citysinging Robert Hodge, Julia Barbosa Landois, and John Pluecker
2018/19 Artist Studio Program curated by Laura August Jun 21 – Aug 18, 2019
Robert Hodge, Julia Barbosa Landois, and John Pluecker citysinging
citysinging presents a body of new work by Robert Hodge, Julia Barbosa Landois, and John Pluecker, made during their 2018/2019 Artist Studio Program residencies at Lawndale. Hodge’s documentary and installation work describes the Blues scene of 1990s-era Houston, as its practitioners remain too-often unremembered or unrecorded. Barbosa Landois looks to the ouroboros as it spirals into itself, to consider the sensation of fleeing climate disaster, especially in light of the recent Deer Park petrochemical fire and other (un)natural events. Pluecker’s poem-objects pay homage to ongoing conversations with their father about the affective geographies and lived violences buried across Houston and in family remembering. Together, their work pushes at the untold and its impossibilities and memories, the entanglement of absence with its description, and the ways this particular place holds its own songs of the unspeakable, the lost, the soon-to-be-gone. About the Artist Studio Program The nine-month Artist Studio Program supports three artists annually with an honorarium, project grant, studio space, and curatorial support, culminating with an exhibition of the artists’ new works. Special thanks to Juan Aaron Castillo, Ashura Bayyan, Jon Clark, David Cobb, Colby Deal, Nathaniel Donnett, Emily Fens, David Fitch, Ray Gomez, Odell Grey, Carlos Hernandez and Burning Bones Press, Sumin Hwang, Michael Jevon Demps, Lauren Lohman, India Lovejoy, Trudy Lynn, Michael McFadden, Jason Michou and TXRX Labs, Tierney Malone, Stephanie Mitchell, Melissa Noble, Shelbi Ragsdale, Alberto Rodríguez Collía, David Shelton, The Peterson Brothers, and Jason Woods. 2
Concert Series with Robert Hodge John M. O’Quinn Gallery Friday, June 21 and July 19 at 7:30 PM Saturday, August 17 at 7:30 PM In Conversation Series: Julia Barbosa Landois and Laura August John M. O’Quinn Gallery Thursday, June 27 6:30 - 7:30 PM John Pluecker: The Unsettlements, Dad John M. O’Quinn Gallery Saturday, July 13 7:30 PM Lecture/performance followed by conversation with John Pluecker and Laura August Robert Hodge and Laura August John M. O’Quinn Gallery Wednesday, July 17 6:30 - 7:30 PM Reading Group with Julia Barbosa Landois John M. O'Quinn Gallery Thursday, July 18 6:30 PM Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and Citizen Potawatomi Nation member Thursday, August 15 6:30 PM Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, celebrated science fiction novelist and MacArthur fellow To sign up for the Reading Group, please contact Landois at julialandois@gmail.com.
Robert Hodge is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores themes of memory and commemoration. Born in Houston, Texas and raised in the City’s Third Ward district, the artist studied visual art at the Pratt Institute in New York and the Atlanta College of Art before returning to Houston. Hodge has exhibited his work in numerous national and international institutions. He has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Houston Arts Alliance and The Idea Fund. Hodge’s current projects include an album he executive produced called Two and 1⁄2 years: A Musical Celebration to the Spirit of Juneteenth and his traveling installation called The Beauty Box.
and in 2015 the local social justice interpreting collective Antena Houston. JP’s undisciplinary work is informed by experimental poetics, language justice, radical aesthetics/politics, and cross-border/ cross-language cultural production. They have translated numerous books from the Spanish, including most recently Gore Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018) and Antígona González (Les Figues Press, 2016). JP’s book of poetry and image, Ford Over, was released in 2016 from Noemi Press. JP is a member of the Macondo Writing Workshop and has exhibited work at Blaffer Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, Project Row Houses, and more.
Julia Barbosa Landois is a multidisciplinary artist who repurposes both materials and narratives to examine ecology, gender, language, and religion. Her work has been featured in museums, performance festivals, and alternative spaces in the United States, Latin America, and Europe, and she has completed residencies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Germany), Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder (Norway), and the Santa Fe Art Institute (USA). Landois holds a BFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. Her studio practice is enriched by her history as a math tutor, garden educator, preparator, and itinerant professor. Barbosa Landois moved to Houston in 2017, and in 2018 received a grant from the National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures to co-create MantecaHTX, the nation’s first online directory for Latinx creatives.
Laura August, PhD, makes texts and exhibitions, often around shared geographic and metaphorical landscapes. Since 2016, she has been working on mud, stones, and the sounds of storms. Her projects are conversations with artists, poets, activists, loved ones, and those we have lost. In 2017, she received The Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her writing in Central America. She served as critic-in-residence at the Core Program at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 2016-2018, and her writing has appeared in numerous international journals, magazines, exhibition catalogs, and artist monographs. Her curatorial projects have included work at artist-run spaces, galleries, museums, and universities in the U.S. and Central America. In 2019, her exhibitions include Mud & Blue (sites across Houston); To Look at the Sea is to become what one is (Radiator Gallery, NYC); and Mario Santizo: Quizás tu batalla sea dura (Centro Municipal de Arte, Guatemala City). She is founding director of Yvonne, a residential project space in Guatemala City, where she divides her time with Houston.
