Houston, Texas - Lawndale Art Center invites artists living within 100 miles of Houston to submit artworks for a chance to be included in its annual open-call, juried exhibition, The Big Show, and a shot at $3,000 in cash awards. This year's Guest Juror, Duncan MacKenzie, Artist/Critic/Writer and Co-Founder of Bad at Sports, will select the show and award winners based on work submitted in person to Lawndale Art Center. Artists may submit up to three pieces of artwork along with a $30 entry fee ($25 for Lawndale members) on June 26 and 27. Jurying of the actual artwork will be conducted over two days. Works not selected for the show must be picked up by the artists on July 1 and 2. More information about The Big Show and artist entry forms can be found on our website, www.lawndaleartcenter.org. The exhibition will open on Friday, July 12, 2013, 6:30 – 8:30 PM, and awards will be announced at 7PM, along with a DJ set by Night Drive and complimentary beverages provided by Bombay Sapphire World Bazaar and Saint Arnold Brewing Company. Artists selected for The Big Show will give short informal presentations of their work during The Big Slide Show on July 31 & August 1 at 6 PM each night.

Cary Reeder’s paintings focus on vanishing historic 1920s bungalows, using these physical structures to explore the themes of loss and secrecy. Reeder’s own home and neighborhood have been the inspiration for this series. Rather than portraying charm and nostalgia, Reeder brings the soul of these houses onto the canvas with an aim to reveal more than simply a structure but to peak the viewer’s curiosity into the stories that lie within. For this exhibition, Reeder focuses specifically on houses that are endangered for demolition in an attempt to document a disappearing history and to recreate the lost sense of place that occurs with each cleared lot. The resulting exhibition brings focus to home, history and memory disappearing in the wake of progress, and to the mysteries and unknown stories of the people next door.

For this site-specific installation, Lina Dib will generate soundscapes in three transitional areas at Lawndale Art Center: the elevator, stairwells and 3rd floor window. These spaces are thresholds that mark the difference between up and down, and inside and outside. Drawing attention to the architecture of Lawndale, Dib will fill these generally unnoticed spaces with sounds that range from the microscopic to the monumental. Sound takes time. It can only exist in time. And unlike sight, sound is immersive. Sound physically hits and penetrates. It bundles us with it. It requires and even creates our presence, such that we are not in front of something, but within it. By situating the viewer within the piece, this intervention will make space itself more pliable — creating a kind of soft architecture using sonic fields that change and at times respond to the viewer, while playing with motion and scale.

Susannah Mira creates objects and environments from industrial sidestream, inspired by the demise of American manufacturing. The decline of this sector, the financial crisis, and gender and wage distribution in the labor market are all inspirations for this body of work. In creating orderly, geometric constructions, she applies a personal logic to the by-products of large enterprise. She also frequently employ the traditionally feminine arts to these industrial remainders, such as sewing, weaving, or detailed handwork, in a willful dislocation of art, design, and craft. Mira's installation in the Project Space employs thousands of laser cut plywood pieces, offcuts from a small business manufacturing build-your-own rocket kits for children.

Fantastic Habitat is a body of photographic work depicting anonymous figures covered in densely textured or patterned textiles inserted into various landscapes as mysterious organic forms. Lush faux fur and vivid fabrics conceal the still figures, producing a bizarre visual and contextual relationship between the shrouded form and its environment and creating a landscape-within-landscape effect. Recent images from this series depict figures covered in bold, kitschy textiles situated within unearthly landscapes of the American Southwest, enhancing the strangeness of the figure/environment relationship and introducing further slippage between real and imaginary. Throughout this work Brister questions the nature of sculpture, performance and portraiture, playing with notions of natural vs. artificial, and challenging traditional photographic renderings of the figure in the landscape. At once both humorous and melancholy, these images resonate with a psychological tension, evoking notions of the sublime and the vulnerability of the human body.

