Author: Carol Knowles

Anamnesis,” Kathleen Holder’s current show at David Lusk Gallery, is one of the most emotionally powerful exhibitions in Memphis this year. Like luminists’ landscapes and particularly Mark Rothko’s late paintings, Holder’s nuanced and intensely saturated pastels burn with a mystical intensity.

“Anamnesis” means remembering, and her works reflect a calling up of deeply buried memories — an image or idea that is in the brain but just beyond reach and then spontaneously pops up.

Phrases that sound like poetry — “I am the house where the moon lives” — occurred to the artist as her fingers spread particles of bluish and golden-white pastels across fields of carmines, violets, scarlets, and cadmium reds in Anamnesis X.

Faint shards of light inside barely visible receptacles could be dying embers in ancient caves (Anamnesis IV) or slivers of gold in alchemists’ cauldrons (Anamnesis XI) or chemical reactions in our bellies (Anamnesis IV) or Holder’s memories of purple-pink steam rising from a smoldering house fire (Anamnesis XII).

Her almost imperceptible, softly glowing apexes invoke images of Gothic arches (Anamnesis X); the tips of a pope’s or wizard’s hat radiating their masters’ special powers (Anamnesis IV); or boat bows emerging from moonlit mists (one of Holder’s metaphors for accessing alternate states of consciousness).

Flecks of golden-white pastel backed by midnight blues (Anamnesis III) or dark umbers (Anamnesis XII) bring to mind pinpoints of light playing out Bell’s theorem about the interconnectedness of particles across vast expanses of space. Like visionary poets and philosophers, Holder intuits that all things arise from common ground. Her art attunes our sensibilities to the point where “unified whole” and “ground of being” are no longer philosophical jargon or tenets of faith but deeply felt experiences. This artist draws us into “the house where the moon lives,” where a chorus of memories, dreams, and sensations pool and reconfigure into the most mysterious of all cauldrons — the human psyche.

Kathleen Holder at David Lusk Gallery through April 2nd

Meikle Gardner’s current exhibit fills two walls of Perry Nicole’s beautiful new gallery space in Chickasaw Oaks. The oils on canvas he describes as a “visual presentation of the interconnected workings of thought processes.” But these works are not dry, intellectual musings. Here is thinking in all its inventive, obsessive, self-reflective glory. The paintings were created within the last six months, and the works’ sharply defined motifs, interlocking grids, intricate weaves, and highly expressive colors tell us about the challenges of preparing for a major show.

Spirit Ditch is dizzyingly intricate. The composition’s multilayered weave unravels, and an oozing, gummy substance drips from the threads. Beyond that is pitch-blackness. At the bottom of this structure, a salmon-colored shape with multiple appendages looks like some sort of spiderlike, fleshy creature caught in its own web. Claustrophobic and disorienting, Spirit Ditch‘s subtitle could be: “Trying to micromanage the void (or God or creative mind) is not a good idea.”

Gardner’s ability to build gesture, color, and composition to intense pitches produces true delight in Maiden Voyage. In this work, the unraveling threads, like those in Spirit Ditch, become a sieve that delicately holds the composition together. Forest greens and orange ochres are highlighted by electric-yellow lines looping, snaking, trailing off, and beginning again. The work is playful and experimental and is punctuated by yellow asterisks to suggest the epiphanies that arise from free-flow thought.

Gray grids superimpose Shiva Saw, a shape-shifting abstraction of spring greens. About the fifth layer down there is what looks to be a pale-green radar screen with finely incised crosshatching. This is an organic form, a life force, and here is its central switchboard. What a richly realized abstraction of Shiva, the Hindu god of creation and destruction. “Shiva saw” (and every creator knows) that each new idea requires working through some old patterns and presumptions.

The artist steps back for a broader view in Tsunami Lights, a haunting combination of title, color, and design. The pale-blue background is calm now. Strewn across its surface are gold and rust-brown gridirons that have been twisted by some monumental force. Superimposed starlight creates the impression that we are viewing the site of devastation from a great height.

In Chinese New Year, Gardner goes all the way down — past grids, past intricate weaves, past finely etched switchboards, to delicate green and blue washes and untouched white paper. His signature grids become unfurling ebony and red ribbons that curl around expressive dots and jottings of Eastern calligraphy in gestures so loose and un-self-conscious they read like finger-painting.

Gardner’s major new show has successfully opened, his slate is clearing, and Chinese New Year, one of his most satisfying new works, feels like celebration and letting go.

Meikle Gardner at Perry Nicole Fine Art through March 30th

For “Something of Our Common Feeling,” the current exhibition at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts, curator Elizabeth Alley has gathered together six local artists and three out-of-towners. These nine artists deliver a show that captures humanity’s shared and unruly qualities. There’s beauty here and raw energy and uncertainty and plain, old common courage.

