The Houston Chronicle
January, 15, 2006

Camera sly: The earnest, funny, sweet world of Eileen Maxson
By Jean Kwon

ON the big night, Eileen Maxson feared that there would be Jumbotrons.

There were, after all, a marching band, cheerleaders, homecoming mums, pheasant feathers and hunting trophies - not your usual art-crowd scene, to say the least. But the November party celebrated the first-ever Arthouse Texas Prize, the country's largest visual-art award: $30,000 with no strings attached. That heady combination of bigness and cash apparently inspired the party's theme: "Texas Excess."

Maxson, 25, looked out of place in her jeans. The 400-plus other guests gathered in the lobby of Austin's historical Driskill Hotel tended toward eye-popping designer formalwear. Philanthropist Becca Cason Thrash's Christian Lacroix pants came straight off the Paris runways, and teemed with silver sparkles. Susan Dell, wife of computer magnate Michael, wore an arty black sheath accented with kinky metal studs; it came from her New York-based fashion concern, Phi. A cutout of taut brown leather covered the derriere of the event's co-chair, Carla McDonald; it appeared as if a horse saddle had gotten stuck to her otherwise backless black Versace gown.

Up for auction were Anthony Nak diamonds and a disco-era feather coat. A Teutonic ice sculptural shrine to Arthouse glistened in one of the ballrooms devoted to the event.

Maxson huddled with her "art family" from Houston's Aurora Picture Show, a funky little place that shows funky little movies in an old church in the Heights. It was not her kind of scene at all.

But there she was, a thoughtful Houston kid who likes to play with video cameras, standing at the top of the ballroom's stairs. Former governor Ann Richards, the evening's emcee, announced that Maxson had won that coveted prize. To loud applause, Richards handed Maxson a check in an envelope, and a felt box containing a silver belt buckle. Maxson looked stunned, like a contestant on TV game show who hadn't expected to be pulled out of the studio audience.

She confessed to the glittering crowd that she "didn't have anything articulate to say, except thank you." Her speech was over in seconds. Among all that excess, she looked sweet, awkward and real - which is to say, she looked much like her work.

THE competition Maxson won sounds like a reality- TV premise. Art professionals from around the state nominated 117 artists for the prize. From that pool, a jury selected four finalists: Maxson, Robyn O'Neil and Robert Pruitt, all from Houston; and Ludwig Schwarz from Dallas. Each received a small award to create a new work for the competition - a work made to compete, head-to-head, with those of the other artists.

Maxson was an ambivalent competitor. She knew many of the other nominees, and some were her friends. But she gave the competition a shot.

For the new work, Maxson took inspiration from recent news in Houston: the grand opening of IKEA's new, bigger store. Like the Arthouse prize, the IKEA event involved both hoopla and a contest: The first customer to enter the store would win a $10,000 IKEA gift certificate.

The woman who won the contest camped outside the IKEA for eight days in the middle of August. She had her husband save her spot when she went home to shower or change clothes.

For her video installation, Maxson created a life-size storefront structure that took up Arthouse's entire glass façade on Congress Avenue. Outside, a red and blue banner proclaimed the installation's name: Grand Opening. It gave Arthouse the hopeful but slightly desperate air of a new strip-mall enterprise - a Chinese takeout, maybe, or small-scale T.J. Maxx.

Inside, Maxson built seamlessly into Arthouse's walls, using dry wall, wood beams and plaster, creating a building within a building. A TV affixed to the interior ceiling constantly played Maxson's fake news footage of the event.

Maxson herself played the winner. Looking dazedly ecstatic, she gave a "kind of impromptu acceptance speech for the television camera," thanking her family and talking about how surreal the experience is. (It was perhaps good practice or Maxson's own, real-life acceptance speech.)

The off-screen reporter (played by Garret Smith) asked, "Why exactly are you here?"

She replied, "I'm not really sure, but it felt optimistic, a moving forward."

It would have been easy to make fun of that IKEA opening, to flinch at our culture of consumption and commercial hokum. Instead, Maxson found something almost spiritual.

"I saw some people camping by the side of the freeway," she remembers, "and what was interesting to me was that between I-10 and a furniture store, these people had real experiences, like a church service. They had a community that came out of this commercial experience."

