Art collective Setup’s Layers would be the first artwork set up to grace the dance ground at Post’s new Art Club.
A midcentury bomb shelter stuffed with Soviet propaganda rests beneath downtown Houston, its concrete partitions a geometrical spray of pink, white, and black. Metal pipes uncovered. A gridded gate and disabled elevator.
Welcome to Art Club.
Located at Post, the mix set up artwork gallery and night time membership formally opened to the general public on December 7. Featuring 13 world artists unfold throughout two tales and 28,500 sq. toes, in addition to the return of TOMO, a previously Montrose-based journal and artwork store, Art Club intends to select up the place large multimedia festivals like Day for Night—which hasn’t been held since 2017—left off.
“We went through and developed Post, but we wanted to bring back some of that edginess and artistic vibe that was associated with Day for Night and bring it back into the building,” says Kirby Liu, Art Club founder and Post director. He beforehand labored as an organizer with Day for Night, so he got here to the challenge with each expertise and a cohesive imaginative and prescient.
Art Club provided a teaser this previous summer time with Quiet Ensemble’s Solar Dust, a cosmic fusion of tulle, flashing lights, and otherworldly soundscapes meant to take guests on an interstellar voyage. Now that the venue’s first season is underway, with the present installations on view between 9 months to a 12 months, it follows by way of on its promise to deliver world-class inventive experiences to Houston.
One such expertise comes courtesy of Cuban multimedia artist Reynier Leyva Novo’s Revolution is an Abstraction, which fills Post’s aforementioned bomb shelter with work and movies deconstructing the aesthetics of authoritarianism. Liu refers to this house because the “Red Room,” and plans for it to be the one gallery dedicated to extra conventional artwork kinds like portray and video moderately than closely technical installations. Exhibits in right here may also revolve round a unifying theme.
“We are trying to set the curatorial mission of the Red Room to be about art that’s dealing with apocalyptic scenarios,” Liu says. “Different elements that we’re trying to weave in between the building’s old history and its recent history.”
Appropriately, Revolution is an Abstraction can be the final set up guests stroll by way of earlier than reaching the “club” portion of the Art Club, an interesting transition from breaking down state-mandated restrictiveness to having fun with the complete freedom of motion. Dancing and DJs make their house right here among the many throbbing beats and pulsing lights. One virtually expects to identify Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss slinking among the many crowds of their leathery best.
Boris Acket’s Dioptrique is one among many installations that look plucked straight from a slick late-’90s/early-’00s sci-fi film. And that is why we like it.
It’s onerous to not consider The Matrix and different pre-Y2K cyberpunk fever desires, at the same time as one strikes away from the designated clubbing space. Though with fewer people-as-batteries, fortunately. Many of the installations use lasers, reflective supplies, and LEDs to create three-dimensional soundscapes and visuals: not not like miniature night time golf equipment in and of themselves, if one removes the impetus to begin grooving.
“I always say that Art Club is a transformer, and its name is really literal. In art and museum mode, visitors experience all the exhibitions through more of a traditional kind of gallery type of way of navigating a space,” Liu says. “And then in club mode, most of the museum shuts down, except for the rooms that are set up to be the club. Then that’s when a DJ or VJ comes in and operates the exhibits like an extension of their sound.”
Upon instantly exiting the principle dance ground, guests come nose to nose with Media.Tribe.’s Encaged. A horizontal cage stuffed with skinny white lasers replicate off the partitions and ground, making a smoky impact soundtracked by the music one room over. It’s cinematic, in a manner, heightening the general sci-fi vibes. You might image the replicants from Blade Runner congregating right here, or T-800 stomping by way of in pursuit of a time-traveling cyborg villain.
Ditto Dioptrique by Boris Acket, situated two galleries down. The final vestiges of muffled music have already light by the point you step in, however the gritty impact stays the identical. Here, the artist has suspended a reflective polymer cloth from the ceiling. It crinkles forwards and backwards on winches, creating lightscapes alongside the partitions and alluring questions on destruction and decay.
Not all of Art Club’s choices look like plucked out of Ridley Scott’s or the Wachowskis’ or James Cameron’s imaginations, after all. Organic varieties and pure themes punctuate the dreamlike journey by way of the galleries as properly.
Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, also referred to as “Shoplifter,” is the primary creator guests encounter when getting into the exhibition house. In her Neverscape, lengths of colourful fur mimic the neuronic networks within the mind. Along with discovering inspiration in nature’s shapes, she additionally absorbs herself within the sciences, notably psychiatry, and believes “vanity is just wonderful” as a result of a lot creativity blossoms from it.
To her, Art Club offers a possibility to totally make the most of what she calls “cavernous space.” Visitors can stroll by way of Neverscape comfortably, winding across the neon nerves and following their eyes upward and throughout the dynamic interactive sculpture.
“I love when I have a space to work in that has a really tall ceiling, because then I can really create this cathedral experience,” Arnardóttir says. “What I liked a lot about this space is that I’m in entrance to this series of sensory installations. And the beauty is that it’s just covered in glass. It’s almost like a fishbowl or a fish tank, and you can see it from afar. As you come walking, you see these twirls of colors that draw you in.”
Located in between Encaged and Dioptrique sits the mild WET:LAND by native panorama designer and artist Skyler Smith. You can scent actual flowers rising alongside native grasses and hearken to the tinkling of dripping water, a slice of greenery and pure magnificence in between the scintillating synthetics.
Exciting information for anybody who missed Montrose artwork journal store TOMO: It’s again with new titles and new merch, courtesy of Art Club.
Liu is conserving mum about what he has deliberate for season two of Art Club after season one wraps up in December 2025, whether or not it would proceed to characteristic disparate themes or trod some thrilling new floor in experiential, immersive multimedia artwork. Citing artwork critic Walter Pater as an affect, he shares a quote from 1873’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Literature: “All art aspires to the condition of music.” By hybridizing the twin disciplines, Liu and the Art Club group expose a greater diversity of holiday makers to a greater diversity of aesthetic escapades.
Clubgoers who love spending their nights and weekends absorbed within the thumping cocoon of Houston nightlife could have an opportunity to reinforce their expertise by way of the incorporation of artwork with agency statements and themes posted proper there on the wall. Art buffs who get pleasure from a glass of wine and making small speak at openings shall be uncovered to the potential of music and motion as a complement to visuals, a reminder that advantageous artwork exists outdoors the stark white partitions of a gallery.