Taking Care: Ryan Crowley, Loc Huynh, Jamire Williams

TAKING CARE: RYAN CROWLEY LOC HUYNH JAMIRE WILLIAMS 2021/2022 ARTIST STUDIO PROGRAM EXHIBITION

ABOUT

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RYAN CROWLEY

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LOC HUYNH

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JAMIRE WILLIAMS

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ABOUT THE EXHIBITION The artist’s studio should be a generative space, one meant for growth, abundance, and nourishment. While these spaces may not provide physical nourishment, they can offer metaphorical food for an artistic practice. Over these last six months, three artists who are part of Lawndale’s Artist Studio Program—Ryan Crowley, Loc Huynh, and Jamire Williams—have taken care of their studio practice during a time when care is needed most. A time for self care and care for community health. It has been restorative to have a space dedicated to artistic making and practice and the fruits of these labors are on view in the exhibition Taking Care: Ryan Crowley, Loc Huynh, Jamire Williams.

ABOUT THE ARTIST STUDIO PROGRAM The Lawndale Artist Studio Program awards artists with dynamic support to develop their creative practice and make new work for an exhibition in the spring. Lawndale is pleased to announce the 2021/2022 Artist Studio Program participants: Ryan Crowley, Loc Huynh, Jamire Williams.

Established in 2006, the Lawndale Artist Studio Program offers residencies to Texas-based artists who are developing a practice in the visual and performing arts.

Once selected, residents receive a monthly stipend, materials allowance, and 24-hour access to a private studio. Lawndale also awards residents with access to a welcoming and vibrant community of working artists, curators, critics, and patrons of contemporary art. Throughout the nine-month residency, the artists work closely with each other and Lawndale staff on the development and production of new work that will be exhibited at Lawndale in the spring.

Major support for the Artist Studio Program is provided by Kathrine G. McGovern/The John P. McGovern Foundation.

All images by Nash Baker 2

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RYAN CROWLEY

Installation view

Ryan Crowley is a sculptor who likens his process of making sculpture to dancing with an off-kilter washing machine. He has exhibited nationally at institutions including Hometown Gallery, Brooklyn; Coustofwaxman, Manhattan; Wayfarers, Brooklyn; TSA Chicago; Julius Caesar Gallery, Chicago; 4th Wall Project, Boston; 1708 Gallery, Richmond; Mass Gallery, Austin and TANK Space, Houston. In 2014, he was the recipient of a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship grant. Crowley studied sculpture at Massachusetts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Virginia Commonwealth University.

Book, 2021-2022 5

ONE THING LIKE ANOTHER, MIRRORING: RYAN CROWLEY’S SCULPTURES

By JD Pluecker The strangeness of a delicate strand dangling, yet apparently hard as a rock. The chiseled marks on wood forming a flower and its petals. The peeling open of a spiral-bound book on the wall. The largeness of an elephant ear but weighty and thick, like concrete. Bowling balls but with the grain of wood visible.

A plethora of forms, colors, shapes, materials.

Each individual piece, a sculpture all on its own, and yet a likeness between them. Long narrow pieces that hang or protrude, poke or tower above.

Glass in panes appears sometimes stained and hand-labored, sometimes smoky and translucent.

Woods, metals, plaster, an insistence on diverse finishes, holes, spokes, legs, and hairs leaning in multiple directions.

Questions about materials, and the materials with their questions. What is this that I am looking at?

What might it be made of? What is it doing here?

Each object in the space appears to function like a piece of furniture or item of decor in some strange living room. Each piece seemingly proud of its own personality, its own individuality within the assemblage of this imagined living room. Or perhaps I am looking at the family of oddballs gathered inside it. There is no sound from these characters, though perhaps what is elicited is the hum of another kind of communication, an other din of seeing and looking, being seen and being observed. The quiet tension of a large number of individuals in one space, yet silent, each immersed in their own work of being. A tableau vivant.

When is one thing like another? What is likeness like? When is an installation in a gallery like furniture? Perhaps that one is like a lamp. That one a purse left behind at the party. That one a table or a sofa anchoring the room. That one a book left open and dangling, hanging from the wall.

