Author: Carol Knowles

Through his influential performance works in the 1970s and ’80s, Joseph Beuys confronted and expanded our experience of self and the world, saying, “Art can heal the wounds of contemporary society.” In the Delta Axis at Marshall Arts’ exhibit “Action Packed,” two Memphis artists and eight out-of-state artists also seek to heal the wounds of modern life by heightening this generation’s awareness.

In a remarkable interactive installation titled “Those Who Do Not Remember the Past Are Condemned To Repeat It,” Michigan artist Adam Wolpa invites us to explore “the manifestations of extreme faith.” Before you handle the snakes crawling in and around Wolpa’s terrarium, listen to his sound system’s speakers (one of which jokes about the body’s foibles while the other quotes biblical passages) and receive a cup of red Kool-Aid in return for telling a joke into a hand-carved wooden ear.

Adam Wolpa’s snakes

Most of the elements of passionately held opinion can be found in Wolpa’s work: unexamined superstitions and folk tales, nationalistic sentiments, props and icons that reinforce dogma, and assumptions of superiority and infallibility. Here also are fears masked by sardonic humor, the endless sound bites of advertising and political propaganda, and feelings of uncertainty handwritten beneath skewered hot dogs.

The ideas driving Anne Beffel’s artwork are poignant and powerful. Following September 11, 2001, she spent nine months in a studio at the World Financial Center (just west of ground zero), creating art that included worldwide stories of personal tragedy, regret, and reconciliation. By posing questions — “What do you really want, why, what would it take to fulfill your desire, and is it worth the time and materials involved?” — Beffel helps her clients design their made-to-order purchases which she then constructs from discarded objects, charging only for the cost of the glue, stripper, paints, and dyes incurred to restore the trashed parts that make up her creations.

Beffel’s bent, chipped, and peeling throwaways are reassembled into portable personal altars — file cabinets on rockers, oversized lazy Susans, and chartreuse futons that convert to writing tables or beds with shelves. This artist’s sculptures, with their disparate components that don’t quite fit into classically harmonious wholes, look something like her vision of a world where people are flawed, where limited resources are wasted, and where cultures have not yet learned to smoothly work together.

Tommy Foster, sculptor and University of Memphis graduate student, combines performance art with Southern kitsch.He has“performed“ over 300 Elvis weddings, and he designed an Elvis tour for the “Action Packed” out-of-town artists, which included lots of boxes of Krispy Kreme mini-crullers and stops at obscure but important sites, such as a parking lot where a young Presley got autographs from some master blues musicians. You’ll find photos of the tour, an automobile seat from the tour bus, and an empty Krispy Kreme box in Marshall Arts’ front gallery next to an “iceberg.”

A few suggestions for enjoying some of the exhibition’s other works: Bring along a fresh package of Krispy Kremes. When you enter Marshall Arts, pull down one of Ohio artist Nathaniel Parsons’ 15-foot wooden staffs piled into the right corner of the front gallery. Climb onto his large slab of simulated ice and row. It’s good exercise and will prepare you for life’s mishaps. Eat some Krispy Kremes to regain your energy.

Finish off the Krispy Kremes while viewing Kevin Hamilton’s video of his M.I.T. projects that synchronize the sounds of various electronic devices with the footsteps of humans crossing streets and walking up stairs. As passersby become aware of the sounds that their footsteps create, they begin to accompany the booms and the beeps with some spontaneous pedestrian choreography.

Bring along 10 bucks and purchase one of Miles Wolfe’s decaled T-shirts. This University of Memphis adjunct professor’s T-shirt images run the gamut from Walt Disney movie posters to scenes of terror.

Don’t attempt to row Parsons’ iceberg out the front door. Do push it across the floor to a wall lined with pictures of people seeing the Manhattan skyline from the vantage point of a small, slow-moving row boat captained by Christopher Moore, a sculptor/photographer more interested in creating moments of silliness and intimacy than in instilling metropolitan awe in the hearts of his passengers.

Curator Cedar Lorca Nordbye (a U of M professor and multimedia artist) has produced an “Action Packed” show of art that plays with the edges of consciousness. As you push around icebergs, design what you buy, tap dance to the sounds of technological devices, purchase a shirt with a visual attitude, and tell jokes into a wooden ear surrounded by the raw feelings and unadorned accoutrements of extreme ideological positions, you may find yourself not only looking at art but also thinking about your life and laughing out loud.

