Gallery Shines at Fair

By Farrah Madanay     10/26/11 7:00pm

Houston's elite gathered to admire and acquire the latest works by contemporary artists last weekend at the Texas Contemporary Art Fair. How much did it cost many of these collectors to take home a brand new, original painting? Five dollars.

The fair, held in the George R. Brown Convention Center, exhibited visiting galleries from bases including Seattle, Wash., Annapolis, Md., and Tokyo, Japan. The coastal presence was particularly prominent, with many exhibitors representing galleries based in New York and California. Each exhibiting gallery marketed their art pieces from individual booths, while the fair also highlighted several large, special projects.

Notable special projects included Paul Villinski's Passage, a 33-foot wooden glider plane, speckled with a thousand black, aluminum butterflies. Another artist, Tracey Snelling, used scaling and mixed media to model her sculpture, El Diablo Inn, after a hypothetical, rural California hotel. By embedding screens with looped film footage of people into two of the windows, Snelling engaged with the notion of perception. Snelling inserted the art fair attendees into her imaginary world as onlookers peeking into these occupied inn rooms.

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The majority of the exhibitors were from commercial galleries that featured work varying from a "Simpsons" Terra Cotta Warrior, to a "Starry Night" reinterpretation, in which cigarette lighters replaced every brush stroke of Vincent van Gogh's original masterpiece. One familiar name at the fair included Sarah Oppenheimer, best known at Rice University for her D-17 exhibition last fall in the Rice Gallery. The P.P.O.W. gallery of New York, N.Y., exhibited Oppenheimer's work, 30-10, made of aluminum honeycomb. The aluminum sculpture played with planes and angles in an architectural space, similar to her D-17 installation, which had boldly cut through the Sewall Hall foyer.

Another familiar name was the Rice Art Gallery itself, which occupied a booth at the fair. Rice Gallery Director and Chief Curator Kimberly Davenport decided to fly in New York-based artist Steve Keene to represent the Rice Art Gallery. In 1998, Keene simultaneously exhibited, painted and sold paintings in his Fresh Art Daily installation at the Rice Art Gallery. Within a sea of intrinsically innovative contemporary art, the Rice Art Gallery's display of Keene's work stood out. Unlike the other galleries at the fair, the Rice Art Gallery didn't simply display the artist's work, but displayed the artist's real-time processes as well.

"We are not a commercial gallery. We focus on on-site based installation, so we thought it would be appropriate to bring Steve down to paint on-site, like he did at Rice," said Christine Medina, the Rice Art Gallery Manager.

Keene's process of painting was inspired by the in-the-moment, music-making process of musicians. At the art fair, spectators watched in fascination as Keene painted multiple paintings at once, in an assembly line fashion.

"He works with source images and makes the paintings as identical as possible," said Rice Art Gallery Assistant Curator, Joshua Fischer. Both Fischer and Medina manned the Rice Art Gallery booth at the fair, assisting Keene with his painting extravaganza.

Though Keene created multiple, identical paintings, paradoxically, his products were inherently individual. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Keene's work was the asking price of his products: five dollars for a painting. Keene's website states: "I want buying my paintings to be like buying a CD: it's cheap, it's art and it changes your life, but the object has no status."

Particularly in a setting like the Texas Contemporary Art Fair, which attracted collectors with deep pockets, Keene's low prices undercut the high-end, consumerist mode of society. His art, in other words, was overtly accessible to any pocket. Fortunately for Keene, Houston collectors recognized that cheap prices do not always denote cheaply made products.

"We had all the walls covered with his paintings, which he shipped down beforehand," Medina said of the Rice Gallery booth's opening night set-up. "We sold all of them at the preview party."

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