Author: Carol Knowles

Don’t let the title of the current exhibition at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis put you off. The works by the 13 Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City artists included in “Perfect: a group exhibition” are not limited by static designs or fixed visions. Chicago-based curator Marci Rae McDade’s vision of the ideal is perfectly odd.

Complex process, common materials, and unexpected imagery were McDade’s prerequisites for considering work for this exhibition. Amy Honchell’s contribution, Perfect Specimen, fits the bill. Honchell stretched nylon around six hula hoops. Beneath this curvaceous body, a bright-red fishnet stocking loaded with marbles makes contact with a spot on the floor that is marked by a bright-yellow hoop. Whether this is a newly charged synapse, connective tissue, blood flow, or a new life form, Perfect Specimen is a wonderfully whimsical, original piece of sculpture.

Sculptor Ben Butler’s 58-inch wood circle, Growth, consists of more than 30 bands of concentrically circling, jig-sawed plywood. A slight space between each of the bands creates snaking shadows on multiple wave patterns. Anyone looking at it for any length of time is guaranteed to experience a feeling of motion. It’s mesmerizing.

Transcendence is a recurring theme. Conceptual artist and fashion designer, Catherine Chow achieves transcendence by thinking through some of the hidden agendas and gender stereotyping in fashion and advertising. Chow creates one-of-a-kind dress-wear out of materials such as sandpaper, dollar bills, sales tags, and twist-ties. Through her piece, Consume, she explores the multifaceted dynamics between art, fashion, and commerce.

Vincent Como finds his own transcendence by completely covering 63.5 square inches of drawing paper with marks made by a ballpoint pen. Untitled (Reinhardt) is a shimmering square of oil-based ink (black maroons, gray mauves, and dark coppers) that hangs on AMUM’s white gallery wall. It’s a unique variation of the black-on-white geometric paintings of Ad Reinhardt and Kasimir Malevich. Como describes his dark, nuanced field of color as a meditational space.

There’s another black-on-white Reinhardt variation (in this instance, black-in-white) in the display cases in AMUM’s entrance hall. With “Caseworks: Terri Jones,” Jones complements and caps off “Perfect” by tossing five black squares into five white cubes. As usual, this Memphis artist says much with little. Like Reinhardt, Jones pares down the world. When you step back, the five consecutive, eye-level cases look like a series of film stills that tell an elemental story about relationship to space and the effects of gravity. Here, within the pure white of the display cases, the black squares sit up, kick back, and slump into a corner. Consider it something akin to performance art, because it’s hard not to project yourself into these cubes — to mimic the moves and the moods reflected in the squares’ postures.

The artists of the Second Floor Contemporary exhibit “Kim Hindman Eric Knoote Carolyn Bomar” engage in a bit of artistic alchemy. For Hindman, it’s mind over matter. Knoote moves the earth. Bomar transcends the universe.

Hindman’s 10 small to mid-size drawings and two small polymer gravure prints explore the mind and the body. Of the drawings, her six green-tinted female nudes (untitled graphite and dry pigment on paper) are masterworks of ambiguity. Receptive, passive, lackadaisical, sensual, fertile — all these readings are possible for the thin-armed, large-thighed figures listing to one side or the other. Hindman cites Egon Schiele, Marlene Dumas, and Nathan Oliveira as artistic influences, and there are hints of physical and emotional distress in her work. Each of these drawings contains one nude figure who is often faceless and handless, with emaciated arms hanging limply or draped along her body.

Hindman’s polymer gravures, also untitled, are particularly unsettling. The figure in one of the prints is hunched forward in an unnatural posture. She is armless, and dark black smudges eradicate her head and stain her left buttock. The artist’s execution of the second polymer print approaches Matisse’s ability to describe mass with an economy of line. It also suggests that passivity, untempered by other attributes, can have unsettling consequences. Here is the same bent-over figure with thin arms plastered against the sides of her body. Her thighs have grown enormous in a work that, in part, serves as a cautionary tale in which a faceless, handless, armless, hunched figure turns into an amorphous lump of clay.

In his series of nine small watercolors, Dutch artist Knoote synthesizes his homeland’s most distinctive features into haunting abstractions. In one of the most striking of these 10-by-14-inch works (all untitled), black grids crisscross and frame tiny portals streaked with royal blue and lemon yellow. These tiny rectangles are not the obsessive repetitions of Agnes Martin or the dizzying designs of Op art. They are not the two-dimensional color grids of Piet Mondrian, another Dutch artist, who also worked and lived in this flat country crisscrossed with canals. The yellow and blue splashes of color look like seascapes and fields of grain seen from a great distance and reflect spatial devices used by 17th-century Dutch masters to create the illusion of whole worlds seen through small windows.

