A collection of blog posts I created for HMNS’ blog, BEYOND BONES.
School is out, and summer is upon us. But with rainy days and the Texas heat beating down on us, a day in is the only thing that comes to mind. That, and a nice tall glass of iced tea. But don’t let the heat ruin your craving for a day out. Join us at HMNS for a morning with Bucky and his other dino pals, or spend an afternoon with Charro and his butterfly neighbors. You might even catch him out and about on the museum lawn catching some sun.
Cockrell Butterfly Center- Houston Museum of Natural Science
HMNS contains history and information for all ages to enjoy. Have the little ones enjoy some hands-on fun in our Block Party Exhibit while you take a breather or two. Watch as they build castles to conquer, jets that soar, and skyscrapers that tower over imaginary cities—a perfect spot to entertain the kids and rest your feet.
The combinations are endless, and perhaps an evening in our newly renovated Burke Baker Planetarium is number one on your summer list of fun. Escape the heat and enjoy a trip to the stars without leaving the inner loop. With an extra hour of museum time, open until 6 pm, relax, and don’t let the heat ruin your weekend fun. Instead, join your HMNS family and come where history is alive.
*The above copy is a writing sample and was not used in any collateral materials at HMNS.
Focusing on the use of two stereotypical genres in photography, suburbia, and monstrosity New Zealand Art writer, visited Rice University Wednesday night to share his take on a fellow New Zealander’s work and her bizarre perception when behind or in front of a camera.
Anthony Byrt, a leading art writer, well known throughout Europe and the US, shared several photographs from New Zealand photographer, Yvonne Todd. Her mix of traditional horror characters was morphed into businessmen and housewives with a motive to kill. “There’s something, both economically inspirational and distinctly Freudian in Todd,” said Byrt, “the suburban daughter of an accountant.”
The first series Byrt shared was entitled, Wall of Man, taken in 2009. The sequence of photographs played an essential role in Todd’s career. Most of the figures in her photos, Byrt continued, “always look lonely, but connect through awkward smiles.”
These portraits were the kind that might be displayed in corporate offices, but for Todd, they were real people, people who responded to an ad in the paper who wanted to be involved in an art project. Her art project.
“They also signal a sort of radical and disruptive shift within her practice too,” Byrt went on, “most obviously they were, as the title expressed, ALL men, and it’s the first and so far only series that Todd has dedicated to the opposite sex.” Her other photographs contained only women as the subjects, making this series stand out when displayed alongside them in galleries.
The women she usually photographed were usually young, and her fascination with wigs and false teeth transformed them into her versions of Frankenstein. She is giving them more meaning outside of the art. Byrt continued to show slides from Wall of Man and Wall of Seahorsel, which contained her images of women sometimes faceless or standing in contorted poses that gave them a manikin likeness.
“With Wall of Man, she’d gone to the opposite end of the gender and age spectrums, not just guys but old guys. And it was, she told me”, said Byrt, ‘her least successful series, sales-wise.’ So collectors seemed far more comfortable with her creepy adolescent girls on their walls than successful doctors and retired CEOS. But as Todd says, ‘“I was more interested in the fact that corporate photography has to convey a sense of infallibility in paternal love. I wanted to see if I could replicate that using ordinary blocks from North shore.”’
̶ KMV ̶
FACTS BOX
Lecture MC/Invited by- Rice Professor, John Sparagana
Anthony Byrt- Art Writer- Speaker
Yvonne Todd- www.ervon.com
A place created by a New York couple for small business owners to show off their product of art, vintage items and handmade trinkets. A monthly two day event for vendors and visitors to stroll through the streets of Rice Village and breathe in the excitement of shopping and the environment.
Twenty-four tents and tables lined the usually empty lot on Morningside Drive where couple Emily Yau and Ian Frascati has organized the event that has come to be known as Rice Village Flea, a tribute to the famous Brooklyn Flea in New York.
“A small, yet very fun event,” said Kelsie Gipson, an attendee of the market, “once I started at the first table I couldn’t leave the market without buying a few things before getting to the last.”
Vendors stand by their booths while visitors and customers weave through and around them and other people to examine the haul each have brought with them. This small jewel in Rice Village, allows customers of the Village visiting the usual boutiques and cafes a fresh outlook of small business owners without a storefront of their own.
“We discovered the term flea market doesn’t have the same association that it has in Brooklyn,” said Emily Yau, Event Organizer, “we wanted to do something similar to Brooklyn Flea, diverse and something that appeals to everyone.”
As well as giving small business owners a way to get their business out into the world, Rice Village Flea has also partnered up with the pet adoption agency, The Love Molly Fund. Being an avid dog lover herself, Yau and the organizer of the adoption agency, Julia Long, allow market attendees the joy of adopting their own dog or even putting microchips in a pet they already own, with a donation of $20.
