ARTHOUSE AT THE JONES CENTER

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Arthouse At the Jones Center
700 Congress Ave
512.453.5312
www.arthousetexas.org

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Viewpoints
AMOA-Arthouse’s curatorial department leads free and insightful 20-minute talks
about exhibitions currently on view

March 28 // with Kimberli Gant, Mercer Graduate Curatorial Intern, on Art on the Green.
6pm at Laguna Gloria

May 16 // with Erin Gentry, Manager of Education Programs, on Texas Prize 2012.
6pm at the Jones Center

Evidence of Houdini’s Return
January 14 - March 4, 2012
Second Floor Gallery

Through the creation of complex visual narratives, the international artists in this exhibition present
provocative abstract forms that investigate art’s potential to interrupt and/or reconstruct elements
of everyday life. Each of the seven artists test the boundaries of working abstractly, with found
objects and images, reformed digital technologies, as well as reference traditional techniques.
While exploring the potential of objects in space, their ideas coalesce around an opposition to
fixed forms. By encouraging examinations of context and allowing for ambiguous formal and
narrative combinations to inform one another, Evidence of Houdini’s Return focuses on the value
of abstraction in contemporary art discourse today.

The historical importance of abstraction within art is a codified and accepted tradition and the
artists in this exhibition are deeply aware of their predecessors. However, abstraction takes on a
new meaning as society moves even more rapidly into a highly digitalized world of constant
stimulation. With a wide range of mediums represented, including painting, photography,
sculpture, video, drawing and collage, Evidence of Houdini’s Return presents multiple
opportunities for the visitor to experience various strategies of abstraction currently being
employed by a dynamic group of emerging international artists.

Jill Magid
Failed States
January 14 - March 4, 2012
First Floor Gallery

On January 21, 2010, 24-year-old Fausto Cardenas fired six shots from a small caliber handgun
into the air from the steps of the Texas State Capitol, just blocks from the site of this exhibition.
Coincidentally, Jill Magid was present as a witness. Fausto’s motivations still remain unknown.

Failed States is an exploration of coincidence, poetics, government power and bureaucracy.
Fausto’s silence lies at the heart of the exhibition. Charged with perpetrating a terrorist threat
to a government system, his case nearly came to trial numerous times only to be continuously
delayed. Last August, Fausto accepted a plea bargain, ultimately silencing himself.

In Failed States, Magid draws connections between Fausto’s futile and tragic act and
Goethe’s nineteenth-century epic poem, Faust. Magid mines Faust for thematic connections
and develops a means of performative exhibition, treating the gallery as a stage to be
studied. Although Faust was originally written as a “closet drama” —a play to be read
rather than performed, it is regularly seen on stage. Similarly, the motivations behind Fausto’s
act are known only to him, yet they have played out on an extraordinary scale. The
exhibition functions on both of these levels, mingling personal and public, fact and fiction,
Fausto and Faust.

Magid extends Failed States beyond the gallery with two offsite projects. Failed States, the
work from which this exhibition takes its names, was Magid’s family car. The artist had her
1993 Mercedes station wagon armored to B4 level, resistant to 9mm through .44 Magnum
gun fire. The car is an invisibly armored closet, installed where Fausto parked his car before
approaching the Capitol. Magid will also publish a work in the February issue of the
political magazine Texas Observer, further extending her reach into the domestic spaces
of subscribers.

Magid is a New York-based artist and writer known for work that infiltrates structures of
authority and power by means of engaging their human side. Rather than treating
these structures as remote subjects to challenge, Magid creates opportunities to
manipulate them, by drawing them closer, exploiting their loopholes, engaging them
in dialogue, infiltrating their systems, repeating their logic. Her work relies on the
malleability of language and its use as a conceptual tool, revealing gray areas of
the law, and creating both an opening and a dialogue where there they didn’t
exist before.

Failed States, the armored car, will be on view on February 4 and March 3, 2012
from 12-3pm on Colorado Street, near the west entrance of the Texas State Capitol.

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Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani
Toute la mémoire du monde - The world's knowledge
January 14 - April 22, 2012
Film & Video Gallery

n Toute la mémoire du monde – The world’s knowledge, Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani
reinterpret French director Alain Resnais’ similarly titled 1956 film. Resnais’ twenty three-minute
documentary sweeps through the historic French Bibliothèque Nationale on Rue de Richelieu
in Paris, exposing how the library functions as a storehouse of all the world’s knowledge. The
jam-packed library seen in Resnais’ film is a stark contrast to the vacant library in Fischer and
el Sani’s 2006 work—where that knowledge has now vanished. After a new Bibliothèque
Nationale was opened in 1996, the Rue de Richelieu building was emptied of most of
its collections, creating the ultimate setting for Fischer and el Sani to examine ideas of
knowledge and memory.

As the camera slowly pans the deserted stacks and exquisite domed reading room, the
viewer reacts to the emptiness, the feeling of loss, and the history of the space. Toute la
mémoire du monde – The world’s knowledge carefully explores collective memory. Even
within the shell of the historical building and void of books, the library feels full. By
presenting the empty space, Fischer and el Sani focus on the withdrawal of knowledge
while commenting on the subjectivity of memory.

Yet, the rooms are not completely empty. Throughout the seven-minute film, the viewer
is confronted with a series of young people, sitting at tables or standing around, waiting.
These interjections into the architectural landscape of the film entice a viewer. With
their uninterested poses and the heightening feeling given off by the electronic
soundtrack, the filmmakers allude to the possible resentment that might arise with the
loss of “all the world’s knowledge.”

Miguel Andrade Valdez
Monumento Lima
January 9 - April 1, 2012
SCREEN Projects

Andrade Valdez’s video Monumento Lima is a chaotic, rapid-fire visual compendium of the
monuments that occupy Lima’s traffic circles and pedestrian malls. They range from the
forgotten to the futurist, the Spanish Mediterranean to the brutal, as well as the Modernist.
In the video, the trapezoid emerges as a very popular shape due to its common motif in
pre-Columbian Peruvian architecture.

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Niklas Goldbach
HABITAT C3B
January 14 - March 4, 2012
LIFT Projects
Niklas Goldbach’s video HABITAT C3B explores a nearly deserted urban environment populated
only by a handful of identical men engaging in an unknown mission. The clone-like characters
chase one man that breaks from the group, recalling stock plot twists from science fiction.
Produced at the main site of Georges Pompidou’s failed gentrification in the 15th
arrondissement of Paris, the video chronicles the implied protagonist’s journey through
a modern yet despondently barren cityscape. The sharp angles of the 1970s architecture
provide a stark backdrop to the renegade man, whose simple, repetitive actions become
laden with complexity as he encounters others who mirror him in appearance yet chase
him through the labyrinthine architecture. The percussion of the footsteps intensifies as the
video progresses and punctuates the otherwise still silence. Goldbach heightens tensions between
fact and fiction and the ambiguity of reality with long patient shots. He produces
a world that is both dystopian and hopeful – the viewer never learns if the outlaw man
escapes or is brought back into the fold.

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