Author: Carol Knowles

Categories
Art Art Feature

Possibilities

Harrington Brown Gallery’s current exhibition, “Dancing into Fall with Contemporary Art,” includes work by technically skilled, strikingly original artists all new to the Memphis art scene.

For his still-life study Pink Fiction, Philip Jackson convincingly re-creates the slimy, uncooked white of an egg inside a water glass. The hint of red in the yolk heightens our sense that life has been cracked wide open. A bright-pink plastic egg — floating just above the glass and lightly touching its lip — captures the crass commercialism and higher ideas of Easter. What is most real, most incorruptible?

In Joyce Petrina’s bronze figure titled P, full breasts rest on top of a large, elegant womb that has been opened up to reveal the fully formed fetus inside — kicking up its feet, ready to jump into life. The mother’s huge trunk-like ankles and feet, firmly planted on the ground, help the woman balance her precious load. Her well-worn face, sunken cheeks, and Giacometti-like skull capture the grandeur and everyday pathos of motherhood.

At Harrington Brown through October 7th

The most memorable paintings in Hamlett Dobbins’ exhibition, “The River Beneath Us” at David Lusk, consist of shapes floating in fields of color so radiant they appear lit from within. Especially expressive line work and complex palettes feel endlessly evocative in pieces such as Untitled (I.V./G.L.M./T.L.W.), a 7-foot-tall painting referencing much of art history as a storybook figure morphs into a frenzied Looney Tunes character into a Cubist portrait that breaks down into pure abstraction.

Even Dobbins’ smallest works look monumental. The 20-by-22-inch work Untitled (for J.W./R.) pans out for an aerial view that suggests how this artist sees the world as well as the process of painting. An opalescent-lemon planet floats in space the color of flesh tones and sand. Dobbins saves his deep-blue and iron-rich earth tones for a silhouetted shape that looks like a butterfly made from the madras cloth that changes color and shape with each washing. In a body of work consisting of 18 paintings — each remarkably different from the next — Dobbins reminds us of the infinite possibilities of matter, mind, and paint.

At David Lusk through September 25th

For L Ross’ September exhibition “Duality,” Pam Hassler, painter, enamelist, and metalsmith, has created a one-of-a-kind body of work in which a copper disc painted with gold leaf and fine-art enamels are mounted on an acrylic painting. Strips of raw, hammered copper fused onto the face of the metal orbs look like coiled serpents glistening in the sun. The serpents never touch their tails, never spin into Ouroboros-like circles symbolizing unity and perfection. Instead, these are worlds in the making in which coiled copper unfurls koru-like across desert sands, seas, and solar systems.

Sometimes Hassler’s expressive black brushstrokes look calligraphic. At times, they look architectural, like the gate posts of a Shinto shrine. In her mixed-media painting Return to Sender II, Hassler’s bold black writing becomes more energized, rolls like thunder across the top of the planet, and ricochets into the void. Gold leaf falls into red-hot lava, capturing the sheer beauty and raw power of creation.

 Helen Phillips’ raku-fired bowls, birdhouses, and ducks, also on view at L Ross, are some of the most evocative works of her career. Into the Shining Sea suggests the world and everything in it. Crackled and glazed thalo blue on the outside, sooty on top, and a lustrous umber inside, this exquisitely formed ceramic vessel is the clear-blue bowl of heaven, is the parched earth, is the chasm that cradles the deep-green sea.

There is poignant humor here as well. In Wisdom of Silence, a singed duck wearing a metal collar and long monk-like robe glides along, cloaked and shackled for an outrageous mix of majesty, misery, slapstick, and spirituality.

At L Ross through

September 28th

Categories
Art Art Feature

Seen and Unseen

Clare Torina’s most powerful paintings in the Dixon Gallery & Gardens’ show “In the Blood” trace a woman’s journey from subjugation to self-empowerment. In Hysteria — a diptych that references the now-debunked 19th-century medical diagnosis describing sexually frustrated women as diseased and neurotic — a beautiful woman appears on the verge of sobbing or screaming. Her nostrils flare. Her face muscles tense. She is back-dropped by pitch-black shadows and a green so acidic it suggests nausea. The screeching baboon in the painting to her left further heightens our sense of the terror and rage one feels when morally/sexually/ideologically subjected to the will of others.

Torina is master of metaphor as well as paint. The bright-white moisture that pools beneath the woman’s lower lip and streams down her chin and neck looks, at once, like milk, semen, and foaming at the mouth. In a world in which sexual and gender attitudes are often as misguided as ever — the artist reminds us — unmitigated rage can turn to madness.

