Student artists debut revolutionary gallery

By Julia Bursten | Thresher Editorial Staff

Good art requires a few basic survival tools: creativity, a purpose or message and a way to make that message known. Good artists have a similar set of requirements: inspiration for a message to convey, a media in which to convey it and a place in which to reach an audience.

The Sheridan Collective, a new, student-run gallery, provides young artists with all of these.

The Collective, an exhibition space in the private residence of Lovett College senior Peter Darrell and architecture student James Townsend (Lovett ‘05), takes art and art lovers out of a sterile museum environment and invites one to confront the other in a more everyday setting: the average student apartment. The debut exhibition, I Wear My Father’s Shirt Backwards, features works by Townsend as well as Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston Teen Council Coordinator Jason Pallas (Lovett ‘04), Will Rice College junior Ruta Perzynska, architecture student Federico Cavasos (Lovett ‘05) and University of Houston student Sarah Jones. The exhibit is open by appointment through Jan. 29.

Inspiration for the Collective came last summer, when Townsend and other Rice students found themselves seeking a way to reach a public audience with their work.

“There is so much emphasis on [exhibiting only well-known work at] galleries that it becomes a pretty closed world, especially for young artists,” Pallas said. “[The Collective] is a more informal, flexible way to reach an interested audience.”

In addition to giving less well-established artists a space in which to display their work, the communal, democratic format of the Collective offers them more input about how their pieces are displayed than a traditional museum.

“I feel more in control in terms of space here,” Cavasos said. “The choreography is easier.”

Cavasos, who is exhibiting an erratic sculpture of PVC piping composed in a joint effort with Townsend, said the Collective’s freedom of installation space allows the piece to exist both inside and outside the apartment. He and Townsend stretched the sculpture from the front yard through the apartment’s second-story window. Cavasos said he could not think of a mainstream gallery in Houston that would have the architecture to create a similar effect, let alone allow him to do so.

Perzynska said she was excited to be offered a spot in the Collective’s first exhibit because she had her own space in an unpretentious environment. One of her installations, a collection of digital, multiple-exposure photography, is displayed on a background of black squares spray-painted over a wall

already covered with graffiti. The graffiti, which extends over the walls and ceiling of the Collective’s two front rooms, was not originally intended as part of the exhibition but was a previous, separate project of Darrell and Townsend, Townsend said. It lends a unique backdrop to many of the pieces, and stands on its own as further testimony to the Collective’s unique approach to reaching audiences through art.

“Galleries can be intimidating to audiences as well [as to artists],” Perzynska said. “[The Collective] is a really fun thing for audiences to be part of, and each of [the artists in the exhibit] has a different crowd to bring in.”

Townsend said the exhibition is intended to be a public gallery for those both in and outside the Rice community. He said the Collective posted Internet advertisements and flyers around Houston, and he hopes to keep bringing in a wider audience through advertising and diversification of the types of art exhibited. Perzynska agreed.

“We want to host DJs, musicians and other performance artists in the future,” Perzynska said. “The Collective is a good forum for taking leaps across genres like this.”

The cross-genre experience manifests itself in I Wear My Father’s Shirt Backwards. The artists use a wide variety of media, from digital photography and PVC piping to mammoth-scale fabric sculptures and a pair of installations using cigarette boxes — one a race of cartoon-like characters influenced by the nicotine rage of the ’60s and the other a treadmill laden with empty cartons and labels.

The exhibit marks the public debut for a few of the artists, and this provides the inspiration for the show’s title. I Wear My Father’s Shirt Backwards signifies both the artists’ public divergence from their parents’ professional lifestyles and the elementary-school tradition of using men’s old work shirts as smocks in art class, Pallas said.

The Collective’s next exhibit will feature video work by Townsend and Cavasos, and a March exhibit showcasing Pallas’ latest projects is in the works. Each exhibit will be open to the public by appointment and curated by a member of the Collective.

January 20, 2006

The Student Newspaper of Rice University

Student artists debut revolutionary gallery

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