Inman Gallery

Astro-futurist world builder and multi-disciplinary artist JooYoung Choi (b. 1982/1983 Seoul, South Korea) documents the interconnecting narratives of an expansive fictional land she has created and named the Cosmic Womb. Her practice is highly varied, utilizing painting, video, soft sculpture, animation, puppetry, music, interactive community projects, and installation art as interwoven vehicles for storytelling. Inspired by the teachings of Fred Rogers, Choi captures this imaginary world with a spotlight on its many characters, story arcs, and interpersonal relationships guided by an ethos of unconditional love and radical imagination.

The exhibition comprises a selection of new work–small-scale tapestries produced since 2021. In this most recent work, Vander Lee aims to heighten the interplay of Diné (Navajo) and Lowland/Dutch tapestry traditions. The pieces explore various facets of time: seasonal transitions, timelessness, and tributes.

Western Bootleg presents three groupings of works, all playing with visual motifs sourced from recognizably Texan, Vietnamese, and Chinese cultural tropes. The images are derived from Vietnamese folk art in both Đông Hồ and Hàng Trống painting traditions, as well as lì xì, or lucky money, small red envelopes given to children to celebrate the first day of Tết Nguyên Đán (Lunar New Year). Huynh mixes these traditional and contemporary modes with Texan iconography to create a distinct and nuanced hybrid image, one that is emblematic of the artist’s own identity. Referencing mass produced visuals from both Eastern and Western sources – from red envelopes to cowboy art, dragons to armadillos – the paintings embrace a “double kitsch,” dissolving cultural hierarchies to present an immediate and democratized image.

Gendel paints colorful, narrative compositions that blur the distinction between figuration and abstraction in their rendering of people and cinematic spaces. Figures – women in particular – take center stage in Gendel’s work, unfolding within dynamic scenes with moving bodies in changing spaces. Embracing a fluid approach to her work, Gendel has commented how she develops “scenes, characters and situations through deliberate figuration, intuitive mark making, color and chance procedures,” often painting over works, or creating the same image in different colors and sizes to subvert the singular image. This procedural evolution mirrors the evolving identities of the characters she paints, allowing a narrative to continue without a predetermined or fixed destination. In doing so, Gendel’s practice quite literally creates a moving image, which skillfully parallels the theatrical, even cinematic, nature of the paintings themselves.

Tracing Luminaries is a new print edition by Houston-based artist Erika Blumenfeld created in close collaboration with Island Press in St. Louis, MO. The project centers on the Women Computers who, beginning in the late 1800s, worked at the Harvard College Observatory with the institution’s growing Astronomical Photographic Glass Plate Collection. These women brought their keen attention and passion for discovery to the task of examining and cataloguing hundreds of thousands of stars and deep space objects, revolutionizing astronomy and astrophysics in the process. In their careful examination of the glass plates, the women hand-inked their research directly onto the glassy surface of countless photographic plates, literally drawing connections across the night sky in lyrical gestures .

Emily Joyce (b. 1976) returns to Houston for her seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. In Joyce’s recent symmetrical paintings, she explores hidden systems of nature, the built world, and the cosmos. The paintings are composed of modular and interlocking hexagons, triangles, and concentric circles with special surprise guest appearances by the occasional lily or a bit of gilded text. While in her twenties and fresh out of art school, Joyce worked as a decorative painter, embellishing the walls of mansions and vacation homes. Now, a few decades later, that early training has seeped into her new paintings. In this recent body of work, you’ll find combinations of faux-bois, gold leafing, spatter painting, stenciling, rag-rolling, marbelizing etc.–sometimes all in one composition. By assigning each technique to its own specific shape on the canvas, Joyce creates an unfolding pattern and off-beat rhythm. The decorative finishes function as sophisticated painting solutions, rather than tromp-l’oeil trickery. Joyce’s presentation includes a site-specific painting onto which other works are hung, a self-referential work that cleverly–and playfully–exemplifies these conceptual underpinnings.

