Building A Haunted House One Piece At A Time
Sculpture Month Houston's yearly exhibition at the Sawyer Yard Silos is not strictly Halloween themed, but it’s perfect for spooky season.
Jon Read’s art installation is screaming at me, telling me I shouldn’t be here, and waving a knife in my direction. Read apologizes, and we move a few feet away to continue our interview in relative quiet.
It’s the annual showcase for Sculpture Month Houston, a yearly exhibition at the Sawyer Yard Silos. While not strictly Halloween themed, it’s perfect for spooky season. The event is held in the gently rotting industrial parts of the re-purposed grain silo and factory. Instead of modern lines and slick presentation like the front of the building, the space is as rusty and dark as Freddy Krueger’s boiler room. The old silos disappear up into darkness, like an inverted bottomless pit. To get to Read’s piece, you have to step over a pair of intertwined mermaids on the floor, their faces a combination of astronaut helmets and video screens showing human eyes.
In the next silo over is “Gods Like Us,” Read’s contribution to the show and a part of his long-running dream to build a haunted dark ride. This is the closest he’s gotten so far. He’s wanted to do that since visiting a combination haunted house/crappy wax museum on Prince Edward Island as a child.
“It was just so cheaply built out of plaster and chicken wire,” he says. “That’s been kind of my aesthetic the whole time I’ve been an artist. There was just something so otherworldly because I was in the middle of Maritime Canada in the North Atlantic, but it had a cheapness, a junkiness to it.”
You can see the inspiration in “Gods Like Us.” The main piece looks like a cross between an ofrenda and an attempt to remake Puppet Master for very little money. A small, misshapen angel with a vulvic chest wound stands two feet tall and waves the knife I mentioned earlier. Read has painted it so that it glows faintly in blacklight. Its jaw has the simple, animated hinge of a ventriloquist dummy, which kicks its motion and screaming voice further into the uncanny valley.
Surrounding the angel are two skeletons who join in the motion by waving their arms and flashing their eyes. Also in the room are two severed heads that slowly rotate, glaring at the visitors through their extra eyeballs. It really is a dark ride in miniature.
When Read was a teenager in Cleveland, Ohio, he started running his own haunted houses every Halloween out of the home of a friend, who lived in a decaying mansion that really upped the ante. It was here that he developed his love of sculpture and installations, building guillotines and open graves every year until he turned 18.
“It became this kind of legend on the West Side,” he says. “At the time, I don’t even think you could take a photo at night with a regular camera, so we never documented any of it, but I still have people every now and then on Facebook like, you did that, didn’t you?”
That boyish enthusiasm has never left him. Though 51, Read looks half his age minus the spray of grey in his beard. Read moved to Houston to become operations manager at DiverseWorks. In the 2000’s, DiverseWorks was a hub for the stranger parts of Houston art, particularly anything that involved performance. It was the perfect place for Read to gestate his own horrific carny creations.
Over the next two decades, he branched further out, founding the musical group The Wiggins as well as filming shorts and music videos. Through it all, he’s kept his kitchen table piled high with projects such as “Gods Like Us.”
Read planned to build a classic dark ride as an art piece. The dark ride is one of the oldest forms of theme park attractions, predating the invention of the roller coaster by about 30 years. Originally, they were either “scenic railways” or “Tunnel of Love” style rides meant to give couples some privacy. Eventually, they progressed to themed experiences, educational attractions and, of course, horror.
Parks like Disney World, Universal Studios, and Six Flags Over Texas would perfect the formula, but the world is littered with lesser-known dark rides, especially scary ones. What they often lack in polish and budget they make up for in the particular horror of poor execution. Mimicking that carny vibe has been an enduring premise of Read’s work.
Thus far, he’s been unsuccessful in getting grants to build his dream art installation. Instead, moving monsters and grotesque body parts keep appearing in music videos and events like Sculpture Month Houston. Read follows in the footsteps of schlock pioneer Roger Corman, who was famous for reusing sets, monsters, and even footage to turn one cheap film into three. One weird creation at a time, he’s edging closer to having everything for his dark ride.
“Now I think I have some ammo that I can actually approach places and be like, look what I can do,” he says. The angel screams as if in affirmation.