Two other particularly evocative works from Knoote are concentrated shorthands of Holland’s flat fields, canal systems, and wide-open vistas. Holland’s forests were denuded centuries ago, and in these semi-abstractions, clouds, waterways, and meadows spiral together into deep green ovals that float in pale atmospheres above multiple red suns or an occasional wisp of a tree.

Using her love for both printmaking and science, Bomar explores the edge of the known universe with artwork she describes as “attempts to apprehend the underlying beautiful mystery of nature.” Her three most recent works are 18-by-18-inch monoprints that look like nebulae billowing (Cutaway #2 and #3) and amoebae dancing (Cutaway #1). Her 15 small polymer gravure prints (6-by-6 inches) also bring to mind energy unfolding at macro and micro levels — like satellite images of galaxies or clouds of electrons circling nuclei seen with the most powerful microscopes. The images vary almost imperceptibly from one print to the next as Bomar exercises her and our ability to perceive subtle changes in form and light. The artist’s Obscure 1-5 are five polymer gravures enhanced with subtle pastels. These small haunted worlds glow with faint light (pale flesh tones and lightest burgundy). They bring to mind Mark Rothko’s dark color fields painted late in his life when he was terminally ill and straining toward the sublime. As in all the works in the exhibition, Bomar’s abstractions are nevertheless elegantly grounded in nature.

With their current Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts exhibit, “Newcomers,” co-curators Jeanine Jablonski and Cedar Nordbye prove that the adage “Those who can’t … teach” is seriously flawed. The show’s seven “newcomers” are world travelers, community activists, and talented artists. Six of them also teach art at the college level.

Charles Johnson is a University of Memphis alum and instructor, who used to work as a painter/illustrator for the Pentagon. On 9/11, he was working at the Pentagon when the building was struck. That day, he decided to move back to Memphis, do his own work, and teach. His works in this exhibit are large mixed-media paintings that are mesmerizing syntheses of collage, abstraction, and realism. With layers of wax, oil pastels, and enamel spray paints, Johnson creates nearly seamless mosaics. He fills his canvases with miniature reproductions of vintage photo portraits, encyclopedia illustrations, geometric patterns, abstract gestures, numbers, letters, and small realistic paintings of animals. A masterfully rendered, threatening pit bull dominates the center of Full Moon Fancy Dancer (from Johnson’s series “Best in Show”). This icon grounds Johnson’s maelstrom of memory and information and reflects his determination to understand the events of his life.

Annette Fournet also teaches at the U of M. Her photographs are complex, fierce explorations of the world. Whether she is photographing Louisiana bayous, the Mississippi Delta, or Eastern Europe, her images celebrate wabi sabi (the beauty of the impermanent) and convey a sense of regret and longing. She expresses these sentiments in three, small black-and-white photographs from her series “Sticks, Stones, and Bones, Images From Transient Landscape.” One of her images is of crumbling, headless stone figures in the Czech Republic (Untitled, 5). The other two are of eerie scarecrows in a field near the village of Kalimbina, Poland. Fournet’s skillful handling of tonalities and the inexpensive lens in her 1960s plastic toy camera blur and transform the scarecrows into ominous creatures. Their conical plastic-bag faces and tattered clothing become the figure in Edvard Munch’s Scream, a Klu Klux Klanner crossing a field at night (Untitled, 4), and a diaphanous-gowned Desdemona singing her final aria in Verdi’s Otello (Untitled, 3).

The nude drawings and polymer prints of Kim Hindman, another faculty member at the U of M, are as tormented as Egon Schiele’s self-portraits and as intimate and disconcertingly familiar as Marlene Dumas’ graphite and ink-wash figures. Hindman’s graphite drawing, Untitled, is a virtuosic theme-and-variation. The delicate contours that outline the headless, handless nude, her distorted abdomen, and her emaciated arms remind us that a “fine line” separates the sensual, the fragile, the distressed, and the diseased. To the right of this figure, smudges of powdered pigment echo the nude’s form, and at the bottom right of the composition, three quick gestures recreate her body as left nipple, central meridian, and high point of right thigh.

Other notable works include Janie Cinzori’s small, warm acrylic abstractions and MCA instructor Jill Wissmiller’s wonderfully campy videos that compare 1950s sexual attitudes and dating behaviors with those of the 21st century. Like Wissmiller, Melissa Vandenberg, a Rhodes College sculpture instructor, creates art that is simultaneously serious and playful. If you stand under the bottomless crib that towers 12 feet above the floor (Fall from Grace), squat next to the high chair whose food tray extends 10 feet beyond the reach of its infant diner (Wean), and come face to face with the 3-year-old’s dress pierced with a rusty key hole (Trivial), you might, like Vandenberg, find yourself unlocking some of the feelings and memories that shape your relationship to food, love, and family.

