Jamie Ho’s work layers floral arrangements with disembodied hands and braided hair, blending beauty with unease in “magic mirrors” at Art League Houston. (Photo courtesy Art League Houston)
Three new exhibitions at Art League Houston are tackling identity, disaster and violence from different angles. Together, they shift between mirrored images, environmental collapse and acts of witness.
The historic Art League Houston is once again delivering inspired curation and socially engaged artwork. Works from Jamie Ho, Hammonds + West and Mateo Gutierrez are on view at the Montrose art space through next Sunday, April 19.
Visitors will see a range of media, including painting, projection, performance and poetry — sometimes within a single space. The work addresses subjects ranging from Chinese-American identity to climate disaster to American violence. It all somehow feels both topical and artistically innovative.
“magic mirrors” by Jamie Ho
Upon walking into the Main Gallery of the building, you’ll wonder if you’re seeing double. Jamie Ho’s solo show, “magic mirrors,” is replete with repetition.
Luscious still-life photographs are printed and reprinted. They echo and sometimes superimpose each other. Is this a grid of identical pictures or a minute sequence of moments in time? Try to spot the difference.
As its name suggests, this show centers on replication and mirroring. Ho’s inspiration is the magic mirror, an artifact from the Han Dynasty China. It reflects an image onto a wall when struck with bright light.
Spring at Bering's
For the artist, this is how Euro-America views China. It is seen as both “technically advanced and shrouded in mystery,” as described in the exhibition text.
This motif also challenges the ways Chinese-American women and femme bodies are historically portrayed by the media. Instead of reflecting the dominant culture, the mirror becomes a place to resist assimilation. It’s where Ho also asserts her own identity.
The exhibition is a stunning work of mixed media. It consists of richly colored yet unsettling photographs. Animated GIFs on screens, kinetic sculptures using found objects, light and projection expand the work. It also features portrayals of the artist’s drag persona.
Particularly mesmerizing are the photographs, which draw from Baroque still life painting traditions. In these lush images, dreamy plant arrangements sit on elaborately patterned silk backgrounds. Framed prints hang atop copies of themselves that sprawl across the walls. The ornate patterns seem to spiral outward endlessly.
Despite their beauty, the photos are eerie. Bunches of hair sprout from vases. Inhuman hands paw at flowers. The hands suggest the monstrosity of Eurocentric control. At the same time, they create a space for self expression. The nail extensions and stockings that distort the hands are reminiscent of drag performance, which Ho uses to question gender norms.
“The River Entered My Home” by Hammonds + West
In the Front Gallery, debris and drawing come together in “The River Entered My Home” by Hammonds + West. This mixed media installation features large scale drawings by Hollis Hammonds and poetry recordings by Sasha West. It also includes found objects and projections of flames. Together, these elements create an immersive and disquieting environment.
The work offers a sobering image of a near future where natural disasters are increasingly common. Viewers move through wreckage, suspended between flood and fire.
Language becomes another kind of debris. Strips of poetry curl around felled branches and discarded mattresses.
Hammonds draws in part from a fire that destroyed her childhood home. In the context of climate change, that memory takes on a new meaning.
West’s poems move across time and history. They question a culture built on limitless growth and explore responsibility and despair.
Piled together on the ground, objects lose their meaning as markers of normalcy. The boundaries between the natural and the human are blurred in the face of disaster.
The show offers a more reflective note as well. The artists invite viewers to see their own role in shaping the physical world and future landscapes.
“And I Feel Fine / Y Me Siento Bien” by Mateo Gutierrez
Moving into the Hallway Gallery, you’ll find mixed media works from Mateo Gutierrez‘s series “And I Feel Fine / Y Me Siento Bien.” This brings together two distinct elements of the legacy of American violence: the aftermath of mass shootings and the journey of migrants seeking entry into the United States.
Gutierrez draws from global news archives and collaborates with photojournalists. In one pairing, a young boy in detention at the United States/Mexico border appears alongside a grieving woman outside Sandy Hook Elementary School. The images are not separate narratives but deliberately placed in conversation.
Gutierrez uses painstaking embroidery as a form of slow, tactile witness to these events. The process resists the speed of digital media and asks viewers to sit with the images.
By merging these narratives, the work suggests a broader American ethos of violence. It points to patterns that extend both within and beyond national borders. The series, ongoing since 2019, builds a cumulative record of these intersections.
Together, the three exhibitions offer distinct but connected perspectives. Each confronts urgent realities through a different visual language.
Jamie Ho’s “magic mirrors,” Hammonds + West’s “The River Entered My Home” and Mateo Gutierrez’s “And I Feel Fine / Y Me Siento Bien” are on view at Art League Houston through Sunday, April 19. Learn more here.
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