Linda Post and Robert Appleton: Igvonne
Window into Houston at 110 Milam Street

Commissioned by Blaffer Art Museum
August 8 – October 31, 2012

Igvonne is inspired by the ruinous restored rear façade of 110 Milam Street, the building which houses Blaffer Art Museum’s Window into Houston series of exhibitions. Expanding upon the site’s evocative impressions of architecture and cultural history, Linda Post and Robert Appleton invite us to imagine Houston as a stand-in for Berlin in 1976 and 1977. During these years American musician Iggy Pop and American artist and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer happened to be living in Berlin at the same time, when Pop was making albums with David Bowie and Rainer was on an academic exchange grant. Igvonne uses video, sound and performance to animate Window into Houston’s downtown site on the bayou as a character in this influential cultural landscape. Post and Appleton inhabit Pop and Rainer as iconic figures by inventing a dialogue between the artists and the cities of Houston and Berlin, both then and now. 

In its exploration of architectural and atmospheric similarities between sites, Igvonne does not completely subsume the two cities into one another. Instead, it considers them alongside other notable times and places of artistic activity in order to ask what it would mean to make Houston pass badly for Berlin. The resulting work effectively grafts Houston onto an international arts scene while simultaneously locating itself firmly within it. 

Post and Appleton are frequent collaborators creating works and performances that. exploit the sculptural possibilities of video and pay close attention to the ways media and performance can manipulate the viewer’s experience of space and site-specificity.

Curator: Amy L. Powell with Claudia Schmuckli