The new head of Memphis College of Art’s graduate program, Sanjit Sethi, is an ingenious creator of art and a better world. For “(Dis)orientation Series,” Sethi strapped a compass and a video camera to his left foot and walked city streets. In his video that plays at Marshall Arts, we see only the dark, shiny metallic compass endlessly gyrating to reflect every nuance of Sethi’s steps. The artist has “compass walked” several cities. The footage seen here could be Sethi wandering Boston’s streets and the MIT campus, his alma mater. This could be the artist discovering Memphis soon after his move to the city. Or this could be Sethi exploring Bangalore, India, where he and some local art students threatened to decorate the streets’ potholes with images and written proof of government misconduct until nearby roadways were repaired.

The artistic chutzpah and experimentation of Sethi and the rest of these “newcomers” bode well both for their future shows and for the art students receiving their instruction.

Last May, two bands of local artists/adventurers experienced Horn Island, once a refuge for artist Walter Anderson. The island-inspired works, currently on exhibit at the Memphis College of Art and Studio 1688, add some powerful footnotes to Anderson’s visionary watercolors and wood prints.

The Memphis College of Art exhibition, “Horn Island 21,” displays the work that 20 students, two alumni, and Professor Leandra Urrutia (who also coordinated the trip) created on the island from May 12th to the 21st. Urrutia’s consummately crafted clay sculpture, Lucky sets the tone for the show. “Lucky” is a horseshoe crab that’s been hung on the gallery wall so that its underside is exposed. Instead of crab legs, nine human appendages dance around a headless female figure that is split wide open. This piece was made with a supple hand and pure intuition.

Lucky also tells us about 20 students who opened themselves up to the elements. For example, Cainin Hooks fashioned replicas of houseflies into gold jewelry (Horn Island Experience Ear Studs); Erin Morrison framed a long, sleek pelican skull in a weathered box/coffin (Eyes of the Island); and Manae Ross sculpted highly textured, earth-toned ceramic vessels by pressing clay into the sides of large, weathered buckets (Mollusk Vessel and Littoral Bowl).

Some of the most original works in the show are Judith Stevens’ Deja Vous Dolls made from scraps of fabric, lace, shells, and baby-doll hands. There’s a dark side to these colorful, imaginative hybrids. Their oversized heads and limp bodies held together with hosiery and cloth bandages suggest mutated creatures struggling to stay alive.

Alex Harrison’s works are small masterworks of abstract expressionism. With thick ridges of oil, nuanced color fields, and highly expressive gestures, the artist recreates island topography, ocean depths, and currents. He diagrams his island adventures with tiny colorful geometries scattered across the thick impastos (S.C.I. and T.T.B.S.I., oil-and-collage on board). Mary Aday’s Ubiquitous UV looks like a figure from a late Philip Guston painting that’s been recast in clay. Its thick blue-black toenails, peeling skin, and complex libido (it sports both breasts and a cluster of penises) are masterfully rendered.

Daniel Long’s mixed-media self-portraits, Flaunty Bob and his Fellow and Shortness Intermixture, conjure up some island magic in which the artist floats in gulf waters, communes with his spirit animals (seabirds and rabbits), and morphs into real and imaginary creatures. These playful meditations take us into Long’s inner world where nature, imagination, and magic are gentle, sometimes indistinguishable companions.

Also on Horn Island, May 9th to the 18th, was the group of 13 artists led by Teresa White, Joseph Young, and Jon Lee, the owners of Studio 1688. The resulting exhibit, “Eight Days in Exile 2005,” is filled with inventive work evoking the hot sun, the 100-degree temperatures, the lack of air-conditioning, and the sudden storms that had their way with the artists.

Kyle Thurman put together a series of increasingly burnt pieces of toast, each slice elaborately framed like an honored icon. Joseph Young went elemental/minimal with 11 square inches of chased copper (Out of the Fire), which is unassuming, unpolished, and uncarved and reveals the exquisite nuances of fired, hammered copper. Christian Ferloni’s moody abstractions, Impending Paroxysms #1 and #2, suggest an island deluged in darkness and water (mixed-media on paper). And in Josh Miller’s Gray Skies Are Coming (charcoal on paper), bright white sand and blue skies become infinite shades of gray.