John Pluecker is a language worker who writes, translates, organizes, interprets, and creates. In 2010, they co-founded the transdisciplinary collaborative Antena
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citysinging Robert Hodge, Julia Barbosa Landois, John Pluecker 2019 Artist Studio Program Exhibition “Echoes can’t get located, obvious things gone aviary, map flown all over the place. We’re missing the overall,”1 writes Fred Moten in his “Index.” He’s talking about description and how we locate ourselves within larger correspondences, and he could be describing a system of being in a place, as much informed by black American musical innovations as by a politics from the ground, up. To miss the overall is not to miss the point. In fact, it is exactly the opposite: it is to insist upon the importance of the things that are too large or too small to describe in a single way. It is to get into the pointiness of the point. The artists in citysinging have been working at Lawndale over the course of nine months in the Artist Studio Program. But they also work alongside each other in Houston, finding questions in the city’s specificities: sprawling and uneven, bumpy, with so many hauntings of beauty and pain. They move across different terrains with distinct sets of questions, but share a deep engagement with the embedded and overlooked. Their practices encompass a way of moving that I like to imagine is very connected to ground, to being grounded. Maybe we call this being present. Hodge’s documentary research and installation calls out to the Blues scene of 1990s-era Houston. Looking to the aesthetic of legendary clubs like the Silver Slipper, he has built Leroy’s, drawing from the archival collection of Melissa Noble and hosting a series of concerts with local blues legends. Movement is central to Hodge’s practice; as we talk about his work, we are driving across the city, and the work is being made as we install it. It’s a reflex movement, a call and response to the time, the place, the community. Born and raised in Houston, Hodge is a natural gatherer of voices: “I try to make the shows I don’t see other people making,” he tells me, about his work as a music producer and curator. This is what Leroy’s also enacts. That is to say, making space for the creative work of others is central to how his work moves. Barbosa Landois looks to the ouroboros as it spirals into itself, to consider the sensation of an impossible flight from climate disaster, especially in light of the recent Deer Park petrochemical fire. In her recent work, she’s been considering the connection between transportation-systems-as-exercise conceits—i.e. stationary bikes, treadmills, stair climbers, rowing machines—and the impossibility of escaping the effects of manmade climate disasters. We can’t cycle our way out of this situation, a feeling indicated by her collaborative poster series of the pending apocalypse, A Flood of Feelings. The infinity 4
ouroboros appears almost dream-like across her work, an homage to cultural traditions which cite this form, and to a chemist’s dream: known for his theory of chemical structure, German chemist August Kekulé credited his discovery of the ring-shaped benzene molecule to a daydream of a snake catching its own tail. Benzene is one of the primary chemicals manufactured at the Deer Park IFC plant. JP’s object-poems pay homage to ongoing conversations with their father about the affective geographies and lived violences buried across Houston and in family remembering. In each Unsettlement, they visit a site that has a story in their family history. They describe the experience as a kind of listening, allowing found objects from these fraught sites to speak. JP is a language worker, and these Unsettlements bear various relationships to words, even as we can’t quite read the intimate stories embedded here. Each object-poem also has a corresponding video: we hear ambient sounds from their journey to collect these things, the traffic, water, bird songs surround the sites we can never quite place. JP’s hand-drawn book collects a year’s worth of thinking and listening, recopying notes and images, and offering a point of access to their thinking through of whiteness and its tentacular presence. “…amarillo all over the place as sunlight, called exactly what it is but pointed out only so we can say what it feels when we describe it, get it all down to the point of it being all y’all all over the damn place. It feels terribly beautiful. It feels terribly beauti ful. Everywhere you went.” Moten isn’t writing about this place exactly, or maybe he is. Each artist here has different concerns, but they wander into each other. Together, their work pushes at the untold, its impossibilities and rememberings, the entanglement of absence with its description, and the ways Houston holds its own songs of the unspeakable. This exhibition is like what happens when you sing together in a place: voices swirl and rise, drift off, break, find harmony, fall out. We could say that this city has histories like layers of silt: they might be swept into the next flood, might be treacherous, are often marked by hurt, are full of truths. This is a city we barely know, a city of monstrous immensities. And what does it mean, exactly, to sing a city? Perhaps it means to listen attentively, to try and make sense of something hard to hold in words, to participate in an incantation, for here, from here. Sing city, song city, citysings, y’all sing it now, we are here, exactly here, citysinging. —Laura August 1
