HOUSTON, TEXAS.- The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston presents Perspectives 152: Four Artists Four Stories, featuring recent work by Houston-based artists Michael Bise, Darryl Lauster, Janaki Lennie, and Soody Sharifi, all in their first museum exhibition. Four Artists Four Stories draws connections between themes in the artists’ work despite their diverse subject matter and use of different media. Bise’s drawings of domestic settings, Lauster’s sculptural recreations of historical decorative arts, Lennie’s painted city horizons, and Sharifi’s photographs of neighborhoods and communities all focus on contemporary psychological anxieties and cultural paradoxes. The exhibition will be on view through September 10, 2006.

“These four artists are emblematic of the exciting and thought-provoking ideas found throughout the Houston art community,” said Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Director Marti Mayo. “As a forum for the new and innovative, we’re proud to continue our mission to bring Houston’s artists and audiences to the center of the art world with the presentation of Four Artists Four Stories.”

All four artists received their MFA degrees from the University of Houston, and have since exhibited at galleries and alternative spaces nationally and internationally. Through their work as well as an active dialogue with their peers and Houston’s significant contemporary art audiences, the four have gathered critical and public attention and continue to provoke discussion. In addition, Lennie is reviews editor of the Texas-based publication ArtLies, Lauster teaches at Houston Community College, and Sharifi recently organized an exhibition of contemporary Iranian photography at Houston’s Dos Santos Gallery. Since graduating last year, Bise has had two solo gallery exhibitions in Houston and Portland, Oregon, and participated in a number of group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.

Organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Curator Paola Morsiani, the exhibition will be accompanied by a Perspectives-format catalogue with reproductions of exhibited work, an essay by Morsiani, and documentation on the artists’ careers.

Michael Bise - Michael Bise’s current work consists of both large- and small-scale graphite drawings on paper that reconstruct significant moments throughout his life, such as seeing his father’s body at the morgue when he was young, or dating an older woman as a young man and growing fond of her small child. A sophisticated narrator, Bise uses skewed perspectives and birds-eye points of view to emphasize the psychological and emotional impact of these events.

Darryl Lauster - Darryl Lauster researches decorative motifs in American Classical Revival- and Federal-period furniture and porcelain, and casts remakes of these domestic items in white porcelain or neutral translucent fiberglass. Lauster uses the remakes to remind audiences of the social and cultural context in which the originals were created, and to draw attention to the craftsmanship inherent in the objects’ designs. The exhibition includes a large display of remade early-nineteenth-century serving dishes on which the artist has replaced traditional decorative motifs. Instead, the pieces feature early 20th-century photographs from the Library of Congress, which were commissioned by the government to document milestones in American life such as the training of the first policewomen.

Janaki Lennie - Janaki Lennie’s work is inspired by nature and the tradition of landscape painting in Western art. Her most recent paintings highlight the juxtaposition of the natural and artificial in Houston’s cityscape by combining tropically luscious, green trees with the ultramodern towering architecture of the oil industry’s buildings and refineries and chemical plants. Lennie pushes these clichéd scenes to extremes in color and composition, moving the naturalistic details to the edges of the painting and rendering the sky as a densely flat and monochromatic field that is reflective of the city’s pollution and often problematic air quality.

Soody Sharifi - Photographer Soody Sharifi moved to Houston from Teheran in the mid-1970s and, like many female Iranian artists of her generation, focuses on the social and cultural transformations in women’s life in Iran since 1978. Sharifi’s recent work focuses on adolescents and their ability to feel at home in multiple cultures simultaneously due to myriad adult influences, Iranian traditions, and today’s global culture and the mass media. By spontaneously capturing the everyday lives of her friends and acquaintances, Sharifi provides an antidote to the narrow stereotypical images that the international media have created of the Islamic people. Another recent series, Mixiatures (2004), are digital collages combining old Persian miniatures and contemporary silhouettes from Sharifi’s photographs. Blown up to thirty-by-twenty-inches, the images merge the symbolic language of the old masters with the realism of photographs. This balance of modern and ancient customs mirrors the tension between private and public space in present-day Iran.