Austin’s Art Palace has moved to Houston with a certain amount of hoopla. Houston hardly lacks for art spaces, but the new always has at least a temporary appeal. Unlike other new ventures, Art Palace arrives with credibility based on its record in Austin. So why Houston? The crass answer is that there are more collectors here. Also, there is a self-sustaining, institutionally supported collectors’ community in Houston; one that is perhaps lacking in Austin.

Art cards by Art Palace.

The proprietor of Art Palace, Arturo Palacios (get it?) is starting in a way that is both bold and smart. His stable of artists is wisely small, but well-regarded locally (Elaine Bradford and Seth Alverson, for example). To get maximum leverage out of these artists before it can exhibit their work, Art Palace needed to promote its artists somehow. Their solution? Baseball cards for the artists, which came packaged in old-fashioned wax paper wrapping with a stick of gum. Smart, like I said.

Art Palace’s opening show, featuring Jonathan Marshall, is audacious. Starting a new commercial gallery with a video as the primary piece takes guts. Most of the art in the show is directly related to the video, a 30-minute narrative film called “Quest of Sight.” This video features two parallel storylines. In one, an explorer type, Johan Pilgrim, is wandering through a desert. He stumbles across some ruins that look a bit like Puebla Indian dwellings. He climbs down a shaft into a cavern, where he has a vision. Meanwhile, a beach bum named Skelebones finds a man washed ashore. The man, Lenny (played by Marshall), has a very long, very fake beard. It’s not clear whether Lenny was washed ashore by accident or if he was actually seeking Skelebones. Skelebones nurses him back to health, and then takes him to a sacred place. Skelebones is not merely a hobo; he’s a shaman of sorts. His place of power is an odd-shaped tent into which he instructs Lenny to enter. He has an electronic device on a pole that is actually an electric drum (he is a thoroughly modern shaman). Meanwhile, Johan has found an identical tent out in the desert, with a similar drum-machine next to it. Lenny and Johan enter their respective tents, and Lenny is transported to an island of garbage, where he finds a device (that looks like a space probe) that gives him cosmic visions. Later, we see him back in Skelebones’ camp, getting tattooed (in a crude prison style) on his knees. The story is, as they say, to be continued.

Now this video isn’t going to knock Avatar off its perch, but like Avatar, it deals with the meeting of modern (electronic drums) and pre-modern (shamanism). The space probe that gives visions is another example of this combination of worldviews. (This seems like an obvious reference to the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.) The space probe is an actual piece of space equipment—the Lunar Surface Gravimeter, which was taken to the moon on Apollo 17. It looks like a piece of modern sculpture — the kind of thing one might find in front of an office building, a type of art I call “corporate plop.” Unfortunately, there was a design flaw that prevented the LSG from ever working. Deprived of its practical purpose, it even more feels like a sculptural monument expensively installed on the moon by NASA.

Ambiguous Landscape Land Art Proposal Drawing / Untitled detail, graphite and enamel on dyed paper, 2009

The other pieces in the show relate to “Quest of Sight.” Both drums are there, and paintings of the LSG and of one of the visions seen by Lenny are included. Unnervingly, there are photographs of the “Lenny’s” tattoos. It turns out that they are real and were produced “prison tattoo”-style. Ouch.

My favorite piece (aside from the video itself) also relates modern art with space. “Ambiguous Landscape Land Art Proposal Drawing” shows a Martian landscape of the type we’re used to seeing from the landers we’ve landed there. It looks like a mosaic of images joined together, depicting a rocky orange plain. But within the plain is a rectangular area in which all the rocks have been removed. It looks like a piece of land art from the 1960s. The surface of Mars would be a perfect place for a Michael Heizer or a Robert Smithson.

Marshall’s work is provocative and somewhat wacky at the same time. I think it fits really well in a gallery that puts its artists on baseball cards.

“Doubled Vision” will be up through March 6 at Art Palace.