Portland, Oregon, artist Elliott Wall’s No One Wants To See This explores sexuality and mortality with postmodern appropriation and esoteric references. A black candle burns beside the black-haired, black-eyed woman who dominates the composition. Her nude body is an exquisite merging of subdued colors that brings to mind Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Her left hand, like that of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, relaxes across her sex rather than protecting or hiding it.

Instead of the dog or kitten one often finds in nude masterworks, Wall has placed the skeleton of a small animal curled up at the figure’s feet. Directly over her left breast is a crescent moon encompassing a star (a reference to Ingres’ Turkish odalisques?, an allusion to arcane knowledge?). Across the deeply shadowed background are faintly written words that translate to the biblical “Pride goeth before a fall,” warning of the dangers of exalting oneself. The subject of Wall’s work could represent the larger idea of “Beauty” and “Death.” But instead of wielding power over others, Beauty, completely nude and hence completely vulnerable, lies down with that skeleton Death. It’s a complex and provocative work.

Adam Shaw’s multifaceted past works — dark, ominous cartoon frames; deeply shadowed, charcoal nudes; and paintings of refracted bodies in water — intersect beautifully in the paintings presented at this exhibit. The four midnight-blue oils on canvas are dark and atmospheric, but one can still make out the beachcombers in Tidepool and the nude swimmers in Amphitrite, Swimmer (Naiad), and Swimmer II.

Kurt Meer is known locally for his subtle landscapes. In the mixed-media work Endorphine, Meer’s signature earth tones become the raw siennas of a rusted-out model of an automobile and the corrosive browns of the aging skin of a woman who is burning her candle at both ends. Endorphine makes for an uneasy recognition, and it also lingers. Here we all are — members of a fast-paced society consuming both the buyer and the bought.

Some of the exhibition’s most unsettling figures appear in Beth Edwards’ studies of domesticity. With devastatingly numbing effect, Edwards perfectly weds a slick, tight painting style with tightly scripted gender roles. Bored husbands stare at their watches (Watch), sleep (Troubled Sleep), or sip iced tea (Susannah), while their hapless wives cry alone or sit naked and unnoticed.

Los Angeles artist Jason Alexander confronts mortality. In Self with Muses, two almost skeletal corpses display an easy body language, leaning back with legs crossed at the shins and hands loosely draped over their loins. These rotting muses appear to be reflecting on what it all meant and what it all continues to mean. The “Alexander” of the painting neither attacks nor shrinks back. His shoulders are relaxed and his head cocked downward. His left hand rests on the edge of a shroud that surrounds one of the corpses. He is listening, considering, engaging in a dialogue with himself, his art, his own mortality. With lessons learned from Degas, Odd Nerdrum, and Egon Schiele and Julian Schnabel, Alexander has created the show’s most expressive figures and a world where neither debilitation nor death impedes the reflective/creative process. Alexander’s bravura artistic skills persuade us that his vision could be real.

Other notable works in the show include New Yorker Gary Murphy’s sumi ink drawing, Emblem, which captures the beauty of an unkempt, unselfconscious face as it daydreams. Alan Duckworth fills a medium-sized acrylic painting with the deeply etched lines of a young woman’s laughter (Saturday Afternoon), and in Laugh he paints broad planes of almost-white on a young man’s laughing face on what may be that same sunny Saturday. Mel Spillman’s nimble lines and deft washes of gouache create mesmerizingly appealing designs in My Look Turns to a Stare. And, finally, Vitus Shell’s mixed-media Sister II Sister is a poignant African-American portrait whose missing eyes and indistinct features suggest the challenges of developing a clear sense of self. n

“Something of Our Common Feeling” at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts through February 26th

In “Rhythm & Roots: A Love Story,” at David Lusk Gallery, identical-twin painters Jerry and Terry Lynn combine surrealism, psycho-social portraiture, highly energized abstract gestures, and their own brand of impressionism. The result is work that celebrates the individual and his ability to imagine no matter how limited his circumstances.

The Lynns, who work together as the

singularized “Twin,” tell just enough of the story to allow

allegorical, thematic, and personal readings. For example, the

60-by-48-inch acrylic painting Lonely is skilled

portraiture and an autobiographical nod to the artists’

childhoods in which a preteen Jerry or Terry turns away from

an adult-male figure dressed in overalls and standing in a cotton field. The

young artist’s posture and gaze are penetrating, yearning. Thin, crisp lines curl about

the painting, suggesting the dreams and goals which are gestating in the

youngster’s mind as well as the pubescent energy dancing around the lower part of

his body. The adult figure could be a fading but important memory when a

young man realizes he wants something different, something more.

