Some of Havel Rucks Projects’ most ambitious works, such as Inversion (2005) and Give and Take (2009), can at least compete on the latter three counts, making the duo of Dan Havel and Dean Ruck an astute choice for Art League Houston’s Texas Artist of the Year for 2014. Much of their art is about the aching beauty of the flux evident in these pictures. In the 1960s, the Vancouver-based N.E. Thing Co. photographed intriguing forms in the built environment and stamped the photos with the company seal denoting them as Aesthetically Claimed Things. Nowadays we all do that in our heads.

