With its thickets of some 200 concrete columns, each 25 feet high, the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern more resembles Istanbul’s Roman cisterns than a public park in downtown Houston. Developed by the Buffalo Bayou Partnership in 2010 as a space with arts programming, the cistern this spring will again transform, this time into a wild flight of AI-fueled fantasy by the artist Rachel Rossin.

Haha Real, Rossin’s site-specific media and sound installation, carries on her investigations into the overlapping territories of game programming and high-tech worldbuilding. In 2023, she showed the eye-popping digital artwork THE MAW OF at the Whitney, which co-commissioned it with Berlin’s KW Institute of Contemporary Art. Rossin has also shown at venues including the New Museum, K11: Shanghai, and Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. She recently emailed with Surface to talk about her childhood inspiration, awe, and work without beginning or end.

What was it about The Velveteen Rabbit that inspired you for this particular work?

The Velveteen Rabbit was my favorite book as a child and the idea for making art from it was circling me for a while. There’s a beautiful idea at the heart of the story that’s embedded in the etymology of “Haha” for the title. In Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag argues that we can often lose the valuable human aspects of art when it’s forced into the disciplines of pedagogy.

As an artist working with technology, I’ve encountered a similar hazard where work can be valued solely for its technical novelty. In Haha Real, I wanted to employ the massive scale of the Cistern as a foil for this tiny rabbit. This involved a complex technical production, where spotlights comb the cistern’s vast architecture in conversation with 8-channel video.

Much of your work involves virtual reality and/or gaming platforms. What did you learn from those moments of world-building that helped conceive this “real-world” piece?

This work operates like a three-act psychological theater piece. The narrative follows an impossibly large storm, focused around The Velveteen Rabbit, which rotates throughout the space in three acts. I often work in video game engines and theater production software. There’s a main stage in the narrative of Haha Real but, like a video game, you’re rewarded with easter eggs hidden in the margins. There’s always some reward for those who travel off the map.

The cistern is a remarkable place—what about it inspires you? Was it intimidating to figure out how to utilize it?

During my first site visit, I happened to be researching the psychological and neurological mechanisms of awe. I was curious to understand why art, like nature, can create the feeling of the sublime. The origins arise from something called “perceptual vastness,” the unique sense of being overwhelmed when encountering space or sensory experience that is too great to measure. The cistern was the perfect setting for the content of Haha Real.

How did you build the show?

It’s built on theater software. We had to orchestrate the components of spot lights, the grid lights in the Cistern, LED screens, water pumps, and sound. As you can imagine, you’re controlling a lot of moving parts at once. To bring those together with accuracy and timing was a challenge. I spent months in my studio in New York animating and simulating the environment of the Cistern in Unity to plan ahead and find issues on site we hadn’t prepared for. Conceptually, the Cistern is cast as the antagonist. I wanted to anthropomorphize it into the antagonist against The Velveteen Rabbit—an agent symbolizing chaos where we’re along for the ride as a tiny being.

Tell me how you organized the piece spatially. How did you decide what goes where?

When you visit the Cistern, there’s a narrative built into your experience as they can only allow 40 people in for pre-scheduled time blocks. Here, you have to enter at the beginning and leave at the end. That aspect lent itself to the narrative aspect of what I wanted to pull from. I leaned into this as an opportunity as most art experiences cannot have a true beginning or end.

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This February, we’re launching a new monthly series of art and culture dinners hosted by notable creatives at Mostrador in Tribeca. Every aspect of the evening, from the guest list to key partners, is tailored to foster community and connectivity among leading artists, designers, and food and drink culture. The first dinner kicks off on Feb. 29 with designer Fernando Mastrangelo. Reach out to learn more about how your brand can be considered for partnership.