Sand, sea, and sky cover the walls of the gallery. The delicately water-colored trees, sand dunes, and the ribbon of blue-gray lagoon in Betsy Brackin’s I’ve Got a Flashlight are expertly detailed. Equally assured is Nikki Briggs’ In Search of My Shades, which shows a small arbor of trees at the edge of the gulf in one seamless vision, which Briggs executed in pen-and-ink without whiteouts or strikeovers. Schools of jellyfish invade several of Teresa White’s glass sculptures. Her translucent, graceful creatures are everywhere — etched into sheets of glass that hang on the walls, sandblasted into a sculpture mounted on a glass table, and carved into a 72-by-51-inch glass room divider.

Jon Lee’s collages are found throughout. In Adventures in Horn Island, sails billow, island flora thrives, red ribbons furl, and images of Lee’s compatriots grow smaller as they recede into the background.

Capping off the show is Wendy Hailey’s beautifully observed oil-on-canvas, Submerge, in which a headless body tinged with blues and greens is buoyed in a blue-black sea. Like Urrutia’s horseshoe crab, Hailey’s figure evokes the state of letting go mentally and physically.

MAX 2005: The Inner Voice of Art” is the fifth show in a series of biannual exhibitions launched in 1998 by the Art Museum of the University of Memphis (AMUM) and Delta Axis. The exhibition’s guest curator is David Moos, curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada. Moos asked artists to submit works that “communicate a distinct sense of self that exists beyond the identity of the artist.”

Do these works of art, from 23 local and regional artists, have enough presence and voice to stand alone? For the most part, yes. Some of the pieces evoke so many sensations they reverberate long after you exit the show.

Jean Flint’s mixed-media sculpture is one such work. Twisted pieces of gray cloth are wrapped with string and hang like intestines, turds, and phalluses within the hoop-skirt body of

The Other Woman. This viscerally gripping work could be about fetishes, anger, and jealousy. But the artist takes us deep enough to suggest an additional reading. By looking underneath the stylized notions of propriety (embodied in the fraying 19th-century hoop skirt), Flint exposes the center, revealing the fragile, gut-churning knot of regret/desire everyone possesses.

With the free-for-all energy of a cartoonist and the gestural skills of an abstract expressionist, Pinkney Herbert blasts his 90-by-72-inch canvas with an Inferno of high-key color. White-hot yellows, streaks of orange-ochre, and meltdown blues read as urgent statement and emotional release. Herbert so forcibly and transparently records his gestures you can feel/see him loading on the oil paint, slashing through it, and scraping back down to the surface of his canvas.

Emily Walls’ Waiting for the Place You’d One Day Call Home is full of modernity, post-modernity, and kitsch. The six-foot mixed-media sculpture is a Naugahyde coatrack. And judging by the red mittens on the ends of the rack’s hooks, the work is also a figure, probably feminine, that is as lean and expressive as a Giacometti. The figure’s dream home will probably be filled with doilies (like the one under her base), secondhand coatracks, red mittens, and life stories as rich as the sculpture’s narrative title.

Virginia Overton’s installation Hot Child fills Gallery B. As she did with the 3,600-pound tractor she hung in the main gallery last spring, Overton is once again messing with space and transforming functional objects into art. Set inside a hanging, 12-foot industrial tube, an antique record player spins the 1970s hit song “Hot Child in the City.” The slightest movement, including setting the needle onto the vinyl record, slowly torques the tube. With the sway of the tube and that sassy, sexy song, Overton’s work evokes a sense of space flowing though time.

To create Joyful Noise, noted Atlanta assemblage artist Radcliffe Bailey covered 60 square feet of wall with dozens of glass jugs and antique brass horns. When combined with museum lighting the work is visually stunning. Lights shine through the jugs onto the brass and create thousands of bronze-tinged aureoles within the piece and a large halo around it.

With his typical multilayered humor and panache, Greely Myatt plastered a 5’9″ zipper into the back wall of gallery A and placed a fluorescent light behind it (Zip for MAX). As colloquialism, as cliché, as metaphor – a lighted zipper’s possible allusions are endless.

Grier Edmundson’s Thoughts on the Definition of Culture, Part II could represent the voice of the conflicted South. This black-on-black oil on canvas depicting a shadowy, almost indecipherable Nathan Bedford Forrest on horseback, may have you thinking about your own dark past and feels particularly relevant, given the current controversy over Forrest Park. n

Through September 3rd

As seen in the exhibit “Early Morning Paintings” at David Lusk Gallery, it’s a new day for Hamlett Dobbins. Gone are the scumbled, thickly impastoed heads from some of Dobbins’ earlier works that suggested sediments and layers of psyche to be excavated. The artist no longer attempts to ground his experiences in large rectangular grids. Instead, he’s stripped away extraneous elements to get at the essential, works of art that accomplish what abstract painter Robert Motherwell described as “closing the void … quenching our profound need for intense, immediate, direct experience.”

