The Art of Football

On any sunny day, Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium (DKR) casts a large shadow over the buildings nearby - including that of the Visual Arts Center (VAC). Many who frequent football games might not know about the art building nearby. And many who stand inside the glass lookout of the contemporary art gallery may have never stepped foot inside the stadium. For artist Francesca Lally, the two worlds aren't that different.

In her new exhibition, " Half Time ," on display Jan. 23 through March 21 at the VAC, the St. Elmo Artist Residency Fellow takes on the intersection of art and football through speculative histories, present-day stories, and the imagined futures of Texas' landscapes and built environments. With work across mediums, the show features found photo and lenticular collages, videos and photos of football games at DKR, prints and paintings, and a large-scale camera obscura that projects the stadium (via a tiny pinhole) into the gallery.

Originally from New York, Lally received an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, where during her studies, she spent her first year in residence overseas at Temple University Rome. Part of her commute to school in Rome was to bike around the Colosseum. When Lally moved to Texas in August to begin her St. Elmo Arts Residency, a program housed in the Department of Art and Art History, her commute felt strikingly similar.

Despite a 2,000-year difference in age between the Colosseum and DKR, what struck Lally was the idea that these two places, across time, serve a similar purpose -- a place for spectatorship.

"Even though modern cities have very little in common with ancient architecture and ancient flows of cities, this is a way in which the architecture has actually not changed that much because the function of the building is still fundamentally the same," said Lally.

Other than the intended purpose, stadiums also tell stories about the people and places they represent. This is where Lally's ideas of imagined futures come into play. If the Colosseum seemingly tells us about ancient Romans -- that they loved watching gladiators fight because they derived entertainment from violence -- what will the highly preserved football stadiums in the future tell people about our society of today?

One thing it undoubtedly says: In Texas, football is singular. Across the state, everyone has a connection to the game. Even if someone didn't play football, they know someone else who did. Football and Texas are intrinsically connected in a multitude of ways and points of view. Lally remembers flying to Texas for the first time and looking out the airplane window to see a bird's-eye view of stadium after stadium, some in towns that didn't have much else to be seen from above.