Richard Brown Lethem (b. 1932) has been living and thinking in paint on canvas since the 1950’s, with results that have been categorized, more or less aptly, as abstraction, expressionism, figuration, social realism, surrealism, and allegory. Now in his ‘90’s, Lethem’s imagery has become unified and direct, often consisting of a central form derived from nature, yet distilled, by the visionary pressure of his attention, into symbols seemingly directly drawn from his psychic landscape, and beamed into that of the viewer. If this is an example of “late style,” it is one defiantly uninterested in a modest contemplation of mortality; instead, the painter’s wisdom exalts an embrace of color and sensuality, and traces the joyous mystery of our consistent presence as neighboring bodies in a shared field of space.

Utilizing both exhibition spaces, Long to Go features new, cross-disciplinary work by Cyrus, including denim and papyrus-based two-dimensional works, as well as sculpture and installation showcasing Cyrus’ rich material practice. Included in the exhibition are collaborative drawings by Cyrus and Dawolu Jabari Anderson, a fellow former member of Otabenga Jones & Associates. This will be Cyrus' fourth solo show at Inman Gallery. As Cyrus says, Long to Go explores the “two-mindedness” of Black America, which possesses a dual African and American past. The show’s title signifies a longing to return to or connect with ancestral Africa, as well as signaling a long road that still lies ahead toward freedom, equality and justice for Black Americans in the U.S. Cyrus’ practice has always centered around the notion of reviewing and re-viewing Afro-diasporic history through a nuanced lens. He aims to look again and bring to light the cultural narratives and figures who have been overlooked, ignored, or censored by the establishment.

In HELL and the Paradisal, O’Neil presents a body of new work which are reactions and responses to her epic 2011 drawing HELL (2011), which is installed in the south gallery. In the main gallery, a group of graphite on canvas works collectively titled The Paradise Fields, are accompanied by other recent graphite drawings on canvas and paper. Directly informed and inspired by the HELL triptych, the Paradisal works are a reflective exercise for O’Neil as she looks back on this monumental piece in the context of her present-day practice. There are several formal commonalities between HELL and the new works in the Paradisal: ferns growing from above, abstracted floating tree branches, dramatic cloud formations, shapes, and ghostlike enigmatic imagery. The tone, however, is entirely different. HELL is about death and destruction, while the Paradisal pieces are about growth, connection, beauty, thriving, nature, and calm, the latter the antidote to the former.

Inman Gallery is pleased to present HOWL, a group exhibition featuring work by Moll Brau, Angela Fraleigh, and Angelica Raquel. In her own way, each artist tackles the magical to explore themes of femininity, the grotesque, the occult, narrative, storytelling, spell craft, ancestral healing and power. Moving through anguish, grief, and anger, the works on view hold space for the processing of those emotions while offering antidotes of healing, protection, and reclamation.

For the past 20 years, Sandström has been exploring the power of the painted surface to communicate visual precarity, and to encourage a sense of wonder and exploration in her viewers. The surface of a Sandström painting exists as a vestige, an imprint, evidence of a previous act while also depicting something visually different than its referent. It points to the past while simultaneously unfolding in the present moment.

For And Jugs Paint Reuse, Frankfort has tightened her focus. She almost exclusively paints the four words of the exhibition title. The scale rarely extends beyond 24 inches on a side, and is often much smaller. The larger paintings are on burlap, which accords with a transition from gestural marks towards sedimentary accumulation, a rough facture that surrounds and engulfs the words. The texture is so pronounced in these most recent paintings that a gap opens between the paintings themselves and their images: in photographs, the words are often still very legible; in person, they almost dissolve into the churn of dense and varied paint handling. Subject to an open-ended working process – a single painting might be ‘finished’ several times over – the words take on some of the transience of spoken language, rather than writing. They might sink back into oblivion in the next moment. Shift your focus, and sometimes they do.

Inman Gallery is pleased to participate in the PrintHouston 2022 Biennial, with a selection of prints by gallery artists, includingTommy Fitzpatrick, Katrina Moorhead, Shaun O'Dell, Robyn O'Neil, Brad Tucker, Beth Secor and Otabenga Jones & Associates. The prints on view were selected to highlight the diverse modes of printmaking employed by the seven artists included, from complex layered digital prints to analogue screen prints with handcoloring.

Ping Pong continues Efrat’s exploration into a distinct painterly approach which began in 2014, creating vibrant and energized abstract works that follow the tradition of Action Painting. Entering the exhibition, viewers are confronted with walls of highly saturated colors in angular, sweeping overlapping blocks, interspersed with frenzied marks inset into the paint. Painting with intensity and urgency, Efrat manipulates overlapping layers of wet paint to simultaneously build up the surface and remove paint to reveal an image before the paint dries, all within the span of two to three days. In doing so Efrat’s paintings have a self-referential archaeological nature, an active excavation in their own creation. They capture speed and life itself.

