Author: Carol Knowles

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Art Art Feature

Mavericks

True to its title, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s current exhibition “Monet to Cézanne/Cassatt to Sargent: The Impressionist Revolution,” is about courage and upheaval.

Eighty-five masterworks from the Brooks, the Dixon, and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art tell a story of a group of 19th-century and early 20th-century artists who broke so sharply with aesthetic, cultural, and religious tradition that their blasphemous and dangerous works were described by contemporary critics as “chambers of horror.”

The Brooks exhibition includes some of the Impressionists’ most accomplished paintings, such as Claude Monet’s stunningly observed Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil.

The exhibition also records what happened after the revolution. As these artists realized they were their own arbiters of beauty and could channel a more personal spirituality, they became more daring.

With compelling after compelling example, the show tracks the Impressionists’ and Post-Impressionists’ march toward work that was increasingly mystical, expressive, and abstract. Don’t miss the shimmering interiors by Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.

You’ll find a pivotal moment in the history of art in Paul Cézanne’s Trees and Rocks, Near the Chateau Noir. As Cézanne moved beyond Impressionism to search for the building blocks of reality, he created an increasingly geometric body of work that culminated in Cubism.

Even Renoir provides intimations of things to come in a show that includes not only that artist’s signature full-figured women but also The Wave, which brings to mind the passionate brushwork of the Abstract Expressionists.

Through October 9th

Fast forward 100 years. The spirit of the maverick lives on in the work of Memphian Greely Myatt, who is noted for unorthodox and highly original works of art that often pay homage to modern and postmodern masters. Without losing any of his iconoclastic edge, Myatt’s David Lusk exhibition “Just Sayin’,” also contains some of the most graceful and philosophical works of his career.

Standing at over seven feet, Volume II is an interactive steel sculpture with a hinged binding that allows viewers to open the pages of a book. Empty thought bubbles and speech balloons welded into each page create a graceful steel filigree that allows us to see all the storylines simultaneously. In one of his slyest and most strikingly beautiful works, Myatt encourages us to experience the world from new perspectives. We can fill in our own text and become an omnipotent observer (in thought bubbles Myatt welded at the top of a page) or the poet speaking from his/her gut (in speech balloons welded into the bottom of the work).

Myatt pays tribute to a couple of his favorite artists in List, a tall, weathered slab of steel on a Styrofoam base back-dropped by a large sheet of aluminum. Traces of color in a small slit that divides the polished aluminum from top to bottom conjures up one of Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings recast in metal.

As viewers approach the installation and stop to assure themselves that Styrofoam can, indeed, support a slab of steel, List also becomes a wry nod to sculptor Richard Serra.

The largest work in the show and one of Myatt’s most apropos alter-egos yet is I Like the Way You Dance, a 10-by-10-by-10-foot sculpture of speech balloons made out of mop handles, plastic, and steel.

The size of the work and the empty balloons allow us to join in the dialogue and step into a dance that blurs the distinction between high and low art and the boundaries between genres. This gracefully arcing work of interlacing speech balloons could be a couple moving in perfect sync and who remind us that what we say is less important than our attitude, body language, and the give-and-take of our conversations.

Or this could be the multifaceted mind of a sculptor whose seamless syntheses of pop/folk/conceptual/abstract art in a show titled “Just Sayin'” speak to universal truths, in a Southern vernacular, and to the history of art.

Through October 1st

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Art Art Feature

The Measure of a Man

As a result of Dixon director Kevin Sharp’s far-reaching vision and collaboration with the Petit Palais art museum, “Jean-Louis Forain: La Comédie parisienne” — the blockbuster show that opened to long lines and rave reviews in Paris last March — now hangs in the Dixon Gallery and Gardens.

Social satirist, patriot, and visionary as well as one of France’s most respected Impressionists, Jean-Louis Forain paints not only luminous landscapes like Woman Walking on the Seashore, he records light in all its manifestations: from gas-lit brothels to the bright lights of Parisian opera houses, from artillery fire exploding in the night sky above French soldiers to the light of religious experience so rarified that contemporary critics compared the emotional power of Forain’s etchings The Prodigal Son and The Mocking of Christ to the works of Rembrandt.

The mix of satire and sympathy that characterizes many of the 130 paintings, pastels, watercolors, political cartoons, and etchings now filling the Dixon makes this retrospective a powerful chronicle of French culture from the belle epoque through World War I to the Roaring Twenties.

In Forain’s watercolor and gouache The Client, the patron of a 19th-century brothel straddles a chair in a brightly lit room so that he can carefully study the women lined up in front of him. The Renoir-esque prostitute, far left, is nude except for the black cross on her florid chest, white high heels, striped stockings fastened with garter belts just above her knees, and an open dressing gown that frames her overripe body. The youngest prostitute, head-down and still clothed, sits in the corner of the room not quite ready to suffer the male gaze.

Forain employs Impressionist techniques to explore every facet of the human condition. Lamplight turns the dress and body of The Debutante into a dazzling white mist. The facial features of this girl are indistinct, her character not yet formed. Like the young prostitute, she sits with head bowed. And like the prostitute, the debutante is being trained to be desirable, to be accommodating, to follow a carefully scripted role.