A preacher with a crisp white shirt and neatly tailored suit stands

in front of a church in Burn. The ground around him is molten

red and violet, the sky is brimstone white, and burnt-yellow flames

lick the windows and roof of the church. Even as the clapboard

building burns, the preacher looks beyond the loss at the viewer and the work

that remains to be done.

In the mixed-media work The

Beginning, slender white-and-black lines and high-key pinks,

violets, blues, and yellows swirl around the expressionless face and slumped shoulders of a

man dressed in a rough brown garment. This

juxtaposition of the intensely colored, abstractly gestured

background and the enigmatic central figure characterizes many

of Twin’s collaborations. These works are particularly

open to interpretation. Above the man of The

Beginning, stark-white lines join in what looks to be a ribbon banner.

The banner is not filled in but could very well proclaim

the man an “Unsung Hero.” Or is he a more personal

figure? Perhaps “Granddaddy Charles,” a hardworking

Southerner who told tall tales and sang spirituals?

The 36-by-36-inch acrylic Forever can also be read

in several ways. This painting’s semi-abstract subject

could be a vision of a dark-haired fairy dressed in gossamer

surrounded by violet-blues and transparent wings of

fireflies. The painting also suggests the lowered,

shadowed head of a girl lost in a daydream or the elongated face

of an insect breaking out of a silk cocoon.

Early Rising, a seamless integration of

background and foreground and one of Twin’s most

haunting works, depicts a woman picking cotton at dawn.

The muted colors of early morning, the shadowed stand

of trees toward which she walks, and the

exaggerated curvature of sky make magic seem more possible

as Twin transforms the long sack dragging the

ground behind the laborer into a wedding gown and her

slow walk into a processional march.

Included in the exhibit are 200 of Twin’s

smaller paintings (sizes ranging from 5-by-7 inches to

20-by-16 inches), which allow the viewer to witness an

artistic evolution. Quickly executed cartoons and

deliberately crude quasi-folk-art caricatures serve as

studies for the exhibition’s larger, more formal portraiture.

In the lexicon of Twin, Holla and

Gangsta are not pokes but gently comedic notings of the exaggerated

attitudes of stereotyping.

Wanderer and White House are small works of

compressed energy and evocation. The central figure

in the 14-by-11-inch acrylic Wanderer is utterly still,

expectant. She contains decades of patient waiting.

Her arms are gently cradled at the waist of her white

muslin skirt, the folds of which are masterfully

rendered. Her deeply shadowed face and the dark umber

background heighten her isolation. The

10-by-8-inch acrylic painting of a clapboard church,

White House, dissolves in a Turneresque landscape of hazy light

and color as the two brothers pool and reconfigure

memories of the intense rites of passage they experienced

in a rural church just outside Memphis.

With their skilled draftsmanship, genuine

feeling, and melding of artistic styles (more apparent in

this show than ever), there is much to admire in

Twin’s “Rhythm & Roots.”

“Rhythm & Roots: A Love Story” at David Lusk Gallery through January 29th

To understand artist Keren Kroul’s curatorial approach to “Identity Crisis,” the current exhibition at Marshall Arts, it helps to recall To Fly Away, the large work she created for “Max: 03” at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis. Kroul used hundreds of tiny handmade paper figures to depict her feelings about childbirth. Some of the figures flew up to the ceiling of the gallery. Dozens more pooled onto the floor in the corner of the room. For “Identity Crisis,” Kroul has gathered together seven artists whose search for meaning is as complex and playfully irreverent as her own.

At first glance, Courtney Ulrich’s two large digital photographs look like gray stoneworks from the pages of National Geographic. On the left is the straight-postured torso of an African tribeswoman, unclothed except for a braided cloth belt. On the right are the torso and thighs of the Stone Age Venus of Willendorf or some other talisman carved to ensure fertility and abundant crops. A closer look tells us that the belly overhanging the braided belt in Abdominal Apron has been “civilized” with years of eating Twinkies and watching television. In Folding Space, Venus’ prayer for bounty has become an out-of-control consumption of food. As obesity fast approaches the position of number-one killer of Americans, Ulrich’s digital simulations of fat carved into stone become disquietingly appropriate 21st-century icons.

To appreciate Immersion: Dialogue, Carole Loeffler’s small fabric and fur sculptures, it helps to get down on the floor next to the headless creature with an anteater’s snout. Across from you is an entity that has been reduced to an arm with claws. Hanging from the ceiling is a plush fire-engine-red hot dog with tentacles. This is what the world looks like to a 1-year-old whose senses are wide-open.

