Penelope Houston

Instagram: penelopehouston

Website: http://penelopehouston.com

Bio: On the eve of 1977, Penelope moved from her home in the Pacific Northwest to California to attend the San Francisco Art Institute. Within six months her career in visual arts was side-tracked by the formation of the critically acclaimed proto-punk band, the Avengers. Since then she has performed over 1000 shows with the Avengers and her solo bands throughout the USA and Europe. Venues include CBGB’s, The Whiskey a Go Go, Winterland Ballroom, as well as LA MOCA and the De Young Museum in SF. She has released 13 albums with independent and major labels. Her musical career is well-documented in publications from Newsweek to Slash. Despite this detour, visual art has always been anchored in her mind and her return to two dimensional imagery presents a seasoned world view.

Statement: “Muzzlers” is a series of oil portraits Houston undertook in 2017, based on original black and white photographs from police records archived at the San Francisco Public Library, where for years the artist held a day job. She discovered the images in mug books titled “Prostitution” and “Muzzlers” – slang for sex crimes. Each portrait is a diptych – front and side views – with the accused’s name and alleged violation burned into the side panels. Although the series harks to a time when sex workers were “low women” and gay men could be charged with “crimes against nature,” Houston’s light and sensuous impasto treatment performs a kind of literary time travel, drawing these individuals forward to a contemporary sensitivity, revealing and in a sense returning to them what the original arrest documentation took away – their essential humanness. Mixing subtle shadings of emotion – melancholy, remorse, shame, even defiance – with direct looks almost painful to meet, Houston creates a reckoning between subject and viewer: who’s judging whom? “One hundred years before the selfie,” says Houston, “photography was an elaborate proposition and the demeanor of the suspects at that significant but unwelcome moment of the policeman’s shutter click is uniquely unmasking. I was struck by the difference in expressions in the frontal shots – pleading or defiant – and the more withdrawn introspection in the profile shots. I took pleasure in painting them, and in the process of discovering and getting to know these individuals. But more than that, I felt a sense of obligation.”