Executed close-up and with materials at-hand, Forain’s pastel and gouache on cardboard In the Wings is an unsettling portrait of sexual politics played out in 19th-century opera houses, where ballet dancers were pressured to accept the advances as well as the patronage of wealthy season ticket holders known as the abonnes. It is unlikely that the dancer in this piece will touch the emotions of the aging abonne with whom she flirts. After decades of assignations with his young charges, the wealthy gentleman’s haughty face looks as hard and gray as stone.

There are no empty hearts, no haughty expressions in Forain’s luminous pastel on paper In Front of the Set. An older dancer, face chiseled with character, sits in front of a stage set where a green lawn slopes down to deep-blue water topped by a pale teal sky. With a look of rue, even sadness, on his face, a portly abonne looks down at his potential conquest back-dropped by Forain’s stunning simulation of the natural world. In spite of a world layered with gamesmanship and illusion, both abonne and dancer have managed to salvage some of their humanity.

In the lovingly and carefully observed, stylish but not stylized portrait Madame Jean Forain in a Black Hat, Forain records his wife’s auburn hair, soft lemon dress, large feathered hat, and the subtle but unmistakably mischievous smile that plays across her arched brows, wide eyes, and relaxed lips. A capable painter as well as great beauty, Jean Forain proved to be a fine partner for her quick-witted, empathic husband. Artistic excellence and strength of family persist. Florence Valdes-Forain, the artist’s great-granddaughter and the leading authority on his work, has authored a full-color 250-page catalog for the show that explores more than 200 of Forain’s most accomplished artworks.

The paintings that fill the final gallery of the exhibit are a powerful last chapter on Forain’s art and life. After the war and until his death in 1931, Forain recorded night life in the Parisian dance halls where jazz flourished, cultural expectations and sexual mores dramatically changed, and flappers redefined womanhood. With brushstrokes by turns fluid and frenzied, blurred and bold, Forain adopts an increasingly abstract and modern palette as he captures the energy that roared through every aspect of life in Paris in the 1920s.

Through October 9th

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Art Art Feature

Imagine That

CREDIT: Holly Fisher, Louie

In David Perry Smith’s “Fresh Horses,” one of this year’s most flawlessly integrated three-person shows, Holly Fisher wields steel like sticks of charcoal and forges strips of metal so fluid, digital images of her work look like contour drawings. We feel muscles rippling throughout the torso of a horse labeled Louie. We see into the cartilage and bones of a skeletal structure that is delicate but strong enough to lock the animal’s slender legs in place as he throws back his head whipping up his mane and tail.

An award-winning equestrian as well as accomplished encaustic painter, Mary Cour Burrows, floats near the top of her Chagall-like self-portrait The Horse Whisperer. Mouth to nostril, Burrows breathes life into a creature whose prominent snout, gentle eyes, and thick fur look like a not quite solidified version of the red mare at the bottom of the painting. In Dancing with the Red Horses, Burrows and four sorrels circle faster and faster until their fully extended bodies move in an unbroken circle — hand to tail to hoof to mane — that brings to mind the primal joy of the nude figures in Matisse’s masterwork La Danse.

In Mary Reed’s haunting collage painting Pause Prance, a woman both rides on and merges with a translucent steed created out of layers of handmade paper and white-gold glazes. The sleek woman is as golden-red as the atmosphere through which she rides. Like many of Reed’s heroines, she looks away from the viewer. Lost in her own dreams, this Guinevere turned gallant knight, this Woman of La Mancha sets out on a vision quest that mixes the legendary and surreal with the deeply personal.

Through June 30th

Included in Pinkney Herbert’s David Lusk exhibition “Broken Time — Progressions” is Fanfare 1, a pulsing pastel on paper. The work’s lime-green and deep-blue asymmetrical rectangles — framed in red and surrounded by jagged strokes of black — powerfully parallel the show’s title, which is the jazz term for irregular, improvised syncopation. The overlapping ovals at the heart of drawing looks like the lips of the trumpeter opening and closing around the mouthpiece of his/her instrument reaching for the high notes and crescendos. 

In a decided departure from Herbert’s driving sometimes explosive style, Tower 3 is a tall but fragile structure in which lines climb, change direction, intersect, and go back up and out as Herbert reaches for that open-ended framework that facilitates fresh vision and the creation of highly original pieces of music as well as works of art.

Through June 30th

Everything glows with life in WKNO 1091 Gallery’s “Artist Spotlight Exhibit: NJ Woods and Marie Babb.” In Woods’ high-key acrylic painting When You’re on a Hill, You’re Closer 2 da Moon, the lightning bugs are huge and children climb a hill as steep as a mountain. An enormous moon shimmers in the sky. Small shacks take on a life of their own as wooden slats turn gold in the moonlight and steep red roofs blow in the wind like the sheets on the clothesline at the bottom of the hill. The painting’s ebullient child-like joy doesn’t register as kitsch, as Grandma Moses-quaint, or even as exaggerated. Instead, Woods reminds us, this is the way children experience the world, the way they remember the magic.

