Rare Birds

Train projecting: Pablo Gimenez Zapiola puts art in motion to get on a Houstonroll

"Power Intense" by artist Pablo Gimenez Zapiola
Photo by Pablo Gimenez Zapiola
"Mas all de Luna" by Agus Taboada
Photo by Pablo Gimenez Zapiola
"Pleasure Maximize" by Pablo Gimenez Zapiola
Photo by Pablo Gimenez Zapiola

Pablo Gimenez Zapiola’s alchemic art is rooted in his love of drawing, painting, architecture, photography, film and video. An exhibition of his works opens Friday at Spacetaker Artist Resource Center and includes works for a video that I first saw via Vimeo thanks to a tip from Labotanica gallery director Ayanna Jolivet McCloud.

For Friday’s opening, Zapiola will be performing with two projectors, casting words and lines of poetry onto moving trains as they roll by Winter Street Studios.

A recent recipient of an Individual Arts Grant Award, which is funded by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, Zapiola is gaining some well-deserved attention for his work. The day after the Spacetaker opening, he will be a part of a group show at Sicardi Gallery. He is the one video artist in that particular show.

Zapiola prefers to be simply called an "artist.” He understands the need gallery owners and critics have to package, market and sell. But he isn’t interested in boxing in his art.

Did I just refer to him a “video artist?” That’s a mistake. Zapiola prefers to be simply called an "artist.” He understands the need gallery owners and critics have to package, market and sell. But he isn’t interested in boxing in his art.

What follows is an edited transcription of a recent conversation with Zapiola:

CultureMap: Your background is in photography, painting and architecture?

Pablo Gimenez Zapiola: I did painting long ago. Lots of painting, oil, acrylic, also pencil, graphite …

CM: Did one medium lead to the next?

PGZ: No. I tried kind of everything and managed a way to learn it and to do it kind of … well? So I always had those methods whenever I needed to express something. But what I did the most was drawing. With pencil. Drawing all kinds of stuff — motorcycles, birds, house, and while studying architecture, I drew a LOT.

CM: What brought you to Houston?

PGZ: The economic crisis in Argentina. I had my own graphic design studio. I was working for a long time and then everything went very bad, and I decided to move here to try something different. A friend [in Houston] told me, “Come to my house and look for something.” So I came with my bicycle, a couple of dollars, and I started from scratch.

CM: The text, lines of poetry and words that you project on the trains — where do they come from?

PGZ: They are from different parts of the world. Some are from poets in Argentina. One poet is from France, one from Russia, but both live in Argentina.

The main idea is to project on a moving thing. I don’t like projecting on still things — I do that sometimes. But I think its much more interesting for me to project onto moving things. I don’t know why.

CM: It’s sort of … it transports you to someplace else very quickly. I’ve only seen this on video. But right off the bat I forgot I was watching words being projected on a passing train; that wasn’t the experience I was having. It’s almost like a gateway to another experience.

PGZ: That’s my purpose. When I do my projects, I never think about what I want to achieve or anything, I just have the idea and I start trying it. Since I know all of those different things, the video, architecture … they merge together and I just start trying things. And then I start to see meaning in what I’m doing. I don’t like explaining my work. I think it narrows down the meaning it could have for other people. I think that’s much more important than what it means to me.

You know all art has become like a commodity in a way. They always ask you to explain what you’re doing.

CM: Right.

PGZ: And I think that’s a mistake. But because they have to sell it, they have to approach people with some kind of packaging. Art shouldn’t be a product. You can sell art, but you can’t treat it like that.

If I frame it and put it in a package … it can’t be more than that. I think art is less for the artist and more for the world.

CM: The words that you use — do you do any kind of editing when you get words from somebody?

PGZ: Two days ago, one of the poets sent me a poem that she just wrote when she woke up at 4:30 in the morning. She said, “This is for you,” and it was perfect! Except for the last line. So I said, you should take out that last line. if you take it off, the poem stays “open.” But with that sentence you're closing the poem. And she took it off.

CM: Are you just projecting words, or an image as well?

PGZ: Yes. There is another projection from another projector. It’s kind of complicated, because I don’t do this with a computer. And I don’t have all the material in one file. This work needs a lot of adjustment so everything comes within the frame and the words are straight, not tilted. I have to adjust everything, the focus [when the train comes].

CM: It really is a performance.

PGZ: Yeah. To me it’s kind of a mystic experience.

CM: (After taking a look at Zapiola’s animation Tubes) Can you tell me what we’re looking at, exactly?