Suddath’s new suite of drawings are characterized by poignant, meticulous linework that draws the viewer’s eye into a morass of flowing, curvilinear forms. Suddath’s compositions are visually concentrated, the linework filling the page from edge to edge, with slight variations in line weight and density.In many we observe a sea of overlapping faces, though the specific facial features become abstracted in the noise of ink. In others the forms appear more floral and organic. The small drawings resonate with an optical frenetic energy, while the larger, saturated color pieces possess a luminous, sculptural quality set within ambient fields of color.

Shaun O’Dell: A Foot Between the Screens of the Unforescene harnesses the texts, images, and folklore characteristic of his early work with increased urgency and innovation. Continually compelled by the histories, ideologies and myths produced by the Puritans and other European colonizers, O’Dell leverages his personal history alongside two decades worth of committed experimentation in mark making to present this current suite of complex multipanel drawings.

Francesca Fuchs’ painting practice centers on the objects she encounters in her daily life. Her work asks us to question why we hold on to certain things and what we consider to be important. Across her career, Fuchs’ critique of “importance” has unfolded in rethinking the dismissal of the small, the intimate, the feminine, and the beloved, insisting instead that these objects illuminate fundamental truths about our selves, our communities, and our histories.

Brad Tucker’s artistic practice includes sculpture, video, works on paper, and paintings that call to mind the 90s and aughts visual culture of suburban skate parks, college garage bands, and Richard Linklater’s Slacker. His work is rooted in his own unique brand of offbeat humor, quirky abstraction, deft language play, and raw performance. Tucker’s characteristic use of “low” materials, such as foam and crudely painted plywood, seem to invite the viewer to have as much fun in their engagement as he has in his making. Nonetheless, serious attention to art history, particularly Minimalism, Fluxus, and postmodern performance, undergird and complicate his practice.

Inman Gallery is pleased to present two solo exhibitions, “Charis Ammon: Stay” and “Alexis Pye: The Real and the Fantastic / The Irrational Joys of the Axis,” which are on view this summer July 10 – August 21, 2021. The exhibitions will open on Saturday, July 10, with an all-day open house; both artists, who are based in Houston, will be present from 12 – 2. This will be Ammon’s second solo exhibition and Pye’s first at Inman Gallery. Although these are two separate exhibitions, common threads can be found between the artists’ works, notably in the dual presence and absence of the human figure, as well as in the viewer’s relationship to their works. Pye’s paintings feature portraits of black men punctuated by a garden theme [OR SITUATED WITHIN A GARDEN OR FOLIAGE SETTING]; her work, as she has stated, is meant to evoke “playfulness, wonder and blackness, as well as the joys amidst adversity.” Ammon’s paintings capture the passage of time and how the surfaces around us register that time and our presence in it, even though there are no actual figures depicted in her works. Humanity is instead present as a vestige in Ammon’s paintings of public, man-made spaces.

Inman Gallery is pleased to present two solo exhibitions, “Charis Ammon: Stay” and “Alexis Pye: The Real and the Fantastic / The Irrational Joys of the Axis,” which are on view this summer July 10 – August 21, 2021. The exhibitions will open on Saturday, July 10, with an all-day open house; both artists, who are based in Houston, will be present from 12 – 2. This will be Ammon’s second solo exhibition and Pye’s first at Inman Gallery. Although these are two separate exhibitions, common threads can be found between the artists’ works, notably in the dual presence and absence of the human figure, as well as in the viewer’s relationship to their works. Pye’s paintings feature portraits of black men punctuated by a garden theme [OR SITUATED WITHIN A GARDEN OR FOLIAGE SETTING]; her work, as she has stated, is meant to evoke “playfulness, wonder and blackness, as well as the joys amidst adversity.” Ammon’s paintings capture the passage of time and how the surfaces around us register that time and our presence in it, even though there are no actual figures depicted in her works. Humanity is instead present as a vestige in Ammon’s paintings of public, man-made spaces.