“We always feature a dog rescue, just because I like dogs,” Yau said, “and I’m not allowed to get any more dogs, so I get to help and hang out and pet them.”
Another idea of the market is to give its customers one of a kind items and a place that is easy to get to and from. With hopes of expanding, Yau and Frascati have not yet made any concrete plans of moving, the location of the market, but would like to continue growing the market and are keeping their options open.
Yau’s major concern is finding a large enough location that would offer a similar environment that Rice Village does.
“It’s physically impossible to expand in our current lot,” she said, “we want to keep the name, otherwise we’d have to start over. But I think in the future, as people grow to start to really like these events, I think customers would still come even if we move off site.”
̶ KMV ̶
Kim Vera: How do you usually start writing a story? Do you follow some sort of outline?
Geetha Iyer: I don’t usually think in terms of plot. It’s much more sensory—a haunting sound or an image. I write pages, sometimes of the same paragraph, until I find a voice that carries the sensory detail I want the story to explore. I’ve learned not to make outlines after that. Once the voice emerges, it tells its own story, and I can’t really control it anymore.
KV: When writing The Glass-World Builder, did you always intend to have the story told through the eyes of an outside character?
GI: Yes, for somewhat unconnected reasons. I had been reading Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas. I loved the concept of the book—a collection of fictional biographies of contemptible literary figures—and was particularly fascinated by the voice of irony coasting under the surface, that of an omniscient outside-the-story/in-on-the-joke narrator. I wanted the challenge of writing something in that vein, an obituary or retrospective or museum pamphlet for a performance artist who “performed” acts of terror, something deadpan, entirely committed to its own reality while being completely absurd.
Of course, Sarla’s story became its own thing as it was being written, and a much more personal voice emerged. And for me, personal voices are problematic. Most of the literature I read growing up, and a fair deal of what I’ve studied at university is by white male British or American authors. I didn’t really understand the psychological impact of this until I started writing myself—I’d become so habituated to assuming that, unless otherwise specified, people in stories were straight white males of British or American extraction that my own characters always sounded more Sam than Sarla, unless I stated otherwise. It makes me feel self-conscious to have to label my characters as other-than-assumed—it leads to those awkward moments where the narrator staggers to the story-telling equivalent of a mirror and describes her skin color, body shape, and sexual preference to herself—and thus the reader. Writing through the eyes of an outside character allows me to displace the need to describe the obvious—that individuals self-define as normative even if the dominant culture sees otherwise. It moves my writing away from stories of character origins and identities to refocus on their doings instead.
KV: Was Sarla based on someone you know/knew in life, or a combination of different people?
GI: I have a picture of Sarla in my head that comes from photographs of a person I’ve never met, a friend of a friend. But she’s otherwise an invention. With that said, I write fiction because it lets me live vicariously. Sarla’s obsessions are my obsessions on overload. I am not a molecular biologist, nor a visual artist, but I once wanted to be both. I’m also not a practicing misanthrope, but I think Sarla’s feelings of disgust toward people is a mirrored reversal of my reverence for biota that are not human. Most of the organisms Sarla works with, in her stories I’ve studied at some point myself. There really are fungi that squirt fruiting bodies out of wood like gel toothpaste. And nematodes are incredible—people talk about humans like they’re some evolutionary paragon but nematodes are so finely adapted to their surroundings that they literally suffuse the planet—you could take away everything else on earth but the nematodes and still be able to tell what the planet looked like—their bodies will mark out everything from the contours of the ocean floor to each knotted tree root in the soil.
KV: Discuss the title: throughout the story, Sarla works with glass in different ways. Did that contribute to your title choice or were there earlier titles you were thinking of using?
GI: I think the title was an afterthought. Most of what Sarla sees is contained in a glass or glass-like framework. Petri dishes, microscope, camera lenses, and airplane windows. The title was just a literalization of the story. I suppose if I hadn’t felt that glass also worked as a symbol, I might have changed the title.
KV: What drew you to start writing, and would you say that science helps fuel your ideas?
GI: When I was eighteen, I decided to be a biologist instead of an artist because I thought it was a less self-serving career choice. I wrote as a way to keep in touch with an otherwise neglected need to be creative. I’ve since recognized that it was a mistake to abandon art-making for science. I write now because I accept that what I do best is make things—world-build, I suppose—from raw materials. And words are the best raw materials, so abstract that their transformative potential is infinite.
I still love biology, though. I’m not mathematically inclined, but I find the natural world endlessly awe-inspiring and learn from it continually. I think of myself as a non-practicing biologist—I still have knowledge of fieldwork and lab work, but I draw different insights from these experiences than I would as a scientist. I use the same data to craft metaphoric truths instead of concrete ones. It’s the best kind of inspiration.
KMV
*More of my work with Gulf Coast can be found here.