Torina counterpoints Hysteria with Vision Quest, a self-portrait of the artist cloaked in her grandmother’s furs and backed by a landscape that brings to mind two masterworks: Thomas Cole’s portrait of a summer storm, Oxbow, and da Vinci’s enigmatic, atmospheric Mona Lisa. Torina’s modifications of the masterworks are telling. In the storm behind the artist, the clouds are darker, the rain more torrential. Torina’s five-by-six-foot torso not only dominates the surface of the painting like the figure in Mona Lisa, it also towers above the viewer. Her full-red lips appear ready to devour or engage us in passionate conversation as she weathers life’s storms, claims her own space, and explores her own psyche, including its darkest, most primal passages. 

Clare’s father, John Torina, takes a different but equally powerful path to “see” more clearly. Instead of searching the psyche, John Torina paints plein air in all seasons, all kinds of weather, at all times of the day. His large, windblown sunsets record thousands of variations of shape, hue, and light. His dark, wet fields reflect the panoramic dances playing out in the skies above. 

Look close. With one stroke of a brush loaded with several pigments, Torina nails the bright, nearly white chartreuse light that streaks across the thick carpet of grass in Pecan Grove. Torina’s observations are so acute, his technique so accomplished — this body of work elicits synesthetic responses — we feel as well as see the lush, warm grass in Pecan Grove and the crystalline cold surface of the frozen pond that mirrors a gray-blue winter sky in Sun and Ice.

In Nightfall, Torina convincingly captures the copper-red scattering of light as the sun drops below the horizon. This waning of energy is so seamless, we witness what could be the sun or a soul slipping from seen to unseen worlds as Torina takes us from spring to winter, from first to last light.

Through September 26th at the Dixon

You’ll find another powerful vision quest in Mary Reed’s Magic Carpet in David Perry Smith Gallery’s “Summer Group Exhibition.” In Reed’s mixed-media painting, a woman with luminously red hair wearing an equally iridescent dress sits on a huge polka-dotted quilt that fills most of the work. Running throughout the oversized, overstuffed Magic Carpet are ribbons the color of iron-rich soil. The woman’s face turns away from the viewer toward a swatch of umber fabric at top left that looks like a darkened window. Reed’s iconic redhead is the artist, is the viewer, is every woman (or man) whose passions simmer, whose full and fertile imagination is ready to soar.

Through August 31st at David Perry Smith

By combining poems of love and transcendence with digital images of a 19th-century maximum security prison, Jason Miller and Lauren Coulson have created “Poetic Visions,” a body of work at Material gallery that is at once spiritual and unnervingly personal.

The only still-intact objects in the crumbling prison cells are metal bed frames that stand as metaphor for our deepest passions and dreams. The beds are empty, the prisoners long dead, but we can still hear their emotions in Miller’s poems.

Miller and Coulson’s most powerful collaboration, Found My Love, reminds us that the imagination is much harder to imprison than the body. A long, arched hallway is blurred almost to abstraction by sunshine pouring through skylights on the ceiling. Across the center of the image Miller writes, “Found my love on the riverbed/Staring up through the flowing glass/into the clouds of dreams that passed.” This work serves as the show’s physical and spiritual climax as Coulson’s luminous photos of rot and Miller’s surreal poetry blur all boundaries and sound the clarion call: These tombs are about to open.

Through August 28th at Material

Categories
Art Art Feature

Hustle & Flow

In their current exhibition, “Cross Pollination,” mother/daughter duo Paula Temple and Ariel Baron-Robbins have filled Harrington Brown Gallery with watercolors, oils on canvas, collages, videos, and large drawings of nudes that take figure studies to the level of fine art. Two signature pieces — Temple’s The Last of the Honeysuckle and Baron-Robbins’ Kudzu — are good indices for the level of skill at which these two artists are operating. 

A full-figured woman in a frayed robe sits in an overstuffed chair in The Last of the Honeysuckle. This watercolor of fading Southern gentility is made particularly haunting by Temple’s accomplished handling of lamplight, which transforms the room’s floral wallpaper into a luminous garden and the woman’s face into a milk-white mask that captures, in equal measure, unflappable Southern matriarchy, the feminine mystique, and the nearly impenetrable nature of the human psyche.

By weaving yellow and gold honeysuckles into the fabric of a comfortable old robe, Temple adds a touch of humor and tops off a painting that’s as intricately patterned as one of Vuillard’s or Bonnard’s interiors. In spite of Honeysuckle‘s complex design, Temple’s colors and lines are laid down with assurance, and this painting is remarkably crisp, clear, and clean.

For collage paintings like Kudzu, Baron-Robbins draws organic and geometric motifs on large sheets of paper, shapes and reshapes her surfaces with torn pieces of discarded drawings, and then paints the layers with a mix of acrylic, graphite, and gouache. Rather than feeling stultified or impenetrable, this compellingly visceral painting, with its cool-gray shadows and pitch-black passages, is enticing. What would it be like to sink our hands into its dank surface, to stroke the stonework that appears to be eroding back into an unpruned, centuries-old garden?

