Rising Stars
Studio 107, through Nov. 30“Rising Stars” is an apt title for this small but sparkling exhibit of works by Robert Pruitt, Leona Scull-Hons, and Young-Min Kang. Its curator, Till Richter, is known for his championship of the avant-garde and as a serious collector of conceptual art as well as brisk and original paintings and mixed media.
The show features short films by each of the three artists. I found Pruitt’s slightly animated films about the adventures of “black stunt man” to be extremely amusing. The low-tech approach combines delicate graphite drawings on lined notebook paper with a boisterous and ironically repetitious hip-hop soundtrack. The story lines develop in dramatic lurches, showing an understanding of the fantastic possibilities of cartooning and the graphic power of storyboarding. Pruitt, who was featured in AMOA’s “22 to Watch,” has just received a $15,000 Houston Artadia grant, as have Amy Blakemore, Brian Wesley Heiss, Laura Lark, and Aaron Parazette. I have to agree with Richter: Pruitt is on the rise.
The film by Leona Scull-Hons was a close-up view of a nose and three torturous minutes of blackhead squeezing. Richter laughed as the audience squirmed. Scull-Hons’ conceptual “photography-sculpture” is all about the bathroom. For it, she “borrowed” dirty towels from friends of the gallery, then washed and monogrammed them. Her work combines a tenderness with a “get out of my bathroom” creepiness.
Young-Min Kang is making ripples around Austin with his clever digital printing. For those who liked his large-scale work at “Construction Site” last month, his work here will not let you down. He told me that he “found a different solution” to one of his self-diagnosed creative problems: the extreme stretching of perspective space. His abstract print work appears about 4 feet by 12 feet on the wall, flat and mostly a constellation of earth tones with a few streaks of pink and yellow. But if you lean against the wall next to the piece and look at it sidelong, you will see a bodacious blond woman in a pink bikini and short shorts. Kang has made a secret, an image within an image. Secrets are always interesting. These three recent UT grads are indeed producing clever things for your viewing entertainment.
This article appears in November 5 • 2004.