Angry Garden Salad is a subtle yet staunch departure from Ruello's previous work. It follows the same modus operandi he normally employs in that he uses technology as a starting point, deconstructing it into a set of formal, painterly engagements. However, this grouping feels vastly more contemplative, introverted, stark, saturated, and quietly gut-wrenching. Also of note: the pieces may be quieter, but they're curiously as, if not more, loquacious than ever before. But the chatter is more self-directed and internally devoted this time-more of a mutter-shards of text and fractured information churning in on itself to the point of oblivion.

From the Studio II brings together new works in fiber from three artists, Charis Ammon, who works primarily in painting, Jamal Cyrus, who, as part of his practice, has been producing works in denim since 2019, and Jana Vander Lee, who works exclusively in fiber. In her paintings, Charis Ammon has long been interested in the ever-changing, patch like quality of the concrete city surface, and she has taken those ideas in a new direction in Inheritance II, layering the domestic—here in the form of reused clothing—with imagery of the city street. Ammon has said of her Inheritance quilts that we inherit our cities just as we inherit our families, and our love for both inheritances naturally comes with complications and ultimately, acceptance. Jana Vander Lee presents three new tapestries, including two in the tradition of her 1970s Theo Moorman works (the famed British artist-weaver), and one large, ethereal work titled Long Before Dawn. Long Before Dawn evokes a nighttime sky filled with stars, and it is informed by her earlier Banner series, which are in conversation with liturgical banners. Finally, Jamal Cyrus continues his work in denim with imagery taken from redacted FBI documents. Funeral Shroud for the Dead Lecturer is taken from an FBI memorandum in the file of literary and political figure Amiri Baraka. Culture Ops in Blue is part of a series of works that address different periods in Black sound and musical production in America; this work focuses on the popularization of the Black American Spiritual, a musical tradition that appeared in the mid-19th century.

Inman Gallery is pleased to present Toni LaSelle: A State of Becoming, an exhibition that focuses on Texas modernist Dorothy Antoinette (Toni) LaSelle's work during a time of significant artistic exploration for the artist. The show will include paintings and works on paper from 1946-1971, beginning with two paintings from the late-1940s, a period when LaSelle was assimilating ideas from European modernism while also immersing herself in the cutting-edge developments happening in contemporary American painting. During the period represented by the works in the A State of Becoming, LaSelle developed her own language of abstraction, which is informed by geometry and nature.

From the Studio I explores the work of David Aylsworth, Tommy Fitzpatrick and Emily Joyce and it seeks to illuminate their ever evolving studio practices, how those practices have changed during the last year and how these three artists navigate creating space within compositions of their paintings.

Inman Gallery is pleased to present Yevgeniya Baras and Julia Haft-Candell: Parts of Speech, a two-person exhibition featuring paintings by Baras and ceramic sculpture by Haft-Candell. The exhibition will be on view from Wednesday, November 12 through January 9, 2021 and is accompanied by a brochure with essay by Clare Elliott, Associate Research Curator at the Menil Collection, Houston.

Yevgeniya Baras and Julia Haft-Candell: Parts of Speech

Angela Fraleigh’s lush and complex works mine the history of academic and avant-garde painting. She describes the exhibition as being: “...part of a longtime project that asks, What if the female characters we’ve come to know from art history—the lounging odalisques, the chorus that whispers in the background—present more than a voyeuristic visual feast? What if these characters embody a flickering of female power at work? Can we see these ‘passive characters as subversive and powerful? And if we do, how might it affect women today and of the future?”

Robyn O’Neil’s prodigious career places her in the company of some of the great landscape artists in the history of art. Known for her detailed narrative drawings that often contain art historical references, her drawings in dry media range from intimate landscapes to large-scale, multi-panel works. Often surreal or symbolic, her drawings reference personal narratives and art historical allusions, and deal with themes of memory, identity and climate crises. The works in this exhibition look upward, and each comes from O’Neil’s ongoing Cloudmakers series, begun in 2018. Two large drawings included in her career-spanning retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2019) anchor the show, and the remaining intimately scaled works were produced since then. But O’Neil’s cloud obsession can be traced to her youth: a self-avowed “weather obsessive,” she grew up in tornado alley in Nebraska and Texas and was a volunteer weather watcher. O’Neil’s interest in clouds and weather form the basis of these pieces.