Through August 3rd

“A Modernist Ouroboros” at Askew Nixon Ferguson Architects features the works of Adam Geary and Anthony Lee.

Geary paints scenes of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Having attended school, lived, and/or painted in these locales, Geary knows these world-class cities. He also knows how the noonday sun turns the tallest skyscraper in New York’s Union Station into a white monolith; he remembers the cracked window and peeling sill on the backside of the apartment complex where he lived in San Francisco; he still feels the pulse of these super-charged cities.

Without creating a hodgepodge of styles, Geary skillfully blends architectural details with expressive lines, nuanced color fields, and evocative shadows to capture the soul of a city as well as its shape. His most haunting work, Nob Hill, combines abstracted architecture (Diebenkorn and Thiebaud come to mind) with Rorschach inkblots. Dark washes of color flow out of the basements of tall lean hotels and skyscrapers, snake across a street, and touch the curb on the other side. These are late-afternoon shadows — night is approaching, the city spilling some of its secrets, taking on a more sensual, slightly ominous persona.  

Although the titles of Anthony Lee’s paintings feel, at first, enigmatic and possibly inscrutable, Lee’s use of an ancient alphabet, the Runes, as names for his abstractions proves surprisingly apropos. Like Lee’s artwork, the characters of the Runic alphabet are geometric shapes whose meanings (unity, transcendence, light, flow) beautifully evoke the attributes of art as well as of life. High-key colors (cylindrical spring greens and white orbs back-dropped by burnt siennas) make this body of work feel even more emotive and alive.

Described by the artist as “early video games, vintage cyberspace, and environments,” these finely tuned abstractions feel like moments of equipoise — pieces of the puzzle slipping into place, the mother board about to switch on, Pac-Man at the ready to race across a video screen eating dots and avoiding ghosts.

Through July 23rd

In March 2010, Rhodes College junior Justin Deere bought 80 disposable Kodaks with grant money he received from the Center for Outreach in the Development of the Arts (CODA).

A team of students gave the cameras to volunteers and staff members running soup kitchens and other nonprofits as well as to the Memphians these agencies serve. They asked the recipients to tell their story through photographs and to share their work in “Unsheltered Unseen.”

Some of the most provocative and poignant photographs produced by this project, all untitled and currently on view at Jack Robinson Gallery, include Shun Maxwell’s image of a man sleeping outdoors, in broad daylight, on bare cement. In another candid work by Maxwell, a group of comrades sit on a discarded couch on top of rubble next to barbed wire.

In an image by Terrie Cooper, a big black dog lies on a man’s lap in a brightly lit living room. Both creatures look grateful for a warm, safe, dry place in which to doze. Cro Wilhite captures another attempt to stay warm and dry in her unsettling portrait of a woman wrapped in a large green blanket, squatting on a dirty cement platform next to a potted plant beneath a handicapped parking sign.

In one of the show’s most playful and empowering works, Reginald D. McGregor uses his camera to record a man with “wheels,” warm winter clothing, and a big, easy smile hoisting his bicycle high in the air. In another image, by an unknown photographer, large white letters spelling out the word “Heal” are back-dropped by an artificial blue sky, which, in turn, is back-dropped by an unsettlingly real, nearly pitch-black night sky. The billboard’s small print reveals that this is an advertisement for a cancer institute. “Heal,” the billboard proclaims … in spite of life’s vagaries, calamities, diseases, and aging processes that, ultimately, claim us all.

The candid details and private moments of courage and pain in many of the photographs could only have been captured by someone who is homeless (or has experienced homelessness at some point in his/her life).

These works, in particular, affirm the human spirit’s resiliency, its ability to find hope and camaraderie in the most difficult of circumstances, and indeed its capacity to heal.   

All money generated by the sale of prints of photographs in the show goes to nonprofit organizations designated by the artists.

Categories
Art Art Feature

Almost Eden

Accomplished painter and university professor Beth Edwards is best known for portraits of vintage rubber dolls that provide wry insight into human nature and the American dream. For her current show, “Along the Way” at David Lusk, Edwards takes her toy dolls, ducks, and dogs out of their showcase homes and places them on the open range in Horse and Rider and into idyllic farmsteads in Happy Cow and Peaceable Kingdom. In the series of paintings titled “Meadow I-V,” there are breathtakingly blue skies, striking red poppies, and healthy, happy honeybees.

Lest we think she has lost her ironic edge, Edwards slips the work At Peace into the show. In this remarkable painting, Edvard Munch’s 1895 masterwork Death in a Sickroom hangs on the wall of one of Edwards’ dream homes. Numbed by grief, the Munch family looks anything but peaceful. This is pre-penicillin Norway, the number of childhood deaths is staggering, and Munch’s beloved sister Sophie is dying.