Every centimeter of Dobbins’ oils on canvas (the large works) and his linen panels (the medium-sized and smaller paintings) is an intensely constructed work of art. In Untitled (for N.J.P. (orange), tiny red, white, and blue rectangles weave into what looks like taffeta, that wonderful high-luster, crinkly but smooth fabric of wedding and evening gowns. The entire surface of Untitled (for D. L.) is covered with complex compositions the size of a dab of paint. These shimmering bits of layered colors never coalesce into Pierre Bonnard’s wife at her bath or George Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte. They serve as metaphor for an abstract body of work whose hues and textures are so accurately recoded they evoke temperature, time of day, season, and tactile sensation. For instance, Untitled (for C.D.), described synesthetically, is frayed denim on skin. It is warm sun and cool shadow in a field of grass on a summer day.

Some of Dobbins’ compositions are playful appropriations of masterworks combined with images as varied as storybook illustrations, fashion-magazine spreads, and patches of linoleum on drugstore floors. Untitled (for M.W.G./M.R.M.) pays homage to the action painters (Jackson Pollock, et al.) and to the irrepressible energy of the artist’s two-year-old daughter, Milla. Spidery lines of light-blue paint puddle and pool as they meander across a background that reads like a pink-gold cyclone. Dobbins underscores this energy with entropy by breaking the golden lines of the whirlwind. This work evokes not only the action painters’ art but also the way they lived – intensely, flamboyantly, and sometimes self-destructively.

Bubblegum-pink shapes attach like thin-necked precipices to the left side of Untitled (for E.J.K./I.V.), while denim-blue Al Capp Shmoos mingle with rectangles that cock in every direction. Some of these cartoon-like blobs are inlaid with soft white and blue aureoles set against blue-black. This intricate pattern looks like a cosmos crammed with stars. As with many of the abstractions in this show, these figures appear to be joyful, with the whole of creation informing their joy.

In Untitled (for G.K.), a gilded table, an oriental rug, some flowers, and a dancer’s clothing become an orange globe that juts into the middle of the picture plane surrounded by mountains of chevrons and abstract organic forms. The artist transforms the orange orb into a color field as evocative as Mark Rothko’s floating rectangles; however, Dobbins’ emphasis is not the transcendental but the infinite inflections of the given world.

Rather than analyzing light falling on objects (as in the noonday cityscapes of Edward Hopper, to whom this artist is sometimes compared), Dobbins’ paintings emanate light. The ochre and peach colors in a field of green at dawn in Untitled (for M.R.M./M.L.), the orange orb in Untitled (for G.K.), and the royal-blue grid of diamonds in Untitled (for I.V./N.O.) all appear to glow from the inside out. The artist achieves this luminosity by alternately layering his colors with a brush and a rubber brayer.

The largest (at 72″x 60″) and one of the strongest paintings in this ingeniously conceived and consummately executed show is Untitled (for I.V./N.O). Red-orange and naples-yellow ribbons form double-helixes up and down an orange-ochre torso, while off-white, semi-abstract figures dance among the ribbons and around the torso’s curves. The spiraling ribbons and phantom dancers suggest that genetic memory and subconscious experience inform this work. A web of royal-blue diamonds forms the backdrop and stunningly contrast the flowing reds and yellows. Some of the diamonds are nearly lost in shadow and others are luminous. Each diamond’s inner glow is slightly different from the next. This painting of a round, sentient body surrounded by thousands of facets of the luminous world is dedicated to the artist’s son, Ives, born four months before the opening of his father’s show. n

“Early Morning Paintings” at David Lusk Gallery through July 30th

For “Room in the Margins,” Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts’ current exhibition, curator Christine Conley has gathered some unique artworks. As the exhibit title suggests, these artists are not coloring within the lines. These works go beyond nice, safe boundaries.

Kathryn Johnson’s anxious figures live in a hostile world controlled by unseen forces. Johnson intensifies the sense of dread by drawing her acrylic and graphite images on dilapidated scraps of wood. The shape of the wood scraps and placement of the figures also increase the tension.

Johnson’s Pitch is a thin, vertical work. At the bottom, a youth crouches in a cave, which is outlined by charred wood. She looks up, her mouth gaping with fear. She appears to be looking at another youth whose neck and lower jaw are bound in a metal device. In Cheap Unpleasant Desires, a woman with prosthetic legs has no head. In its place is a knothole surrounded by silver acrylic. In Damnum Absque Injuria (Latin for “injuries that have no legal remedy”), a gaping hole oozes red resin next to a woman with disheveled hair and an addled face. In these works, Johnson seems to bring these wounds to the surface to understand them.