Unknown American artist, Man on Rooftop with Eleven Men in Formation on His Shoulders, c. 1930, Gelatin silver print, George Eastman House, courtesy of George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester. EX.2013.FI.095

John Singleton Copley (American, 1738–1815), Watson and the Shark, 1778, Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ferdinand Lammot Belin Fund, 1963.6.1

Soo Sunny Park
Unwoven Light
11 April - 30 August 2013
Soo Sunny Park’s installation Unwoven Light animates Rice Gallery’s expansive space, transforming it into a shimmering world of light, shadow, and brilliant color. Suspended from the walls and ceiling, thirty-seven individually sculpted units are arranged as a graceful, twisting flow of abstract form. Entering the gallery there is no set path to follow. Instead, we are invited to meander slowly as one might stroll along a river’s edge, stopping to admire the glints of light that dance on the water’s surface.
Unwoven Light continues Park’s ongoing experimentation with the ephemeral qualities of light and how light affects our perceptions of architectural space. She began thinking about her installation by making a site visit to the gallery in July 2012, to experience the built and the natural elements of the space: its proportions and surfaces, and in particular its lighting conditions. Though immaterial, light is a critical structural element in each of Park’s works. Here she has utilized both the gallery’s lighting and the natural light that enters through the front glass wall. Park notes, “We don’t notice light when looking so much as we notice the things light allows us to see. Unwoven Light captures light and causes it to reveal itself, through colorful reflections and refractions on the installation’s surfaces and on the gallery floor and walls.”
Seeing a Styrofoam cup stuck on a fence one day got Park thinking about the chain link’s properties of being both rigid and porous, of acting as a boundary while retaining an appearance of openness. She shapes each section of chain link by holding it in tension, bending it, and then welding each corner to hold the form in place. The shaped unit becomes a building component that she may use more than once, recycling it into new installations. For Unwoven Light, Park used twenty sculptural units from a previous installation and built seventeen new ones. Working long days with two assistants in her New Hampshire studio, it took Park two weeks to complete one unit. Each required seven hours of welding to brace the fencing, one-hundred hours of tying the wire that holds each Plexiglas piece in place, and many more hours of cutting Plexiglas shapes to fit the chain link cells.
The structure of chain link fencing is similar to the grid of fibers arranged horizontally and vertically on a weaving loom. However, Park uses the grid structure as a means to “unweave.” Wired into each open cell of the chain link is a cut-out shape of iridescent Plexiglas. Iridescence in nature is seen in the sheen of peacock feathers, fish scales, and butterfly wings, appearing as a myriad of colors that appear to change with the angle at which they are viewed. Here the iridescent properties of the coated Plexiglas serve to unweave light, each shape turning from clear to colorful in light’s presence. Explains Park, “Like a net, the sculpture is a filter that is meant to capture the light that is already there and force it to reveal itself. Now we can see it, the light, in purple shadows and yellow-green reflections that both mirror the shape of the fence and restructure the space they inhabit.”
Each visitor’s experience of Unwoven Light will be unique, depending upon the time of day, ratio of natural to artificial light, precise angle of viewing, and even the number of people in the gallery. It is possible for two people to stand next to one another and each have a completely different experience of the dynamic presence of light.
We thank Rice University Art Gallery intern Greta Shwachman (Rice ‘15) for interviewing the artist and writing the first draft of this text.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Soo Sunny Park received her BFA in painting and sculpture from Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, Ohio and a MFA in sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Park is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant; Grand Prize winner of the 19th Annual Michigan Fine Arts Competition; The Helen Foster Barnett Prize, National Academy Museum, New York; Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture residency, Skowhegan, Maine; Cité Internationale des Arts studio residency, Paris, France, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts & Literary Arts Residency, Bellagio, Italy. Her most recent installations are Capturing Resonance (2011-12), created with composer Spencer Topel for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and SSVT (South Stafford, Vermont) Vapor Slide (2013/2007) at Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Soo Sunny Park lives and works in Hanover, New Hampshire where she is Associate Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College.
Materials from Capturing Resonance have been incorporated into Unwoven Light. Rice Gallery thanks Lexi Lee Sullivan, Assistant Curator and deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.