Through June 30th

Some of the most sensual and iconic works of Niles Wallace’s career are currently on view in his Gallery Fifty Six exhibition “Sticks and Stones.” Dozens of deliberately misshapen stark-white ceramic bowls fill the top shelves of Wallace’s 8-foot-tall Collection Cabinet. Fired with a single glaze, Wallace’s colors are sometimes as crisp as the white and black halves of a yin-yang symbol, sometimes as nuanced as tea stains against hairline cracks in a porcelain cup, sometimes as sleek as the petal of a rose.

On the bottom shelves, Wallace places one plastic container inside another and warps both bowls with a heat gun. These surprisingly beautiful bowls writhe, reach out, and fold back upon themselves — sometimes tortuously, sometimes with delicate grace. These asymmetrical, shape-shifting works of art speak to every aspect of the creative process — ideas gestating, art and life evolving, and imagination as malleable as molten plastic.

Through June 25th

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Art Art Feature

Stir It Up

Anima/Animus,” Kurt Meer’s current exhibition at L Ross, references Carl Jung’s designation for the feminine/masculine qualities that exist in us all. A thoroughbred horse — a creature that is both graceful and strong, majestic and grounded — stands at the center of Still. Ears pricked, alert and calm, the thoroughbred gazes out over the landscape. The wide range of siennas and umbers that color the animal’s coat look as fertile as the freshly plowed earth on which this mare (or stallion) stands. The moist soil and silken fur reflect the lavender sky. Though no searing suns, no billowing clouds roil our point of view across the surface of his paintings, Meer’s skies feel all-encompassing and alive. Soft blue seamlessly gradates into silver into lavender into the radiant pink that borders the white-gold mist near the center of Clouds I. Peering into this painting — so accurately observed that every particle of moisture seems to vibrate with light — it feels certain the sun will soon break through.

Opening reception May 6th, through May 28th

In Memphis College of Art’s group show “The Greece & Crete Studio Elective Workshop,” architect and environmentalist Clark Buchner explores the fragile boundaries between line and form and illusion. The thick eroded walls and ramparts in the digital image Tree in Courtyard, Palace of Knossos, Crete, Greece suggest that some important monument or religious edifice lies just beyond our point of view.

Buchner, however, isn’t drawn to the grand or merely picturesque but to scenes that etch more indelibly into memory. He shoots low to the ground, accentuating the rubble in the courtyard and the decay at the base of the walls. The shadow beneath the trunk of a tree feels as tangible as the object that cast it. By placing the tree in the foreground of the image, Buchner suggests this leafless sentinel is as important as the ruined walls it guards.

Through May 9th

Larry Edwards, Pinocchio’s Dream 2, at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens

For decades, accomplished colorist, social satirist, and hell-and-brimstone preacher Larry Edwards has explored “the three F’s — the foolishness, foibles, and frailties of human behavior.” The Dixon Gallery and Gardens’ current exhibition, “3 Themes,” contains some of Edwards’ most unnerving artworks yet. In his saturate/surreal gouache, pastel, and watercolor painting Pinocchio’s Dream (2), multiple Pinocchios tumble and fall as scissors cut through their strings. Unseen forces set other Pinocchios on fire. Far right, a pair of scissors are about to cut the legs of yet another Pinocchio.

In another chapter of Edwards’ retelling of the children’s classic, Armored Noses Admiring Pinocchio, a blood-and-flesh Pinocchio — now a real boy — balances on three disembodied and helmeted heads stacked on one another. Pinocchio sports a nose that looks phallic. Noses and/or tongues (another body part adept at bearing false witness) protrude from the helmets.

In Pinocchio Falls into the Inferno, Edwards has his subject paying for his transgressions. But in The Phoenix, it’s another story, one which the artist describes as “a happy ending … the mythical bird and Pinocchio rise, reborn from the flames.” In Edwards’ oeuvre, however, entries into heaven and exits from hell are never easy rides. With a smile that looks more maniacal than transcendent and a nose that is, alas, as long as ever, Pinocchio is spewed into a pitch-black world where clouds are dense and brown.

Manipulated by unseen forces, easy prey to flattery, driven by desire, and possessing multiple personas, how can Pinocchio, or any of us, speak to truth? One thing, however, feels certain: Edwards — a tireless painter and retired professor emeritus now in his 80s — is edgier and more ironic than ever.

Opening reception May 19th, through July 24th

In Harrington Brown’s current exhibition, “Two Rivers,” the swatches of color on the surfaces of David Hinske’s paintings look as shot through with light as the Taos home in which he works. The rhythms of Hinske’s brushstrokes — by turns staccato and fluid, impastoed and full-throated — mirror improvisations of the jazz music playing in the background.

In works like In the Kitchen, Digging in the Pantry, and Basil (In a Can by the Window), what looks abstract is most real for this painter/chef/musician who multi-tasks. Hands on the meal prep as well as on his brushes — slathering oils onto canvases as high-key as the notes of a sax, pulling sprigs of fresh herbs from orange-lipped canisters, and peeling/slicing/dicing tomatoes and yellow peppers for the soup simmering in a kitchen that also serves as one of Hinske’s studio spaces: Everything is in motion.

