Art Capsule Reviews

"The Big Show 2007" Juror Rita Gonzalez, assistant curator of special exhibitions for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has managed to keep the crap quotient pretty low for "The Big Show 2007." Most of the unsuccessful work is only bad in an innocuous way, and she has managed to pull out some fairly interesting work from Houston's diverse art scene. Jeanne Cassanova's Somehow Inside Opalescent (2007) somehow makes candy-colored paint, glitter and floral fabric all work together in a really gorgeous way. Cassanova layers multiple line drawings with pools of pink and clear resin. Ebony Porter makes drawings with a minimalist bent. She uses tiny little dots of black acrylic paint to create geometric shapes on pristine white squares of paper, and the results are quite successful. Emily Umnus-Patrick has created a self-portrait bust, Me Me Emily (2007). Artfully sewn from felt and stuffed, the sculpture kind of looks like a giant Muppet, but it's way cooler and quirkier. Bexar's No Thanks? (2007) is pretty funny too — a slide of a man's face is projected large-scale on the wall, over giant nails sticking out from it. The nails seemingly tack up a raised eyebrow, yank down a lower eyelid and curl an upper lip more than Elvis ever could. There is a goodly amount of lame figurative work in the show, but one of the notable exceptions is L.A. Holloman's Incentive (2007), exquisitely rendered in oil on paper. Holloman skillfully combines two disparate images to wonderfully absurd effect. Across the bottom of the painting, a ragtag band of guerrillas gleefully hold automatic weapons aloft, while above them, giant, stylish, brightly colored espadrilles — seemingly straight out of a spring shoe ad — rain down from the sky. ¡Viva las Espadrilles! Through August 18. Lawndale Art Center, 4912 Main, 713-528-5858. — KK