Untitled Art, Houston 2025: Booth A21 – George R. Brown Convention Center, Houston, TX
Upcoming exhibition
Overview
Troy Lamarr Chew II, Save That Money, 2025
Altman Siegel is pleased to present works by Troy Lamarr Chew II, Hiba Kalache, and Trevor Paglen for the inaugural Untitled Art, Houston 2025. This presentation reveals the hidden infrastructures that govern contemporary life, mapping the unseen mechanisms that shape our shared reality.
Troy Lamarr Chew's Slanguage series translates the coded vernacular of rap lyrics into meticulously rendered paintings of symbolic objects. Chew transforms contemporary Black cultural expression into a visual lexicon where everyday items carry layered meanings. Drawing from Flemish still-life and surrealist traditions, these works reveal how both historical and contemporary artists use symbolic objects to encode complex social narratives.
Hiba Kalache's gestural abstractions draw from both personal history and broader political contexts. After the 2020 explosion in Beirut's port, Kalache returned to the Bay Area where she continues to develop her intuitive painting practice. The Lebanese landscape remains a consistent reference point in her work, informing abstract compositions that confront themes of entropic fragility, disintegration, and power. Through automatic mark-making and layered brushwork, Kalache's canvases navigate between structure and dissolution, creating a visual language of experiences that often elude direct representation.
Trevor Paglen continues his decades-long investigation into surveillance technology, AI, and state power. His presentation includes documentation of unidentified orbital objects (unids) and visualizations of computer vision algorithms, which unveil and give context to covert surveillance infrastructure.
Together, the works of Troy Lamarr Chew II, Hiba Kalache, and Trevor Paglen illuminate the technological, cultural, and emotional systems that shape contemporary life. Each artist reveals hidden structures that belie these complexities. Paglen exposes the covert operations of state surveillance, Chew decodes the layered vernacular of Black cultural expression, and Kalache translates personal and political trauma into abstract, embodied oil painting. Whether through satellites, slang, or gesture, their practices confront the forces that govern visibility, memory, and power. In dialogue, their works offer a compelling meditation on how unseen mechanisms, be they systemic, linguistic, or psychological, leave their imprint on the world and the self.