While traveling around Mexico’s Pacific coast, Eric Meyer fell for the remarkable history—and, thanks to a bustling scene of international film and organ festivals, contemporary frisson—of Morelia. He spotted a 17th-century colonial mansion among the quarry arches and 250 listed monuments in the city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and with help from his firm, Mclean Meyer, transformed it into Casa Alondra, a six-room boutique hotel. A palette of pale, Provençal–inspired colorways keeps the focus on original tile floors and soaring timber beamed-ceilings. Given the region’s legendary craft traditions, it’s only fitting that its furnishings feature cabinets made nearby, bathtubs for the guest rooms hand-made by Santa Clara del Cobre smiths, and ceramic vases by Dolores Hidalgo across bedroom walls.

Chef Dan Corona, who got his start at Hunik in Merida before a stint as head chef at Casa Sandra in Holbox, helms Casa Alondra’s Restaurante Diego. There, he plates local strawberries into salads to brighten other courses like artichoke foam soup and roast beef risotto, all served within the shaded Olive Court. Guests and locals can whet appetites beforehand with a cevice and pisco sour among the quarry fireplace and velvet seating of Corona’s Rhythm Room bar, then repair to the roof terrace, with its panoramic views of the city and its pink cantera stone cathedral at the foot of the Sierre Madre Oriental.

Rudy F. Weissenberg and Rodman Primack founded AGO Projects to foster design voices and communication between their spaces in Mexico City and New York, leading to exhibitions at Project Room at the invitation of India Mahdavi and buzzy booths at FOG Design+Art and Design Miami. For this year’s Mexico Art Week, they’re presenting the fruits of a two-year collaboration with Agnes Studio, founded in 2017 by Guatemalan designers Estefania de Ros and Gustavo Quintana-Kennedy. Amueltos is the studio’s first exhibition and only second collection, and its celestial-themed tables and other esoteric pieces might just make the studio a star of the CDMX festivities.

Moschino has appointed Adrian Appiolaza, a highly regarded Argentine designer, as its new creative director. Appiolaza recently moved to Milan from Paris to work on his first collection, which is set to debut later this month. His appointment comes following the sudden death of Italian designer Davide Renne in November, who had started the role ten days prior. Appiolaza has previously worked at fashion houses including Chloé, Louis Vuitton, Miu Miu, and most recently Loewe, where he served as ready-to-wear design director for a decade.

In other people news, Nicky Dessources has been named the new executive director of collectible design fair Salon Art + Design; she succeeds Jill Bokor, who helmed the role for more than a decade. The Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation named SHoP Architects principal Angelica T. Baccon as its new Chair of the Board of Trustees. The artist Moridja Kitenge Banza recently joined Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem and has accepted a position at the prestigious McCanna House Artist-in-Residence Program.

Last week, it seemed all of London made an appearance at Serpentine’s opening party for a landmark Barbara Kruger exhibition. The show, “Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.” marks Kruger’s first solo institutional show in the city in more than 20 years. All manner of artists, designers, architects, and art-world figures showed up to mark the occasion, mingling and celebrating over glasses of Ruinart champagne.

When was it? Jan. 31

Where was it? Serpentine South, London

Who was there? Bettina Korek, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Sumayya Vally, Peter Saville, Norman Foster, Chet Lo, Imogen Kwok, Duro Olowu, and more.

When: Until March 16

Where: Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago

What: Shrobe leaves his mark on the portraiture tradition with vibrant works that cross boundaries between assemblage, collage, drawing, and painting. Oral histories, online archives, and family portraits inform the New York–based artist’s interpretation of the discipline recast with hues of orange, green, and gray, as well as found objects such as tabletops, flooring, and textiles. By drawing from late 19th- and early 20th-century photography, Shrobe bolsters the visual history of Black, Indigenous, and people of color being depicted with autonomy and dignity.

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Founded in Graz, Austria, in 2013 by Anastasija and Martin Lesjak, 13&9 Design has developed numerous collections from concept to production together with specialized partners in a variety of spaces including furniture, lighting, acoustics, textiles, accessories, exhibitions, and sound design. This creative community is its own label and a design studio for international companies such as BuzziSpace, Mohawk Group, FACT Design, Lande, Wever & Ducré, XAL, and VITEO Outdoors.

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