A baby duck with a strawberry doily on top of her head stands next to Munch’s portrait of despair. Her orange beak is slightly parted, eyes shut in reverie, fat cheeks turned white-gold by sunshine streaming through the window, her tiny wings raised in what looks like a spasm of joy. An ecstatic rubber duck next to the death scene initially feels jarring — what an outrageous juxtaposition, what an aesthetic affront. And yet, the longer I looked at this portrait of pure joy in the face of the world’s relentless sorrow — rather than wincing or guffawing — the more I wanted to weep and let go.

Through July 2nd

David Hinske is also after something rarified, almost ineffable in “Transcendental Vocabulary” at Art Under a Hot Tin Roof. In this exhibition of nonsensically titled luminous abstractions, Hinske asks us to let go of visual and verbal associations, to play in fields of free-flowing color shot through with light. 

Barely visible, thumb-sized smudges in several of the paintings conjure up the first bits of matter coalescing and the first artist making his/her signature mark with a chunk of charcoal in a Paleolithic cave. The rest of Hinske’s boundless and effervescent surfaces bring to mind cotton candy and Technicolor amoebas. Like Edwards’ surprisingly powerful rubber duck portrait of bliss, Hinske’s melted-popsicle pools of radiance are also a joy to behold.

Through June 26th

At first glance, the American flags, vintage photos, handmade prayer cabinets, and antique Bibles in “One Room Schoolhouse,” J.C. Graham’s Gallery Fifty Six exhibition, looks like a show full of feel-good patriotism and down-home religion. Take a good long look. Graham’s flags are torn, his vintage photos are the frightened mirthless faces of children too soon grown up, too quickly indoctrinated. The small pools of blood-red acrylic that seep through the bull’s-eye of a target and through a little boy’s jacket at heart level suggest emotional wounds at the center of us all. This is soul-rending, icon-shattering Americana. 

In the satisfyingly ironic, mixed-media work Confession, two boys with mischievous faces have written and rewritten “I will not confess” on a blackboard. On blackboards, school tablets, prayer cabinets, and soiled stripes of the American flag, Graham writes in urgent child-like scrawl: “Run, run run,” “Mary, Mary, Mary,” “Don’t you see,” “What’s the point?” Like these youngsters, Graham is not afraid to ask questions, to challenge authority.

Through June 30th

Lisa Jennings’ increasing mastery of collage is particularly powerful in “Presence,” the L Ross exhibition that honors ancient wisdom and the web of life. In her haunting self-portrait Body of Clay, Hair of Flowers, the artist’s face flows, nearly seamlessly, into her clothing, hair, and the vegetation surrounding her. This near-abstraction is not the facelessness of anonymity or the fractured psyche of cubism but a powerful reminder that psyche and substance are intimately connected.

A skilled sculptor as well as painter, Jennings carves found pieces of wood into figures like the roughhewn work titled Wisdom. The top of the head is gnawed away. Its skull is bleached white, its eyes are huge and hollow, and a branch is attached to the sternum of this fierce creature who still reaches out to embrace the world.

Jennings tints the the figure titled First Love with acrylics, balances a tree limb on top of her head, and places a stone tablet in her long supple arms. As beautiful as she is wise, First Love isn’t a lawgiver but a young woman who wears her heart on her sleeve (as well as a limb on her head), who learns to balance body/mind/spirit, who bears witness to a world that is equal parts whimsy, pain, and grace.

Through June 30th

Categories
Art Art Feature

Beautiful Creatures

Christopher St. John’s passionately painted, endlessly inventive exhibition “Icarus Transformed” at Harrington Brown re-envisions the Greek myth in which a boy fails to heed his father’s warning, flies too close to the sun, melts his wax-and-feather wings, falls into the sea, and drowns. Instead of being doomed by hubris, St. John’s protagonists — feminine versions of Icarus — defy their limitations, spread their wings/arms/fins/paws, and attempt to soar again and again and again.

Many of St. John’s creatures, as in A Strange Angel, survive the fall but have not quite worked out all the kinks. This bald, baby-faced angel with one white and one red wing, bright-pink genitalia, and a huge left arm (sprouting blue fur and industrial-grade fingernails) looks out at us with an ecstatic or perhaps maniacal smile.

In what looks like natural selection at warp speed, St. John’s oils on panel and more than 300 drawings mix and match seemingly endless permutations of species that stretch like pulled taffy in Melt the Wax, swell to the point of bursting in Severing Point, and flow like founts of blood in The Filter.

