F is pleased to present A Horseshoe Over a Door, a two-person exhibition that pairs Los Angeles-based Skylar Haskard and Chicago and Houston-based Devin T. Mays. Featuring large-scale, improvisational, site-specific and -responsive sculpture, the exhibition puts the artists’ works in dialogue and takes place both within the gallery and throughout its adjacent backyard. A Horseshoe Over a Door is on view, by appointment, from February 11 – March 31, 2024, at 4225 Gibson Street, Houston TX, 77007, with a public reception on February 11, from 2–5 pm.
For Haskard, improvisation is a constant, manifesting in his continuous manipulation of materials over time. He builds works up, then breaks them down to rebuild something new. Haskard’s playful repurposing of individual parts suggests that the process of making is as significant as its ends. Finished works often only exist in the photographic notes he makes while working. In the gallery, Haskard has assembled a single installation he has rehearsed for months. At its center, on a table, is a life-size folksy cyborg. Cast and painted mannequin body-parts are merged with parts of a wheelbarrow: handles, carriage brackets, the wheel. The table is surrounded by a screen-structure that holds items in its netting, items that may be found in the cyborg’s “bindle bag,” an accessory most commonly associated with the figure of the hobo, which the cyborg carries on a stick over its shoulder. In its identification as a hobo, the cyborg becomes an archetype of the outcast, a trope of an idealized American beat survivalist.
Mays also works within an extended embrace of temporality, seeking and probing the boundaries of each artwork that he makes. His installations and performances are made in his carefully considered interaction with the site, drawing out its features with complimentary or opposing gestures. At 4225 Gibson, Mays has elected to work outside, creating a multi- sensorial work that fills the backyard. From behind a garage door, gently propped open by a row of cinder blocks, comes the hum of a single harmonious yet droning note of an electric air organ. In the yard, dozens of colorful balloons that have been inflated with Mays’s breath are tied with ribbon to the trees and brush in a composition that moves in the wind. Over the course of the exhibition, Mays will tend to the work and yard, replacing and adding balloons as necessary.