Ed Rainey’s Domesticated Horse drawings are exquisitely rendered and very sad. Within the motley coat of one horse, there is another complex but discernible pattern: the piercing eyes and raised wings of two large seabirds. Rainey’s acrylic-and-ink drawing on an old Audubon print is a tour de force of intricacy. It’s also a moving reminder that all animals, domesticated or not, have a beast within.

Monochromatic Strip Drawings, 2, 4, and 6 allow us to follow Rainey’s mind as one idea, memory, and image leads to another. There is one martini with olive and one soft shoe (1950s-style), scientific illustrations of large and small intestines, and a meticulously rendered black crow. Surrealist painter Rene Magritte’s famous pipe and provocative statement “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” are also included. Rainey’s references to a mischievous bird and Magritte’s explorations of language and reality convince us there is more “afoot” in these drawings than “digestion” and skillful rendering of the “real” world.

Emily Walls’ The Think Machine (acrylic and ink on paper) depicts an electric toaster with padded insides. Attached to the padding is an unshaded light bulb that shines above a floor pad. Outside of this no-frills hot box, the artist records visions of Gummi Bear-like characters roaming among piles of broken machinery like survivors from a plane crash.

One of Walls’ most telling creatures is a faceless, handless, amorphous little torso in a dress (detail from You Love Broken Things). She’s on her knees, her back to articles of discarded clothing and broken machinery parts. Except for her brand-new, patent-leather shoes, she is drawn with one fluid outline. Wall’s expressive worlds lie somewhere between disaffected modernity and a girl’s Southern childhood where there was little emphasis on personal power but lots of praise for her shiny shoes.

A good look is needed for Cedar Lorca Nordbye’s blocks of wood strewn on a table along with his crayons. Printed with deceptively childlike images and with words and phrases, this artist’s “Thought-Blocks” deconstruct and reconstruct some of the sacrosanct ideas and stories we tell ourselves.

These raw blocks of wood are arranged on top of and vertically, horizontally, and diagonally to one another. They can be grouped and read in several ways. For example, blocks whose words express gratitude and relaxation in Thank God I’m Still become a judgment when they are placed next to a block printed with the word “Moral.”

Also on view are eight of Nordbye’s sketchbooks with references to Kosovo, Columbine, and quotes from social scientists and spiritual leaders. One quote is from Pope John Paul II: “The sick, the elderly, the handicapped, and the dying teach us that weakness and suffering can be embraced with no loss of dignity.”

This could be an all-purpose statement for “Room in the Margins.” There is an all-embracing fearlessness in the wounded women and broken worlds of Johnson and Walls and the free-flowing ideas of Rainey and Nordbye. On wooden scraps and old prints, in junk piles and corners of sketchbooks, these artists find room in margins as well as in their hearts and minds. 

Through

August 27th

For the current exhibit at Art Forms at Grace Place, nine sculptors from around the country deliver “Duende,” a concept that Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca described as a dissolution of ego and “a baptism in dark waters — where volcanoes, ants, gentle breezes, and the enormous night, straining its waist against the Milky Way, abide in tenderest intimacy.”

These sculptors have studied with master artists and artisans around the globe. Their art is quirky, multi-cultural, and complex. For example, the figure of Linda Cares’ Le Petit Prince has muscular legs and slender dancer’s feet that leap with joy. His crown is a wide-open vessel and his face an erupting volcano. This is a face before language, before thought. Cares was trained in the Middle East and in Korea, where fierce-faced deities fill museums and shamans expel evil spirits. She believes that artists are conduits of intense energies, and so it follows that Le Petit Prince looks like a primordial dance, like something that has flowed from her.

Another notable work is Celtic Passage IV, Paul Braun’s pitted and textured blue-black steatite that simulates a menhir, a prehistoric stone slab that marked sites possessing special powers. Then there are Pam and John Wagner’s evocative totems made out of 19th-century baking tins, early-20th-century wooden barbells, croquet balls, weathered scythes, and African corn mashers (and more), which they find in European and American Southwestern flea markets.

Sandra Ehrenkranz’ clay, mixed-media Circus Woman is an overweight 40-something with missing body parts and tiny wires, lights, and beads radiating out of her body. Fortune Dance is a laser-eyed, flushed cheeked dancer with mangled arms who is posed so that she appears to be endlessly turning. These scrappy, enchanted circus performers — one decorated like a Christmas tree and the other spinning out of control — are fitting metaphors for life’s hardships and exhilarations.