PGZ: A series of photographs, a sequence — I just put one after the other. These are photos I did in London in the tube. You can’t put a tripod up because the police will come and get you. Or maybe they’ll kill you like they did the Brazilian. So I just go with my camera … I have thousands of pictures of the tube in London … [In] this animation you have the movement and the stillness, which creates a dialogue.

I go to Photoshop to adjust each picture. Since I don’t have a tripod I have to overlap them perfectly. They still move a little bit. I like the movement, I don’t care. Then I go to Flash and place each picture, I set a speed and I create an image and that’s how it is.

CM: At Friday’s opening, you’ll also have sound created by Carlos Pozo. How do you two collaborate?

PGZ: The work is very casual. A couple weeks ago we were discussing at Spacetaker what we could do so that when people are waiting and I am waiting for the train they don’t get bored! What could we add, right? I thought about Carlos. I met him two years ago at Labotanica and heard his — it’s not music — his sounds! And thought, this is perfect for my animations. It is not possible for something MORE perfect.

CM: He probably thought the same thing about your images!

PGZ: In some way we are one. We don’t work for that, there isn’t any effort. It’s just the dialogue between our projects, they merge so well. I feel so comfortable with his sounds. He’s going to create sound for the gallery so that sound is always playing when the gallery is open. And he’s going to perform the days I perform. He’ll be there with his stuff creating custom sounds.

CM: And you’ll have the sounds of the train.

PGZ: Of course!

"Meaning In Motion," an exhibition by Pablo Gimenez Zapiola, runs Friday through August 13 in Studio B11 at Spacetaker, located at 2101 Winter St. The opening reception is 7 to 10 Friday night. Admission is free. Live projection performances take place Friday, July 21, and 27 and August 6 and 12 from 8:45 to 10:45 p.m.

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Movie Review

New horror movie Faces of Death puts a modern twist on cult classic

Photo courtesy of of IFC Films

Dacre Montgomery in Faces of Death.

True horror fans will likely be familiar with the 1978 cult film Faces of Death, which purported to be a documentary showing real-life killings in gory detail. It didn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop rumors from continuing to spread for decades. Now, almost 50 years and multiple sequels later, comes a new version of Faces of Death, an actual movie that pays homage to the original in interesting ways.

Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works at a YouTube-like company called Kino as a content moderator, flagging videos that violate the company’s policies. This means her job often involves seeing some truly despicable things from all manner of depraved people. One day, though, she comes across a video that seems a little too real, and after seeing more similar videos, she starts to believe they’re genuine murders.

Going against her company NDA, she starts to investigate the videos on her own, which puts her on the radar of Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), who is actually kidnapping people and killing them on camera through methods seen in the original Faces of Death film. It’s not long before Arthur tracks her down, with a plan to make her one of his next victims.

Written and directed by Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-written by Isa Mazzei, the film is not so much scary as it is creepy, with the occasional gross-out sequence. The idea of having someone emulate the killings in the cult film is a good idea, and pairing it with the modern-day attention economy — in which content creators go to increasing lengths for clicks — is a clever twist on a concept that other films have done.

The film as a whole is a commentary on how social media and video sharing sites have often decided to prioritize profits over the well-being of their users. Margot is shown allowing videos involving violence and sexual assault to stay on the site while nixing ones depicting how to use Narcan or demonstrating putting on a condom on a banana. Josh (Jermaine Fowler), Margot’s boss, is even explicit in the company mandate that outrageous videos drive views.

While Arthur has the makings of a good villain, there are few attempts to make him seem truly diabolical. His kidnappings often seem more spur-of-the-moment than calculated, and even though he has a well thought-out dungeon at home, the house’s location in the suburbs seems to make him vulnerable to easy discovery. Goldhaber and Mazzei leave more than a few unanswered questions along the way that take away from the intensity of the story.

Ferreira is yet another actor from Euphoria who’s capitalizing on her exposure from that show. She plays Margot’s increasing anxiety well, and when the action ratchets up in the final act, she meets the moment in a satisfying way. Montgomery returns to the vibe he had while playing the evil Billy on Stranger Things, and even though his character doesn’t fully live up to his potential, Montgomery sells his evil for all it’s worth.

The new Faces of Death may not be what some are expecting given the reputation of the previous films, but it’s a solid horror/thriller that uses the brand as a launching pad into something different. It doesn’t make much of a dent in the scare department, but it does give its violence and gore a degree of relevance in today’s often desensitized world.

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Faces of Death is now playing in theaters.

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