Exhibiting Art and Publishing Magazines
Flats, FLAT Files, and Where They’re At
In 1989, I started working for Fantagraphics Books, the venerable publisher of art comics, as an editor. It was headquartered in Seattle, and while I lived there, I became more involved with the city’s local art scene. I got to know Larry Reid, the director of COCA, a large alternative art space in downtown Seattle. In 1991, Reid suggested to us the idea of having a big exhibit of alternative comics. Years later, Reid said, “I approached them [Kim Thompson and Gary Groth, the publishers of Fantagraphics] sort of gushingly at Peter [Bagge]’s party and asked them to put together an art exhibition for COCA. They seemed a little skeptical. I think Kim and Gary were sort of less interested in the pretension of the fine art world. I think they were trying to examine the comic book form and elevate it to a literary form in and of itself. [. . .] I just hounded them into submission. I think Peter was really influential—and Robert—to sort of convincing Gary and Kim that this was a worthwhile endeavor.” This enormous exhibition, Misfit Lit, opened at COCA and subsequently traveled to LACE in Los Angeles and venues in Winnipeg and Minneapolis. This was my favorite part of my career as an editor at Fantagraphics, and it imbued in me a love of the publishing/exhibition axis.
In Houston, we have two exemplars of this axis, F (discussed earlier this month here) and FLATS. FLATS describes itself thus:
FLATS is a nomadic photography exhibition series held in homes around the Houston area. We’re also a photo lab and community darkroom space offering film developing services and support to local photographers, from budding to pro. We aim to create a platform for Houston-based photographers to connect and show their work in intimate, non-traditional settings.
But this is only part of the story. FLATS also publishes a magazine called FLAT Files. The second issue was published this summer. FLAT Files is slick and well-designed—it does not at all feel like an ad hoc or amateur product. The editor is Jessi Bowman, who is the director of FLATS. She also curated FLATS most recent exhibition, Where They’re At, a group exhibit featuring work by Debra Barrera, Theresa Escobedo, Brandon Tho Harris and Emily Peacock.
The exhibit is in a large, light-industrial warehouse east of downtown. I’ve been told that this building will be the future home of the Aurora Picture Show. The space is huge and unfinished, making a somewhat tricky place to have an exhibit, but providing the artists a large venue for installations, which Escobedo and Harris make extensive use of. It’s not a great place to show a bunch of photographs on a wall, white-cube style. This is what Peacock basically does, but she scatters her photos. There is not a nice neat level row, with the center line of each photo is 58 inches above the floor. Her photos and video are down close to the floor, high above the viewers heads, etc. Which given the space she was in, how else could she exhibit them? But Barrera’s, Escobedo’s, and Harris’s work felt perfectly at ease in this strange exhibition environment.
It’s worth mentioning that this neighborhood is slated for an innovative, urbanist redevelopment. The redevelopment is by a real estate group called Concept Neighborhood, a group that includes the owners of the Axelrad. This is not their first rodeo, but as far as I can tell, their approach has been piecemeal in the past. The Axelrad is a great development, and being across the street from the soon-to-be-closed Station Museum made it a nice cultural location. But non-car-dependent urbanism requires people living there and the ability for them to get groceries and other stuff they need within walking distance. That kind of neighborhood barely exists in Houston. (I deliberately live in one of the few places in Houston where this style of living is possible.) Concept Neighborhood is going to try to create such a neighborhood from scratch, reusing already existing structures while not gentrifying the neighborhood out of reach of the people who already live there. And given their history, they want it to be not only urbanist but also artistic. The neighborhood is already the home of El Rincon Social and will be the home of Aurora Picture Show, it feels like this will be a new artistic nexus for Houston.
Without trying to put this exhibition into a thematic box, each of the artists here does address “family.” Peacock’s work touches heavily on her relationship with her sister and her child, Barrera’s work is about her father, Escobedo speaks of “cultural heritage” in her statement, but perhaps more important are the two framed portraits that are part of her Ofrenda—they are old fashioned portrait photos who could be read as Escobedo’s grandparents, and Harris’s installation also includes old, formal portraits that appear to be family portraits.