Opening reception May 6th, through May 31st

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Art Art Feature

Charged Objects

Part Pop artist, part shaman, Willie Cole takes household objects and so charges them with danger and talismanic power, they become ego-shattering icons as well as riveting works of art. The artist’s best-known work, Stowage, was showcased at Cole’s 1998 solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. It also serves as the centerpiece for his Brooks exhibition, “Deep Impressions.” A long, slim projectile covered with tiny white dots lies near the center of this nearly black woodcut. Surrounding the projectile are a series of circles, each imprinted with a single iron-scorch. As we step in closer to this wall-filling work, we realize we’re looking at the layout of an overcrowded British slave ship ingeniously re-created with a blackened image of an ironing board and iron scorches. We’re staring through the ship’s portals into the stark lean faces of African tribesmen about to be sold into slavery.

At the edge of abstraction, Cole’s iron-scorched paperwork Raid looks like rusted hulls of ships ramming into one another. Or these could be blood-stained spears flashing in combat. Its emotional energy feels as sudden, unexpected, up close and personal as the melees that occur when slave traders “raid” African villages.  

The right panel of the triptych Man Spirit Mask contains another evocative image. For this work, a photo etching of the artist’s face has been elongated, cropped, turned upside down, and jammed into the sole plate of a Proctor Silex steam iron. Like Stowage and Raid, this strikingly original and unsettling work is filled with seemingly endless asides about the callousness and cruelty that occur when humans are treated like chattel, jammed into cargo ships, and consigned to the drudgery of planting/harvesting/hauling cotton and cooking/cleaning/ironing.

Through May 8th

You’ll find powerful portraits of architectural facades as well as faces in David Lusk’s current show, “Jared Small: Small World.” Over a Cup explores the boundary between the everyday and the sublime and finds transcendence in unexpected places. Dressed in his Sunday-best white shirt and suspenders, an older man sits in a small, clean, well-worn kitchen. The Hopperesque square of light shining through the window and framing his face suggests this is a holy place where a senior sips coffee and reflects on a hard but honest life. 

Small’s portrait Lena stands on its own as a moving character study as well as serving as part of a large mural depicting another biblical parable the Good Samaritan. As Lena turns on her fine black leather heels to walk away, she looks back at an injured person who lies just outside the picture plane. She doesn’t see the storm clouds racing across the sky, a building fraying/dripping/dissolving, or the pitch-black shadow hovering close to this beautiful, oh-so-busy young professional who serves as poignant reminder that everyone’s place in the world, sooner or later, comes undone; that all of us eventually will need a helping hand.

In a Row takes us from radiance to decay to total dissolution. Though the wooden frames of three shotgun houses are worn, the middle home’s lemon-yellow paint job is breathtakingly beautiful in sunlight. The cement walkways at the bottom of the painting liquefy and spill into what looks like a chasm. In light of recent earthquakes, tsunamis, and threats of nuclear meltdown, Small’s beautiful, ephemeral worlds feel more visionary than surreal.

Through April 30th

Sculptor and painter Anton Weiss witnessed World War II, spent his childhood in a concentration camp, and, after the war, relocated to the United States, where he studied Abstract Expressionism with Hans Hofmann. In his L Ross exhibition “Remnants,” Weiss’ life comes full circle as he captures the chaos and the potential for change that occurs when citizens of the world rise up against tyranny.

Weiss takes the long view — planets float in deep space, and loosely knit, irregular rectangles look like city-states coalescing and decaying, like civilization rising and falling. Weiss weds the inventive shapes of Abstract Expressionism with Surrealism’s cosmic mystery with Dada’s absurdist humor and anti-war sentiment. At the top of Remnants 003, a half-moon cradles a dwarf sun. Near the center of the work, several hammered, weathered metal strips resemble a military jacket — torn in two, brown with age, and stripped of all indices of rank.

After the war, Weiss vowed to stay away from the dark side. And so throughout his career he refused to paint black or nearly black works of art. In what Weiss describes as a “personal as well as aesthetic breakthrough,” the artist has created works that while very dark are also some of the most insightful and life-affirming pieces in the show. Measuring 48-by-24 inches, Remnants 007 feels figurative, personal. The work’s deep charcoal grays conjure up soot generated by industry or artillery fire, or, perhaps, this is the dark night of the soul.

In Weiss’ layered and scumbled acrylic surfaces and in his hammered and weathered metal fragments, you’ll glimpse shadows of the psyche, foibles of the human heart, and nearly indecipherable scripts that read like hieroglyphs in an ancient tomb or fingernail scratches on a prison wall.

Through April 30th

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Art Art Feature

Passion & Pain

Memphis College of Art’s current exhibition, “Drawing Comment: Illustration and Social Commentary,” includes internationally noted artist Luba Lukova’s stunning portrait of love and loss titled Water. Although the work is semi-abstracted, we can just make out a mother’s expression, still see the pride and concern she feels for the fire-engine-red baby that lies on her chest and cries. The mother is armless. Her body is as cracked and gray as parched earth. Instead of statistics regarding rates of mortality, instead of discussions about drought and its impact on the African continent, Lukova’s in-our-face, one-on-one work of art asks us to feel, really feel, what it’s like to love a child then watch it die.

