Jill Bedgood at SITE Gallery
Sculpture Month Houston returned this year with the exhibition Tensile Strength, the second annual show of works at SITE Gallery at the Silos at Sawyer Yards. Launched in 2016 by Volker Eisele of Rudolph Blume Fine Art / ArtScan Gallery, the events organized around Sculpture Month Houston are twofold: a yearly exhibition of local and national artists creating site-specific works at the Silos, and a biennial citywide event in which participating galleries and nonprofit organizations showcase sculptural works.
Artists take up the challenge of transforming imposing silos into installations in intriguing ways. UT Austin Professor Beili Liu and UT alumna Jill Bedgood (MFA in Studio Art, 1983) both participated in Tensile Strength. Artists were challenged to re-imagine spatial concepts and directly engage the viewer on multiple sensory levels. Bedgood's installation transformed the SITE Gallery silo into a meditative space inspired by a Byzantine chapel, plastering the ceiling funnel with gold-leaf squares and drawing lightly on the walls. The Houston Chronicle's Molly Glentzer, in a review of Bedgood’s Even Song at SITE Gallery, wrote that the piece "honors its site almost mystically." "Incorporating the wall’s water and rust stains, human marks and operating windows, Bedgood adds a layer of drawings that look like Renaissance diagrams of constellations, illustrating a lunar cycle," writes Glentzer. "That tour de force pays off for those who look up, where the artist has hand-applied 1,000 gold-leaf sheets on the ceiling funnel - a silo as a Byzantine chapel."
Bedgood's work creates multi-media art that reflects her questioning of the duality of human nature, while Liu's practice is steeped in material and process, responding directly to the site in which its located.
Beili Liu, Lian (Silos), 2017
Oftentimes embodying transience, fragility and the passage of time, Liu’s immersive installations are engaged with multifaceted dichotomies: lightness contrasted with heft; fierceness countered by resilience; and chaos balanced by quiet order. Working with commonplace materials and elements such as thread, scissors, paper, stone, fire and water, Liu manipulates their intrinsic qualities to extrapolate complex cultural narratives.
Tensile Strength is on view from Oct. 21 - Dec. 2, 2017.