Using techniques she learned from potters on Africa’s Ivory Coast, Helen Phillips coiled and pinched clay into Exquisite Egret, which shows both hope and regret. The egret’s beak dips over the edge of a bowl, the inside of which is cracked like parched earth. His top knot of feathers are frazzled copper wires, and his silky white face is hardened and grayed like African savannahs during drought. Portions of this beautifully crafted stoneware sculpture are glazed and polished with encaustic, while other areas are mushroom and smoky gray. The vessel, while durable, is also breakable and serves as Phillips’ homage to devastated wildlife.

Bin Gippo carves grace out of the hard earth. In New York in the 1960s, Gippo studied with Noguchi and Nizuma and learned to push her materials to the limits. Today she is noted for her ability to convey movement in stone and metal. Light shines through waving folds of alabaster in Joy in Motion. In Black Swan Presence, huge bronze wings ripple over the long neck and head of a swan that is being startled out of slumber.

In The Offering, Lisa Jennings envisions herself as cedar, sycamore, and stone. Her seven-foot cedar torso arches up. The layered quartz veins in her perfectly oval stone face suggest the layers in the artist’s psyche as well as in nature. Jennings hoists a twisting sycamore branch whose wood has decayed into patterns resembling feathers. Using Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent of music, art, and education and the only Aztec deity that did not require human sacrifice, as a guide, Jennings offers herself to creativity and life.

Sculptor and painter Anton Weiss, who was educated in Europe and New York, explores earth from the Big Bang to present-day. In Pangaea Column, a series of increasingly large orbs are carved into the center of a nearly six-foot copper column. On top sits Pangaea, an ancient land mass splitting into earth’s continents. In Balance 2012, another monolith tilts precariously on a metal log, and in Pangaea Universe, Pangaea floats in nuanced stains of raw sienna. Whether we see environmental devastation, social/political turmoil, apocalypse, and/or the end of an epoch (the year 2012 marks the end of the Mayan calendar), Weiss’ powerful sculptures remind us of the earth’s balancing act.

“Duende” at Art Forms at Grace Place through June 4th

For some, God is in the details. For Elizabeth Alley, as seen in her latest exhibit, “Playground Paintings” at Perry Nicole Fine Art, the details are in the details. Painted from close-ups of old family photos, these expert displays of brushwork, contrast, and composition suggest poignant narratives and overarching designs of modern life.

In Easter, a noonday sun creates black shadows, and shimmering white gloves are pressed against the high-key colors of Easter Sunday finery. But the real focus of this high-contrast painting is the relaxed face of a young boy who lightly touches the tips of his dad’s fingers. In the only full face depicted in Alley’s current work, we see one of those moments when at age 6 or 8 or 10, we become aware of self, aware that we are an independent thing beyond family, church, and all the other groups that define us.

In Balcony, above the second floor of a nondescript orange-stucco motel, Alley ladles on gray waves of smog and humidity to create an urban summer sky. The artist’s signature crisp edges — every brush stroke is evident — arc for the motel’s lights. The energy contained within these large globes feels compressed and charged, a metaphor, perhaps, for the stories played out in the rental rooms they illuminate.

The gold buttons of a mother’s finely tailored suit, her gold wedding band, and the gold barrette in her daughter’s hair tell us the family in Shopping has purchasing power. In the center of the work are a fine leather purse and the right side of a little girl’s face. Her expression is that stricken stare a child wears while enduring long bouts of shopping. That girl was the artist at age 4, who is now putting that intense focus into her art.

Through April 29th

Fast-forward to “Kudzoo,” the current show at Studio 1688, in which three Memphis artists explore 21st-century urban life and its possible futures. Adam Smith is a graphic designer, cartoonist, fine-art painter, and an internationally recognized graffiti artist. His bemused look at himself and the world include Struggle, a self-portrait of the artist as computer body parts, a fractured skull, and circuitries that wrap around his body. To further satirize this rather twisted state of affairs, Smith sculpts his right foot as a tangle of rope and metal and dangles it off the bottom of the composition.

Graphic designer Michael Carpenter creates posters that tell complex urban stories, sometimes cautionary ones. In the bottom left corners of two large posters created for the documentary film You’re Gonna Miss Me, Carpenter tells the story of Rocky Erickson, a 1950s rock-and-roll legend, who secluded himself for decades in his mother’s Austin, Texas, home. In the first poster, a young Erickson’s full expressive mouth appears to be forming new song lyrics. He looks straight out at the world, and the expanse of white poster surrounding him feels like the unlimited space in which he creates. An older Erickson lowers his head and hunkers down in the corner of the second poster as if to avoid the world’s bright lights.