Through March 27th

A New Yorker for years, now living in Nova Scotia and exhibiting across Europe, Canada, and the U.S., Leya Evelyn paints like she lives — experimentally, with daring, and open to new possibilities.

The nuanced, layered, scumbled, and scraped surfaces of Evelyn’s “Recent Paintings” at Harrington Brown Gallery allow us to see her visions unfold as sunlight moves across a weathered facade in Wilder By Far, no. 2, as almost impenetrable darkness falls across the right panel of the triptych Chance Meetings, and as passions are laid bare on the scraped saturate-red surface of I Knew About It Anyway, no. 5. 

The circles and ovals that often appear in Evelyn’s work are not geometrically exact symbols suggesting eternity or cycles of nature or elliptical orbits of planets that change little over millennia. Somewhere between line and form, between object and abstraction, Evelyn has developed a highly personal language of gesture that feels inflected with emotion and new ideas: frayed rope-like lines hang loosely then knot up in I Knew About It Anyway, no. 1, uncoil and reach up in Tell Me the Reason, no. 2.

Along the edges of many of Evelyn’s paintings tiny pieces of fabric are collaged next to equally small swatches of color. You may find yourself moving into and stepping back from these paintings again and again as you explore works so rich and evocative, each centimeter of their borders is a fully realized work of art.

Through April 5th 

For “Lied, Tied & Dyed,” artist and activist Suzanne Broughel has filled Jones Hall Gallery with incredibly soft materials and colors. As we step in close to enjoy her subtle textures and tones, we’re also drawn into an exploration of what the artist describes as “white skin privilege and economic racism” and “serious inequalities that still exist.”

Broughel’s mix of the conceptual and visceral, her nuances of meaning as well of texture and tone, and her inventive, sometimes unnerving, use of everyday materials — including skin bronzers that simulate bullet wounds in ribbed cotton T-shirts, basketball hoops tied into knots used for lynching, and Martha Stewart bedsheets tie-dyed and titled White Confidant of a Black Panther (Self-Portrait of David Horowitz) — make her explorations of privilege and prejudice particularly powerful. 

Hundreds of rows of beige-toned Band-Aids tilted Forty Acres of Bandaids (Every Shade of Bandaid For Sale Within Forty Acres of the African Burial Ground, NYC) not only address the presumption that flesh tones are beige instead of deep-brown or black, they also evoke the stone blocks out of which slaves in Egypt and in 18th-century New York City built huge edifices that housed and entombed the rich and powerful.

Many of Broughel’s works radiate in all directions in sometimes celebratory, sometimes chaotic, sometimes explosive ways. In our overpopulated and high-tech world, millions of people, no longer needed for backbreaking labor, are jobless and destitute. Their basic needs are unmet, their desire for opportunity is profound, and their energy is coiled and also ready to explode.

Through March 25th

James Inscho’s paintings bring us full circle. Memphis attracts noted artists from around the country and world, and our city sends out prize-winning artists like University of Memphis fine arts major, James Inscho, whose works can now be seen at the U of M’s Communication and Fine Arts Building.

Stand close to Inscho’s large oil-on-canvas The Condition IV, and it nearly overwhelms with undulating fields of burgundy, crimson, and opalescent orange. Stand back several feet, and you’ll see a portrait of humanity that is at once existential, sardonic, and seething.

Near the center of the work, a full set of teeth, tinted blood-red, smiles at us with what looks like a warning and a welcome, a grimace and a grin. Inscho’s shape-shifting pool of roiling blood and emotion in this work confronts us not with a portrait of disease but some truths about the human condition that can’t be cured or overridden or high-teched away.

Through April 15th by appointment

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Art Art Feature

Where There Is Hope

Dixon Gallery & Gardens’ current exhibition, “10 Under 30,” is filled with strikingly original, relentlessly honest works by 10 young artists who blur the distinction between high and low art, blur the boundaries between genres. Included in the lineup: Kate Bradley, Eric Bork, Lauren Coulson, Eli Gold, Joel Halpern, Kyle Holland, Jesse Nabers, Emma Self, Rhonda Spight, and Alex Warble.

Self is a mixed-media artist who makes her own paper, binds her own books, then turns them upside down and inside out. In Double Houses, Self’s book covers are transformed into steeply pitched roofs and her soft-pulpy paper becomes pages on which the lives of the families inside will be written.

In the bronze/steel/aluminum sculpture Modern Tragedy, Eli Gold confronts us with a ballet dancer whose feminine instincts, sense of balance, and milk of human kindness have been irrevocably harmed by a regimen that has become too demanding and mechanistic. The dancer’s strong, straight right leg ends in a fully arched foot and perfect toe stand. Her extended left arm completes a posture so textbook perfect that she looks frozen in time in an en pointe position she could hold forever. But something is terribly amiss. The dancer’s face looks tortured instead of disciplined. Her left leg and right arm are missing, and her womb and right breast have been replaced by a handgun. The weapon that has maimed the dancer is now pointed toward the viewer, poised to go off again.

