Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s current exhibition, “Pieced and
Patterned: Southern Quilts 1840-1940,” covers a pivotal century in
American history. The materials and designs on display as well as the
texts and placards that accompany them are full of rich asides and
insights into the political, economic, and social upheavals and the
dramatic changes in attitudes regarding race, class, and gender that
occurred during those 100 years. But what makes “Pieced and
Patterned” a must-see show is associate curator Stanton Thomas’
assemblage of quilts created with skill, passion, and originality.
Quilt – Snakes, by an unknown maker: on display at the Brooks in the museum’s current exhibition, ‘Pieced and Patterned: Southern Quilts 1840-1940’
In Eva Lena Harrington’s Quilt – Hatchet, nearly seven square
feet of row after row of small, white “hatchets” pieced on top of an
ebony background look more like a huge work of Op Art (stark, crisp,
geometric, pulsating) than a soft, hand-sewn quilt.
Hundreds of diamond-shaped pieces of silk, needle-pointed and pieced
with consummate skill, suggest facets of light in Quilt – Touching
Stars. Gaze for a while at the complex palette and kaleidoscopic
shape of nine stars radiating across 83 square inches of pale blue
silk, and the work begins to look like fabric art’s answer to the Big
Bang. The maker of the quilt is unknown. She was perhaps someone’s
wife, someone’s mother but not an artist in her own right. Her
anonymity speaks volumes about gender in the early 1800s.
The embroidered and pieced surface of Quilt – Snakes
accentuates the rise and fall of serpents slithering across a
blue-green background. Their complex bands of color suggest poisonous
vipers. The quilt’s vibrant colors and associations with warmth, deep
sleep, and dreams mesmerize even as we squirm and try to look away.
Through May 17th
Closing reception, Thursday, May 14th, 6-9 p.m.
In her L Ross Gallery exhibition “Footprint of the Ancients,” Lisa
Jennings gessoes fine handmade papers onto canvas, paints them with
acrylics, then scumbles and scrapes back through layers of paper and
paint to suggest Ireland’s limestone cliffs, cobalt waves churned by
Atlantic squalls, and curraghs, the ancient boats used to carry the
Irish between islands and along the coast.
With each successive exhibition, Jennings further masters
nuances of color, texture, and subtle figuration. Her gradation from
cadmium yellow to palest lemon in Green Days in a Forest
registers as luminous, nearly seamless light. We can almost feel the
biting cold in the frozen white-gold mists that fade to blue-gray in
Winter Moon. Light shining off what could be a slanted shoulder
and shin suggest the lift and turn of a body about to step out of
crumbling limestone.
The artist’s strikingly original motifs are complex enough to
suggest lines of narrative as well as psychological and physical
terrain. In Vessel, a blue-gray figure elongates, refracts, and
dissolves into a thalo sea. Complex patterns of drips and washes take
us down to pitch-black waters. Diagonal shafts of energy thrust us back
up to the surface where sunlight filters through Ireland’s ever-present
coastal mists, turning the oars and prow of an empty curragh into
gold.
Richard Gamble’s People Are Generally Trustworthy
Through May 31st
Artist, activist, and social satirist Niki Johnson has gathered
together works by 13 noted painters, sculptors, photographers, and
videographers for “Baker’s Dozen: An Unorthodox Benefit for UrbanArt,”
being held Friday, May 15th, in three Broad Avenue venues: Material,
UrbanArt, and Odessa. If you like your art layered with complex ideas
and irony, this is your kind of auction.
Liz Daggett’s recipe for art calls for equal parts passion, skill,
and originality as she projects her four-minute, multi-screen video
James Baker’s Dozen into the rounded cups of a six-muffin baking
tin. One of the round screens shows environmentalist James Baker’s
passionate, intelligent face as he shares 12 tips for saving energy and
the world. Some of the muffin-cup screens are portholes into the lives
of animals struggling to live in increasingly compromised environments.
Others serve as wormholes in time as Daggett splices in an early
television commercial asserting that particularly caustic cleansers are
safe as well as effective.
In Christian Westphal’s Nightlife, a man in silhouette
strides across cracked pavement backdropped by trash and glaring
streetlights. Westphal pulls off this noir scene of crumbling American
infrastructure with a can of industrial-grade spray paint.
In Richard Gamble’s unsettling and sardonic People Are Generally
Trustworthy, dark-red crime-scene tape is painted across the
urine-yellow bodies of two rabbits dressed in outfits that bring to
mind clowns and vaudeville performers. As we decimate rabbits’ warrens
in the name of urban sprawl, we defile these creatures in ways that
bring plenty of adjectives to mind (none of them synonymous with
“trustworthy”).
With humor and style, the exhibition’s 13 artists have also designed
limited-edition T-shirts. At 10 bucks per T, they’re the best art
bargains in town.
“The Baker’s Dozen” opening reception at UrbanArt, Material, and
Odessa, is Friday, May 15th, 6-8 p.m., $5. The silent auction is at
Odessa from 6 to 8 p.m. To preview auction items, go to nikijohnson.net.