Grand Opening was not so much a critique or analysis as it was a memorial giving dignity to a piece of modern life. "I think that it's inspiring that people go on living their lives in these desolate environments," says Maxson. "People go to Wal-Mart and have these tender moments there with their kids, or fall in love. People persevere."

MAXSON grew up mostly in Houston, in Olde Oaks, which she describes as "a subdivision behind Wal-Mart." Her dad worked for an oil company, and her mom taught school.

Maxson majored in photography at the University of Houston, but she never really left Olde Oaks. "In a way," she says, "my goal is to be able to show my work to my parents, who are smart and educated but not really into contemporary art."

She grins and corrects herself: "Not at all into contemporary art.

Fairly often, Maxson made her videotapes in her parents' house, working out of her buttercup-yellow childhood bedroom. One of those was Tape 5925: Amy Goodrow, in which Maxson plays the fictional Amy Goodrow, a teenager auditioning for MTV's The Real World.

Maxson put on a mod-gothic Louise Brooks black wig and began improvising for the camera, which she placed on a tripod, as she had so many times before. Her character talked shyly about herself, attempting to connect with a disembodied person off camera. The character's openness is excruciating; she becomes difficult to look away from.

That is, at least for the real-life viewer. In the finished version, a male voice is suddenly heard over her wistful monologue. We realize we are watching the audition tape as a bored MTV editor is reviewing it. The off-screen editor (played by Maxson's friend Vinnie Hopson) conducts a telephone conversation while intermittently fast-forwarding the tape. As Amy reluctantly begins to tell the story of her first love, the fast-forward action permanently cuts her off, and we hear the editor making plans for the evening.

"Amy's story is really about an unrequited love - with a man and with television," Maxson explains. And that's something that her parents - or almost any viewer - can understand.

"People understand faces and expression and emotion," she says. "You recognize that Amy feels a connection with a person she's never met. She's so desperate that she can be that way in front of the camera, hoping that this person will see her."

And of course, he doesn't.

But the viewer's eyes are locked on Maxson. You can't help but wonder - as you wonder about all artists and actors - how much of her is in her characters. Another one, Nora Gamble, is a hapless weathercaster, trying to project authority but looking lost. Nora lacks the shiny self-confidence of the people we usually see on TV. She could be anyone: the toll collector, the bank teller or the counter girl at Saks - anyone who needs someone to raise them up and tell them their life has meaning.

Like Amy and Nora, Maxson wants very much to connect to the viewing audience, to find some sort of community in this wired world. But unlike Amy and Nora, Maxson seems to have a chance.

A week after Texas Excess, Arthouse is mostly empty of art, but a few pieces wait to be picked up. Two side panels of a triptych by finalist Robyn O'Neil remain on one wall, and Robert Pruitt's Bubble Gun , an Uzi covered in bubblegum, is still inside its glass case.

Grand Opening, though, isn't going anywhere. Like most installations, it won't outlast its single exhibition, and only a few of its parts (the videotape, the banner, pieces of the wood frame) will survive to be stored in Maxson's parents' garage.

A crew of twenty-somethings shows up to help Maxson with the demolition. Sarah Voglewede, Arthouse's associate preparator, hands Maxson a hammer and asks her to take the first swing at her prize-winning work.

Maxson hams it up, posing as Leona Scull-Hons, Arthouse's exhibitions coordinator, captures the moment with her digital camera.

For a second, Maxson hesitates. She looks genuinely pained. "I don't know if I can do it," she says.

Finally, she swings the hammer, and a small, almost perfect hole appears in the wall. She swings again, punching a hole below the first. She swings again and again. Bits of drywall float through the air.

Scull-Hons and Maxson huddle together, giggling at the photos. Maxson will take them with her this month, when she leaves Houston and her buttercup-yellow bedroom to pursue a master of fine arts degree in video and installation art at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh.

She thinks she'll return soon to Houston. "I feel like it's where I'm from, and that's where I need to make work," she says. "Houston is what makes sense to me."

But just now, in Austin, it's clear that her life is changing. The demolition crew has rendered the installation a shambled mess. People on Congress Street peer curiously through the big glass windows.

Maxson enjoys the moment.

"No one paid attention before," she says.