Let’s eye Book for a while longer: hung on the wall, what look like pages open out onto a number of forms that appear to be made of plaster. Holes in the pages and squiggles everywhere, the forms of asemic writing appear to be only gestural but then in one place—Feb 22—like a datemark for the book or is it from the library and is it being checked out?

The ridges of fin-like protrusions, also swathed in plaster. The steps on the sides indicating the stack of pages or the levels of a pyramid, rise to a vertical plateau. The coils in the center as if the book is spiral-bound, the remnant of a screen for a house crawlspace. The ripples in glass, both yellow and white, like scrambled eggs. A small insect-like object, moored on its back, unable to move. This bug—Crowley told me—is actually made of glass that has been painted over, to make it finally resemble metal more than glass. Glass made to look like metal. Moments of glass in the objects are a reminder that Crowley has a history in glasswork, particularly in the production of cannabis paraphernalia: pipes, tubes, and bongs have an afterlife here in the forms of glass, even when masked as another material.

What if Moth Breaks were a lamp, the spherical orb of light emerging from the corkboard. The gall of an oak tree perches. The base appears to be a silver-painted cement, the lampstand a painted ceramic-like material, always one thing like another, gesturing to something else, a confusion or an indeterminacy, an uncertainty. Again lettering or asemic language that at times becomes more legible and at others entirely illegible. The hands of a clock stuck on 1:37, more or less. A pane of multicolored stain glass that ripples organically through a variety of shades and colors, blues, blacks, glimmering translucent green glass. What is a lamp and where is the decorative break?

In a visit with Ryan Crowley, he told me stories of moving between three different studio spaces over 6

the last year: one at Lawndale, a garage at home, and a workspace at Rice University which is both a day job and access point to other kinds of tools. He told me too about the soundtrack of his early years that re-appeared during the making of these pieces: Roy Orbison, Lee Hazlewood, Pretty Woman, Queen, and the afterlife of punk, Fugazi. COVID is audible here perhaps, visible in the intricacies of working and re-working the characters: the depths of COVID-induced isolation and its attendant deep dives into neverending rabbit holes. Or maybe this is Crowley’s way of working, this repetition and constant re-working, shifting.

was surmised on initial inspection. One weird thing un-understood as a mirror for a person searching for somewhere, something else. Each of these objects is like the trip it took to create it, the object embodying the process to find the arrangement, the decisions made in its on-going creation.

What we find here is a practice that foregrounds the gradual shifts, rearrangements of domesticity, re-mixing endlessly in the living room: the objects function as receipts from the voyage, a detailed accounting of the transitions.

As Crowley and I spoke, I began to wonder how his own identity or history might come into this work.

This question is not always asked of individuals whose identities are not somehow marginal or “exotic” or different from the “norm.” There is an assumed universality in dominant identities whether of whiteness, straightness, or masculinity.

So I asked Crowley, and his answer provides avenues for further reflection.

Crowley told me he doesn’t use or get into or ground himself much in his own biography, though he does see the works as mirrors for himself.

Again, likenesses. One thing like another but not quite. As he told me, he is into weird, strange things that are seemingly incomprehensible, both to him and the viewer—especially upon first glance. He is less interested in how these things emerge out of him or where they might come from. As he stated, he is obsessed with these objects so baffling or unpredictable that he ends up asking himself who he actually is or might be. The pieces become shadowy mirrors that occlude a straightforward accounting of identity or origin.

Skewedelabra (and Smoked), 2021-2022

One thing is like another or it is not. One thing looks to be made of one material, but then it is not what 7

LOC HUYNH

Loc Huynh received his MFA in drawing and painting from the University of North Texas in 2020 and his BFA from Texas State University in 2016. Huynh has exhibited work at numerous venues nationally, including Baby Blue Gallery in Chicago; Wilkinson Gallery (New York Academy of Art) in New York; Inpost Gallery in Albuquerque; among many more. He is the recipient of the Voertman-Ardoin Fellowship, Hixson-Lied Fellowship, and Vermont Studio Residency Fellowship. His work has been featured in New American Paintings and Glasstire.