Naked except for lush pubic hair and with heads that look like lampshades joined at the cheek, two Icaruses sing in unison in Paper Dolls Sing Your Praise. Their wings have morphed into multiple and very full teets. Their foreheads sprout horns like a unicorn, another mythic creature noted for its beauty, purity, and faithfulness. Unashamed, uncensored, unabashedly inventive and alive, Paper Dolls, like all St. John’s creatures, suggest the most fatal flaw (and surest prescription for defeat), instead of hubris, is failure of the imagination.

Closing reception, Friday, April 30th

At Harrington Brown through May 4th

A wide range of genres depicting both grandeur and everyday pathos in “Venice in the Age of Canaletto,” the masterworks exploring often conflicting loyalties — to God, country, family, business, and pleasure — make Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s current exhibition a powerful meditation on what it means to be human in this or any other century.

The inspiration for the exhibition, The Grand Canal from the Campo San Vio by master scene painter Canaletto, creates the impression we are strolling along the campo. With deft strokes and telling details, Canaletto captures the attitude and physiognomy of strong, svelte seamen hoisting their sails, hauling in their nets. A brawny man in tattered clothing, perhaps a former seaman himself, stares out to sea. An invalid makes the most of a beautiful day by resting in the sunlight against a deteriorating palace wall. A master of perspective as well as architectural and figurative detail, Canaletto paints grand domed churches, the Customs House, more palaces along the banks of the canal, and dozens of ships in the far distance.

To further deepen our understanding of 18th-century Venice, a wide range of textiles, furniture, prints, and paintings have been gathered from museums and galleries across the country.

Beneath grand statuary, back-dropped by a serenely majestic body of water, a wealthy young couple dance The Minuet in Tiepolo’s oil on canvas on loan from the New Orleans Museum of Art. Crowds of revelers, of all ages and from all stations of life, pair off for pleasures more abandoned than the courtly minuet. Masqueraders at the center of Tiepolo’s carnival wear the tall conical hats and beak-nosed masks of Punchinello, a popular comedic character described in the show’s catalog as “embodying humanity’s cruelty and deceit” and “evoking the sorrows and poignancy of existence.”

While all the show’s mythological, historical, and religious paintings are masterfully executed, the most moving works, like The Minuet, possess a moral complexity that goes beyond the pursuit of pleasure, beyond the conquest of heaven and earthly principality.

Intended to be displayed as a pair, Sebastiano Ricci’s pendant paintings involve choices. In his dramatically staged, richly colored Jephthah and His Daughter, a Israelite general will keep his promise to God — to offer up the first living creature to emerge from his house upon his victorious return — though this means sacrificing his only child. In The Finding of Moses, in order to save a child, a daughter defies her father’s decree that all newborn sons of the Hebrews be slain.

At the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through May 9th

Categories
Art Art Feature

Being There

The paintings in “Altiplano,” Keiko Gonzalez’ exhibition at Lisa Kurts, are both abstract and achingly real. Gonzalez, a widely traveled, internationally respected artist, lives and paints in Altiplano, the vast Bolivian plateau flanked on all sides by peaks of the Andes. 

Many of Gonzalez’ paintings — such as Laja, Patacamaya, and Tren a Oruro — are named for small towns scattered across the Altiplano. One-story buildings at the very bottom of these works look minuscule compared to the imposing Andean peaks that rise above them. In his particularly powerful deep-red monochromes, we feel the passion of the artist as well as Altiplano’s rugged terrain as Gonzalez scrapes, scumbles, and gouges palette knives into layer after saturate layer of carmines, burgundies, corals, and brick-reds.

Thick passages of carmine slashed through with burgundy in the 72-by-72-inch pink-ochre painting Calamarca suggest a scarred rock face and the torn flesh of farmers who eke out a living in a beautiful, inhospitable terrain. Dark purples and midnight blues limned in white in Las Animas evoke the sub-zero temperatures and frozen mists of this 14,000-foot-high Andean plateau, where fierce winds make piercing sounds the locals describe as “voices of the ancestors.” 

At Lisa Kurts through April 30th

 

Like Keiko Gonzalez’ “Altiplano” paintings, some of the most powerful pastels in Kathleen Holder’s David Lusk exhibition “Okeanos” are large red monochromes. Rather than conjuring up primal emotion, raw earth, and bruised flesh, Holder’s pastels draw us deep into barely discernible syntheses of water, shadow, and light.

The velvety sheen of Holder’s mixes of powdered pigments and opalescent minerals create the impression that light is about to break through even her darkest passages — like the lavender-gray twilight in Okeanos II and the iridescent Okeanos V, in which a river rounds a bend beneath a pinpoint of light in a night sky. Four pinpoints of light, aligned horizontally across the center of this midnight-blue painting, conjure up otherworldly or quantum physical systems of communication (something akin, perhaps, to Bell’s Theorem) that crosses vast expanses of physical and psychic space.