Through May 1st

Rebirth stands eight feet tall. Its color fields of burnt umber and raw sienna surround you in darkness. The yellow and red at the center seem to burn you, while a white-hot splash serves as an all-seeing eye, staring you down.

The artist who painted Rebirth knows about burning and darkness. Anton Weiss witnessed the bombing of Europe during WWII. After the war, he spent nearly four years of his childhood in a concentration camp in Yugoslavia. Before his internment, Weiss promised himself and his parents that he would become an artist. He would spend his life creating rather than destroying.

The paintings and metal sculptures in his current show, “Ancient Passage,” at Art Forms tell us about Weiss’ journey to his creative center after experiencing years of brutality.

Weiss settled in New York in 1959 to study with the abstract-expressionist master Hans Hofmann. With Hofmann’s guidance, Weiss learned how to splash paint and juxtapose colors and textures in ways that expressed his feelings and allowed him to deal with some of his grief. The catharsis that Weiss experienced as a creator of abstract art gave him the desire and courage to live as an artist.

Weiss’ paintings combine color fields, the scraping, dripping, and scumbling of action painters such as Hofmann and Jackson Pollock, and the expressive glyphs and corrosive rawness of the art informel of TÖpies and Burri. Weiss’ metalworks are as striking and spontaneous as his paintings. He rubs acrylic across the surfaces of steel, aluminum, and copper to produce countless subtleties of color and shape.

To create Sanctum, for example, one of the most powerful works in the show, Weiss cut pieces of copper, steel, and aluminum and welded them into patterns similar to the organic designs in the shale he excavates from streambeds in Middle Tennessee. By cutting these patterns into hard metal and juxtaposing the unvarnished gray of steel with luminously stained copper and aluminum, Weiss sets up polarities of texture and tone. The metals are etched with expressive cursive marks and stained with multiple layers of acrylic, creating shapes that evoke a number of associations. At Sanctum‘s center, two jagged rectangular sheets of copper (burnished almost to radiance) are laced together with brass. The copper’s luminosity, brass clasps, and calligraphic icons bring to mind tightly secured ancient temple doors through which only the most determined will find their way into the sacred space of the poet/philosopher/artist.

Dystopia VI suggests a journey to one’s inner landscape. The aluminum, steel, and corroded copper are stained with umber and sienna. Across the face of the darkened metals are complex inscriptions. The artist’s etchings into the corroded copper augment the already compelling beauty of chemical disintegration and produce an effect of ancient magic symbols and talismans. Like early shamans, Weiss appears to be exploring artistic netherworlds, seeking his own power.

The acrylic painting Rebirth II gives the viewer a further glimpse into the artist’s mind and heart. Saturated red rectangles overlie a subtly shadowed background. These rectangles are irregular, semipermeable, and soft-edged. They float, brush against one another, and are sometimes loosely grouped. The atmospheric background is marked with expressive lines that detour and suddenly twist. This painter’s shifting geometric shapes and expressive calligraphy show a capacity for changing feelings and directions.

For Line Series/Two Squares, Weiss transformed a large sheet of aluminum into a universe of soldered land masses with an energy grid that reaches toward the curvature of another world just beyond view. The “islands” rest in a sea that is faintly etched with a hieroglyphic script. The aerial perspective of this piece, its allusion to other worlds, and its traces of intentionality invite the viewer to contemplate humankind’s place in the universe.

“Ancient Passage” at Art Forms (2016 Restington Lane, 292-5559) through July 31st.

Heatstroke, an example of painter Jan Hankins’ surreal landscapes

In his latest curatorial project, “Calculus of Risk” showing at Delta Axis at Marshall Arts, David Hall (Flyer art critic, artist, and artists’ advocate) has brought together the apocalyptic landscape paintings of Memphian Jan Hankins, the contorted metal work of St. Louis sculptor Arny Nadler, and the street portraits of Memphis photographer James Looney. These are artists who dare to look the world full in the face and visually depict what they find there.

For the past decade, Jan Hankins has created surreal landscapes that are a mix of politically astute cartoon caricatures, realistic renderings similar to 1930s WPA workers’ murals, richly layered images suggestive of the recesses of the human mind, and apocalyptic scenes of ecological devastation and geopolitical terrorism that take impressionistic renderings of color and light to hell and beyond.

