Untitled Houston 2025

NH DePass

Swivel Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition by NH DePass at the inaugural edition of Untitled, Houston. Featuring five new wall-mounted sculptural works and two floor-based installations. Depass’ presentation invites viewers into a layered, time-warping exploration of cultural memory, digital mediation, and handcrafted legacy.

September 19th-September 21st

George R. Brown Convention Center, Houston, Texas

Merging traditional carpentry with artificial intelligence, DePass creates a contemporary Kunstkammer—a modern cabinet of curiosities—where analog skill and digital technology intersect in uncanny harmony. In a world increasingly shaped by sterile efficiency and data-driven systems, DePass reclaims the tactile, asserting the handmade as a vital site of authorship and meaning. Drawing on mid-century modern aesthetics refracted through nostalgic Americana—cowboys, rock-and-roll, vintage signage, and roadside ephemera—DePass constructs intricately built frames and cabinets that house AI-generated oil paintings. These images, simultaneously serene and estranged, create a deliberate friction between the past and present, the authentic and the algorithmic.

Unlike many who use AI as a mere tool, DePass treats it as a collaborator—his process guided by uncovering rather than inventing. The resulting works, haunting in their painterly precision, reflect on our increasingly mediated relationship with nature and history, filtered through screens and shaped by code. A highlight of the presentation are the five wall works which feature saloon tableau rendered from multiple shifting perspectives, scenes that unfold with a cinematic trajectory. Populated with archetypes of the American West, the compositions echo the complexity and gravitas of a Renaissance painting. 

Depass’ handcrafted cabinets—drawing from California craftsman architecture and historical woodworking—serve as narrative vessels rather than simple display objects. Laden with motifs, cowboy folklore, typography, and shapeshifting figures, they offer a meditation on distortion, confusions, and loss in a hyper-digital age. As writer George Saunders once observed, “...where there were no artifacts of previous cultures, no ancient ruins, just expedience-formed vistas…” DePass leans into that void, suggesting that in our rush towards progress, something human, tactile, and irreplaceable remains indispensable. NH Depass in one motion collapses centuries of influence—Renaissance painting, frontier mythos, AI technology, and modernist design—into singular, resonant forms.