Marek Cecula's "The Porcelain Carpet"

In 2007, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston acquired the Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio Collection -- a private collection of contemporary ceramics that amounts to a whopping 475 works spanning more than 50 years. In Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Ceramics, an exhibition of the collection currently on view, the museum narrows that massive collection down to nearly 160 works. It's still a lot, but there are some really standout pieces.

Though spread out through four distinct "rooms," the exhibition feels cluttered -- there's so much to see and take in, but not a ton of room to walk about. But it flows well, so even if you miss some works, you get the gist. The collection moves logically from modern pots to functional ceramics to postmodern to decorative. There are works on the walls, naturally, as well as hanging high from the ceiling and lying low on the floor. And they're more varied than you could imagine -- there are works that are illuminated, abstract sculptures, conceptual, broken. Works that comment on war, homophobia, "society," dreams. There are works made the old-fashioned way, by hand with clay, and others made with modern, digital technology.

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A gallery-goer takes in HJ Bott's "Mesocarp Mischief" during the exhibition's opening night.

Houston artist HJ Bott has been exploring his so-called "displacement-of-volume system" for 40 years now. And he's celebrating with an exhibition of his newest works at Anya Tish Gallery.

It says something that after 40 years, Bott hasn't gotten bored with his self-developed technique, which explores lines and geometric shapes on fiberboard that he then casts with glossy, bold color. And the op-art works themselves are far from boring -- they're bright, colorful works that attract viewers like moths to a flame. And once they get you there, they're highly cerebral -- through his sharp lines and shapes, Bott plays with dimension, creating 3-D shapes that almost seem to rotate in space on the canvas.

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A work from Perry House's "Happyville" series.

It's not often that an artist gets an opportunity to collect his or her work of the past quarter-century and hang the output on a gallery wall.

Along with an art exhibit, there's another reward that happens before the pieces are hung just right on a freshly hammered nail. Specifically, an opportunity for a creative type to see how his or her style has grown, changed and shifted over the years.

This applies to Houston artist veteran Perry House, whose "Elegance/Violence" exhibit opens to the public next month at Art Car Museum.

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"Floral Sushi," artist Lesley Bolden

This Saturday, Art Attack swung by Spring Street Studios for its monthly Second Saturday with the main purpose of checking out the inaugural exhibition of east2collective's 5X5X5.

East2collective is comprised of Adrienne Wong and Holly Hoyt Miscovich, who share something very special. A wall. The two artists are next-door neighbors within their Spring Street home, which is where they met and became partners. The two were looking for an outlet for not only their own work but also the work of their contemporaries. They saw a need within the art scene for a space in which artists could showcase work in an environment that encourages community and an open dialogue. "We have the space," Wong tells us, "so we figured why not?"

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On Wednesday, Sotheby's set a new world price record for art sales, bringing in $44.6 million each for Roy Lichtenstein's Pop Art painting Sleeping Girl and Figure Writing Reflected in a Mirror by British artist Francis Bacon.

A total of 46 pieces were sold for a combined $266.6 million, including a $37.04 million sale of Double Elvis [Ferus Type], Andy Warhol's silkscreen and paint portrait of The King.

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Charlaine Harris

Novelist Charlaine Harris is about to pull the plug on Sookie Stackhouse and her friends in Bon Temps, Louisiana. Ater the just-released Deadlocked, there's only one more title in the series of books that spawned the popular HBO television series True Blood.

Harris is in town on Friday to discuss and sign Deadlocked at Murder by the Book, one of her top two favorite bookstores in the country (more on that below).

In Deadlocked, Sookie faces two new devious opponents, a rogue werewolf and a vampire queen who wants to take Sookie's boyfriend Eric as her consort. (Eric is a big, beautiful Viking, so we understand the attraction.) The queen's plan doesn't sit well with Sookie, who thinks Eric should just refuse the request. But if the queen or other vampire officials decide to take revenge on Eric for his perceived insult and disobedience, that would put him in real danger. Yes, he's already dead, but even vampires can get deader.

Eric, on the other hand, thinks his curvy mind-reading girlfriend Sookie should just throw a little fairy magic on the situation and save him. But Sookie can use the fairy magic only once, and when one of her friends is hurt and about to die, she has to decide whether to save her lover or her friend. (If you know Sookie, it's no real surprise which one she chooses.)

Back to the role Murder by the Book, and especially former staffer Dean James, played in launching the Sookie Stackhouse books. Harris was already a published author when she hit upon the idea of a supernatural series built around a telepathic waitress living in a small town in northern Louisiana. (Anne Rice had already taken New Orleans, so Harris took the northern part of the state, she says. It's not as physically beautiful or culturally varied, but it made the perfect home for Sookie.) It was a change for Harris; apparently it was too big a change for her agent, who was reluctant to shop the title around.

