Please join us from 11 am to 1 pm.

Shane Tolbert Houston Texas New Paintings

Playing with conventions of what paint can be as a medium, this body of work challenges the P in painting.  There is no paint, at least not on the canvas.  Rather a process of reactivating pigment in the dyed canvas fibers with a solution of sodium chloride.  I look to engage the canvas as medium and subject instead of its traditional role as a primed ground for paint to exist on as did the color field painters, and like them I seek to embody the idea of what a painting is even in its absence.

A drawing element is found in the sewn thread and breaks in stitching.  Sculpture emerges during fabrication: treating, washing, iron, cutting, collaging, sewing and stretching.  What’s fascinating to me  is the intersection between the domestic process of making these paintings and their heroic presence as art.   ST

Shane Tolbert Houston Texas New Paintings

TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS Injured Soldiers and Marines

For Mr. Greenfield-Sanders, best known for portraits of artists and other celebrities, the task was in some ways an alien one. ”In most portraits you take, you’re trying to highlight someone’s best qualities, the best angle of their face, their beautiful hair,” he said. ”Here you’re trying to, in a sense, highlight their frailty, their injury. It’s an awkward thing to do, to show the world someone missing their arm or three limbs.”

more from the New York Times

more from The Houston Press

“Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: Injured Soldiers and Marines“ In Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s photograph Danielle Green-Byrd, Specialist, U.S. Army, an attractive young black woman in a pale-blue button-down and low-rise trousers smiles at the camera. She’s holding her prosthetic forearm in front of her. This October, the United States is coming up on more that ten continuous years of war. The fact that we are at war ebbs and flows through the consciousness of most of us in the general public. But the people who have been irreparably injured by war can’t forget. In a project commissioned by HBO in conjunction with the documentary Alive Day Memories, Greenfield-Saunders took this series of unflinching portraits of young men and women disfigured and maimed by war. They confront Greenfield-Saunders’s camera calmly and directly, not asking for pity but asking us to see them for who they are and what they have survived.

Read a review of this work in the upcoming February 15th issue of Military Press

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders "John Jones, Marine Staff Sargeant," 2006

The work of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders will also be on view at the Rice Media Center at Rice University February 3-25th:

THE BLACK LIST PROJECT VOLUMES 2 & 3

The Media Center will be open from Monday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and from noon to 5 p.m. on Saturdays; an additional screening will take place Feb. 11. All visits are free to the public. This show is presented as a collaboration between the Humanities Research Center and Rice Public Art, and is sponsored by the Visual and Dramatic Arts Department, the dean of humanities and Rice’s HumanArt Program.

more information here

Whoopi Goldberg Timothy Greenfield-Sanders Black List Project

The Rice Thresher review can be found here

The Houston Press review can be found here

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders Rice University Media Center The Black List Project 2011

Numbers

This blog was viewed about 7,700 times in 2010. That’s about 19 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 21 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 51 posts.

The busiest day of the year was June 11th with 184 views. The most popular post that day was HILARY WILDER.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were dbhbg.com, facebook.com, mail.yahoo.com, mail.live.com, and webmail.earthlink.net.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for joseph havel, james turrell, richard tuttle, organic structures, and helen frankenthaler.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

HILARY WILDER June 2010

Opening Saturday January 16th: KYUNG-LIM LEE Recent Drawings January 2010

JAMES TURRELL Skyspace Reopens July 2010

FAUX BOIS : Rusty Arena, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Sherrie Levine, Diana Rudsten, Richard Tuttle May 2010

Dec. 16, 2010, 5:31PM

Artist James Turrell got to know Peter C. Marzio, the longtime director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, who died Dec. 9, while working with him on various projects. They include Turrell’s permanent installation The Light Inside in the underground tunnel that connects the MFAH’s Law and Beck buildings, the recent acquisition of 12 of his works dating from the mid-1960s to the present and an upcoming retrospective. The Turrell survey is scheduled to open in 2012 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York before traveling to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the MFAH and other venues.

MORE HERE

James Turrell The Light Inside Museum of Fine Arts Houston

Vernon Fisher Painting Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery December 2010

Vernon Fisher Paintings Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery December 2010

Vernon Fisher is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.  He has had solo exhibitions in Houston at the Contemporary Arts Museum (1980 and 1989 – Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla and traveling to The Albright Knox, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Center for the Fine Aarts, Miami) and the Glassell School of Art of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2000).  In addition to installations at the Museum of Modern Art (NY 1990) and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington DC 1988), Fisher has also been included in Biennial exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art (NY 1981 and 2000).

Vernon Fisher Upstream Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery November 2010

Vernon Fisher "Disconsolate Pairs" Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery November 2010

Vernon Fisher "The Incorrigibility of Pain" Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery November 2010

Through December 2nd

Richard Tuttle Metal Shoes Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery November 2010

Founded in 1966 in Los Angeles, Gemini G.E.L. has continuously worked with the most important artists of the 1960′s to the present, including  Vija Celmins, Robert Gober, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Richard Tuttle, among many others.   The archive of Gemini G.E.L. is housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. which includes one example of each print they have published, rare proofs and working materials and related documentation.  Click here for more information about the Gemini G.E.L. Archive at the NGA.

