A Collection of Babysitters by Betsy Huete

Art League Houston is excited to present A Collection of Babysitters, a solo exhibition by Houston-based artist and writer Betsy Huete featuring a chapbook of poetry and sculpture based on the children’s fiction series The Babysitters Club by Ann M. Martin.  Exhibition Dates: August 5 – September 17, 2016. Opening Reception: 6 – 9 PM Friday August 5, 2016.

Germane to a particular generation of women born in the eighties and who came of age in the nineties – although the series remains popular today – Huete engages with questions of female friendship, and the camaraderie, jealousy, love, and loyalty inherent in it. She’s also interested in the importance and confinement of female representation: what is the value and what are the problems of popularizing young girls starting a babysitting business in white, suburban Connecticut?

Huete assembles her poetry by lifting phrases from the first eight Babysitters Club volumes, intuitively selecting and remixing the words into prose poems of her own. Although the content of The Babysitters Club reads as innocuous, even saccharine, Huete believes that embedded within the text are deep-seeded feelings of all the things that make relationships tick, that make them fall flat, and she thinks that conflating and confusing the language Martin uses in her novels can unearth some of the reasons why these books are engrained in the collective nostalgia of a particular generation of women.

In short, there’s more to the story than Stacey hiding her diabetes and Kristy’s jealousy of Mary Anne’s and Dawn’s new friendship.

View a preview of Huete’s chapbook here.

The sculptures are in turn translations of the poems.  Huete dissects her poems line by line, allotting and establishing a bank of materials from which to play and let sculptures organically develop.  Perpetually residing between construction and decay, Huete is interested in the ways these objects, through a kind of double translation, continuously point to and turn their backs on notions of nostalgia, childhood, and innocence.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Betsy Huete is an artist and writer from Houston.  She received her BFA from Rice in 2006 and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Houston in 2014.

Huete has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Lawndale Art Center, Matchbox Gallery, and galleryHOMELAND, and participated in Houston’s Fringe Festival in 2012.  She attended the artist residency Mildred’s Lane during the summers of 2012 and 2013, and was subsequently included in the residency’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the fall of 2012.

A frequent contributor to Glasstire, Huete has also written for The Great God Pan is Dead, gulfcoastmag.org, and served as the assistant editor for the Art Lies section of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts in 2013. Additionally, in 2012 she collaborated on Dis Manibus: A Taxonomy of Ghosts From Popular Forms published by Information as Material in the UK.

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/huete11

Press Image: Betsy Huete, Bees, 2015, Clamp lights, wood, cabinet, 3 x 3 x 2 ft.