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AN ALTAR FOR THE OCEAN BETWEEN US: LOC HUYNH'S FAMILY PORTRAITS

By JD Pluecker A simple altar on the wall made out of four narrow, white shelves. One longer shelf at the top with a vessel full of rice, a box of incense sticks and two naturalistic portraits of elders. Below this longer shelf, three smaller ones, each with a plate and three multicolored, rainbow rubber band balls, reminiscent of fruits. An austere, elegant display of familial connections and ancestral honoring. The artist Loc Huynh has decided to bring a more intimate assemblage into the gallery with this piece, An Altar (Remembrance and Reverence) (2018-22), opening the art space to a form of honor and representation perhaps more common in the home or a family business. An improvised shrine to lay an anchor for ancestors who have passed away and for Huynh’s artistic work, which sketches a suite of complex stories of migration and separation, war and flight.

The altar’s two naturalistic, full-color paintings of elders—who I learn from Huynh are his maternal grandparents—stand in contrast to the other depictions in the show, which favor a more stylized approach with stark lines, grayscale, spray paint ombres, and bold contours reminiscent of graphic novels or comic books. These paintings revive his grandparents in a way, as they recreate scenes from photos in paint. His grandparents are mirrored across the show in a variety of different media, including three-dimensional cardboard sculptural cut-outs of his grandparents’ faces (Bà Ngoại and Ông Ngoại, both 2021-22) and a hand-painted mural connecting two portraits on one wall.

In conversation with Huynh, I learned a great deal about some of the familial voyages that undergird the scenes depicted in the paintings. Each item in the show has been carefully selected to reflect personal histories; for example, the rubber band balls are a reference to the labor of his grandfather who worked in the rubber industry.

His grandmother’s family labored as cooks in French kitchens. His maternal grandparents became jewelers together.

The way that jewelry connects the two is visible on one long wall in the gallery where another two individual portraits of the grandparents are hung at opposite ends, separated but also connected by a mural painting between them of a sea with cartoonish clouds and a flock of migrating birds.

On one side is a portrait of his grandfather, Greetings from America (2021), and on the other, his grandmother, Still in Saigon (2022). In the air, seemingly hanging from the space between the clouds are two necklaces with pendants. The necklace closest to the grandmother, Grandpa in Jade (2021), has a portrait of a younger version of her husband, and vice versa on the other side with Grandma in Jade (2021). The jewelry unites them, but also hangs in the space between. For there to be connection, there must also be separation. One depends upon the other.

After the Vietnamese war of resistance against the United States, Huynh’s maternal grandfather moved with the family to the U.S., but his grandmother stayed behind to look over the family property in Saigon and had trouble getting a permanent American visa for years, which meant that she never fully moved to the United States.

Each summer, Huynh’s grandfather would travel to Vietnam, while every winter his grandmother would come to the U.S. Their love would be at a distance for the rest of their lives, though they would see each other on a consistent basis through the years.

Huynh’s grandfather passed away when Huynh was around 10; his grandmother stayed in Vietnam until her death, when Huynh was 17.

One small painting in the show dramatizes this family separated by an ocean. When Huynh’s grandmother was on her death bed, his mother 10

rushed back, ultimately arriving the day before his grandmother died. Unlike the many other scenes in the show depicted originally in photos and re-created in paintings, there was no photo of the hospital scene, so Huynh imagines it in I Waited for You (2022), a small painting included in the exhibition: his mom in a vibrant full color at the bedside of his grandmother in black-and-white.

There is a series of constant transitions in the show marked by color, a move from vibrant hues to black-and-white and then back to color.

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Though the family had a clear and direct connection to the Vietnam War, Huynh’s family didn’t discuss those difficult experiences with him. Huynh’s images of the war came from movies like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. Hollywood movies focusing on the experiences of GI’s, their own voyages and experiences in the war, with Vietnamese people always sidelined, somewhere off-screen or on the margins. In this work, Huynh repositions himself and his grandparents in the center of the story. The war and its mass-media depictions in the U.S. are thankfully left outside of the frame.