Barrera’s photos are printed on long vertical sheets, and are hung loosely from the wall, sometimes draped over the warehouse’s support struts. Barrera told me that she designed the images to work that way—to physically interact with the interior of the warehouse. So a piece hanging over a metal strut will echo it with a horizontal element.
The images on the hanging are part of a series called the Fantasma series, which deals with death and fear. A lot of it is about her father, who died when Barrera was 14. He had a gravestone and casket business in Corpus Christi called Barrera Monument Company. The title of this installation, Infinite Granite, logically follows. If you’ve ever visited Corpus Christi as a tourist, you may have seen some of his work—he built the base for the statue Mirador de la Flor, dedicated to Corpus Christi’s most famous artist, Selena Quintanilla-Pérez. Barrera’s father died when she was just 14. In addition to the vertical photographic collages, the installation includes a small chunck of granite displayed on a circular mirror. Gravestones and early death seem spooky, but describing it makes it sound spookier than it was to see it.
There is no way a viewer would have known all of this without being told. I was told by Barrera herself, but most of this information is included in her statement. As she told me this, it made me think about an opinion that I used to believe as a young man: I thought that art should stand on its own, that it should be enough to exist without an explanation. I no longer believe this—I love the stories and history that form a context for art. I think this change it attitude came about in part from looking at ancient art—one’s incomprehension can only be mitigated by knowing something about the culture that produced the art. I ultimately started thinking that this was a general rule applicable to all art.
Theresa Escobido’s installation is big but compact. A purple and blue wall frame a photographic representation of Tlazolteotl, the Aztec “goddess of filth”. The image is of a stone representation of the goddess that currently resides in the British Museum. It is mounted on a mirror in the shape of an arched niche. It sits above a mound of dirt on which rest three circular shelves, the same color purple as the wall behind them. On them are various objects, including the two photos mentioned earlier. There are also plants in the dirt. It feels very much like an altar, which it is. It is an ofrenda to Tlazolteotl. And honors the artist’s ancestors.
Brandon Tho Harris’s work is also in the form of installation, effectively a collage of different images and objects. I don’t have the context for this work as I did for Barrera’s and Escobido’s. Perhaps he wrote a statement like the other artists, but if so, I failed to find it inside this cavernous exhibition space. But he does seem to be addressing family history.
The work includes old photographs, presumably from Vietnam. On his website, Harris tells us that his family was among the hundreds of thousand refugees who came to the United States after the fall of Saigon in 1975. I don’t know if the old photos that form parts of this installation are the artist’s own family photos or if they are found photos from Vietnam, or some combination of the two.
Worth noting is the model car placed on top of a stack of old tires. What its relationship with the rest of the installation is, I can’t imagine. But it looks boss.
Also on the boss end of the coolness scale are the images by Emily Peacock. I have been following Peacock’s career since she was a grad student at the University of Houston. Peacock had a rough COVID, including divorce and a stay in a mental facility. She writes about her need for human connection, how she and her sister (who has long been an important part of Peacock’s artwork) moved back in together. The photos here reflect that, especially the series of Peacock Schemers, somewhat kooky double portraits of her and her sister goofing around.
Peacock has always been willing to shock viewers. In her statement, she describes herself as an “extreme extrovert." Her various nude self-portraits reflect this. Vitruvian Woman Peeing and Gaze that Old-Fashioned Gaze both dare the viewer—especially the male viewer—to not turn away.
I’ve always thought of fruit roll-ups as industrial food products aimed at children, but Peacock finds a way to turn this crap food into a merkin.
And in her video Hang in There, she turns herself into a punching bag for her small son Indiana.
Extreme extrovert indeed!
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Thank you so much for writing about this! It means a lot. - Jessi