GUt it, forget it. invisible houston

ESSAY by Surpik Angelini

NOVO: "new," originating from Latin and used in languages like Portuguese and Italian, but it also carries meanings of "fresh," "renew," or "change" and appears in phrases like de novo (from the beginning/anew) in legal and scientific contexts, referring to starting something over or from scratch.

Seeming to embody the etymological implications of the word NOVO, his family name, conceptual multimedia artist Reynier Leyva Novo has been focused, through his cultural research and his art, to poetically re-novate or evoke historical events and urban realities that have left prevailing traces in our collective memory.

For his current exhibition at Transart, Gut It, Forget It. Invisible Houston, Novo created a monumental assemblage consisting in several burnt pieces of furniture with 3D replicas of identified local birds posed on them, ad hoc, here and there. The piece invokes a personal poise of his experiential daily wanderings through Houston’s Third Ward, burned currents and sounds wafting through the air with a cacophony of songs, now replicated in a sonic atmosphere in our exhibition space.

In his extensive exploration of a number of Houston neighborhoods, Novo noted the sustaining presence of sacred sites. Houston has an exceptionally dense religious landscape. Novo collected dust from a number of evangelical Christian churches, particularly those found in African American Wards, as well as from Jewish Synagogues, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu and Islamic temples located in other Houston neighborhoods. Novo’s collection of Sacred Dust and their accompanying video documentations, composes a vast body of work, partially included in our current exhibition.

Novo’s third nod to Houston’s Invisible Hauntology, consists in evoking a number of gutted historical buildings in Houston, through a 9 ft x 13 ft monumental painting. Beneath its monochromatic blue surface, the artist has hidden a list of lost historical sites. Ironically, a figure of a cosmonaut looms over the memorial listing. The original cosmonaut was originally rendered on the façade of a gutted building located in the now defunct Graffiti Park. These hidden images can be perceived by the viewers with infrared technology through different devices.

A cosmonaut: Houston’s symbolic figure of the future, now gutted and defunct.

Counteracting Houston’s tendency to obliterate its own history, Reynier Leyva Novo is now working to create an Open archive, which will publicly offer people’s personal accounts, family histories, collected photographs, sounds, iconographical urban testimonies. This project is generously supported by the Center for Art and Humanities and The Houston Public Archives at the University of Houston, Harvest History TSU.