There has been a lot made of Shepard Fairey lately. I won’t go into that. But the most powerful work of political art I saw during the election was at E.A.S.T. last year. It was a simple piece of watercolor paper with the words “BLACK PRESIDENT,” centered, all caps, written across its middle, leafed in gold. At the time, like the much-touted Fairey piece, the sentiment was a mere aspiration. The possibility of a non-white president was the dream of the heavens, an act of redemption pushing a hole in the clouds to see sun. That simple yet elaborate piece was the work of Carlos Rosales-Silva, and it worked so well because it put into balance the historically oppressive identity marker, BLACK, and the greatest aspiration for political achievement, PRESIDENT. The piece was at once simple and monumental in a powerful historical moment.

For his show at MASS Gallery, Rosales-Silva continues to plumb the depths of racial identity, focusing on his own Native American and Mexican heritage. Flavored by a healthy dose of machismo and pop culture, No National Monument is dominated by two sculptural works. On one end, the words VATOS LOCOS 4EVR are spelled out in huge gold Mylar balloons and float in three ranks like pipes in an organ. The reference comes from the film epic Blood In, Blood Out, but it’s used here as a totem of the Mexican-American youths who graffiti the walls of their border towns with the slogan. The letters hover like a collection of Koons rabbits, lifted by their own aspirations of buoyancy, upward mobility and beauty. The letters are also sad, the way a piñata is sad, doomed to be smashed, its cavity emptied.

On the other end of the gallery, a balloon wrapped hatchet juts from a log and is surrounded by a wheel of yellow, white and pink decorative sand. A dangling feather and two cameos of Indian warriors adorn the title piece, No National Monument (2009), completing the reference to Native spirituality and masculine power. Bookending the space, the two sculptures are emblematic of Rosales-Silva’s strengths. They are at once reverent and self-deprecating, loaded with clichés yet defying the clichéd, able to address issues of identity while infusing a sense of humor into the overall assemblages.

Five works on paper hang on the walls. All but one feature quotes Rosales-Silva gleaned from Mexican-American themed movies and stuck on watercolor paper in gold leaf. The phrases he choose, “Death don’t have no mercy/ in this land,” “Then the cops showed up/ and we lied like rugs,” “I am immortal/ I have inside of me blood of kings,” “If you don’t give me heaven/ I’ll raise hell,” belie a deep emotional connection with the sentiments they convey. The gold leaf on white elevates the phrases, like plaques, to a form of public/governmental art the likes of which you find on DC monuments. The final work on paper simply says, “FUCK SPAIN.” The statements are short, witty and poignant. By re-contextualizing these phrases, which otherwise are quaint and sentimental, Rosales-Silva memorializes them. The words are no longer simple statements, but become epic assertions shining in gold. Part of the reason this re-contextualization works is because the statements are so incongruous with the medium in which they are presented. There is a lot a humor in that, and it’s this humor working with the monumental sentiments that I would like to see more of in the future.

Rosales-Silva is treading familiar ground here. The Indian and Mexican clichés are old, but what makes Rosales-Silva’s work interesting is the idea that these clichés can gain new life when elevated and seen through a filter of humor. No National Monument is an attempt to reclaim culturally constructed images of Native Americans (cameos, hatchet, feathers) and Mexicans (phrases from movies), and transform them into emblems of spirituality, beauty, and strength. And Rosales-Silva has a real knack for elevating the quotidian symbols of Native American and Mexican life, transforming them into the very monuments that his show’s title claims do not exist.

Dan Boehl lives in Austin, where he is working on a post-petroleum children's novel.

Lordy Rodriguez
Austin Museum of Art, Austin
Through May 17
by Eric Zimmerman

Lordy Rodriguez, Texas, 2006, Ink on paper, Triptych, each panel 63 x 45 inches. Courtesy the artist and Finesilver Gallery, San Antonio.

