Author: Carol Knowles

The Art Museum of the University of Memphis exhibition “Red Grooms: Selections from the Graphic Work” brings home the work of an internationally respected artist who grew up in Tennessee and spent much of his youth sketching people on the streets of Nashville. For the past 50 years, Grooms has lived in New York City, creating masterworks of humor, insight, and ingenuity not in bronze or on canvas but with torn paper, hot-glue guns, and printing presses.

“Red Grooms” was drawn from the collection of the artist’s lifelong friend, Nashville contractor Walter G. Knestrick, and the bulk of the exhibition’s 90 prints either immerses us in New York street life or in the lives of 19th- and 20th-century artists. Many of the show’s best works are cartoon-like lithographs whose saturate colors and exaggerated physiognomies reveal a physically and emotionally roiling sea of humanity.

Jackson in Action, a three-dimensional lithograph, features a nonstop Jackson Pollock. With a cigarette in the mouth of each of his two heads and his six arms slapping paint across a canvas, the artist ignores a turpentine can’s warning about flammability. In South Sea Sonata, another three-dimensional lithograph, Gauguin’s huge, brooding head tilts down, the eyes half-closed. He appears lost in imagination somewhere between his sketchbook and the Tahitian women who surround him.

In Little Italy (three-dimensional lithograph), Grooms takes us to the corner of Broome and Mulberry. We step into a New York neighborhood and look at life inside the apartments above a café and see the frustrated faces of drivers caught in traffic. Great attention to detail was given each vehicle, person, and building. For example, the iron grates of the fire escapes and the hair net of the woman people-watching from her second-floor apartment are die-cut from black arches paper. On the backside of Little Italy is a street in Chinatown created with the same care.

Other lithographs place us at Graceland, where Elvis‘ upper lip and hips angle as sharply as the skyscrapers that appear to sway with energy in Times Square, then it’s off to the fast-food stand of a New York Hot Dog Vendor, where they sell, what the artist has described as, arguably, the best hot dog in the world.

When Grooms explores 19th- and 20th-century masterworks, his own work becomes more insightful and inventive. In the atypical, nearly seven-foot woodcut, The Existentialist, the artist chiseled out the heavily lined, complex face of Alberto Giacometti, a sculptor who took art in unexpected directions. Alongside the weathered head are carved figures reminiscent of Giacometti’s attenuated, eroded works in clay and plaster.

The three-dimensional lithograph De Kooning Breaks Through celebrates artistic freedom. It’s a faithful reproduction of Willem de Kooning’s 1953 work Woman and Bicycle, except in this version the wild-eyed, bubble-gum-pink, huge-breasted vixen (tramp, vampire, mother-from-hell) rides on the handlebars of the bicycle that de Kooning pedals through the center of the canvas. De Kooning Breaks Through pays homage to the in-your-face energy with which de Kooning defied modern art’s prohibitions against realism when he created his iconoclastic “Women Series.”

Fat Man Down evokes another culture. In this spray-painted stencil, two Sumo wrestlers push into one another with perfect equilibrium. They’re encompassed by a tiny red sun that floats in the center of 8-by-8-inches of untouched white paper. This image, an alternative version of Japan’s flag, is a resonant metaphor for the country — an island nation, land of the setting sun, pure Zen mind, Sumo wrestling, and haiku, 13 syllable poems that evoke fleeting images of nature.

Grooms is most compelling when he explores the full range of humanity. In his 1971 breakthrough lithograph Nervous City, rats as well as pedestrians scurry down a New York sidewalk densely packed with policemen, hippies, mothers with baby carriages, drug dealers, and pedophiles. The central figure, a street walker who is being drugged and sexually molested, stares directly at us with a maniacal expression.

Grooms’ depictions can be exaggerated and intense, but this wry artist is keenly aware of humankind’s foibles and tragicomedies. His presentation of passions that drive us to paint, to create the perfect hot dog, to destroy ourselves with drugs, to gain 400 pounds (so that we can knock down equally hefty opponents) gets it just about right.

