Rice Art Gallery’s summer series to feature evocative installation

Rice
Art Gallery’s summer series to feature evocative installation
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The Rice Gallery
will inaugurate its “Summer Window” series with
“Pastor & Collux,” an original site-specific
installation by artist James Cullinane.

The “Summer
Window” series was conceived to allow visitors to experience
an exhibition through the gallery’s glass facade. “Pastor
& Collux” can be seen seven days a week from 8
a.m. to 8 p.m. June 8 through Sept. 8. A festive closing
celebration, featuring free refreshments and family activities
throughout the day, will take place on Museum District Day,
Saturday, Sept. 8.

Cullinane creates
large-scale drawings by hand-sticking tens of thousands
of aluminum pushpins into the wall. When viewed from a distance,
the pins form highly-textured, larger-than-life-size illustrations
of model children playing simple outdoor games. Reminiscent
of a seemingly more innocent time, the images are beautiful
as well as evocative.

The artist’s
drawings are taken from an elementary school primer he discovered
in a used bookstore in Bilbao, Spain. The book includes
illustrations of fit and healthy children, the ideal prescribed
by Gen. Francisco Franco’s Falangista Party. “They
happen to be images of childhood that support a fascist
agenda of ‘clean and healthy bodies and minds,’
but they could just as well be the Boy Scouts of America,”
Cullinane said. Like imagery from Greek mythology and contemporary
advertising, they are attractive, but loaded with subtle
and ambiguous meanings.

Cullinane changes
the scale and material of these schoolbook illustrations
to create a different tone or presence. “It becomes
a menacing and beautiful presence that changes the scale
of these book images to a 16-foot-high architectonic wall-relief
of nails,” Cullinane said. To give the images added
dimension as well as a sense of monumentality, Cullinane
tried projecting the images from the book onto the wall
of his studio. Eventually, he stumbled upon the idea of
inserting pushpins into the wall to transform the intimate
space of the children’s book illustrations into large-scale
public works. Cullinane thinks of the projects as minimalist
sculptures in which the pins give the images dimension,
shadows and textures without betraying their original outline
format.

The exhibit’s
title, “Pastor & Collux,” draws on a mythological
reference. The title inverts the first letters in the names
of Castor and Pollux, the twin sons of Zeus and Leda who
were transformed into the Gemini constellation. By applying
the mythological names to a 1940s image and recreating it
as a 16-foot-high wall-relief, Cullinane addresses how images
can be transformed through context to convey different meanings.

Cullinane received
a bachelor’s of fine arts from the Cooper Union School
for the Advancement of Art and Science in 1979. He traveled
to Spain on a Ford Travel scholarship in 1978 and returned
again in 1999 while working as an assistant to Richard Serra.
He has exhibited at numerous venues, including the University
Art Museum at SUNY–Albany, Kohler Art Center, Pierogi
2000 and the Brooklyn Museum. He lives and works in New
York.

Located in Houston’s
Museum District on the Rice University campus, the Rice
Art Gallery encourages the creation and appreciation of
contemporary art. Exhibitions focus on site-specific installations.
Admission is free.

Rice Art Gallery
programs are supported in part by the Rice Gallery patrons
and members, the Brown Foundation, the Kilgore Endowment
and by grants from the city of Houston and Texas Commission
on the Arts through the Cultural Arts Council of Houston/Harris
County. Continental Airlines is the official airline of
the Rice Gallery. KUHF, Houston Public Radio and the Saint
Arnold Brewing Co. are sponsors.