Harris was certain she was onto something special with Sookie, and she decided to get another opinion. She sent the manuscript to her friend and fellow author Dean James. "No one knows more about mysteries than Dean, and I really valued his opinion," says Harris. "When he told me he fell off the bed laughing reading the manuscript, I knew I was right about Sookie." Harris's agent reconsidered and the series went on to be a huge success.

Catch up with Sookie and Charlaine Harris at 6:30 p.m. on Friday at Murder by the Book, 2342 Bissonnet. For information, visit the store's Web site or call 713-524-8597.

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"Room-drawing for Houston #2" by Dirk Rathke. Just try to take your eyes away from the glowing orange.

Berlin artist Dirk Rathke has quickly built himself a reputation here in Houston. After several shows at Gallery Sonja Roesch, he's known for his curved canvases -- monochrome shapes that bend, twist and seemingly ripple ever so slightly you have to check the edge of the work just to make sure of their depth -- and stripped-down drawings that go off the canvas entirely. In "Endearing the Line," his third exhibition at the Midtown gallery, Rathke returns to familiar territory.

As the name suggests, the show plays with line, space, and dimension, resulting in playful, attention-holding pieces. The most prominent is the remarkable site-specific installation, "Room-drawing for Houston #2." In his first solo show at Sonja Roesch, back in 2007, Rathke memorably took over the back end of the gallery with neon orange tape. He does so again, this time placing orange tape in the shape of two squares that take over the ceiling, wall, and floor. It's part sculpture, part painting, thanks to the brush stroke-like lines of the tape, and it completely throws you off. You're not sure how to react to it -- do you look at it straight on, or dare to get inside the lines and challenge the 3-D quality of the work?

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Photo courtesy Burning Bones Press

Dennis McNett constructs huge 3-D mobile art

Dennis McNett, one of the nation's renowned printmakers, practices the tedious, time-consuming art of carving. Most of his works are huge and have a graphic basis in '80s skateboard and punk rock culture; they are frequently described as "surly."

He also specializes in large, mobile pieces such as the Wolfbats he is currently exhibiting across the country as well as a Viking ship replica he displayed in Philadelphia last year.

Living in New York City since 2001, McNett has come to Houston to construct his first mechanically powered piece, an art car for the 25th anniversary of Houston's famed Art Car Parade. He will be working with Burning Bones Press in the Heights, who is assisting McNett with the construction.

McNett will also give a lecture at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Art Car Museum as part of this year's Art Car Parade activities.

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"It is used for identification purposes" by Kristy Peet.

Houston artists Kristy Peet and Britt Ragsdale have notable photography exhibitions up right now in one of the Museum District's more unconventional spaces.

Described as a gallery, salon, home and chicken ranch, Gallery 1724 is all of those things, though it's no more a gallery than your local Starbucks, hotel lobby or random business that hangs art on its walls can claim to be. To see the work, you have to navigate between tables, chairs and desks of a couple waiting rooms, one lit worse than the other.

In many galleries, you may feel like you have the space to yourself, a curator or owner out of sight in a back room. Here, without someone greeting me at the front desk, I felt like I was trespassing. It was a feeling that, for any law-abiding gallery-goer, would make you feel ill at ease.

The feeling was a good setup, though, for Kristy Peet's "How I Will Die." In her series of clinical-looking photographs, all sharply lit and crystal clear, the photographer is confronting her hypochondria, as she puts it, though it more closely seems to be her fears of mortality. In one photograph, she's lying stretched out on a gurney, a white blanket stretched out over her body except for her feet, which are sticking out towards you with tags hanging from one of the big toes. In another, she's wrapped almost entirely in gauze bandage, her face a white, blank mask. Other images deal with biohazards, amputation, skin cancer and obesity, primarily with the artist as the subject.

There are various props which make the photos like these little scenes or dramas. Peet's playing, it's make-believe, but there's some aspect of truth to it all -- we all go somehow. It's such a personal subject, yet the photos seem scrubbed clean of any messy emotions. The most evocative of all, in this sense, is the gauze portrait, "The most common type of bandage is the gauze bandage." Covered in gauze, Peet has been consumed by her fears to the point where she is indistinguishable.

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Photo by Meredith Deliso

David A. Brown poses with his "Optical Chapel."

Houston is losing another chapel. But this one doesn't have anything to do with the Byzantine frescoes.

This Friday, Heights artist David A. Brown will be taking down Optical Chapel, a photographic installation that represents more than 135 hours of manpower and is comprised of just under 11,000 photos.

For the past month, visitors have meditated in this blue-toned "chapel," which is found in a vacated medical office in Midtown's Mekong Plaza next to Khon's Bar. Using thousands of 4x6 photos, Brown has created a kaleidoscopic vision of downtown Houston. Abstract images of the Chevron building, Allen Center and an abandoned restaurant on the 600 block of Main Street are made into unique patterns and then layered in neat rows to the point where they're hardly recognizable. The resulting imagery resembles the highly detailed and repetitive tiles of Islamic mosques.

"The second I saw the space, I knew exactly what I wanted to do," said Brown. "I wanted to do photos as material."

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