It’s closing time for some great art exhibits this weekend. We’ve got Meikle Gardner lampooning the state of society, and Anton Weiss looking back on his long career. There’s Deborah Brown taking portraiture to a new level, and James Clar lighting things up.

For his current exhibition, “Meikle Gardner” at Perry Nicole Fine Art, Gardner combines striking palettes and semiabstract shapes to create surreal, sci-fi, and 21st-century scenarios. Roadways fling out asteroids (Levitation Road) and spring-green tendrils grow human body parts (Primordial).

In the largest painting in the exhibit, Three Alarm Circus, wrecking balls and trapezes appear to swing in syncopation across the top of the painting. This work is a chaotic concoction of lavenders and oranges and takes us for a circus ride — across three-alarm political arenas, three-alarm environmental devastation, and three-alarm war zones. In between red-orange flames that lick upward from the bottom of the painting and the high-wire act at the top, a contortionist twists, bends over backward, and changes shape as well as position. A gold ring hangs down from its bull-like cartoon face and a wind-up key protrudes from the side of its booted heel. Pulled around by the nose, all wound up, and caught between wrecking balls and a fiery pit, Three Alarm Circus succeeds as bold design, as cautionary tale, and as sardonic metaphor for our world today.

In “Anton Weiss: Seven Decades,” the current exhibition at L Ross Gallery, Weiss takes a wry look at himself and translates a long life into zany totems, ancient architecture, spacescapes, and Zen landscapes. Weiss handles his welding torches and grinders as fluidly as brushes and palette knives. In Transformation, for instance, he welds slender bars of steel into what looks like an electrical current coursing through a cartoon character’s large frazzled head.

Beautiful and complex like the colors and patterns of erosion, Lode Star (acrylic on canvas) is a poignant reminder that all things human-made (buildings, monuments, and paintings) are subject to change and decay. Faded circles appear to float across fields of light ochre, burnt sienna, and blue-gray. Near top center, Weiss scrapes through some squares and rectangles, scumbles their lines and colors, reveals several layers of underpainting, and creates the semblance of an ancient, crumbling cityscape.

Weiss’ abstract geometries and color fields also suggest spacescapes. In Seven Decades Series – 007, a pale golden orb floats in a thin atmosphere of light grays and ochres (acrylic stains, copper on aluminum). New to the artist’s oeuvre are several untitled Zen-like landscapes in which traces of color and faint gestures are painted onto sheets of metal. These simultaneously delicate and durable works are particularly apropos for an artist who, at 70, understands both life’s fragility and its enduring passions.

Deborah Brown is a skilled figure painter. In one of the large, untitled mixed-media works in “Resonance,” the current exhibition at the Jay Etkin Gallery, she beautifully captures skin tones, clothing textures, and the expression of a woman lost in thought, a slight smile playing across her lips. But Brown isn’t interested in traditional portraiture. Most of the canvases in this body of work are tarred, torn, stapled, nailed, burned, waxed, and/or collaged with broken mirrors.

In a diptych thick with wax and pigment, we can just make out the backs and the relaxed shoulders of two women whose body language suggests that they are quietly reflecting. In another multilayered work, only a woman’s face is visible, partially obscured by broken shards of mirror. Instead of appearing to be in pain or disoriented, the face behind the broken glass looks out with a steady, penetrating gaze. This could be the alter ego for an artist who says she sees “people reflected in each other” and explores the “textures of life.”

As you look into the cracked mirrors, behind the torn canvases, and at the figures absorbed in thought, some of your own memories and feelings may well up. As Brown has noted in previous interviews, that is what she hopes will happen.

James Clar, the first Lantana artist-in-residence at the FedEx Institute of Technology, is at a milestone in a relatively short but very full career. At age 27, he has already had a show at the Museum of Modern Art, won numerous awards for his 3D Display Cube, and designed a mesh of LEDs to light up an entire hotel in Barcelona. As a finale for his residency at the FedEx Institute, Clar is building an installation that will light up the rooftops of the South Main Arts District on Friday, April 28th.