Jon Lee’s Fu Manchu-79 has the appearance of an ancient Sung dynasty landscape created with modern materials — acrylics, encaustic, stencils, latex, aerosol sprays, and polycrylics. A fierce-looking winged energy that reads part-dragon, part-nightmare swoops down into the picture plane. Upside-down words spew from a tangle of dark umbers. To the side of this morass of thoughts and circumstances is a primordial body dripping off-white secretions down to the bottom of the canvas.

Lee drops latex paints and sprays aerosols onto acrylic washes that overlie expressive graphite and ink lines. He repeats this process several times to simulate passages though an atmosphere whose layers appear to go on forever. Lee describes art as a “creative state where he can breathe, escape from a too hectic life, and sort things out.” In Fu Manchu-79, Lee has created a beautiful painting and a refuge from which he can see himself and the world a little more clearly. •

Through April 30th

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Parts Seen Within the Background of the Whole” plays off every inch of ceiling, floor, and walls of the University of Memphis Art Museum’s main gallery. It’s a bravura exploration of space, light, and perception, where the ceiling has turned into a sky filled with the cosmos and the floor has opened up and plunges our point of view down 24 feet.

Architect Coleman Coker and his associates at buildingstudio draw us into a worldview informed by Eastern mysticism, quantum-field theory, and early Greek philosophy, including Parmenides’ assertion that “Undifferentiated being is the ultimate reality” and Aristotle’s belief that “Nature is active with a life of its own — as things in our world spring forth constant and unending.”

Coker and his team, in collaboration with U of M art and architecture students, built their ideas with the simplest of materials. Forty black rectangular columns are each topped by a five-gallon glass container half-filled with water. A lamp, placed underneath, shines through the water, through the beveled glass, and through the narrow throats of the bottles. The lamps cast images across the ceiling of the gallery, transforming it into radiating circles of light and dark that read as candlelight, coronas, and partially eclipsed solar bodies.

Depending on the vantage point, the five rows of eight lighted columns take on different forms. From the museum’s entranceway, they look like golden-domed mosques and minarets. Glimpsed from the walkway on the second floor, they appear as black-robed novices involved in a rite of passage. Walk through them and they become a black-columned temple. Or they could be a golden-helmeted regiment, which is lined up in front of a long, slender reflecting pool parallel to the right gallery wall. In the pool’s fathomless black waters are clues regarding the power that the regiment protects and the temple honors.

If you stand in the front line with these nearly six-foot-tall monoliths, straight ahead you’ll see pitch-blackness. Reflected to the right is a blank slate, but to the left, the pool’s surface reflects the two ancient statues that guard the entrance to the museum’s Egyptian collection. These Sakhmets also once stood in regimented lines guarding the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III (1391-1353 BC). According to Egyptian mythology, Sakhmet destroyed humans for their disobedience.

Break rank with the sentinels and walk around to the far side of the reflecting pool (thereby, challenging protocol) and the universe of “Parts Seen” is again transformed. The blank tablet and ancient disciplinarians disappear. On this side, the pool’s surface inverts the 24-foot-ceiling/cosmos and appears to plunge it into the gallery floor. In one of the exhibit’s most moving touches, the ceiling’s radiating rings of light and dark read as orbits of electrons spinning deep in the earth.

Shadowy and amorphous shapes are projected across the entire length and width of the far-right wall next to the reflecting pool. The seamlessly flowing forms shift your perception from macrocosm to microcosm, and you may find yourself experiencing what Coker has described in interviews and essays as “universe and mind in one ever-flowing movement — part of an overarching enormous field of energy.”

Behind the main gallery in a separate room, the students put together a second installation consisting of three large plastic sheets. They positioned lights at different levels and angles to shine through the plastic and demonstrate light’s permeability. This part of the exhibit serves as a contrast to the installation in the main gallery. Taken together, the two pieces confirm that this is both a quantum-physical and a material world. As much as the glass and water of Coker’s work manipulates light for a number of mind-bending effects, the students’ wrinkled, almost-opaque sheets stifle it to the same degree.

As you leave, one last glance at the installation reveals that the lights have now become lanterns that softly illuminate the reflecting pool, with a backdrop of clouds flowing across a night sky. Here is a Japanese Serenity Garden at midnight and more proof of an unbounded creativity in one of the most compelling works of art seen in Memphis in a very long time. n

“Parts Seen Within the Background of the Whole: buildingstudio + Coleman Coker” at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis through April 16th