The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft’s inspired current show, “Interstitial Spaces,” brings together Julia Barello and Beverly Penn in their first collaborative installation. This is such a natural pairing that it makes for a cohesive, rich, full show, even with only nine pieces on view. The two artists make skillful, sculptural wall works. Barello’s materials of choice are X-ray and MRI films, which she cuts and dyes to look like delicate flora — they seem to sprout from the wall, they’re so textured and alive. Penn, meanwhile, takes real plants, then freezes and casts them in bronze to capture every curl or twist.
The resulting pieces have such a lightness to them, it’s surprising and impressive to find out that they’re bronze. Each of the artists’ works have a sense of wild about them that’s still nonetheless contained — Barello’s flowers and trees are neat and trim, while Penn’s threads are sprawling like unruly weeds yet still contained, whether in perfect circles or straight, exact lines. Their sensibilities combine wonderfully in a new collaborative wall installation made just for the center that stretches the length of the main wall. It’s massive — you can’t take it all in at once, but have to walk along, taking it in as you move through the space. It’s called Submerged, and the film and bronze do seem to move together fluidly, like water or, similarly, a wind current.
What really comes through here and in the other exhibition works is the ways the pieces interact with the spaces they don’t occupy. Around each twist of a bronze or film flower, there’s emptiness in the form of the white wall. As the name of the show implies, these between, or interstitial, spaces are as important as the works themselves. Through September 1. 4848 Main, 713-529-4848. — Meredith Deliso
