Jean Luc Mylayne
September 8–November 10, 2007
Blaffer Gallery, Fine Arts Building, University of Houston
For more than thirty years Jean Luc Mylayne has explored the intimate bond between subject and photographer through a non-traditional approach that combines exacting conception, visionary inventiveness, and infinite patience. Mylayne's photographic subjects, commonplace birds such as sparrows, starlings, and bluebirds, belie the wholly unique experience that Mylayne captures in his stunning photography. Mylayne has traveled nomadically in Europe and the United States, at times spending months, even years, in search of his ‘commonplace' subjects. Jean Luc Mylayne focuses on a series of monumentally scaled, color images by this French photographer and artistic pioneer, a culmination of more than two years of patient and careful exploration in the landscape surrounding Fort Davis, Texas, an area where the migration paths of Eastern, Western, and Mountain Bluebirds converge. The exhibition will feature some 20 large-scale, framed, color photographs, and will be Mylayne's first solo museum exhibition in the United States.
Amy Sillman: Suitors & Strangers
September 8–November 10, 2007
Blaffer Gallery, Fine Arts Building, University of Houston
Suitors & Strangers presents recent and new paintings by Amy Sillman in an aesthetic dialogue that vividly charts the artist's ongoing negotiation of abstraction and representation, offering a unique opportunity to assess and appreciate her unwavering commitment to painting.
Deeply imprinted with personal experience, Sillman's carefully constructed paintings engage the viewer on an emotional level while asking intellectual questions about the condition of painting today—a condition that needs constant negotiation and rethinking to overcome the doubt that has plagued painterly practice in the wake of modernism.
The title of this exhibition encapsulates the complex pictorial relationship between figurative and abstract imagery. In Sillman's paintings, abstraction and representation are both suitors and strangers, united through desire, but separated by idiosyncrasy. Their courtship, passionately played out over time by the artist, is one marked by awareness of difference, and their tentative union implies a state of vulnerability and temporariness. Always one to relate art to life, Sillman paints the way she lives: driven by passion and desire, full of doubt but also courage, never at an end but always at an beginning and likely to take us by surprise.
2007 School of Art Annual Student Exhibition and Open Studios
December 1–December 15, 2007
Opening Reception and Open Studios: Friday Nov. 30, 7–9 p.m.
Blaffer Gallery, Fine Arts Building, University of Houston
The 2007 School of Art Annual Student Exhibition showcases a broad variety of artistic approaches by including work by students in their first to third year. Held every year, the student exhibitions offer a mix of fresh and ripened ideas and allows for many new discoveries. It includes work from all disciplines taught at the School of Art including painting, sculpture, photography/digital media, graphic communication and interior design. In addition to the exhibition in the Blaffer Gallery - and back by popular demand - all of the classrooms and studios in the Fine Arts Building will be open to the public during the reception on Friday, Nov. 30, 7-9p.m. Open Studios is an opportunity for behind the scenes access to the creative process and to young artists. Please join us for this popular and lively event!
Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space
January 19–March 29, 2008
Blaffer Gallery, Fine Arts Building, University of Houston
Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space includes five major works: D'Est (From the East), 1993; Sud (South), 1999; De l'autre côté (From the Other Side), 2002; Là-Bas (Down There), 2006; and features a new project filmed in Siberia commissioned especially for the exhibition. Akerman is widely regarded as one of the most important woman directors in film history, but her work in the crossover genre of film and visual art has never been fully explored. Beginning with D’Est in 1993, Akerman developed an artistic practice melding documentary filmmaking techniques with video installation. Imbued with social and political undertones, her multi-channel works contain the artist's characteristically slow moving action, mesmerizing attention to detail, and visual grace. This exhibition, her first solo survey in a U.S. museum, reveals Akerman's explorative and creative energies, as well as her singular understanding of some of today's most challenging concepts and themes: the transformative impact of cultural diaspora, memory, and history.
2008 School of Art
Masters Thesis Exhibition
April 12–April 26, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday April 11, 7–9 p.m.
Blaffer Gallery, Fine Arts Building, University of Houston
The 2008 School of Art Masters Thesis Exhibition marks the crowning achievement of a new generation of emerging artists graduating from the University of Houston. Following three years of research and development, this exhibition offers many students the first opportunity to show their work in a museum context and challenge the public with new, fresh ideas. A catalogue including selected reproductions of each artist’s work, will accompany the exhibition.
2008 Houston Area Exhibition
May 10–August 2, 2008
Blaffer Gallery, Fine Arts Building, University of Houston
The Houston Area Exhibition has been a significant component of Blaffer Gallery’s program since 1974—sometimes beloved, sometimes less so, but always provocative and stimulating. As in 2004, this years’ installment will be selected by a guest curator through careful portfolio review and a series of on-site studio visits. The resulting exhibition will offer a fresh and personal take on the Houston art scene by a renowned figure in the field of contemporary art.