William O’Brien’s contributions to “Identity Crisis” are amateurish and cheaply framed. This is deliberate. The artist has adopted his 12-year-old self to revisit a bittersweet adolescence. His untitled installation contains drawings and paintings of varsity basketball players, Boy Scouts, same-sex puppy loves, a recurring motif of eyes weeping blue tears, and pop stars with identity issues of their own. With cathedrals built out of mountains of phalluses topped with tiny crosses, O’Brien tells us about his conflict between moral imperative and burgeoning teenage sexuality. At the center of his installation is an abstract painting of free-flowing waves of multihued pink. With these 31 small drawings and paintings on paper, O’Brien is time-traveling, offering his younger self a chance to express himself honestly.

Megan Reed and Kamilla Talbot approach the concept of self from opposite ends of the spectrum. Reed explores the mutable nature of identity and memory with “Anatomy,” a series of photographs taken in a moving car and then blown up to further abstract color and shape such as in her work Green. Talbot describes her oils on linen and canvas as a record “expressing the authenticity of her experience in the world.” The artist presents an explosion of color and pattern in an outcropping of rock (Black Pool) and the twists and bends in the stalk of a flower (Daisy).

Other notable works in the show include Brad Hampton’s phosphorescent Reference Man, a computer-generated anthropomorphic glob of primary colors that Hampton laminated and mounted onto an acrylic panel. This mutable creature could be humankind’s alter ego in a possible future where we are all able to handle life’s crises with the shape-shifting facility of a Saturday-morning cartoon character.

Anne Gaines’ vivid oils on linen — Studio View, Right Window, Studio View, Left Window, and Brooklyn Rooftop, NW Corner — depict the rooftops and buildings of a somewhat dilapidated Brooklyn neighborhood that she and her friends have turned into an artists’ community. Like Hampton’s Reference Man, Gaines’ buildings are also shape-shifters. Chimneys, clapboards, and metal pipes taper in and out, and wavy lines suggest sagging shingles and warping wood. But they also suggest energy emanating from the buildings where some of Gaines’ neighbors, like the participants in “Identity Crisis,” are creating their own statements about life. •

“Identity Crisis” at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts through October 23rd

Yale-educated and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Alicia Henry is currently an assistant professor of art at Nashville’s Fisk University. This talented iconoclast has also worked with Indians on a reservation and with Africans in Ghana when she served in the Peace Corps.

“One of my goals,” she writes in her artist’s statement, “is to depict a broader vision of society (racial, gender, economic, and social levels) — to make visible that which still often goes unseen.” For her exhibition, “Repercussions,” at the Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College, the artist has met that goal. The 13 untitled acrylics on fabric she created cannot be ignored. These are works of art that compel both compassion and horror.

One piece is a cloth cutout of an armless girl pinned to the wall on the right of the gallery’s entrance. A veil is securely stitched around the edges of her face. The girl’s mouth is barely discernible and her eyes are nearly closed. Long, slim legs are hinged to the torso like those of a puppet, and a circle has been cut into the arch of her pelvis. It’s an unsettling combination — the girl’s shrouded face, armlessness, unprotected torso, and marionette legs. The work portrays the grief and helplessness one feels when subjugated to the will of others.

Henry has converted a small room at Clough-Hanson into a combination birthing chamber, funeral parlor, and shrine for ancestors. On this room’s left wall, a 16-by-8-inch leathery skinned woman wears a rough brown cotton smock. Her left foot curves up, her ankles turn inward, and six dark spheres fall from her loins. Perhaps it’s waste. Or this could be “Gaia” spasming out a series of fragile, temporal planets. Or this could be a woman about to kick her way out of a system that relegates her to the position of birthing machine.

On the smaller gallery’s right wall, the 10-inch-tall silhouettes of three women dressed in fine black linen suggest that passion and basic humanity cannot be neatly contained in funeral or sacramental rites. These three staid sisters’ long braids are unwinding down to their ankle-length garments. Their clothing is unraveling. The entrails of one of the mournful sisters are slipping below the hem of her robe.

For another work, 24 small figures (approximately three-inches-square) are pinned like insect specimens in six neat rows. With varying combinations of black and brown acrylics, the artist creates the appearance of great age in this lineage of humankind whose shapes resemble antique toy airplanes with arms/wings fully extended. The subjects look like they have long been moldering, yet at the same time, they appear eager to embrace life, to unpin themselves from the wall and fly.

Henry’s artwork allows us to feel our humanity as part of the billions of souls who struggled and experienced joy and pain before us. On one of the walls in Clough-Hanson’s main gallery, she has pinned up an intensely red tulip. On the opposite wall she renders four tiny hearts with the texture and color of crumbling sandstone. With this juxtaposition of images the artist seems to suggest that, as the color and resiliency of youth fade, ultimately we all become collateral damage in this temporal, fragile scheme of existence.

As we leave Clough-Hanson, we see again the girl with the veiled face and the unprotected body. Opposite her is another work consisting of three fabric dresses whose surfaces have been painted with bows on top of collars on top of polka dots on top of pockets.

