One Moment in Time Expanded

Art is all about choices.
Rebecca Villarreal, for example, decided to teach herself to weld. Using Rice equipment, the graduating senior created her aptly titled floor sculpture, Rebar, from lengths of curved rebar welded together in an open cylinder. Visually, the piece was similar to a sheaf of wheat bound together in the middle and curving outward at the base and top.

But even after she fabricated the labor intensive sculpture, Villarreal’s work wasn’t done. The rebar curling out on top created a circumference that was too broad to fit through the gallery doors. Instead of leaving the work out of the show, Villarreal decided to trim the rebar sections. Art is all about choices.

To choose a curator for this year’s student show, OUTPUT: Rice Student Exhibit 42, Rice Gallery director Kim Davenport turned to Rice’s own student body. Brendan Mulcahy was a graduate student in architecture and had studied fine art as an undergraduate. Following graduation, he landed a job working as an assistant to artist Sol LeWitt, known as the “dean” of conceptual art. Mulcahy started thinking about graduate school, but after spending four years working with LeWitt, he figured that getting an MFA in studio art would be redundant.

With an interdisciplinary approach to art, Mulcahy decided to pursue a master’s degree in architecture at Rice. The graduate program here suited him. Mulcahy describes it as “very experimental,” allowing students to pursue interests that range from the practical to the highly theoretical.

Mulcahy brought his open, artistic sensibilities to his job as curator. He met with the graduating art majors and asked to see their work—not just projects they had done as a part of their classes but also things they had created on their own. That’s how he discovered Ruya Saner’s drawings. Saner had a collection of quickly and surreptitiously sketched portraits of students and faculty in the architecture department—many done during lectures. Mulcahy took a selection of the highly gestural drawings done on various scraps of paper and clustered them into one larger vertical piece. This presentation gave cohesiveness to the assortment of images and conveyed a strong sense of Saner’s work.

OUTPUT was Mulcahy’s first stint as a solo curator. “I realized how powerful curators are,” he says. “It’s very similar to making art for me, but instead of using a pencil, you are using other people’s art.”

Mulcahy was impressed with the ambition and motivation of artists like Villarreal as well as the collaborative work of Leslie McAhren and Courtney Dow. Snacks, a 16mm film by McAhren and Dow, was the standout of the show. In fall 2004, they received the Mavis C. Pitman Exhibit Award to help finance the film, and they shot it during the fall and spring semester. Adapted from a short story by Sam Lipsyte, the film centers around an awkward Baby Huey-esque teen and his love of food. What was most striking about the work, shot entirely in Houston, was the artists’ ability to evoke a palpable sense of place through their camera work and choice of locations that are wonderfully evocative of the Bayou City’s swampy splendor—ranging from the banal to the tropically overgrown and derelict.

For the vast majority of the graduating students, visual art was not their sole major. As in the past, this year’s crop had double and even triple majors, and their other studies often informed their work. In the case of Will Thompson, his documentary films led directly to his figurative paintings. Christel Miller’s interest in gender studies resulted in her series of staged photographs of “drag kings”—black-and-white images of women dressed as men.

For Mulcahy, the difference between making artwork in a traditional sense and curating is that, with curating, “You are given a fixed set of variables, and then you move them around to sort of flush out the composition or concept that you want to make. If you want to have an agenda, then curating is a good place to be.”

Mulcahy graduated last May and headed to New York. When asked what his plans are, he replies, “I’m just going to be an artist.” Given his open approach to art, that could involve any number of things, curating among them.

—Kelly Klaasmeyer