“Homage,” “The Blue Hour (A Clock Stopped),” “M*dres” & “Turning Memory”

In celebration of its 30th anniversary, Blue Star Contemporary welcomes 2017 with a quartet of exhibitions that look to the future with a keen eye on the past. Standing out as a likely crowd pleaser, “Homage” promises to be an intriguing tribute to “Blue Star I,” a show that rose from the flames of the SAMA’s canceled 1986 show “San Antonio Contemporary” and effectively inaugurated the Blue Star Arts Complex as a hub for contemporary art. Taking cues exclusively from titles and descriptions of pieces included in that show the started it all, participating artists David Almaguer, Joe Harjo, Jennifer Khoshbin, Michele Monseau, Andrei Renteria, Anthony Rundblade and Ed Saavedra created “new work inspired by these details,” without ever having seen the originals. One of the more mystical elements represented in Artpace’s Tex-centric 2016 exhibition “Objectives,” Jessica Halonen’s fascination with the history of the pigment known as Prussian Blue comes back into focus via “The Blue Hour (A Clock Stopped)” — a solo show that sees the Austin/San Antonio-based Michigan native employing sculpture and oil on linen to “tap into the cultural and social associations the color blue evokes.” An ever-inventive multidisciplinary artist and recent Blue Star Contemporary Berlin Residency alum, Julia Barbosa Landois fuses semantics and serigraphy in “M*dres,” a series of silkscreen prints examining “how gendered language reflects and structures our political and cultural attitudes towards women.” In addition to two-dimension works that deconstruct concepts surrounding often-loaded words like “mom” and “madre,” Barbosa Landois’ Blue Star project encompasses a performance that satirically contrasted “the banalities of parental life with the performance artist persona, using a smartphone as mediator and monkey wrench.” A Chicago-based artist with an extensive exhibition history, John Steck Jr. evokes themes of “ephemerality, physicality, materiality, fragility and mortality” in “Turning Memory,” which comprises images from his series Lament (Disappearing Photographs) but also entails “two exposure boxes where the images are created during the span of the exhibition, punctuating our need to permanently document and hold a moment longer.”