Though Gold’s darkly patinaed bronze dancer was sculpted long before Black Swan opened in movie theaters across the country, there are powerful parallels between the film and the sculpture — both brutal and beautiful works about a ballet dancer’s descent into madness and the damage we can do to ourselves and others in the name of art.

In Joel Halpern’s softly muted painting Bust a Move, row after row of sagging electrical lines and tilted telephone poles are punctuated with pale gray facades of businesses and homes. All signage and adornments have disappeared during decades of disuse and disrepair. In a landscape that is both desolate and hauntingly beautiful, the last rays of light glow in a mix of pollution and humidity that is tinted with the unmistakable blue cast of dusk. 

Another economic downturn — homes foreclose, businesses fold. Halpern goes deep into Memphis, deep into the Southern ethos as he strikes that same beautiful and tragic note, that same mix of desolation, longing, and resilience of the human spirit that fills the wail of the blues trumpet and twang of the country guitar.

In Lauren Coulson’s haunting photographic transfer and acrylic on panel Rebirth, a nightmarish creature inhabits a dreamlike landscape as strands of straw wrap around a woman’s thick thighs, stunted shins, and tiny feet. Long grass hangs down like locks of hair from the skulls of cattle that have replaced the woman’s head and chest. Empty eye sockets look directly at the viewer with the unsettling power of a cautionary tale about gender expectations that can stunt body and mind, about creatures whose udders and docility are more valued than their cognitive functions. Coulson reaches into collective consciousness, into dark passages of the psyche that can unsettle but also serve as a deep pool of self-awareness and creative insight.

For On Sunday Nights, two of Eric Bork’s friends (and classmates at the time) invited the artist into their home and into their bathroom to record a scene so tender and private it feels more intimate than sex. In this compelling portrait of relationship, the man sits on the commode, lid down, while his partner bathes in the tub several inches to his right. Bork convincingly simulates the way artificial light turns moist beige tiles into a mist of gold and the way light reflects off the mirror-like lip of the porcelain tub to brighten the underside of the woman’s breasts. 

Though they never touch, the couple’s bond is palpable as they mirror one another’s mood and mindset — with the same tilt of head, the same relaxed face and gently closed eyes, the same easy intimacy of sharing tub and toilet in one another’s presence, and, most importantly, their trust that each will understand the other’s need for this moment of silence.

It’s Sunday night: time to process the week ahead. Bork captures that moment so completely as a young couple juggles employment, classwork, family responsibilities — each developing his/her artistic voice while still finding time to nurture a relationship as side-by-side they go into that deep, quiet space all artists must learn to access.

Through March 6th

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Art Art Feature

Straight Ahead

Wardell Milan’s Clough-Hanson exhibition, “Landscape! Romance, Rottenness,” is a mesmerizing mix of figure and landscape, mystery and mayhem, ripeness and rot. In a series of mixed-media collages titled “Heroine: Nude and Landscape,” evocative and complex women stare at us with large, limpid eyes and secrets to share. The heads and long petals of purple sunflowers become Heroine #4‘s dark nipples and the translucent sleeves of a designer blouse that she has accented with skintight lizard-green gloves. Sultry and self-assured, she looks straight at the viewer as she touches the edge of her pubis, though not in shame or an attempt to cover herself. This is the gesture of a woman who feels empowered by sexual energy.

Roses sprout from the back and womb of Heroine #1. Her disproportionately short legs and slightly gangly body accentuate her youth. Small hands are cupped just beneath her chin in a gesture of surprise and an attempt to shield herself. In this compelling portrait of innocence, instinct, and sexual awakening, a third arm and hand (larger and more crudely drawn) reaches under the long mane of hair that covers the young woman’s breasts.

Heroine #5 is neither coiffed nor manicured. Part-woman and part-mother earth, her long strands of hair are tangled. Her torso morphs into a dense mix of vegetation and earth that looks like a compost heap, both fetid and fertile. The rest of her body is over-lit and stark-white. With the faintest of diagrams and drawings, Milan delicately traces part of her skeleton and reproductive system.

No detached oglings, no casual couplings are possible with Milan’s unnerving, iconic females. They draw us into the web of life, where we glimpse the part each of us must play in nature’s cycles of pubescence, full flowering, regeneration, and rot.

Milan’s digital C-prints of miniature stage sets — constructed from Pop art, family photographs, and myriad other sources — also teem with life and decay. Near the center of the C-print Christopher Columbus’ Discovery of the New World, Columbus wears what looks like an aluminum-foil spacesuit. He stands on top of an equally inept-looking aluminum-foil spaceship that bears the red cross that also appeared on the flags of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.

Across the top of the C-print, a jet liner flies past ancient ruins toward a large stone edifice toppled by natural disaster, modern warfare, Armageddon. African tribesmen stand next to slave traders, slaves, odalisques, and eunuchs. Near the bottom of the work, African-American teenagers, circa the ’60s, sit beside their “wheels” and boom boxes. Far left, a young woman with her hair in curlers strolls with a friend across the rubble of a bombed-out city — or perhaps, the rubble of time. 

Instead of discrete timelines, concise textbook accounts of history, or simplistic statements regarding the meaning of life (or progress or manifest destiny), in Milan’s crowded, chaotic C-prints you’ll find something richer, more entangled, and real.

