Arm Candy
Iva Kinnaird and Emily Peacock in San Jacinto
San Jacinto College is one of many community colleges in the Houston area, and it has an excellent art gallery. I dropped by a few days ago to see an expansive exhibit, Arm Candy, by two of my favorite Houston artists, Iva Kinnaird and Emily Peacock.
The exhibition was the idea of art professor Bradly Brown, but Kinaird and Peacock took the idea and ran with it. They designed a “corporate identity” for the exhibit—a logo, poster art, etc. As marketing goes, this poster makes them look cool as shit.
I suggested to them that they would have an absolute smash hit if they put the above warning on a billboard on Dixie Farm Road near the campus.
Rather than a collective project, “Arm Candy” showcases recent work, but not necessarily brand new. I’ve seen a few of the pieces at recent exhibits. For example, I’m pretty sure that some of the Ibuprofrin sculptures by Kinnaird had been shown at her 2022 exibit at F. Or perhaps they were remade for this exhibit—I have no idea how long a sculpture made of Ibuprofrin gel packs would last. Not forever, surely. But some were new to me.
While most of the art in the exhibit is not collaborative, some of the pieces in the show by Kinnaird and Peacock seem to talk to each other.
Three works featuring images of hot dogs, all created in 2023. Did the two artists, while planning this show, decide together to make some hot dog-related artworks, or had they already made these prior to planning the show? Was it a coincidence that each had these pieces in their 2023 inventory? In any case, they were distributed together in a corner.
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