Cartography is just one instance of an essentially anthropocentric attempt at organizing the world—an attempt wherein the notion of space is subordinated to locations of significant places. Seductive in their formal qualities of line, shape, color and text, Lordy Rodriguez’s nomadic maps are no exception to this desire to order our experiences of the world. States of America is a decade long project that, utilizing the language of cartography, sets out to re-map the United States. In addition to the fifty known states Rodriguez gives us five more to complete his project: Internet, Hollywood, Monopoly, Disney and Territory. The presence of these additional states suggests that our geography is as much a state of mind as a concrete reality, a key idea surrounding all of Rodriguez’s drawn places.

Lined up and stacked atop one another throughout AMOA’s central galleries, Rodriguez’s mythical States are visually striking. Multitudes of place names populate the precisely drawn maps, pulling you into their carefully articulated surfaces. Once you are there, the drawings create an immediate sense of spatial disjunction. Rodriguez’s re-locating and re-shaping of major cities, municipalities, territories and neighborhoods throw into question what you know about geographic location. Hollywood, for example, borders a newly shaped Republic of Texas. From state to state you are met with these unfamiliar juxtapositions of location and landscape, until one place blurs into another in rapid succession and eventually numbing repetition.

This repetition of form and strategy eventually diminishes the rewards of looking at the drawings individually. The exhibition’s monotony may stem from the larger organization and installation of the project. Rodriguez wants us to see States of America as a single piece, yet the drawings are framed individually and hung with little apparent attention to their relationship with one another. The straightforward installation is a missed opportunity to further complicate our notions of the map and place. In addition, a few of the drawings were unavailable for the exhibition. If parts of the map are missing, where does this leave the piece as a whole? There is tremendous reward to be found in peering into the individual drawings and reveling in their disjunctive effect, but the larger project suffers from the missing pieces and an inconsequential installation.

More noticeable variation in his approach to each of the fifty-five states could only compliment Rodriguez’s deft handling of his medium and skill at making an image on paper. A topographic map with its network of frenetic concentric lines, or even a map or two of a specific city’s streets would be a welcomed change in point of view, like the key map, which “zooms out” offering a view of all 55 states and changing our location as a viewer more dramatically.

Memory, travel and the creation and definition of place loom large under the surface of Rodriguez’s drawings. Artistic precedents can be found in the work of visionary artists and architects, whose speculative practices use our knowledge of the world and re-imagine it. As with those visionary artists and architects of the recent past, the question remains whether the work is merely a paper reality or behind the surface there is something concrete patiently waiting to take form. In Rodriguez’s case, the latter is possible. Given his reliance on personal experience to create them, Rodriguez’s maps may be not only a two-dimensional proposition, but also the residue of a corporeal reality.

Eric Zimmerman is an artist living and working in Austin.

Kelli Vance
TXB 09, Big Medium, Austin
Through April 11
by Claire Ruud

Kelli Vance, She Became Frightened and Stopped Listening, 2008, Oil on canvas, 36 x 96 inches. Courtesy Chris Jay Hoofnagle, San Francisco, CA.

Seduction, brimming with violence and danger, pervades Kelli Vance’s large-scale, cinematic paintings of women. In one such work, a well-heeled foot steps down a spiral staircase behind the splayed body of a woman whose neck appears to have broken in a fall. In another, one woman straddles another who lies prone on a bed, the former’s hands tight around the latter’s neck. These paintings beg narratives laden with malevolence and homoeroticism—a vicious paring.

Taken together, the group of paintings chosen for Vance's solo exhibition at the Texas Biennial raises a whole set of questions for me about the intersection of violence, danger and homoerotic desire between women. What’s so sexy about a cat fight? Why are lesbian thrillers and murder mysteries (The Hunger, Bound or this season of the L Word) so sensational?