The artist who conceived and created the works for “Repercussions” feels the world deeply and addresses what she finds there. Life is not just about clothes and procreation. Henry’s very dark and very powerful artwork reminds us that, to varying degrees, society’s assigned roles, programmed rituals, and slick veneers diminish and dehumanize us all. •

“Alicia Henry: Repercussions” at Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, through October 27th

For the past 20 years, Memphis College of Art professor Bob Riseling has led groups of students, alumni, and faculty members to Horn Island, a small island 12 miles off the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This May, 48 artists signed up for the nine-day experience.

Also in May, Teresa White, an MCA alumna and co-owner of Studio 1688, led a second group of eight artists who stayed on the island for eight days.

Both groups took long hikes on wet sand, ran through shoulder-high grass, swam at midnight, shared artwork and tall tales around campfires, and woke up on the beach to see the sunrise through tent flaps. And for the four days that the two groups’ stay overlapped, they visited each other’s camps.

The artwork created or conceived on Horn Island is now being displayed — Riseling’s group at MCA and White’s at Studio 1688.

White’s 200-pound glass-and-steel installation, The Ocean Is Alive and Dances to the Beat Inside My Head, is a reminder of the storms that come up suddenly and often on Horn Island. In Studio 1688’s main gallery, 175 strips of annealed blue glass hang from three pieces of steel, re-creating the power and grace of retreating waves.

Inspired by the thousands of dead puffer fish — casualties of industrial pollution — washed up on the island’s beaches this spring, Erik Yaeger molded 12 fish out of clay, sea water, and crushed shells and fired them in a kiln set up on the island. In homage to the dead fish, Yaeger has arranged the ceramic puffers along with sand, palmetto leaves, driftwood, fish bones, and shells on a 20-foot stretch of floor at Studio 1688.

Horn Island’s colors loom large in many of the works. Riseling’s wood carvings of red-eyed Ring Tailed Green Racers slither throughout MCA’s exhibition, while Micaela Riseling’s pink and purple sunset roils in her mixed-media Horn Island Skies. With neon-orange oil sticks, Wendy Young convincingly depicts total-body Sunburn. William Bearden holds his camera close to the water and captures an image of a shallow sea jangling with golden bracelets of light in Under a Sherbet Sky. In Jay Crum’s acrylic on wood, Red Beach, white light vibrates through a dusty pink sky and emanates from the blood-red bodies of students set above a crimson mosaic of rocks, snakes, and continental platelets.

Many of the more than 200 works in the MCA exhibition express intense feelings of community and bonding with nature. Amanda Howard’s mixed-media Daily Hike tells us about a blisteringly hot May day when students hiked for 24 miles with such a fierce determination that Howard envisioned them as marching warriors in tufted headdresses, shields, and elongated fire-engine-red masks. The ceramic alligator snout protruding from an MCA wall, with its dingy, chipped teeth and granular, dull-brown skin, suggests that Leandra Urrutia saw her Spirit Animal up-close and personal.

With watercolors, charcoal, pastels, and acrylic paints, Jason Roach recorded Horn Island at sunrise, noon, sunset, and in storms. Especially striking is his ability to capture the last traces of color at dusk, as in his watercolor Vanishing Light. With pen and ink on paper, Jeremy Waak creates waves of sand in Dune #4. Buttocks, feet, kneecaps, and breasts refract and repeat in waves and shadows as artists merge with the Gulf waters in Jay Crum’s acrylic on wood Night Swim.

In Preston Drum’s acrylic painting, eyeglasses are not necessary for seeing in What Matt Saw at Night. They hang lopsided and twisted across the side of Matt’s face. The subject’s translucent white body suggests the physical and psychological effects of moonlight swimming and sleeping on sandy beaches. This student-turned-night-creature reaches toward the moon with a three-pronged hand/claw/paw. He leans his head forward to peer into an impressionist landscape that contains faces looking back at him, depicting an artist’s willingness to open himself up to new experiences.

Hanging between the first and second floors of the MCA galleries is Waak’s Horn Island Dream 119, a 12-foot assemblage of buoys and nylon rope. This suspended hulk of flotsam with elements extending in all directions serves as a fitting centerpiece and metaphor for the artists/islanders. In Waak’s work, the exhibit’s artists are still together swimming, hiking, and reaching out for new ideas. •

“Horn Island Twenty” at MCA runs through September 18th; “Eight Days in Exile 2004” at Studio 1688 through September 19th.

The titles of the two exhibits currently at David Lusk Gallery are particularly apropos. “Sight Unseen” by Huger Foote and “The Very Idea” by painter John Ryan accurately suggest how the show’s artists look deeply into the nature of things while maintaining playful attitudes.