Holder’s dark-red pastels evoke “Okeanos,” the Greek term for the cosmic river flowing between our universe and a sulfurous underworld. The pyramidal shape near the top of Okeanos I, the darkest and most iconic work in the show, could be Mount Olympus, the prow of a boat emerging from the mist — Holder’s symbol for accessing alternate states of consciousness — or the softly-glowing conical hat of a bishop (or wizard or fool), each radiating its owner’s special prowess.

Burgundy shadows at the center of the painting read as dark passages of the underworld or the psyche. Light breaks again at the bottom of Okeanos I — not as reflected light but as inner radiance — as Holder’s metaphorically complex mixture of mystery and myth draws us, increment by subtle increment, into the deepest pool of all: the human soul.

At David Lusk through April 24th

 

What to make of Peter Bowman’s exhibition, “Time and Space,” also at David Lusk? Bowman’s color schemes are unorthodox, his compositions are off-center, his lines of perspective are seriously askew. The centerpiece of his show is a studio table covered with empty paint tubes, mixing pans, palette knives, and what looks like a decade’s worth of slathered-on oils.

Is Bowman untrained or primitive or, perhaps, a faux folk artist? None of the above. In one of the most exuberant, inventive shows of his career, Bowman envisions God as a graceful frond that arcs up and into the painting on the wall in Untitled (Orchid). The frond’s spring-green tip is about to touch the stem of a brown pear (as rough-hewn as a lump of clay) in an ingenious update of Genesis and the Sistine Ceiling that suggests every act of creation is as powerful as the first.

Why stop there? Like a child, like the Buddha — Bowman sees the world with fresh eyes as he experiments with alternate universes and messes with time and space. In Untitled (Rising Sun), a free-floating pear (Bowman’s illusion is unsettlingly convincing) is backdropped by a red sun. Instead of rising above or dropping below the line of horizon, the bright-red disc embeds itself in a bank of snow.

Categories
Art Art Feature

To the Heart of Things

“Metal in Memphis” on display in the Dixon Gallery & Gardens’ Mallory and Wurtzburger Galleries features work by six sculptors, all of whom are also artists-in-residence at the National Ornamental Metal Museum: Jacob Brown, Kevin Burge, Andrew Dohner, Mary Catherine Floyd, Jim Masterson, and Jeannie Tomlinson-Saltmarsh.

From the sleek sterling-silver perfection of Burge’s art deco Cake Knife to the curled lip, misshapen throat, and pitted, pear-shaped body of Brown’s Rock Vase, a forged-steel homage to life’s imperfect beauty, assistant curator Julie Pierotti has gathered together artworks by sculptors who push their materials to the limit.

Floyd’s mastery of mild steel borders on alchemy as she convincingly simulates leathery sheaths in Cocoon, dark brocade in Vaughan Design Wallpaper Study II, and what could be the cratered surface of a moon in Vessel II. By fraying the top edge of this crescent-shaped work, Floyd also conjures up an ancient boat covered in animal hides and a bamboo basket in-the-making.

Tomlinson-Saltmarsh pushes meaning as well as metal to the limit in the cast-aluminum installation “Escaping the Net.” Using the heads of rubber baby dolls as molds, she creates what look like three torn pieces of tapestry. Viscerally compelling as well as metaphorically complex, we both see and feel the innocents’ attempts to disentangle or push their way through the metal netting. By adding tiny trolls, jack ‘o’ lanterns, clowns, and disembodied hands and feet to the tapestry, Tomlinson Saltmarsh takes us from whimsy to kitsch to horror. 

At the Dixon Gallery & Gardens through March 18th

Mike Coulson’s abstract landscapes in “Recent Paintings,” on display at Askew Nixon Ferguson Architects, evoke the world’s constant flux and passages of rare beauty. Layer after layer of what look like translucent skin, sky, and swaths of fabric in Stepping Out suggest deeply tanned beachcombers au naturel and back-dropped by piercingly blue sea and sky. They move in and out of the light beneath beach umbrellas with crisp-edged stripes that fade to gray to black, then lighten to near transparency as their colors bleach in the sun.

Coulson’s works — acrylic on canvas and inkjet prints — contain exuberant calligraphy and complex crosshatchings backed by seemingly endless variations of color and topped off with saturate stripes. Remarkably, they never look overworked or confused or muddy. 

As titles like Awakening, Through the Middle, Peeling an Onion, Heart of My Heart, and Eye of the Needle suggest, Coulson attempts to get to the physical, emotional, and psychological heart of things. In Sanctuary, he creates a safe haven that brings to mind sunlight and breezes moving through the Venetian blinds of an open window and across the walls of a room in which we nap. Depending on how deeply we doze and each wall’s proximity to the light, Coulson’s subtly modulated color fields, brick-red, burnt-orange, raw sienna, and umber bleed into one another. Luminous orange threads (cords to the Venetian blinds, perhaps, or fleeting dream images) wafting across the surface of the painting make Sanctuary one of the most evocative works in this or any other current show.

