VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Inman Gallery presents the exhibitions Carl Suddath: 60' 6" and  Katrina Moorhead: Landscape of a Danger, on view Saturday, January 15 - Saturday, February 19, 2011. Opening Reception: Saturday, January 15; 6-8pm.

Carl Suddath: 60' 6", in the Main Gallery, comprises a group of drawings and several new sculptures. The exhibition's title refers to the distance between the pitching mound and home plate on a modern baseball field. This seemingly random title provides not so much of an umbrella for the exhibition's works but a point of beginning: a number which has a specific reference in space somewhere that is not in the gallery.

Specific then, but abstract, Suddath's work is quiet, and even modest. More than a bit enigmatic, each work nevertheless assumes an attitude of quiet insistence. Each asks for a negotiation, a conversation. Several large black graphite drawings present an excerpt of darkness, a piece of the night sky. Impossible to focus the camera on their surface for documentation, they resist our gaze in the same way, pointing instead, away from themselves, to the space in which they hang. This curious negotiation becomes an active exercise between the viewer and the work in the exhibition.

Katrina Moorhead: Landscape of a Danger occupies the North Gallery. Expanding upon ideas developed through a group of small sculptures from 2009, the installation couples meticulously embellished natural elements (animal skins) with objects and infrastructure built from common materials used in the construction industry. Emphasizing the rawness of the whole, the artist has created a place that seems to be screaming, a dynamic, shifting landscape in the process of becoming or folding or unfolding.

Katrina Moorhead is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant Award. This grant is funded by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.

Images: (upper) Carl Suddath, Untitled, 2010 pencil, Flashe and colored pencil 22 x 30 inches; (lower) Katrina Moorhead, Sculpture of a Danger, 2010 seashell, bells, tartan, fishing twine, thread, 2 x 16 x 6 inches