Through December 8th

 

It’s a pleasure to watch an artist grow. During the last four years, Matthew Hasty has evolved from a good, slightly garish landscape painter to an artist whose panoramas of the Delta in his L Ross exhibition, “Gravity,” are some of the most spectacular and subtly nuanced landscapes seen this year. In Crepuscular Rays and Cloudburst, rays of light spread across the entire surface of these 4-by-5-foot paintings. As the rays pass through cloudbanks and open sky, their colors change from silver to endlessly gradated shades of ochre, amber, and white-gold. The moist earth that borders the bottom of these works is also softly glowing.

In another subtly stunning landscape, Moonlit Cottonfield, thousands of tiny off-white puffs create hundreds of rows of cotton. Like lines of perspective, the rows narrow near the horizon, converging in a pool of soft light cast by a full moon. Hasty’s mix of mist and moonlight nearly obscures the slender pines that stand like ghostly sentinels at the edge of a field.

Hasty’s dark, effervescent, but still compelling, River Sunset does not blaze with saturate color. Instead, clouds scatter across a lavender-gray sky like embers. The sky’s reflection in the muddy Mississippi turns water into burgundy wine. Just beneath the setting sun, a slender shaft of light streaks across the river. Hasty glazes the earth with as much care as his sunsets and the surfaces of water. You’ll find burnt sienna and gold-green tints in the fertile Delta riverbank at the bottom of the painting. 

Hasty hopes this body of work will “elicit an emotional response and have a soothing effect on viewers that invites contemplation.” Hasty’s luminous landscapes succeed in this and much more. If we look, really look — this increasingly accomplished artist reminds us — each bend in a river, each sunset, each patch of umber earth is a masterwork of texture, color, composition, and light.

Through November 30th

Categories
Art Art Feature

Still Here

The Dixon Gallery and Gardens’ “Objects of Wonder: Four Centuries of Still Life” from the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, is a remarkable exhibition filled with work by classical, modern, and contemporary masters. Some of the show’s highlights include The Banquet of Holofernes by the 17th-century Flemish master Kaspar van der Hoecke, Max Beckmann’s German Expressionist Still Life with Blue Irises, and Georgia O’Keeffe’s iconic Pelvis with the Moon — New Mexico. Particularly expressive is Marsden Hartley’s Flounders and Blue Fish, a painting that works as still life, as evocative surface, as semi-abstraction, and as drama as Hartley’s scraped, scumbled, and stylized stark-white flounders appear to devour the small blue fish to their right.

The 50-plus paintings, photographs, and sculptures on view are not only technically accomplished but also represent pivotal moments in the history of art. Noted as the Father of Realism as well as a consummately skilled painter, Gustave Courbet insisted that art depict the everyday and the underbelly of life as well as its opulence. While imprisoned for espousing socialist causes, Courbet painted a small pile of fruit titled Still Life. Some of the fruit looks hard and green (perhaps plucked too soon from its branches). The pink blush of other pieces promises melt-in-your-mouth ripeness, while small holes and crevices on the surface of pears pressing into the pulpy flesh of other pears suggest the edge of rot where insects and worms have beaten the prisoners to some of the fruit inside.

A small gallery to the right of the Dixon’s main exhibition hall contains still lifes by some of the 20th century’s most noted photographers: Edward Weston, Edward Steichen, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Ralph Steiner. The long supple stem and bushy head of Mapplethorpe’s gelatin silver print Carnation looks as sensual and statuesque as his iconic portraits of celebrities and nudes.

Steiner’s stunning layout in Ham and Eggs helps us see the chicken egg anew. His brightly lit gelatin silver print accentuates the beauty of the eggs’ off-white opalescence as well as the seemingly infinite shades of gray created as their oval shells curve away from the light. There is humor here as well. The artist heightens our sense of an unbroken egg’s perfection (promise of new life, new possibility) by cracking three of the eggs, overcooking their whites, and slapping their pitted and rubbery surfaces onto slices of ham. Steiner’s inclusion of dozens of small unbroken eggs in his layout is a mesmerizing reminder that their sheer numbers and ubiquitous presence inure us to their beauty.

Around 1907, in one of art history’s most dramatic breaks with precedent, Pablo Picasso began removing guitars from the expressive hands of his Blue Period figures, taking the instruments apart, and reassembling them into shapes and colors that get at their essence. In his 1917 painting La Guitare, all that remains are a semi-abstracted burnt-umber fretboard, bright-yellow rectangles, small stark-white shapes outlined in red, and a soft-blue background back-dropped by a still softer pink. Though the figure is absent from this cubist work, we can still feel the musician leaning into his instrument as he plays his sometimes sonorous, sometimes strident, sometimes soothing notes.