At Askew Nixon Ferguson through March 12th

Categories
Art Art Feature

Top Form

For “A Delicate Balance,” the mixed-media installation in the ArtLab at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, Colin Kidder and John Morgan turn toy balloons into fine art. They bend, twist, wrap, and blow rubber balloons into amalgams of vegetable and animal life as they explore what happens when nature’s delicate balance is poisoned, globally warmed, and irradiated almost to extinction.

The only recognizable creatures in their post-apocalyptic jungle are the hummingbirds Kidder and Morgan have sculpted from Polymer clay. While the birds’ tufted bodies and wing feathers are still intact, their beaks are now pointed metal darts sharp enough to pierce the rubbery hides.

And it looks like they’ll be needing them as they hover and dart just beyond the reach of the hundreds of deep-purple, opalescent-orange, and electric-blue tentacles that reach out from the walls or scurry across ArtLab’s floor dragging what look like smooth pink intestines — turned inside out — behind them. Their bellies are stretched to the point of bursting as these phosphorescent, toxic creatures allure and then poison unsuspecting prey.

As edgy as they are instructive, Kidder and Morgan’s original, beautiful, and topical mutants make “A Delicate Affair” a must-see exhibition.

Through February 27th

In Pinkney Herbert’s four large pastel drawings at Playhouse on the Square, energy builds, coalesces into increasingly complex shapes, and culminates in a 100-by-125-inch pastel titled Alpha, one of the most inventive works of Herbert’s career.

A softly glowing, sable shadow, hovering in the background, sucks us in as we are swept across the surface by a spinning serpent. Something more profound is suggested by the serpent’s huge, hinged mouth, its deeply furrowed green forehead crowned with tufts of feathers or leaves, and the threadlike umbilical chord that loosely ties the free-floating shadow (womb? black hole?) to the creature’s belly where large black spermatozoa gestate. Herbert has assembled characters from several creation stories including Mesoamerica’s Quetzalcoatl, the British Isles’ Green Man, and the male and female principles of Shiva, the Hindu god dancing the world into existence.

Mounted in Playhouse on the Square’s impressive new performance and gallery space, Alpha can be read as metaphor for all artists (playwrights, actors, musicians) attempting to shape new ideas and new art forms out of the primordial stew.

Through February 22nd

Christian Brothers University’s current exhibition “Raw Silk” provides viewers with the opportunity to see the collages and silk paintings of two accomplished fabric artists working at the top of their form.

It’s late autumn in Japanese Torii, Contance Grayson’s most evocative collage, in which hundreds of pieces of kimono and Japanese money, stamps, advertising flyers, and vintage postcards are layered and stitched into a deeply textured tapestry of the gardens, sea coast, mountains, and Shinto shrines of Japan. Grayson take us through the gate of a shrine into the courtyard beyond where a tiny figure (the only human presence in the piece) meditates in the garden.

Phyllis Boger’s dyes and resist on silk include crisp, colorful, child-like geometries of Italian hill towns and translucent mosaics. But Boger’s most moving and strikingly beautiful work is Procession.

A weathered copper roof tops a sagging, deep-red facade. Three hooded figures, completely in shadow, stand on mottled royal-blue and teal tiles. One of the figures raises his cloaked arms and gives thanks for the tiny windows of light, umber woods, and rolling fields that border his town. Deep-green and raw-sienna shadows swirling inside the penitent suggest that, instead of merely going through the motions, he deeply feels the ritual he performs.

Through March 11th

Elisha Gold is best known for his metal sculpture, such as the nine-foot sunflower planted at Memphis Botanic Garden whose face is covered with 700 rounds of ammunition instead of seeds.

For Gallery Fifty Six’s current show “Forgive Your Enemies,” Gold has mounted a series of paintings that are as sardonic, socially conscious, and politically astute as his sculpture. 

Replete with Ben-Day dots and comic-book-inspired scenes of military battle and beautiful women, Gold’s slick and crisp-edged enamel paintings are, in part, homage to Roy Lichtenstein. In Gold’s particularly chilling portrait of cynicism and presumed superiority, a socialite raises her glass of champagne and toasts the viewer with the work’s title, It’s True. The Bigger the Lie, the More Believe.

Categories
Art Art Feature

Full Throttle

From Elizabeth Alley’s saturate, crisp-edged depictions of the 1950s in Perry Nicole’s 10th Anniversary Exhibition to Mary Stubbs’ black-and-white infrared photography at the Buckman to Daisy Craddock’s brooding Southern landscapes at David Lusk, Memphis galleries are bringing in the new year with shows that run the gamut of sensibility and style.

