Tracing contemporary art's vanguard typically leads local audiences to stalwart venues like the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Glassell School's CORE exhibition or openings at grassroots art collectives like Box 13 and SKYDIVE. Come Saturday, the frontier for new art forms migrates to the waters of Buffalo Bayou, as the Tex Hex, an artist-made boat and floating cinema, embarks on its maiden voyage.
On Saturday, spectators will gather along the bayou near 1011 Wood St. to observe a 70-minute floating presentation, Visionary Transport, curated by filmmaker Deborah Stratman. Partly inspired by this weekend's Art Car Parade, the selection of films has been organized along the theme of car culture, with works by experimental filmmakers the likes of Kenneth Anger, Buckminster Fuller and Robert Nelson.
Organized by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston, the Tex Hex is the result of an unprecedented level of collaboration between artists, architects, curators, filmmakers and idea makers. In 2006, the center invited the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) - a loose collection of artists, researchers and scientists based in LA - to serve a year-long residency.
From there, the Mitchell Center and CLUI began collaborating with the Buffalo Bayou Partnership to establish a field office on the banks of Buffalo Bayou. Next, CLUI involved SIMPARCH, a sculpture collective with Whitney Biennial, Deitch Projects and Ballroom Marfa cred. CLUI and SIMPARCH began working on a disused metal pontoon boat, building it out into what would become the Tex Hex.
"The idea of the Tex Hex is that it will become a research tool for artists," says Mitchell Center program director Bree Edwards. "So artists can go into the water and do research in areas that are inaccessible by land - say, maybe the bird-foot of the Louisiana coastline." Ideally, Tex Hex will be environmentally solvent, functioning with solar power and a composting toilet.
The collaborators christened the device "Tex Hex" in reference to the hexagonal patterns that link physical and conceptual elements of the project, as well as the hexagonal molecular form of benzene, a compound found in crude oil and an industrial precursor for many plastics made in the area around Houston. The six-sided theme is continued into the shape of the stainless steal structure that now resides atop the pontoon.
Enter Deborah Stratman, who has worked with CLUI and SIMPARCH in the past. The artist was invited by the Mitchell Center to engage for a short residency in April and May of this year. "We selected Deborah because she's worked with both entities, and she is very familiar with Houston because she's shown her own films at the Aurora Picture Show," Edwards says.
Read more at http://houston.culturemap.com/newsdetail/05-17-11-the-floating-art-theater-tex-hex-brings-a-new-wave-in-art-cinema-to-buffalo-bayou/
