VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Inman Gallery is pleased to present two exhibitions: Brad Tucker - Tijuana Brass and in the north gallery Darcy Huebler - Thought Process.  On view January 9 – February 21, 2009.

SPECIAL EVENT:
Gallery talk with Brad Tucker
SATURDAY, January 10th, 12 NOON

Inman Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Austin-based artist Brad Tucker. Originally from California, Tucker graduated from the University of North Texas, Denton in 1991 and received an MFA from Bard College in 2008. From 1999-2001 he was a Core Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Glassell School of Art. This is his fourth solo exhibition in Houston.

In Tijuana Brass, Tucker has erected a sprawling suite of new floor and wall sculpture. Scissor gates, foam blocks, and carved wooden objects together compose an installation for the viewer to navigate physically, optically, and conceptually as a playing field of cultural associations. The low-lying accordion-style gates—typically used to zone off rooms in a house—expand and contract to mark out the mutable space of the gallery. A large, curved rectangle of perforated angle stock—as one might find in the track of a garage door opener— similarly frames the white walls as a marquee.

Tucker "showcases" the relationships between objects, bodies and spaces, as well as between expectations and realities. Forms and materials clash: a trumpet and a neon sign are meticulously carved in wood. Moreover, sculpture functions as drawing: oversized crosshatches, dotted-lines, and words fill the empty page of the gallery. Tucker’s erected borders and boundaries, eliding explicit political connotation, are provisional, fragile, and fragmentary; they are domestic and intimate, if not personal.

Tijuana Brass shows Tucker's return to language-based works, as well as his regular reworking of the tropes of art history, in this case Minimalism, in characteristic quirky, idiosyncratic and fun style. Mixing high and low, abstraction and concrete, spatial and sensual, Tucker invokes the spirit of Tijuana, a place where anything goes.

In the north gallery, California-based artist Darcy Huebler presents six new works including two large canvases that, at first glance, are boldly representational. Open System (ESU #3) and Open System (ESU #4) reproduce Eames Storage Units, depicting each cabinet life-sized and slightly angled toward the viewer.

Originally built in 1950, the configurable ESUs of Charles and Ray Eame s were a precursor to" modularity" in design. In Huebler's hands, the display units are presented as floating abstract grid-like compositions of color and shape.

Complementing these images are four smaller, thoroughly abstract works that offer a purely retinal experience of graphic color and undulating line. Together, Huebler's Thought Process challenges viewers to appreciate that representation and abstraction can be simultaneous phenomena.

Pictured:  Brad Tucker, Detail from Shutter Stop, 2008, enamel on wood and acrylic on foam rubber, 36 x 111 x 39 inches.