Jay Giroux Exhibits at Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston
Posted Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Opening Reception: Gallery One Three Seven: Jay Giroux
Thursday, July 23, 2009 at6:30 p.m.
Help Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (CAMH) celebrate the opening of work by Jay Giroux in Gallery One Three Seven, a 1.37 square foot gallery curated by Sharon Engelstein, in conjunction with the exhibition No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston.
About the Artist
With a background firmly rooted in skate and street culture, Jay Giroux has developed a creative process and product which reflects his desire to connect the disparate aspects of the pop continuum – music, skateboarding, fashion, and club culture – to a fine art aesthetic informed by the relation of form and function, and theory and practice. In addition to pursuing his MFA at the University of Houston, Giroux currently runs Pep Rally Inc, a design and consulting firm, as well as Read & Write Editions, an art multiple company. Giroux has shown at spaces such as Objex Artspace, Miami, FL; USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL; Berkeley Art Center, CA; and Sanctuary Artsite, Burlington, VT.
Other Exhibits at CAMH
No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston
Free from the land-use and zoning ordinances that shape other large American cities by separating residential, commercial, and industrial areas, Houston allows a mixed-use approach where disparate architectures and functions blend. In this often chaotic, jarring urban topography, many Houston artists have been able to carve out spaces and opportunities for themselves, their work, and their communities. No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston is the first museum exhibition to consider the current and past efforts of regional artists working in the urban environment.
The exhibition features work by 21 individuals and collaborative teams. Participants contributing new projects include The Art Guys (Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing), who will present a performance that involves marrying a tree; Mary Ellen Carroll, who is reconfiguring an abandoned tract house in the southwestern Sharpstown neighborhood; and Rick Lowe, who celebrates residents of the Third Ward in billboards. Also included is work by current and former Houston artists Bill Davenport, Ben Tecumseh DeSoto, Sharon Engelstein, The Flower Man (Cleveland Turner), The Fundred Dollar Bill Project (Mel Chin et al.), Andrea Grover, collaborators Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, George Hixson, Lauren Kelley, KnittaPlease (Magda Sayeg et al.), Eric Leshinsky, Lee Littlefield, Benjy Mason and Zach Moser of Workshop Houston, Jim Pirtle, and Nestor Topchy.
No Zoning includes examples and documentation of important city interventions and visionary structures from the 1980s to the present. The exhibition incorporates a combination performance, lecture, and video screening space that will present special programs during the museum’s extended Thursday evening hours. In addition, a series of special artistic programs and educational tours will be located throughout the city.
Perspectives 166: Torsten Slama
The first solo museum exhibition of the work of innovative, Berlin-based artist Torsten Slama, Perspectives 166 features a selection of approximately 35 large drawings, paintings, and works in airbrush on paper. Slama’s architectural and landscape scenes and his figurative images are filled with meticulous detail and mysterious narratives. The works often depict post-apocalyptic worlds filled with abandoned avant-garde architecture, esoteric technology, and humans engaged in symbolically charged psychodramas.
Employing an unsettling and captivating style of Magic Realism, Slama’s works share the vertiginous perspectives of traditional Chinese landscape painting and the scathing satire of German Neue Sachlichkeit, or “New Objectivity,” painters and drawers like George Grosz and Otto Dix. Slama’s concerns, however, collapse past and future to reflect the perennial forces shaping individuals and civilizations.
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