Created within a six-month time frame and encompassing a 10-mile radius of inner-city Memphis, Foote’s 11 photographs are sweeping (42-by-60-inch) close-ups that combine the artist’s love of energetic lines with an Impressionist play of color and light. Full sunlight turns white clapboard phosphorescent in Untitled 6. Thousands of weed stalks and grass blades become green waves that eddy through a corridor of yellow gold in Untitled 11. Dead grasses and vines slice and curl around the monochromatic picture plane of Untitled 10. And the fading left bumper of an abandoned 1950s automobile appears as rounded and porcelain as the torso of a reclining Renoir nude in Untitled 7.

Untitled 7, one of the most powerful pieces in the show, is a jumble of decay, life, light, line, and color. An intense blue sky is refracted through the windshield of the old car and reflected back and forth between the front and side windows, creating a shifting mosaic of midnight blues. Vines growing through and inside the car record the persistence of nature — a struggle between the manufactured and the natural playing out as weeds slowly push open the car’s front door.

While Foote was exploring back streets and vacant lots in Memphis, Ryan was fishing off the coast of Florida and the inlets of the Mississippi River.

Ten masterfully rendered acrylic paintings on paper record the sensory impressions Ryan experiences while fishing: leaves floating onto the surface of a lake, startled birds turning sharply in mid-air, a nest fallen into the water, and ribbons of red and yellow surveyor’s tape flapping on beaver sticks, those pristine white branches with the bark gnawed away.

In a recent interview, Ryan said he hoped that, above all else, his paintings “remind others to notice, to be more aware of their surroundings.” The artist succeeds. With his personal iconography of memory and reflection, Ryan takes a nuanced look at both the natural world and human nature.

He takes us deep into his paintings with midnight-blue washes and subtle gradations of color. His ominous palette for birds ranges from pitch-black to nearly transparent gray ochre, and his translucent beaver sticks are shadowed with yellows, blues, and lavenders. Highly textured blue washes are tinted with ochres and greens and accented by shadows on the water’s surface.

Ryan distills experiences into images that create feelings and perceptual shifts in viewers. In Untitled 1, the soft brown contours of a bird nest become an eye surrounded by deeply furrowed animal hide. The eye’s gaze has been described as bold, unsettling, foreboding, instinctual, cryptic, straight-from-the-gut, frightening.

In other paintings, crows, those intelligent fishing-site scavengers, soothsayers, and savvy tricksters, appear to search their own natures as they bend their heads in flight, observing the reflections they cast on water (Untitled 7) and turning to face their own shadows (Untitled 4).

Ryan’s paintings are adeptly executed statements of color, design, and haunting metaphor. Once again, this artist’s icons of distilled memory and sensation entice viewers to take leaps of imagination and chase shadows of their own. n

“Sight Unseen” (dye coupler prints by Huger Foote) and “The Very Idea” (acrylic paintings by John Ryan) are on display at David Lusk Gallery through July 31st.

Creative Journey,” the current exhibition at Thames Art and Interiors, provides a rare opportunity to track an artist’s progress. Andrea Prince’s series of acrylic ink works on paper evolves from an ornate and graphic style into subtle and intriguing abstract images.

Prince warms up the show by bejeweling a butterfly’s wing in Spiraling Series. She continues to build energy with her signature ellipses in Expansion, Chrysalis, and the exuberant Emerging. She then charges the remaining 16 paintings with complex, contrapuntal tensions.

Through the Looking Glass loops and weaves together stones, bricks, flowers, electrical grids, microscopic life, sky, and layers of memory. This labyrinth of lenses, portals, and transparencies offers the viewer Prince’s fleeting impressions and a look deep into her wider vision.

Up, Down, Round and Round maps a unique geological history of the world: layers of sea beds, salt floes, and rich deposits of ore that are topped off by a ribbon of viscous purple. Here, perhaps, is the flow of lava. Or is it blood? The map’s midsection depicts the surface of the earth as irregular sloping plots of land that bring to mind small communities whose members settled at the bends of rivers, planted hillside gardens, and honored seasonal cycles. Some of the plots are new spring-green. Others are brown from tilled earth or a too-hot summer. Other plots turn rusty orange from the approaching winter. This color is repeated at the map’s top left. Here the earth is stripped down to its ores, and all other nuances of color and life disappear. Top right a series of rectangular grids complete the map as industry transforms the world into planned communities, malls, and parking lots.

Cancan demonstrates Prince’s ability to layer her compositions without muddying colors or chocking flow. In this work, the sky is filled with transparent half-circles edged with blue wings. It’s a dynamic, resonant work, bringing to mind flying or the flip of a dancer’s skirt.

Evocative shapes fill Spaces in Between as well. Tall, lean rectangles look like skyscrapers in a night sky. Other rectangles reach up and morph into circles on the face of a floating icon that could be an egg or a space pod. With energetic form, Prince puts us in a place somewhere between science fiction and the probable future.