Vance’s paintings flirt with these questions, and the larger dynamics underlying them—dynamics of power and pleasure, of public and private, of personal and political. By flirt I mean that her paintings engage violence and homoeroticism experimentally, playfully and provocatively. Vance is still in the earliest stages of her career, (she received her MFA last year from the University of Houston,) and like the beginning of any relationship, her paintings are exploratory, agitated and brimming with anticipation.

Vance paints from photographs. Most often, she uses herself as model for these images, setting up the scene so that she can pose for the camera and snap the shutter remotely. Using oil on canvas and a photo-realist style, she blows these images up dramatically (the smallest work in the show is 3 feet wide and 8 feet tall). Vance’s sharp, polished style and impressive scale, coupled with her sadomasochistic subject matter, compound the seductive quality of the work.

Curator Michael Duncan’s prominent positioning of two works—Sometimes I Hate You at the front of the first gallery and I Kissed a Girl, depicting singer Katy Perry of “I Kissed a Girl” fame, at the back of the second—heightens the homoerotic charge of the entire exhibition. A chillingly beautiful painting of Vance pinned to the ground by another woman, She Became Frightened and Stopped Listening (2008), feels sexually predatory, and a portrait of Vance with honey dripping over her face and bare collarbone seems made for a woman’s delectation.

Vance’s repeated appearances in her work point to the fabricated quality of her images. These are fantasy—fantasy as a productive opportunity to escape the limitations of culturally constructed identities and socially acceptable situations. The fantasies Vance paints rehearse a common cultural wet dream/nightmare. Yet again, the threat of physical violence stalks in the shadows behind homoeroticism; lesbian attraction threatens moral order.

Beyond her own recurring presence in the images, Vance is still looking for ways to trouble these narratives and imagine new possibilities. There’s potential, for example, in the places where she lets her finish fetish collapse in on itself, as when the glaring light of a bedside lamp offers an opportunity for a looser, more abstract style and the image’s perfection breaks down. In these moments may lie one such opportunity to interrogate pop culture’s glamorization of female homoeroticism and disrupt the culturally sanctioned image of the vampiric lesbian.

Claire Ruud is Editor of ...might be good and Associate Coordinator of testsite.

Mike Osborne

Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas

Through March 21

by Alison Hearst

Mike Osborne, Television Cultural Center, 2008, Inkjet print, 40 x 50 inches. Courtesy Holly Johnson Gallery.

China is, for better or for worse, a hot topic. Although swiftly stepping into the future as an industrialized superpower, China still attempts to maintain an old-school aestheticism (as exhibited in the 2008 Olympics’ opening ceremonies). Moreover, these traditional displays, juxtaposed with vistas of Beijing’s shiny new skyscrapers, all seem to be part of a massive propaganda machine, generating endless images of a fully historically rooted yet fully modernized (and rich) society.

Beijing, this complex and contradicting present-day metropolis right before the 2008 Olympics, is the subject of Mike Osborne’s exhibition, On Location Beijing, at the Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas. Osborne’s lusciously colored photographs are bright and theatrical, yet have an off-the-cuff documentary sensibility in their often quotidian subject matter. Like their subjects, the photographs mediate between the grand and staged and the intimate and unplanned. This twofold approach in portraying Beijing cleverly captures its uneasy growing pains and the incongruities that comprise this city.

Although visually stunning, Osborne’s photographs are not of the picturesque. Television Cultural Center (2008) shows the building as we’re not meant to see it: in a stage of vulnerable, unspectacular infancy. The state-of-the-art architecture sits rather uneasily within an apocalyptic-looking construction site and surrounding shanties. Scaffolding and a littered, un-landscaped dirt pile eclipse the intended grandeur of the building. Further diluting the spectacle, the photograph hones in on one lone worker on break. This intimate, everyday scene is an unexpected—and welcome—alternative to the presumed hubbub of the urban development. Exposed here is China’s often hasty and unsafe approach towards modernity, viewed from an angle normally obscured by the Chinese government.

