Road Trip: Houston Artists Showcase in San Antonio

Blue Star began as an ad hoc exhibition space in 1986 in order to give San Antonio artists the sorely-needed opportunity to show new work in their own hometown. After an attempt to put on a local contemporary art show at the San Antonio Museum of Art fell through, the artists involved worked together to turn an unused 1920's warehouse into a venue of their own. The center's grassroots beginning eventually led to a city-wide Contemporary Art Month celebration and inspired the First Friday tradition of local galleries opening their doors to the public, allowing art-going crowds to hop from one opening to another in a night-long event. Current Blue Star Director Bill FitzGibbons, an artist himself, invited Gilbert to curate the anniversary exhibit, which will run until May 15.

With contemporary art now a staple of the city's culture, a new generation is coming into its own. For the FitzGibbonses, it's a family affair. Sean FitzGibbons, son of Bill, has been converting his father's working studio into a gallery once a month and putting on one-night-only events, focusing on younger artists and inventive curatorial approaches. As First Fridays have gotten more established, the underground art scene of the city has started their own tradition of Second Saturdays, giving lesser-known artists more opportunity to put their work before the public. But for Houston, Sean made an exception. For the first time, LoneStar Studios opened its doors on a Friday and welcomed the gallery-hoppers to come see what Houston had to offer.

Knowing that Gilbert would be curating the best of San Antonio for Blue Star, Sean proposed the idea of having a separate showcase at LoneStar where Gilbert could bring the brightest from his own hometown. The cross-generational aspect of the gesture was not lost on Gilbert, who quickly approached Cody Ledvina and Brian Rod to share the curatorial responsibilities with him. Ledvina and Rod, both of whom also contributed work to the show, spread the invitation to the up-and-coming artists they have displayed at the Joanna gallery, including several that were participants in their own very first show.

Houstonist had the opportunity to sit down with two of the artists who were on display and talk about their work. Maria Guzman, who had just given an artist talk as part of the CAMH's Slide Jam! lecture series the previous night, contributed a performance piece called "When You Run Come Around" featuring two "models" doing a choreographed catwalk to the song "Calabria." Guzman responded to the body-heavy visuals of the original music video by hiding her performers inside large torso-and-limb-concealing costumes. With this performance, she took her long-held interest in working with fabric (cf. her flickr photostream) and highlighted its interaction with movement and audience engagement, combining the tropes of a fashion show with the two-dimensional patterns created by the costuming and choreography. Guzman and others played the part of fashion photographers, snapping rapid-fire pictures of her volunteer-models Sebastian Forray and Asal Shokati as they spun and bobbed along to the music's "whoop, whoop" beat. Lyrics such as "make me wobble, make me whole body bubble" provided the setup for her visual punning. Guzman told Houstonist that it was the word "round," which to her connoted both the sensual and the funny aspects of the body, that she wanted to emphasize in her piece, using the exaggerated shape of the costume to put the visuals of the music video and the spectacle of the fashion-show in a new context.

Sculptor Jonatan Lopez brought his piece "Your Fertile Acre" to the show. The metal sculpture is a new version of a previous plaster-based work that had been made on behest of Planned Parenthood for an exhibit at Project Row Houses. Both versions aim to represent the predicament of women in places where abortion is illegal. The new version consists of pieces of scrap metal welded in the form of a woman's torso, with conspicuous gaps in the belly and breasts, evoking a loss of unity with the reproductive centers of the body. Suspended between two posts strung with barbed wire, the woman's hollow shell remains frozen in failed escape. Lopez's piece was in good company with the exhibit's other socially-minded works, including a painting by El Franco Lee II depicting the flooded streets of post-Katrina New Orleans.

For Houstonians who didn't make the trip, it's not too late to catch another Gilbert-curated exhibit: Bryan Kuntz's "My America" currently up at G Gallery, running until March 29 as part of the 2010 FotoFest Biennial. The Joanna Gallery will also be having a big exhibition/celebration (including a reprisal of Guzman's "When You Run Come Around") on March 13 to christen the opening of their new building, dubbed the Joannex.

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Photo: flickr user mariaguzman