The small hospital painting of I Waited for You (2022) is also the exception in the sense that no one is smiling in it, while, in the other family portraits, everyone is smiling. Huynh shared that the smiles are his own response to an overly solemn and academic approach to art-making, a sense of a smile as being anathema to high art. In Huynh’s work, he embraces aspects of storytelling drawn from comics or graphic novels; this impulse to caricature allows him to approach painful histories and to convert them into characters that move through stories rich with migration and motion.

Though Huynh has never made a comic book, he did include a small zine in the show, The Ocean Between Us (Biến hai bên chúng ta), that provides another entry point into the narratives behind the show. These paintings and their stark rectangular forms almost seem drawn out of a comic book not yet written. Full-scale paintings of figures that promise to re-emerge in multiple forms. A story yet to be written, but with the characters already fully realized.

Ông Ngoại, 2021-22

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JAMIRE WILLIAMS

Jamire Williams is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans experimental jazz, performance, and sculpture. His work is grounded in an investigation of the Black diaspora and driven by a deep faith and sense of the immaterial. He has performed and presented nationally and internationally at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, Lawndale Art and Performance Center, Bim Huis, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Montreal Contemporary Art Museum, Stony Island Arts Bank, Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Michael Todd Gallery, Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, and Brookfield Place. In his music and performance, Williams has collaborated with such luminaries as Solange Knowles, Kara Walker, Jason Moran, Dev Hynes, Robert Glasper, Julie Mehretu, Moses Sumney, Kahlil Joseph, Jamal Cyrus, Ari Marcopoulos, Christian Scott, and Chassol.

DAILY BREAD, 2022 13

THE TESTAMENT & THE TRANSFIGURATION

By MICH STEVENSON Jamire Williams' work replaces references for religion for sincere reverence for God. As a result, viewers are welcomed into a contemporary representation of both divine encounter and undeniable relationship between a man and his maker, Yahweh. The works, which move in a seeming timeline from left to right, parallel biblical narratives with the chronology of Williams’ life. In this way, the work is a visual embodiment of the Christian faith tradition echoing historic prophecy and anointing.

While the materiality of the work conveys the likeness of a musician born in the gospel Southern United States, the conceptualization of the work is telling of an artist tasked with a prophetic undertaking that would include a modern Exodus for himself and family. As such, Williams’ work in Taking Care: Ryan Crowley, Loc Huynh, Jamire Williams begins with a film piece titled IN RETROSPECT: A BFA IN LORD HELP US, marking the origin of a two year journey that would relocate Williams and his wife and daughter from opportunity in Los Angeles to the unknown in Houston. Directed in collaboration with Williams‘ wife, Asia, the film depicts a larger framed man as a representation of Jesus Christ holding the weight and supporting the movement of a smaller framed man, representing Williams and his family. The words “DON’T MOURN OVER THE COUNTERFEIT” cascade above the screen, revealing a promise of the life and work to come and letting go of the former. The viewer turns opposite of the screen to realize the completion of Williams’ holy promise from God in BEAUTY FOR ASHES. In 2021, Williams prepared to release his studio album with his dream record label and solidify the success he’d positioned his life for. Walking away from his pinnacle moment, an existential awakening unfurls, leaving the crumbled ash remains symbolically displaced on the ground.

The opening works identify the announcement of Williams' Exodus; the latter orchestrate his journey.

Ash and dust rise across the expanse of the concrete to form the viewer's examination of Williams’ prophetic instructions in his work titled EL SALI, one of the many Hebrew names of God translated as “the God of my strength.” In this work, Williams establishes the pillar of his faith, setting a 30 pound rock atop a large stack of Holy Bibles, each interwoven with sound circuitry and speakers.

An immediate sensory confrontation occurs as the viewer waits for the sculpture to make a sound, a mute observation distills into the physical posture Williams submitted to at the beginning of his artist residency. Speaking on the posture, Williams states, “at the beginning of my residency, I anticipated I’d be making some amalgamation of sound. I’m a drummer. Instead, I was reduced daily to my knees in prayer; crying in exhortation. I needed to hear from God. Throughout this residency, I’ve not created one new sound. I prayed.