Last month, when the Television Cultural Center accidentally burned down one of its new buildings (which was not finished as planned in time for the Olympics anyway, and was as yet unoccupied) in a fireworks display celebrating the Chinese New Year, the event compounded the impact of Osborne’s photograph of the adjacent building in its early stages. The Chinese government swept photographs and reports of the fire under the rug, allowing only its own official statement—and no images whatsoever—to circulate. Thus CCTV, the very mouthpiece of government propaganda, became the subject of its own censorship.

Qianmen (2008) also illustrates, quite literally, the contradictory worlds found in present-day Beijing. Here, Qianmen—a gate into Beijing’s ancient Inner City—is closed-off and mostly obscured by rickety metal fencing that appears to be constructed from salvaged dumpster parts. A canvas printed with an image of the ancient city is haphazardly draped over the ramshackle fence—an attempt to mask the modern atrocity with a simulated historical vista. Three photo-happy tourists are seen capturing Qianmen through the fence, expunging the actual lackluster environment from their photographic records and reminding us of the many untruths in our carefully edited photographs. Just as Quianmen seems to capture these tourists in an unsuspecting and honest moment, so too all Osborne’s photographs seem to capture the city itself unawares.

Like many of his subjects, Osborne is also a tourist documenting his travels. Yet unlike the tourists in Qianmen, Osborne doesn’t forgo the gritty, under-construction sights for untainted, exotic views of a past or present world. Perhaps it is Osborne’s presentation of the intimate and conflicting moments—within a city striving for the spectacular and the flawless—that make these works much more substantial than any tourist photograph; they reveal the candid and contradictory moments avoided by the tourist in search of the picturesque and, also, by the Chinese government in search of an unblemished self-image.

Alison Hearst received her M.A. in Art History from Texas Christian University and is a freelance writer living in Fort Worth.

Center for Land Use Interpretation
Blaffer Gallery, Houston
On View Through March 29, 2009
by Lee Webster

BP Refinery, Texas City, 2008, Digital print, 22 x 14 ½ inches. Courtesy the CLUI Photographic Archive.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) knows the show isn’t in the gallery. It’s driving east out of town on I-10 Houston’s “Energy Corridor,” it’s creeping by boat along the banks of the Buffalo Bayou running around and about Houston’s highways and byways, it’s in the unseen industrial landscapes that hide behind skyscrapers and below underpasses in the nation’s fourth largest city: Houston. CLUI made the city its specimen, laboratory and exhibition space all at once.

CLUI is a group of artists and other interested parties who design projects around the exploration of American spaces. They find the loci of man’s largest and least visible footprints. They search out publicly invisible landscapes: the government restricted nuclear testing sites of Nevada, the urban outskirts of southern California, the underground sewers of LA, the American Atlantises of cities and towns drowned by dam projects. Then, they document. With pictures, video, research and writing, they assemble a portrait of the place. The final and most poignant work is in the sharing: since 1994, CLUI has organized countless tours, bus trips, guides and exhibitions which bring the public into spaces that may only exist in their imaginings or may be just beyond their front door, but until then went unseen or unnoticed.

Through a residency with the University of Houston, CLUI set up shop on the banks of Houston’s industrial waterway, using a portable trailer plopped down in a scrap yard as its field office. From this hub they started exploring the vast network of refineries, plants and corporate complexes that make up the oil industry in Houston.

Every oil-related corporation, if not based in Houston or Texas, at least maintains an outpost here. The first room of the Blaffer’s upstairs gallery chronicles CLUI’s search for the public face of this vast industry. The photographs depict the stark facades of their offices, some occupying shiny, showy skyscrapers downtown, others hiding out on corporate campuses behind guarded gates and wooded drives. Beside each photo of a blank-faced building is a short profile of the company that inhabits it. In an adjacent room the industrial innards behind each corporate brand are revealed, with photographs of vast fields of oil derricks and landscapes dotted with huge storage cisterns and gridded by miles of pipeline.

