“Brent Houzenga: Remixed Remains” at Pawn Works Gallery

As I walked to the opening of Brent Houzenga’s show at Pawn Works in Ukrainian Village, my eye caught a 19th-century bearded gent’s. His picture is stenciled amid the graffiti on the wall enclosing the garden of neighborhood restaurant Jam. Houzenga derived this portrait from a pair of photo albums he found more than five years ago in Macomb, Illinois. The albums’ 1890s photos of anonymous men and women became the central motif of his work.

In the gallery and on nearby streets, anonymous and unsmiling faces peer out from behind Cy Twombly–esque energetic scribbles, words and cartoons that evoke Jean-Michel Basquiat, and thatches of painted lines, all in a loud palette of bold or neon colors.

Between Houzenga’s references to contemporary masters and his attempts to weave his stern characters into a street-art jungle, there is so much going on in his works that they risk becoming scattered. The Des Moines–based artist messes with these stoic men, women and children by bedecking them with silly glasses and scuba-diving masks, or giving them spiked hair and fangs. The hardness and coldness of the subjects’ visages remain remarkable counterweights to such embellishments, however. They come off as unwilling crusaders holding their ground despite Houzenga’s taunts and paint bombs: the sensory bombardment of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Pawn Works has given Houzenga free rein over the gallery space, and the resulting immersive experience is amazing. Portraits reverse-painted on salvaged windows are surrounded by Houzenga’s stencils and graffiti, usually clustered at eye level but sometimes running from floor to ceiling in large-scale compositions. A remarkably dynamic tension emerges when the artist forces his cast of self-reliant, God-fearing Victorians to time travel to his irreverent, Day-Glo contemporary world.