Richard Tuttle Metal Shoes Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery November 2010

From PBS Art 21:

Richard Tuttle was born in Rahway, New Jersey in 1941, and lives and works in New Mexico and New York. He received a BA from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. Although most of Tuttle’s prolific artistic output since he began his career in the 1960s has taken the form of three-dimensional objects, he commonly refers to his work as drawing rather than sculpture, emphasizing the diminutive scale and idea-based nature of his practice. He subverts the conventions of modernist sculptural practice (defined by grand heroic gestures, monumental scale, and the ‘macho’ materials of steel, marble, and bronze) and instead creates small, eccentrically playful objects in decidedly humble, even ‘pathetic’ materials such as paper, rope, string, cloth, wire, twigs, cardboard, bubble wrap, nails, Styrofoam, and plywood. Tuttle also manipulates the space in which his objects exist, placing them unnaturally high or oddly low on a wall, forcing viewers to reconsider and renegotiate the white-cube gallery space in relation to their own bodies. Tuttle uses directed light and shadow to further define his objects and their space. Influences on his work include calligraphy (he has a strong interest in the intrinsic power of line), poetry, and language. A lover of books and printed matter, Tuttle has created artist’s books, collaborated on the design of exhibition catalogues, and is a consummate printmaker. Richard Tuttle received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; ICA Philadelphia; Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; and the Museu Serralvesin, Porto, Portugal. SFMoMA is the organizer of a 2005 Tuttle retrospective.

Richard Tuttle Metal Shoes Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery November 2010

 

We are pleased to announce  New Mirror Paintings by William Betts, his third solo exhibition at Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery (also 2007 and 2008).  The artist lives and works in Houston.  Recently the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Houston Arts Alliance, Betts has also received top awards from the Assistance League  (Juror: Keven Salatino), and the Albuquerque Southwest Biennial (Juror: Neal Benezra) .

William Betts is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant Award.  This grant is funded by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.

Please join us Saturday October 9th from 11 am to 1 pm:
ERIKA BLUMENFELD

In September and October of 2004, Erika Blumenfeld was invited to Marfa, Texas as Ballroom Marfa’s inaugural artist-in-residence.  Through the generosity and non-financial support of the nearby McDonald Observatory, Blumenfeld was granted the rare opportunity to work on site up on the main peak of the observatory in one of their astronomer’s houses.  During her two-month residence, Blumenfeld created her first video-based installation, titled Moving Light: Lunation 1011, which documents a complete lunar cycle.

Lunation is the mean time between two successive new moons, and the lunation number is calculated from the first new moon that occurred in 1923.  This piece, titled 1011 after the actual lunation cycle, documented the waxing and waning of moonlight over a 30-day period, from new moon to new moon.

Recorded through an altered telescope and self-built recording devices, Blumenfeld documented the varying intensities of light radiating from the moon onto handheld photographic film.  The resulting images portray not only the changing quantity of moonlight in its nightly phase, but also the artists own hand which, in holding each piece of film over the long two-minute exposures, moved slightly from her own heartbeat and body’s subtle sway.  The relationship between technology and the human implementing it is expressed in the completed video installation, where each of the exposures taken over the 30 days were animated in sequence to produce a twofold moving account of the lunar cycle.

Moving Light: Lunation 1011, 2004 Projected Installation (00:03:27, looped, silent, DVD) Dimensions Variable, Edition of 8

What is the nature of light?  My inspiration begins with this question, which instills in me a perpetual sense of wonder at the universe.  From this vantage point I attempt to document the various manifestations of natural light we experience everyday: dawn, twilight, midnight, midday, the solstices and equinoxes, the full moon and lunar phases.  My intention is to catalogue the actions and intensities of light over time, and visually describe the astronomical cycles that occur throughout our year.

To record these moments of light I expose photographic film and paper, and light-sensitive digital devices directly to the natural light source itself: the sun and moon.  Rather than using a traditional camera or lens, I build self-designed light-recording equipment, which allows the light to directly travel across the surface of photosensitive materials.  The resulting images are recordings of the subtle gradient shifts that light makes over time, and yield a visual account of light’s trace.  As I continue to pursue the ever elusive and transitory phenomenon of light as both subject and medium, I am in awe of its infinite possibilities.

-Erika Blumenfeld

MEG WEBSTER New Drawings.

Meg Webster Installation View Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery

from left to right: Corn Starch, Coffee, Onion Powder, Cocoa, Mustard, Wasabi, Fenugreek

The work of Meg Webster has been shown nationally at numerous museums  including solo exhibitions at The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh 1984), Milwaukee (1990), The Weatherspoon Arts Gallery (North Carolina 1992), The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (1992), and P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center (New York 1998).  Her diverse  installations combine sculpture, shaped earth, living plants and water.  Monochromatic works on paper of spices and elemental materials – including concrete, salt and sugar – are uniquely appealing to both the eye and nose.  Like John Cage before her, Webster’s sculpture and drawings employ chance and passing time to reveal the intersection of the beautiful and the ephemeral.