My last stop in the gallery was to watch the twelve minute video, Houston Petrochemical Corridor: From the East 610 Loop to the Highway 146 Bridge: A CLUI Landscan, which carries the viewer over miles of industrial land that can only be glimpsed from the highways that lead from Houston to the coast. This hyper-real flight over this massive industrialscape is hypnotizing.

It is these unusual perspectives that accomplish CLUI’s goals most effectively, presenting our world to us from new perspectives to reveal the forces just beyond our view that shape the sociology and ecology of our communities. CLUI’s project in Houston is hugely important, mostly in its insistence that we get out and examine our surroundings. The gallery exhibition takes you only halfway there. The group has partnered with organizations across the city to provide public drive-in screenings at the junk-yard that houses their field office and pontoon boat tour tours of Houston’s East End along Buffalo Bayou. The exhibition catalogue provides a suggested driving tour of the vast complexes to the east of the city, the short distance of which I traveled had me vowing to return to drive the rest. If you are lucky enough to be in the city on the weekend of March 21st, don’t miss the last boat tour in cooperation with Buffalo Bayou Partnership, which is sure to show you a view of Houston and its industry you will never see from the highways going through town or lounging on the lawn of the Menil.

Lee Webster is an artist living and working in Austin.

Beili Liu
Three Walls Gallery, San Antonio
Through March 29
by Wendy Atwell

Beili Liu, Miasma, 2009, Wool, thread, acrylic medium, Dimensions variable (each column 4 to 9 feet tall). Photo by Blue Way. Courtesy the artist.

A pit in the stomach, a sense of unease or dread physically registered by the body: can this sensation be rendered visually? Beili Liu conveys this helpless anxiety in Miasma (2009), one of two installations at Three Walls Gallery. The other, Lapse (2009), provides a counterpoint. In the process of making her art, Liu maintains a careful balance between destruction and creation. Lapse is bright and expansive, which counteracts out the cipher-like quality of Miasma.

Miasma, a mobile-like installation made from a cluster of long, snarled strands of black wool, darkens the bright white gallery walls like a storm cloud. Liu hung each snarled strand from the ceiling by monofilament, each at a distinct distance from both ceiling and floor, so that the entire group appears invisibly suspended in the air. Longer strands loom in the back of the cloud, giving the form a sense of rising or expanding upwards. Part of Liu’s Three Thousand Troubled Threads series, the installation references hair, which the artist explained is considered a burden in China. Liu alters the rope-like wool threads, which bear an uncanny resemblance to hair, by hand, and then uses acrylic medium to sculpt and preserve the shapes of her twists, pulls and snarls. Like a maddened mother, instead of smoothing and plaiting a child’s hair, she rends it into difficult kinks and tangles.

Lapse, a twelve foot long piece mounted on the right wall consists of three panels but appears to be seamless. Liu used a torch to burn multiple layers of vellum. She then cut the burned edges into strips and layered them onto the panels with acrylic medium. The unburned white paper stripes contrast with the brownish charred edges so that the smooth surface gives an allusion of three dimensionality. The effect of the torch on the visible edges of the vellum strips is subtle; the eye follows the small delicate tracings of burned edges in the same way it follows the strands of wool in Miasma, riding the slight curves, indentations and bumps along the way. Overall, the many strips meld into a flawless visual rhythm, despite the variations of each strip’s edge. The result looks like tree bark compressed and flattened into an elegant pattern.

Liu goes through a process of destructing her materials, thread and vellum paper, so that she may reorder and design the installations. Part of the process is happenstance—how the threads pull apart and how the flames burn—but the artist’s hand is controlling the depth of the media’s alterations, leaving behind traces of anxiety, capturing and holding these elusive feelings like specimens on a glass slide.

Wendy Atwell received her M.A. in Art History and Criticism from The University of Texas at San Antonio.