Two of Clar’s light sculptures are on display at Material. The interactive piece Blue 88 consists of 14 fluorescent tubes of blue light arranged to look like the side-by-side figure eights on an LED clock face. You’re encouraged to turn the tubes on and off. As you reconfigure this sculpture, opening and closing its parameters, you may find yourself thinking about blue skies and the pervasive quality of the light that softly illuminates the tubes and the gallery space.

To create You and Me, Clar suspended fluorescent tubes of white light from the ceiling. In this uncharacteristically personal work, the artist pays tribute to his wife for the ways “she supports me and lets me shine.” Metal ballasts on the ceiling spelling out the word “you” represent his wife. The cool-white fluorescent tubes that spell out the word “me” refer to Clar — a particularly appropriate metaphor for an artist whose career, like light, seems to have no limits.

For the past six years, Cynthia Thompson, the head of Memphis College of Art’s papermaking and book-arts department, has curated highly praised shows for the college dealing with subjects as wide-ranging as violence, faith, and race.

For “Above + Beneath,” her current and last curatorial project (she’s stepping down to concentrate on her own work and that of her students), Thompson brings together her love of words, textures, and eloquent abstraction. In this spare but compelling show, six New York artists explore the parameters of the human body with works that go as far above and as deep into the body as science and imagination can take them.

Lesley Dill, for instance, envisions Emily Dickinson’s rarefied, passionate poetry with Red Thread Fall. Thin filaments of wire at the top of this sculpture twist together to form a line from Dickinson’s poetry. It reads: “TAKE ALL AWAY FROM ME BUT LEAVE ME ECSTASY.” Cascading from these words are thousands of long, delicate threads in shades of gold and orange mixed with red. Dickinson has let down her hair.

Il Lee invites us to experience our bodies, feelings, and thoughts as one luminous whole. In his 46-by-60-inch untitled work on paper, thousands of strokes of a ballpoint pen become an iridescent ocean of purple-black ink. Set against untouched white paper, this piece can be read as the silhouette of a mountain beneath a pale sky. It’s also an abstraction evocative enough to be a Rorschach inkblot and saturate enough to be the sum of a viewer’s ballpoint pen doodles, grocery-store lists, love notes, and diary entries.

In this intensely personal yet monumental work, we see the individual strokes of the artist’s pen at the edges, and we feel the cumulative power within the large shape of thousands of gestures that make up a work of art or a human life.

Sarah Lovitt’s three small, untitled bas-reliefs hint at processes deep inside the human body. Some of the artist’s earlier works explored scars, wounds, tumors. For this show, pustule-like forms work their way almost to the surfaces of smooth, translucent wax molds. Lovitt’s studies of the fragile but resilient body’s ability to release toxins and to heal are simultaneously disturbing and hopeful.

On a lighter note, photographer Gary Schneider “gunked-up” his hands and created what could be a portrait of the artist as playful child with the Midas touch (Genetic Self Portrait: Hands). Heat- and sweat-sensitive film emulsions (photograms) appear gritty and black where Schneider imprinted his hands. In stark contrast, light reflecting off his fingertips resembles whirlpools of gold. Here is the artist (gritty with dirt or grease or photo-emulsions) curious, digging into things, and bringing them into the light. With both hands raised, palms wide open, Schneider appears to exclaim, “Hey, look at this!”

Theresa Chong, an accomplished cellist as well as a nationally noted visual artist, charts the twists and turns of her own creative process. Graphite lines accented with touches of gouache white flow rhythmically, switch back, dead end, and go in unexpected new directions. Up close, Chong’s points of light on dark blue rice paper bring to mind synapses, electrical circuits, and insights forming deep within a psyche (Fred I, CNS, and Light 6 #1). Viewed at a distance, they look like night skies dense with stars.

Paper sculptor Noriko Ambe dissolves boundaries of “above” and “beneath.” She describes the experience of cutting into and layering hundreds of sheets of vellum-like paper as “melting into the natural world.” Viewing Ambe’s work produces a similar effect. The thin, staggered ledges surrounding the open center of Linear Action Cutting Project #7 resemble wide-mouthed chasms cut by water for millions of years. Their translucent, smooth surfaces also suggest shifting sand dunes, deposits of shale in an ancient sea bed, and, like the proverbial onion peel, layers of our own skin and psyche.