Untitled (Tree) tells a story about exploration and discovery. Within a circular format, the deep furrows of a tree flow like rivulets through pale gray atmosphere. At the center of the composition, the tree disappears into an opaque and velvety void created by thick application of blue-black acrylic inks. Lush pink and red flowers at the top of the tree’s canopy become descending, looping, concentric ovals. Prince describes this synthesis of two universal archetypes — ying-yang and the tree of life — as “endless cycles and labyrinths reflecting life’s paths, choices, and search for understanding of self.”

Down Deep, one of the most successful paintings in the show, stands as a visual metaphor for the creative process. Prince’s palette becomes calmer and more Zen as she takes us deep into mind and matter. New moons float in a light taupe sky; lines in gray-brown earth suggest burrowing moles and earthworms. Down deeper you’ll find lotuses at various stages of unfolding. Deeper still are geometric circuitries — the hard wiring of mind and matter. At bottom, the form of a monk in robes bows his shaved head in deep meditation. Here is the place where nothing is coveted but awareness and where prolonged concentration leads to an intimate knowledge of how the mind works. In such a place as this, Prince’s creative ideas flow freely. n

“Creative Journey” at Thames Art and Interiors through July 24th

In her current Power House retrospective, “Drawing a Line from 1993-2004,” Memphis artist Terri Jones combines raw gallery space, nuanced linework, and a palpable sense of light to give viewers an elegantly unsettling opportunity to experience a microcosm and boundless space simultaneously.

Tiny creatures undergo tiny changes in Jones’ graphite drawing on vellum Untitled (2003), a work included in the exhibition’s digital slide show. One can almost feel the pulse of life and see virtual trails of electrons as, step by minute step, the shapes group together, separate, replicate, and fade.

Jones’ ingeniously provocative Merging Histories, Shared Secrets and Not Yet (1995) is a North Gallery installation consisting of 23 tumblers placed on a dark steel shelf that divides a white wall panel. Each glass but one is filled with water and paraffin and contains a fish hook threaded with line from the tackle box of her father, who died shortly before the artist began work on the installation.

The varying distances between the glasses of water, the lines of tackle that pool onto the concrete floor or into a gourd from Jones’ garden, and the fish hooks that imply notes on a line of sheet music create a rhythm as complex and haunting as “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” the song that inspired this work. That song tells a story about runaway slaves who hid in railroad cars and followed the Big Dipper and the Mississippi River north to freedom.

Keenly aware of background as well as foreground, Jones uses all available space. In her 2000 and 2003 shows at David Lusk Gallery, her squiggles, ovals, and squares appeared at the edge of gallery walls, walked around corners, and hung free-form in space. In her current exhibition, Jones’ art appears on 30-foot-high window sills, liquefies in a broom closet, and grows as a profusion of zinnia tendrils she plants and harvests every 10 days or so in Power House’s cave-like former fuel room. High on the wall, to the right of the main entrance, is the artist’s signature neon-blue Horseshoe (1996; remade for exhibition in 2004).

Nashville Drawing (2000), another work in the North Gallery, takes us on a journey from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional to the numinous. Four tiny graphite squares on vellum are framed in a box and mounted on a rectangular pedestal that is backdropped by a large wall of windows. Focusing on a delicately miniscule drawing on a five-foot base in front of a wall of sunlight engages viewers with line, volume, and light and, for some, creates dramatic perceptual shifts.

What Jones does with nuances of line, spatial field, and light she also does for the color red. Within a small dank room downstairs, she has placed Hot Wax Line (2004), a slender nine-foot mullion that contains red wax heated to a constant temperature. This is liquid red at 160 degrees Fahrenheit, pungent with the odor of hot wax, glowing with reflections from its shiny copper container, and surrounded by the stains, spills, and uneven cement floor of a former broom closet. (The artist will produce another statement on heat and the color red when the zinnias she is growing just outside of Power House bloom in July.) For this exhibition, Jones also chose red to color the three-inch wedges of glass that she cast and placed on the floor against the high walls of the South Gallery and red to color the 600 pounds of sand and sawdust that she piled on window ledges to become broken lines that circumscribe the walls of this towering room.

With the subtlest of art objects, Jones directs our eyes to the stained floors, obscure corners, and near-ceiling windows of Power House, an eroding industrial-era art object with its own reds and lines in the form of crumbling bricks, electrical circuitries, heating and cooling conduits, and smudges created by the coal that it housed and burned.

