When Jim Pirtle turned a dilapidated downtown building into a notorious after-hours hot spot, he also created one of the most unusual artist-run spaces for alternative art and music in Houston, an increasingly popular city for working artists in recent years.
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"Going Postal: Nostalgia and Indignation in the Art of David Krueger" by Rachel Hooper
To enter David Krueger's room at CUE, you walk through the door of an old-fashioned post office. It was built from memory to replicate the building in the small town of Encinal, TX, where his grandmother served as postmaster. Krueger, born in 1953, vividly recalls traveling into town as a teenager. He would drive past the ranches of southwest Texas to pass the time watching his grandmother sort her neighbors' mail. Thus, the artist invites the viewer to step into his childhood and his nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent time. You can even faintly smell his grandmother's lavender perfume with which he has infused the cardboard he used to construct the installation.
Read More"Panoramic Appropriations: The Poetry of Painting" by Jennifer Duffy
Cynthia Miller sees her paintings as poems. Instead of playing with words stacked upon one another to create a statement, Miller layers colors and carefully chosen images that create lyrical and serendipitous connections. "My husband is a poet and we love language. The flow of the words and the rhythm create the meaning," she said. "I love the rhythm of a painting. I work in flat images and [they] create a trancelike state that stylized design will afford."
Read MoreLABORATORIO 060 by Helena Chávez MacGregor
In Mexico City, everybody knows that if you have an emergency there is no point in dialing 060. Everyone knows that help, if it ever arrives, will come late. Laboratorio 060 emerges from this state of national emergency, being aware that there is no way to produce any final resolution, because time and space are out of joint, and that state, more than being an irreversible moment of chaos, allows the very possibility for something to happen - without notice, or invitation.
Read More"On Tom Secrest" by Michael Patrick Welch
To speak with 65-year-old Tom Secrest about his art, you must hunt him down on the marshy edge of America in Lafayette, Louisiana. There, Secrest lives and worksin a tiny, dark student apartment, its every wall, countertop and floorboard layered in thousands of his etchings, drawings, paintings and various amalgams in between, each and every one framed.
Read More"Not Too Real: Karen Tam and the New Chinoiserie" by French Clements
Although Karen Tam says her work draws upon an imaginary China, she's practically lived there too, growing up above her parents' Chinese restaurant in Montreal. She completed schoolwork in the restaurant's back room as her father prepared a variety of food-chicken balls, egg rolls, chop suey-rarely eaten in the family's apartment. Generations of previous Chinese immigrants to the West had fine-tuned these hybrid recipes, guaranteed to be more popular than the original. Tam recalls a friend in Canada who opened a pure Szechuan restaurant, only to fold soon after for lack of business. She jokes, "It was too real!"
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