Is “melting into the natural world” too esoteric and dramatic a claim? As we are gently and incrementally drawn into an artwork remarkable for its power to evoke myriad visceral responses within its 11-by-14-by-1-inch boundaries, the artist’s descriptions of disappearing into nature begin to make sense.

Standing in the middle of “Rana Rochat: Paintings,” the current exhibition at the David Lusk Gallery, what one notices first are lines looping across saturate fields of ochre and coral, circles floating in earth-toned atmospheres, and everywhere the soft glow of beeswax.

The show’s strongest paintings combine luminous sweeps of color and line with complex environments that work on several levels. Untitled L511 could be an homage to time. In the painting’s middle panel, translucent whites through multiple layers of black evoke eons and the vastness of space. In the left panel, marks on a white wall create irregular rectangles and suggest traces of history inscribed on stone slabs. And in the right panel, lines crisscrossing and flowing over the edges of warm, glowing coral feel like life in the here-and-now.

Untitled L509 broaches the ineffable. Delicate white lines explore a pitch-black middle surface, and scumbled grays cross the panel to the right like jumbled images on a monitor. Three balls of gray beeswax hover to the left. The balls, which are stacked totemlike, dominate the picture plane and are translucent. But rather than reflecting the world with crystal clarity, these spheres are complex, searching the shadows for what Rochat describes in her artist’s statement as “intuition, gut feelings, and the profound experience of mystery that a painting has the potential to provide.”

Both Rochat’s muted, enigmatic paintings and her more luminous, free-flowing works elicit visceral reactions and personal associations. For example, in Untitled L480, black ellipses swerve across and light grays dribble down the right panel. This, combined with the faint white light that glows through layers of dark-gray encaustic, creates the feel of looking through a windshield while driving on blacktop on a stormy night. In a smaller work, Untitled L475, splintering brown lines in a green-gray mist look like brambles in a fogbank, and lines looping across a particularly luminous ochre painting (Untitled L470, left panel) invite us to dance across the earth in full sunlight.

“Jeni Stallings: Myth,” the current exhibition at the L Ross Gallery, is also filled with large, complex worlds created out of pigment and beeswax on panel. In addition to the encaustic, Stallings uses fabric and graphite to build sometimes poignant, sometimes campy narratives about the power of myth to inspire, to delude, and, ultimately, to show us how to write our own stories.

In the large (48-by-48-inches) mixed-media painting Flyer, a girl stands on the pedals of her red bicycle and flies across a blue sky above a grid of squares that suggests the tightly structured milieu from which she has fled. All that remains of the earth is a scattering of white, wispy dandelions whose seeds can be blown and implanted hundreds of miles from the parent plants. The painting’s wide expanse of blue sky gives us a glimpse of the vastness of possibility into which the heroine flies.

With encaustic painted on top of a drawing of a fairy-tale princess on wallpaper made out of vintage bed sheets (circa 1960s), Stallings builds harrowingly comic, uncomfortably familiar stories about the happily-ever-after. In this series of three paintings (Domestic Goddess 1-3), the sheen of beeswax becomes diaphanous gowns, silky pillowcases, the patina of dreams, and the muted glow of myths whose origins go back millennia. But, here, we see into stories that are too limiting. Domestic Goddess 2‘s arms (all six of them) are multitasking household chores. Rather than broadening these young women’s horizons, the age-old stories about the good wife, a woman’s place, and home-as-castle use up their goddess energy with mundane tasks.

Hanging to the right of the Domestic Goddesses is Gypsy. Not engaged in household chores, this bohemian lounges on a chaise created with bold, fluid strokes of black and blue paint. Most of Stallings’ feminine archetypes look demurely down with unfathomable, timeless expressions. Gypsy’s huge eyes look sharply to her right and appear to be wryly studying the three erstwhile young homemakers of the Domestic Goddess series.

“Lie back. Take a good look,” Gypsy reminds us. If you do, Stallings’ passionate, sassy archetypes (including inner child, fairy-tale princess, genie, mystic, and bohemian) may inspire you to envision more, acquiesce less, and get on your red bike and ride.