In the North Gallery installation called Hurry (1996), a dead tree hangs from the ceiling below a blue neon sign that lights up the word “hurry” in reverse. In this work as with others, the found and personal objects Jones chooses, her allusions to change and fragility, and her works’ spare elegance provide clues to how she envisions her art and experiences life. Distilled, her artist/life statement could read, in part: Don’t hurry; feel the space inside and around you, recognize the spare and ephemeral beauty of each line, each light, each thought. n

“Drawing a Line from 1993-2004” at Power House through August 1st

Spring break spent inside a wooden box. A golf course climbing the walls of a university art museum. A chalk-white alter ego squatting on a toilet. Explicit drawings of a figure experimenting with a strap-on phallus. What were these student artists thinking?

In five recent exhibitions, graduating students from the University of Memphis, Memphis College of Art, and Rhodes College asked questions and challenged existing attitudes. They saw the world anew by creating alter egos and multiverses that ignored the laws of time/space, corporate ownership, and class division. They experimented with new materials and looked for beauty in urban landscapes.

Discourse by Mikewindy at AMUM

One of the most striking works currently on exhibit is Mikewindy’s master’s thesis work Discourse, at the University of Memphis Art Museum. Discourse, a very large, surprisingly graceful sculpture created to fill the entire space of the museum’s entrance gallery, is the artist’s monument to golf. Slender pink rods of metal connect 28 multicolored and multishaped carved-wood golf courses that footstep along the 66-foot floor, climb the walls, and hover close to the gallery’s 24-foot ceiling.

Other strong work in AMUM’s master’s thesis exhibition (showing through May 28th) include Hugh Busby’s especially accomplished Accepted-Unaccepted, a film documentary exploring homosexual relationships. Busby cut and spliced prime-time television footage from news programs, docudramas, and comedy series into five short films that powerfully point and counterpoint stereotypes regarding homosexuality. The films also poignantly chronicle the challenges and deep bonds of the gay male union.

Exhilaratingly all-encompassing describes Johnny Goodwin’s photomontages for T-shirts, mugs, and postcards. Goodwin’s surreal landscapes are cohabited by cartoon characters, historical figures, Buddhist shrines, national monuments, brand names, and television and movie stars. Also on view is some fine technical artistry in Rebecca Cross’ prototypes for “artist-friendly” computer interfaces. Viewing photographer Kristopher Stallworth’s clean lines, spare compositions, and planes of pure pigment may enhance your observations of Memphis city streets as you recall the lighted storefront window floating in a black void in his C-print Poplar Ave., his lines of intensely blue shopping carts marching across expanses of gray in American Way, and red-brick facades framing saturated skies in Germantown Parkway.

Among the most original works produced for the University of Memphis bachelor of fine arts show at Studio 1688 in April were Berry Hooper’s experiments with material and form. Especially ingenious was Hooper’s Two by Two, a sculptural concoction of resin, fiberglass, and a king-sized bed sheet. Flexible and translucent, Two by Two wafted with the breezes coming through the gallery’s front door and imbued light passing through it with beautiful amber tones.

For her Memphis College of Art master’s thesis, Hillary Pesson created Art and Lies, a series of exquisitely rendered contour drawings depicting a young woman’s reactions to a dildo. Not primarily intended to shock or titillate, this figure’s gender experiments feel unabashedly private, focused, and reflective. Her gestures and postures are nuanced depictions of the wonder and uncertainty that accompany intense emotional and physiological experience.

Memphis College of Art graduate Marina Tami sculpts with neon-colored paper and pages from magazines. For her master’s thesis, My Pleasure, she rolled and stacked pages of pure pigment into a shape that, depending on one’s point of view, looks like a psychedelic hamburger, a box of 1,000-watt crayons turned on its side, pixilated peacock plumes, or the world’s crown jewels loaded on the bed of a semi. Exploring Tami’s pink, chartreuse, and electric yellow and blue building blocks (who needs Legos?) produces jolts of pure visual pleasure.

Thirty-one Memphis College of Art bachelor of fine arts candidates mounted a show that ran the gamut of artistic disciplines. Almost all the work was strong, including Tod Salin’s 3-D animation digital video, Space Pod; Thaddeus Bogg’s Skin I (imagine a large Malevich in off-white handmade paper with subtle embossing); and David Hardin’s Designer Dave Self-promotional, a hilarious packaging and selling of the artist as “a six-foot ultra-creative designer with incredible portfolio and work skills.” Extra kudos for photographer Moko Fukuyama’s creation of a campy, chalk-white omniscient observer who witnesses the lifestyles, anxiety, and tedium of modernity while squatting on a toilet, wandering city streets at night, and examining (not so) over-easy eggs strewn across a kitchen stove and floor.

The most compelling work in this year’s Rhodes senior thesis show (showing through May 15th) was Amanda Brown’s Blackification Box, a plywood think (and create) tank whose ceiling and walls are covered with pictures, drawings, and writings of African-American slaves, statesmen, and entertainers. This Hispanic and African-American artist, who also created two videos exploring racial stereotypes, spent a week in her wooden box considering her own and others’ racial prejudices.