In Hankins’ painting 9-1-1, for example, white-hot flames consume buildings and machinery. All that remains is a graceful mechanical grid of incandescent pipeline. Five scorched clarion horns are covered with a purple and yellow patina, and charred, skeletal heads of demons replace the stars on a Confederate flag. The horns (once specially purchased by automobile owners for their clear, sharp, and ringing sounds) blare out the roles that outmoded cultural prejudices play in misunderstanding, hatred, and acts of violence. 9-1-1‘s red and orange flames with their white-hot tips create the impression of a tiger’s face, complete with white cheek tufts and a roaring, sharp-fanged mouth. The tiger’s roar is probably ironic as well as fierce: Exxon tiger paraphernalia proliferates as the animal’s natural habitat and resources disappear.

Hankins is an accomplished realist, surrealist, impressionist, and caricaturist. His incredibly complex, layered colors and designs are mesmerizing testaments to geopolitical truths as bizarre, convoluted, and frightening as they may sometimes be.

James Looney’s photographs looks into the face of humankind, carrying on the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who waited for the decisive moment to capture the significance of an event. Looney’s artistic relationship to the world is similar to other American street photographers including Robert Frank and Brian Robertson, who speak of capturing “the blues, jazz, and Zen” of social landscapes.

Two of Looney’s most technically accomplished and emotionally powerful photographs are Perennial and Fuzzy. In Perennial, late-sunset colors and the headlights of a passing automobile refract through a plate-glass window to color a butcher shop mauve and dusty green. The vertical line of the shop’s edge thrusts toward the viewer and divides the photograph into two worlds: One world is inside the shop, where the owner, according to the artist’s statement, is losing patience with Canadian governmental policies that fail to deal with the problems of the homeless and drug-addicted; outside is the second world, where a homeless woman stands on a sidewalk and stares through the window at the carcasses of chickens and cows. Her shoulders and lower lip are slack. There is no slight smile of expectation. There is no movement toward the shop. (Street people are not allowed inside the world on the right.) Looney’s definitive photograph captures the failing light and sense of little time, the distorted colors and perceptions, the hard lines of class division and political thinking, and the paralysis of the will to act, both in the homeless woman and her country. The photograph is a powerful outline of significant problems facing the modern world.

In Fuzzy, Looney aims his camera into a group of young students smoking and talking at a city park. To their left is the front torso of a man dressed in blue jeans who adopts the swaggering predatory stance of a drug dealer. (Notice the suggestive hand gesture across his crotch.) He is telling his friend what he intends to do to the students once they get messed up on the crack he has just delivered to them. The two casually but nicely dressed young women look comfortable and assured. They’re just experimenting. They’re just getting a rush before they graduate from a British Columbia culinary school and settle into a professional routine. One of them will overdose and die within the week.

The titles of St. Louis sculptor Arny Nadler’s work suggest drama. One Immigrant makes a journey in the hope of something better. He strikes out on his own (Lone). He has an accident and dies before he reaches his destination. He is later Found on Site. But his friends and family never know what happened because the remains at the crash site are Beyond Recognition.

Nadler’s tubular-steel studies with their unexpected twists and turns are reminiscent of American David Smith’s 1950s metal calligraphy. Like the new British sculptors, including Bill Woodrow and Richard Deacon, Nadler’s artwork alludes to both engineered forms (airplane wings, crutches, clutches, and shoulder straps) and biomorphic shapes (torsos, pelvises, and rib cages). Nadler’s particular power lies in his ability to translate these elements into a pathos suggestive of classical Greek drama in some future civilization where life-forms have become a seamless combination of the mechanical and biological. These futuristic entities are sleek and swift, but they are still subject to pilot error and mechanical failure. In spite of their advanced design, they are like Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun. There is daring, imagination, tragedy (and probably a bit of hubris) in these crash sites. Nadler believes there is also hope: “Twisted in the wreckage is more than mere failure. Through trial and error, regrouping and, most importantly, will, future attempts follow. They have to. Progress, after all, depends on it.”

Take a risk. Get to know some of the people in Looney’s worlds. Pilot one of Nadler’s crashed sculptures (whose wounded shapes still contain tremendous tensile energy) to a safe zone that advances science but also protects the natural world. And look into your own psyche as you explore the densely layered Rorschachs of the American and global mind contained in Hankins’ apocalyptic visions.

“Calculus of Risk,” at Marshall Arts through June 6th.