“Objects of Wonder” is an endlessly inventive and expressive exploration of what a still life can be. To the left of La Guitare is a felt suit on a wooden hanger. The suit’s crisply tailored lines suggest a uniform with all its insignia and medals stripped away. Filzanzug (felt suit) is a recurring motif in Joseph Beuys’ conceptual/political/activist (and highly influential) art and pays homage to a group of nomads who saved the artist’s life during World War II when Beuys flew a bomber for the German Luftwaffe. After his plane was shot down, Tatar nomads found him nearly frozen to death in the Crimea and wrapped him in fur and felt. Not technologically advanced but possessing a finely honed sense of compassion, the Tatars stand in striking contrast to the Nazis who advocated the extermination of anyone who failed to measure up to their corrupt and rigid ideas regarding superiority.

Master artists like Hartley, Courbet, Picasso, and Beuys demonstrate again and again the expressive power of paint and ideas. Rather than feeling inert or passive or lifeless, their still lifes continue to inspire us decades (even centuries) after their creation.

“Objects of Wonder” at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens through January 9th

Images:

[In print edition] MARSDEN HARTLEY (American, 1877–1943): Flounders and Blue Fish, 1942. Oil on rag board, 16 3/4 x 22 3/8 in. Norton Museum of Art. Bequest of R.H. Norton, 53.76. Courtesy of the Norton Museum of Art.

GUSTAVE COURBET (French, 1819–1877): Still Life, 1871. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in. Norton Museum of Art. Gift of Elizabeth C. Norton, 41.12. Courtesy of the Norton Museum of Art.

RALPH STEINER (American, 1899–1986): Ham and Eggs, 1930. Gelatin silver print, 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. Norton Museum of Art. Gift of Baroness Jeane von Oppenheim, 98.577. Courtesy of the Norton Museum of Art.

Categories
Art Art Feature

Edgy

Curator Cynthia Thompson has gathered together artworks by 10 internationally noted artists for “Anguish,” MCA Graduate School Gallery’s inaugural exhibition that runs the gamut of grief.

Polly Apfelbaum’s huge, floor-covering Funkytown is made out of hundreds of hand-dyed and hand-cut pieces of synthetic velvet that range from soft-edged pastels to more tightly stitched pieces of fabric to large swatches of deep-blue and deep-burgundy velvets that appear to puddle and flow across the gallery floor toward a wall where two beautiful young women are sobbing.

Words written in black ink across vibrant pink flesh in Jenny Holzer’s 17 Cibachrome prints titled Lustmord (sex murder) cut deep into the psyches of women ravaged by war and into the collective consciousness of wartime Bosnia as Holzer records the actual words of victims, family members who witnessed the atrocities, and perpetrators who seem concerned only with whether or not their sexual appetites have been satisfied by the women they raped and murdered.  

“Anguish” covers grief but never wallows in pathos and speaks to truth so powerfully that this show may change forever the way you look at life and art.

Through November 7th

Under the direction of its new curator, Lester Merriweather, Jones Hall Gallery at the University of Memphis is also mounting some daring, strikingly original shows such as “Objectify Me, Woman!” in which Tam Tran explores “gender blur” and “the gray areas of sexuality” by applying makeup and women’s clothing to young men posed in traditionally feminine postures.

In Hello Monroe, a man with white-gold hair, porcelain skin, dreamy expression, and chin cupped in hand strikes a pose recalling Marilyn Monroe and the Hollywood glamour shots of the ’50s. The same man, wearing an unbuttoned translucent blouse in Me Again, thwarts our soft porn expectations with his Adam’s apple, flat muscular chest, and the thick black hair surrounding his navel.

A touch of color added to the lips of a svelte young man with long brown hair who holds his arms above his head and grasps the metal bars behind him in Pretty Jesus blurs boundaries by exploring the thin line between gentleness and passivity, sexual and spiritual passion, and sainthood and sadomasochism. 

In Close Call, a man looks down the barrel of a rifle. His expression is brooding instead of dreamy, and his wrinkled cutoffs augment the shape of his penis positioned directly beneath the barrel of the rifle. Red lipstick makes the portrait even more unsettling. This could be a story about cross-dressing or testosterone in overdrive or sexual identity so conflicted that passion turns to rage.

Tran’s explorations of sexual identity come at an especially poignant moment. The teenagers who committed suicide recently after being taunted for their sexual orientation tragically remind us that shaming can also lead to self-loathing and violence directed against self.

Through October 22nd

Bring your children, your Peter Pan sense of play, and your Jane Goodall empathy for life when you visit David Lusk Gallery’s current show, “The Liberated Landscape,” which features some of Tad Laurtizen Wright’s wryest, most original, and poignant artwork to date.

Feel the vibes emanating from the radiantly radioactive tree titled A Cautionary Note. Pay homage to a fallen giant as light bends and blurs through a liquor flask raking across sawdust in Urn for a Dead Tree. Do a two-step with Buzz Saw Retirement, the large jagged-edged circular painting hanging from the ceiling.

Even Lauritzen Wright’s smallest works pack a physical and metaphysical wallop. A white median strip propels the viewer’s perspective straight up a black-topped highway in Heavy Metal Rainbow. Instead of racing toward a pot of gold, we soar toward a skull tinted pink and red, suggesting fresh road kill. Or perhaps this is a fierce Hindu god or a memento mori whose still intact, perfectly white, perfectly straight teeth provide no secret potent for immortality no matter how often we brush our pearly whites.

Through October 30th