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Post Houston was made for installation art.

Okay, it’s also made for rooftop gardening and one of the best food courts this side of a Singaporean mall. There’s plenty of room in the 550,000 square feet of renovated and restored Barbara Jordan Post Office downtown for multiple uses. As with the Buffalo Bayou Cistern, Post Houston repurposes a historic, decommissioned element of our city’s infrastructure into a creative space rather than dooming it to a rubble pile.

Post hosts dozens of events and shows every year. The latest and buzziest, Solar Dust, by the Italian art group Quiet Ensemble, opened on June 1 as the first showcase by Post’s in-house Art Club, and will run through October. Promoted as a combination of exhibition space and nightlife destination, Art Club occupies a 40,000-square-foot section of the building’s X atrium. It officially opens with a litany of international talent in November—Solar Dust is intended as an appetizer, a sensory tease of what’s to come once the doors open fully.

Fabio Di Salvo and Bernardo Vercelli founded the Rome-based Quiet Ensemble in 2009. They envisioned opportunities to craft immersive installations exploring multimedia experiences, blending visual art with music, natural concepts, and technology. Post’s Art Club is the first to host Solar Dust in the United States. And fittingly so—Houston has seen an explosion of interest in installation art over the past decade, fueled in large part by high-profile exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston like Yayoi Kusama’s Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity (ongoing), Pipilotti Rist’s Pixel Forest and Worry Will Vanish (which ran in 2023), and others. Their “Instagrammability,” as it were, encourages visitors to share themselves interacting with and experiencing art and invites their friends and followers to stop by and enjoy themselves, too.

This is a good thing. It nurtures an interest in the arts and allows works like Solar Dust to make their way to the Gulf Coast first. (Sorry not sorry, New York and LA.) Given Art Club’s desire to merge gallery art with nightlife aesthetics, Quiet Ensemble’s novel construction and incorporation of thumping music synced with flashing lights makes for an appropriate christening for the burgeoning space.

Constructed of a tulle made from steel and filament, Solar Dust takes inspiration from the astral constructs of its name. Light, color, and shadow entwine in an organized dance meant to make viewers feel suspended in a monolith-driven Kubrickian voyage throughout deep space. There are no stars here. No planets or galaxies or gas clouds. Merely an endless vacillation between a haze of “dust” and jagged, twisting swirls redolent of sci-fi wormhole travel.

Unlike a monolith-driven Kubrickian voyage throughout deep space, however, Solar Dust doesn’t overstay its welcome. The whole experience takes only around 15 minutes. Flash photography is prohibited to preserve the artists’ intent, so any selfie takers wanting to spread the word will need to work in tandem with the piece’s glow. The work embraces a loud and flashing approach by design, and viewers are only able to see it from three sides, so it’s more immersive than it is interactive.

Yet despite the aforementioned sight and sound, Solar Dust almost paradoxically lends itself to meditation. Similar to French installation art studio Visual System’s A Circular Journey, which featured at the Atomium in Brussels from 2018 to 2019 and covered similar themes of humanity’s preoccupation with overlooked space minutiae, all elements involved work so thoughtfully in tandem that it absorbs rather than alienates.

With such an accomplished piece as Solar Dust kicking things off, Art Club holds a lot of promise for future exhibitions. They’ve already proven themselves informed curators who understand what artists speak to Houstonians’ taste.