Asia Society Texas is pleased to present Rafael Domenech and Tomas Vu: Heat Silhouette, the organization’s first public art installation. This collaboration between Cuban American artist Rafael Domenech and Vietnamese American artist Tomas Vu assumes the form of a dynamic outdoor pavilion with two stages, occupying AST’s 13,000-square-foot lot at the intersection of Oakdale and Caroline Streets in the heart of Houston’s Museum District. Rafael Domenech and Tomas Vu: Heat Silhouette is commissioned in partnership with the University of Houston’s Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts.
Described by the artists as a form of “urban acupuncture,” Heat Silhouette is a physical structure designed to welcome the spontaneous circulation of people, energy, and events. The outdoor pavilion takes cues from college campuses, popular culture, and experimental magazines. Made of wood, aluminum framing, and laser-cut construction mesh — the very materials used to build the city of Houston — the pavilion becomes an extension of the museum and a public programming space. The title itself references the most omnipresent weather condition of Houston: the summer’s intense heat, a heat so palpable that it feels as if it occupies actual space, creating a silhouette or edge.
For the artists, the pavilion resists merely being a form of architecture. Instead, the pavilion physically operates as an experimental magazine, referencing the graphic processes seen in radical publications from the 1960s and 1970s like Kontexts, an important catalyst of avant-garde poetry. Readers do not flip Heat Silhouette’s pages; instead, they become viewers that are invited to walk in, around, and through the publication. Laser-cut texts appropriated from popular science-fiction films, poetry, and other sources intermingle to form multiple layers and viewpoints that shift with the sunlight. Heat Silhouette is a space of active production filled with theater-like compartments — a site where text, image, and pattern coalesce into a kind of urban camouflage.
Asia Society Texas is accepting proposals for community-led events that utilize Heat Silhouette.
Admission
More to See!
Admission for this exhibition is free.
Photography
Photography is permitted.
Rafael Domenech was born in 1989 in Havana, Cuba, and lives and works between New York and Miami.
He conceives objects colliding in space, organizing a sequence of artworks with physical or theoretical connections into a larger system, especially their own fabrication. His work explores how the artwork itself is part of an ecosystem of practices outside the studio into the institution and world beyond art and is a story of human relationships before aesthetic considerations. Situated at the forefront of artists who are redefining the exhibition experience, Rafael Domenech creates architectural interventions which intersect publishing methodologies such as cutting, redacting, revising, and circulation as research tactics to amplify his interest in the exhibition model as an active machine for production rather than a repository space.
His work has been exhibited at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; SculptureCenter, Long Island City; Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City; The Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; The Bass Museum, Miami Beach; Phillip and Patricia Frost Art Museum, Miami; ICA VCU Museum, Richmond, Virginia; Artium Museum, Vitoria, Spain; MIT List Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest, France.
Tomas Vu was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and moved with his family to El Paso, Texas, at age ten. Vu received a BFA from the University of Texas, El Paso, and went on to earn an MFA from Yale University. He has received numerous awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Award, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. Vu has exhibited globally, including at MoMa PS1 (New York), CAFA Art Museum (Beijing), Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, and the Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing). He has been a professor at Columbia University School of the Arts since 1996. In 1996, Vu also helped found the Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies. Since its inception, he has served as Director/Artistic Director of the Neiman Center. He was appointed the LeRoy Neiman Professor of Visual Arts in 2000.
Opening Celebration for Rafael Domenech and Tomas Vu: Heat Silhouette
Saturday, November 11, 2023
2–5 p.m.
Wellness Series: Tai Chi in the Pavilion
Saturday, January 27, 2024
10–11 a.m.
Wellness Series: Tai Chi, the Ancient Chinese Moving Meditation
Saturday, April 20, 2024
10–11 a.m.
Wellness Series: Meditation in the Pavilion
Saturday, May 11, 2024
10–11 a.m.
Asia Society Texas is accepting proposals for community-led events that utilize Heat Silhouette.
Heat Silhouette is commissioned in partnership with the University of Houston’s Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts.
Exhibitions and their related programs at Asia Society Texas are presented by Nancy C. Allen, Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen, and Leslie and Brad Bucher. Major support comes from The Brown Foundation, Inc., the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance, The Clayton Fund, Houston Endowment Inc. Generous funding also provided by The Anchorage Foundation of Texas, National Endowment for the Arts, and Texas Commission on the Arts. Free Thursday exhibition admission presented by Regions Bank. Funding is also provided through contributions from the Exhibitions Patron Circle, a dedicated group of individuals and organizations committed to bringing exceptional visual art to Asia Society Texas.
Presenting Sponsors
Nancy C. Allen
Leslie and Brad Bucher
Chinhui Juhn and Edward Allen
Program Sponsors
Presenting Partner
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