CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Art League Houston is pleased to announce the opening of Jillian Conrad and Jeff Forster, September 2 through October 15, 2010. The opening reception for this exhibition is Thursday, September 2, 2010 from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., with an artist talk at 7:00 p.m. This exhibition runs concurrently with Cockroach Poems, an exhibition by sculptor Joseph Havel, Art League Houston's 2010 Texas Artist of the Year. Jillian Conrad is an artist whose work moves between the boundaries of sculpture, drawing and architecture. Shaping humble materials (i.e. plywood, concrete, and cardboard) into shapes and surfaces reflective of our everyday landscape, she connects viewers both visually and viscerally to the world around them. Jeff Forster is a sculptor who works in clay. Growing up in rural Minnesota, Forster observed the cyclical changes of seasons, conjuring ideas of life, death, and rebirth, concepts that are integral to his work. Making sculptures from reused materials and fired remnants, coupled with photographs of pre-existing sculptures, Forster's creates narratives that explore the passing of time and the inevitable process of entropy, in geological and human terms. |
Art League Houston is pleased to announce the opening of Cockroach Poems, an exhibition of sculpture by 2010 Texas Artist of the Year Joseph Havel. The opening reception for Cockroach Poems is Thursday, September 2, 2010, from 6:00 9:00 p.m, with an opening talk by the artist at 6:30 p.m. An exhibition catalogue, with essay by art historian and critic, Mary Leclére accompanies the exhibit. This catalogue was made possible through a generous grant from the Susan Vaughan Foundation. Design services were donated courtesy of Axiom. Lauded by critics and audience alike, Los Angeles Times art critic David Pagel says, "The beauty of Havels art resides in the effectiveness with which it disentangles wonder from transcendence, simultaneously reuniting mystery and the ordinary world as it rescues fascination from other worldly transport. Referring to Havels 2006 ten year retrospective, A Decade of Sculpture: at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Michael Odom of Artforum declared in his review, "the combination of style and subject were almost perfect. Among the works in Cockroach Poems are a group of collage "poems which Havel created using text cut from the book The Dream Songs by poet John Berryman. After Havel reorganized the text to form a kind of associative, personalized poem/drawing, the resulting collages were inadvertently further edited by cockroaches, who ate glue and bits of text, randomly altering the work. Rather than giving the project up as a loss, the artist addressed the act of nature by selecting the poems which worked best as finished works, and discarding those that didn't. The layering of actions, histories, and narratives inherent in the Cockroach Poems reflects the conceptual ground of his other work in the show, of which deceptively simple forms and gestures lead to a multiplicity of references. |