The revelation of those prayers is here now in this work.” Williams’ piece EL SALI does not make a sound; rather, the deluge of silence and visual weightedness present in the work persist in asking the viewer what sound they might hear.

The Exodus story tells of a tribal nation of God’s chosen people identifying themselves by covering their households with the blood of a sacrificed lamb for protection. The lamb’s sacrifice is a foreshadowing of Jesus Christ sacrificing His life to save souls from hell. Williams sets a backdrop on the 40 x 20 foot gallery wall as the “Blood of Christ” cascades from floor to ceiling. This symbolism is significant because it first represents Williams’ personal sacrifice to give up a successful career as a musician to share the Gospel of Christ; second, a blessing of promise that God will be with Williams as He was with the Israelites of the Old Testament when parting the Red Sea. The works on the wall reveal an innate understanding of the 14

worldly resistance toward the faith that instructs and sustains Williams. Fiery Darts, an assemblage consisting of a retro drum major’s headpiece pierced by darts, conveys the undertaking of Williams’ new work is physical as much as it is spiritual. Adjacent to this work is a series of music sheets titled Scores 1-10, each a painting where notes are replaced with emotive markings. The drum major’s responsibility is to lead the band under the instruction of the music director. In this interpretation of sounds unknown, Williams inquires to God of the sound he is to make.

Interfacing with his own creation and unique giftedness, Williams asks, “What sound exists that I could make that can please God?” Williams as a psalmist emerges with a work simultaneously hiding and revealing the sound God wants to hear.

The final sheet represents the historical lost Tribe of Judah, one of the twelve founding tribes of Israel, scattered with the ease of being erased. Ash-like charcoal is hand-stretched across the canvas of the score, providing the answer to the artist’s question. Any sound from the people of God in praise and adoration to God is the sound that will please God.

Historically, each biblical prophet is required to set the place where God will reveal himself through a specific set of instructions utilizing seemingly incongruent elements. Williams' work follows the same prophetic undertakings. It is clear in Williams' work that God is not seeking to engage the rationale of mankind as much as He is the heart of mankind. Williams' final work reveals the inaudible sound of SPEAK O LORD in a piece titled DAILY BREAD. This final work is a collection of Bibles encased in Saran Wrap seated on a dining chair, a visual reference to the words of Jesus: “For man does not eat on bread alone but on every word that comes from My Father’s mouth.” For Williams, the end of his career is the beginning of his calling from God to return and be restored by the word of God, as Genesis 1:1 speaks, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

As Williams’ question is answered, so is his next instruction provided. He is now to bear the responsibility of telling God’s people who they are and who God is. In the biblical tradition, each prophet is anointed on their head with oil. Echoing the first psalmist, biblical King David, Williams places The Anointing, a found object installation of a vase filled with anointing oil, next to a book titled Satan You Can't Stop Me, referencing Psalm 118:17: "I will not die, but live, to declare the works of the Lord."

Williams as a prophet of God emerges with SPEAK O’ LORD, a triumphant sculpture towering the heights of the gallery. A similar deluge of silence is present as was in EL SALI; however, the viewer can see that the sound they are in search of is a voice as they encounter a 4 foot tall planter box with three microphones elevated toward heaven from dirt below. Looking up toward the tallest microphone stand, the viewer waits for the voice to speak.

FROM GENESIS TO THE MAPS, 2022 15

JD PLUECKER

is a language worker who writes, translates, organizes, interprets, and creates. They have translated numerous books from the Spanish and their book of poetry and image, Ford Over, was released in 2016 from Noemi Press.

MICH STEVENSON

(b.1987) is a Houston artist and skilled laborer working in the fields of sculpture, product design, manufacturing and transportation logistics. His creative practice includes public art, site-specific installations, technical drawing, design, photography, and writing. His works in sculpture have been included at Ruby City’s presentation of the 2021 Texas Biennial as well as the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, Blaffer Art Museum, and Project Row Houses.

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