem, where storefronts and live/work spaces slowly attracted artists and their ilk. Aubuchon decided to move back to the scorching South a little over a year ago. When she's not buzzing around, she works as an archivist at Artpace. Co-curator John Mata says he enjoys installing the work and watching everything coalesce.

"My favorite part of the gallery is installing – problem solving in a domestic setting, with a smaller budget. We're aware of institutional aesthetics (like Artpace) but we do things in a different way and we pull it off," Mata said. "Part of what we're constantly doing is thinking of things like 'Notes to Self' – definitions of different concepts and ideas and making those relationships in art."

This constant communication and cathexis builds a sound foundation for a fledgling art space. Their reason for opening a gallery? "We opened a gallery to contribute to what San Antonio already has to offer. We want to bring together people in the community in addition to both national and international artists," Aubuchon explained in a recent interview. "There's a lot of good fucking art and we never get to see it."

Destina Olivares


If the first two shows at Unit B are harbingers of what's to come, then South Texans won't be looking elsewhere for the "good fucking art." Both shows, Reconstructing the Mundane and Notes to Self, featured site-specific works/installations as well as curious trios made up of one artist from three regions of contemporary art world: local, national and international. That formula for innovation sets up shop once again with next exhibition, tentatively titled Pun Intended: Gary Sweeney transports his ongoing work with plastic cups into the weathered backyard fence at 500 Stieren Street, just a cigarette flick away from the stalwart Sala Diaz house/gallery. Chicago writer and artist Erik Wenzel escapes the windy city to show off his sui generis brand of funny bone drawings. And if that weren't enough, Johnathan Russell and Chris Wildrick plan to provoke a few smirks with photographs of cats and maladroit adults and scientific charts exposing obscure new species of dinosaurs.

The next show at Unit B opens May 19 from 6:30pm until the last Lone Star leaves the ice chest. Bring your insatiable appetite for art.

Images courtesy Unit B (Gallery)

Michelle Gonzalez Valdez is an artist and writer living in San Antonio. She is also the contributing editor of …might be good.

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