Fred Moten, “Index,” in Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, The Hundreds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019): n.p. 5
Robert Hodge, Julia Barbosa Landois, and John Pluecker citysinging Exhibition Checklist window
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Julia Barbosa Landois 01. Forever Almost, 2019 Collage, silkscreen and paper 38 x 48 1/2” 02. Nature Nurture Nature, 2019 Collage, silkscreen, acrylic and paper 49 1/2 x 40” John Pluecker 03. Unsettlement 8, 2018-present Objects collected from a site of significance to the artist’s dad Dimensions variable 6
04. Unsettlement 12, 2019 Objects collected from a site of significance to the artist’s dad Dimensions variable 05. Unsettlement 9, 2018-present Objects collected from a site of significance to the artist’s dad Dimensions variable 06. The Unsettlements: Dad, 2019 Video of book object, duration 08:42 07. Unsettlement 13, 2019 Objects collected from a site of significance to the artist’s dad Dimensions variable
08. Unsettlement 14, 2018-present Objects collected from a site of significance to the artist’s dad Dimensions variable 09. The Unsettlements: Dad, 2019. Observation videos from sites of significance to the artist’s dad on three monitors, durations variable
19. Robert Hodge The Man, The Legend, Leadbelly, 2019 Reclaimed wood, diamond dust, hemp thread, Xerox copy of color print and thumb tacks 33 x 39”
10. The Unsettlements: Dad, 2019 Hand-copied book object installed in closet (inaccessible*)
20. Jason Woods Soul Food Served Daily, 2014 Photograph from the artist’s collection 25 x 21”
11. Unsettlement 2, 2018-present. Objects collected from a site of significance to the artist’s dad Dimensions variable
21. Miss Ann’s Playpen, ca. 1994 Vintage flyer from the collection of Melissa Noble 10 ¾ x 7”
12. Unsettlement 6, 2018-present Objects collected from a site of significance to the artist’s dad Dimensions variable
22. Juke house description from the collection of Melissa Noble 17 x 11”
13. Unsettlement 1, 2018-present Objects collected from a site of significance to the artist’s dad Dimensions variable Julia Barbosa Landois 14. Ouroboros (For Kekulé), 2019 Animation controlled by stationary bike 15. A Flood of Feelings, 2019 Silkscreen and relief on found reproductions of Jan Brueghel the Elder’s The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark (1613); installation of participatory prints 16. Sky Serpent, 2019 Collage, silkscreen and paper 21 1/2 x 26 1/2” Robert Hodge 17. Robert Hodge Leroy’s, 2019 Objects from the collection of Melissa Noble with found objects, concert series
Photographs on sign: Lawrence Hitz, Untitled, n.d. Lawrence Hitz, Untitled, n.d. Melissa Noble, Untitled, n.d. Lawrence Hitz, Down on Reed Road, n.d.
18. The Great Electric Show and Dance, n.d. Vintage poster from the artist’s collection 44 x 48”
23. Roger Wood Down in Houston, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003 (first edition, signed) From the collection of Melissa Noble 24. Historic sites around the Third and Fifth Wards in Houston, TX, ca. 1999-2003 Photographs from the collection of Melissa Noble 25. Robert Hodge No Soliciting, 2019. Reclaimed paper on wood panel 48 x 47” 26. Video compilation: Les Blank The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, 1968 Video, duration 31:00
Les Blank The Sun’s Gonna Shine, 1969 Video, duration 10:00
Les Blank & Skip Gerson A Well-Spent Life, 1971/2005 Video, duration 44:00
Robert Hodge Blues is the New You, 2018-2019 Ongoing documentary project clips, (durations variable)
27. Archival checkerboard from the collection of Melissa Noble 18 ¾ x 16 ½” 7
Installation image by Laura August.
Mission Lawndale is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center that engages Houston communities with exhibitions and programs that explore the aesthetic, critical, and social issues of our time. About Lawndale believes in the role of art and artists to inspire and inform the world around us. By serving as an intimate gathering place to experience art and ideas, Lawndale seeks to foster connections between communities in Houston and beyond. Lawndale presents a diverse range of artistic practices and perspectives through exhibitions and programs, including lectures, symposia, film screenings, readings, and musical performances. Through exhibition opportunities, the Artist Studio Program, institutional collaborations, and the engagement of an advisory board comprised of artists, curators, and scholars, Lawndale seeks within its mission to support all artistic and cultural communities of Houston. Support The Artist Studio Program is supported by Kathrine McGovern/McGovern Foundation. Lawndale’s exhibitions and programs are produced with generous support from The Brown Foundation, Inc.; David R. Graham/Felvis Foundation; the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation; Houston Endowment; Kathrine G. McGovern/The John P. McGovern Foundation; The National Endowment for the Arts; the Texas Commission on the Arts; The City of Houston; and The Wortham Foundation, Inc. John Pluecker’s work has received additional funding from the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.
4912 Main Street Houston, TX 77002
www.lawndaleartcenter.org