Rice University’s Student Newspaper — Since 1916

Thursday, March 28, 2024 — Houston, TX

Leo Carter


NEWS 3/26/09 7:00pm

A plywood mindscape

This week Henrique Oliveira arrives at Rice for his first solo exhibit in the U.S., and with him he brings most of the salvageable plywood siding from his neighborhood construction sites in Sao Paolo, Brazil.Oliveira, only 35 years old, has found an ingenious and altogether stunning way of presenting the found object medium, plentiful in the surroundings in which he lives. Gathering it at construction sites or among the refuse of shantytown housing, known in Portuguese as favelas, the piles of painted and weathered plywood strips, organized by color, size and texture, covered the floor of the gallery in the weeks preceding the opening. At the audience's feet are what Oliveira calls "the fractured image of a painting" that he began to assemble during the days preceding the exhibit's opening.


NEWS 1/29/09 6:00pm

All trailer, no trash: Rice Gallery's latest exhibit goes green

This month's Rice Gallery exhibit is a little out of the ordinary. While in the same vein as the gallery's usual architectural installations - begun by Shigeru Ban in 2002 - the Emergency Response Studio is different because it is mobile. Artist Paul Villinski had the idea for his latest piece while rummaging through post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans in 2006 for found objects and refuse to use as artistic material. It was then that he noticed the dilapidated house in the large-scale photograph that currently hangs on the left wall of the gallery in Sewall Hall.Reflecting on traditional war artists like Winslow Homer, Villinski said that being in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina made him feel like some war was being waged.