Rod Moorhead, one of Perry Nicole’s newest artists, counterpoints Elizabeth Alley’s paintings of starched white blouses and Danish modern divans with Furies #6, a pit-fired clay sculpture of a young woman who appears to take shape or to decompose in front of our eyes. Pieces of cloth (or perhaps Eden’s proverbial serpents) wrap around the loins and barely pubescent breasts of a creature who looks like a hybrid of a fallen angel and teenage Eve. We can see the sculptor’s thumbprints in the figure’s ruffled, sooty brown wings and the armless, half-formed body that still looks malleable. The half-closed eyes and relaxed mouth (in limbo? a little dazed?) complete Moorhead’s haunting evocation of what it feels like to be human, to be able to glimpse the divine while still trapped in a mortal coil.

Perry Nicole’s anniversary exhibition also provides viewers with an opportunity to see, side by side, works by a wide range of accomplished landscape artists, including Martha Kelly’s signature vision of summer, Top of the Island, in which a canopy of trees casts cool, dark shadows across a grassy field that looks lime-green in full sunlight.

Instead of the expressive female forms for which she is best known, Mary Reed contributes textured, sinuous landscapes to the show. In Boundaries, for example, the bare branches of a misshapen tree reach out toward a winding river and layers of handmade paper, fabric, and paint suggest the heft and roughhewn surface of large boulders as well as the rise and fall of waters rushing toward us.

Arline Jernigan fearlessly works and reworks the surface of her mixed-media, nearly monochromatic painting Flight. We soar through overcast skies past crumbling limestone rock faces, where plant life just begins to take hold in the crevices, where ideas just begin to take shape on an almost blank tabula rasa that is one of the subtlest and most assured works in the show.

Through February 26th 

TU, a touring company noted for its inventive syntheses of dance forms (including ballet, contemporary, and African), performs Friday, January 29th, at the Buckman Performing & Fine Arts Center. TU’s choreography has been described as “beautiful, intelligent and singularly wrought.” The same can be said of the watercolors, ceramics, and black-and-white photography mounted just outside the Buckman auditorium in the Levy Gallery’s January exhibition, “Seen, Shaped, Considered: Works Inspired by the Natural World.”

In one of the most mature works of her career, Mary Stubbs — a photographer noted for images of crosses and church steeples — evokes transcendence with infrared light and a trinity of trees. The trees at bottom left and bottom right of Beyond the Moment are barren. Across the top of the work, branches of a third tree are covered with buds backdropped by luminous jet contrails and a preternaturally dark sky.

Anne Froning Wike creates a sense of wonder with ceramics. A prime example is Lotus Gazing Bowl — Amethyst, a clay vessel shaped out of ever-widening circles of translucent mauve petals flecked with dark green. At the center of this inventive, exquisitely beautiful mandala is a tiny pale-pink rose.

Clouds roll across the top edge of Tom Pellet’s satisfyingly complex, delicately observed watercolor All That Glitters. Near the bottom, a geometric abstraction of greens and corals repeats the colors in the leaves and petals of a large camellia that fills the rest of the work.

Through February 12th

Massive oaks, magnolias, and crepe myrtles weighed down with dusty mauve blossoms nearly fill the canvases in “Points South,” Daisy Craddock’s show at David Lusk. There are no breezes, no rippled waters, no rustling of olive-green foliage in Craddock’s oil-on-linen Magnolia, Midday. Instead, the placid gray surface of a lake reflects an overcast sky. In hands less skilled than Craddock’s, colors muted and images blurred by thick atmosphere could feel suffocating.

For viewers who both rue and revere the Deep South’s all-encompassing humidity (including Craddock, who grew up in Memphis in the ’50s when open porches and ceiling fans were the norm, not central air-conditioning), Craddock’s honest and elegiac paintings register as brooding rather than oppressive, contemplative instead of languishing.

Categories
Art Art Feature

Tough Times

It was one heck of a year for Memphis art. The tougher things got, the more sardonic, surreal, and soul-searching artists became with their works.

Universities, museums, and galleries, also reflective of the times, mounted particularly moving exhibitions. Memphis College of Art’s January exhibition, “Close to Home: African American Folk Art from Memphis Collectors,” featured one of Hawkins Bolden’s untitled scarecrows. Made out of pots drilled full of holes and held together with brooms and frayed fabric, Bolden’s deeply textured testament to life conjured bullet-riddled WWI helmets on top of old wooden crosses and Don Quixote fighting injustice atop a broomstick horse.

For its summer show, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art exhibited 81 of Jacob Lawrence’s prints, including his masterworks, “The Legend of John Brown” series. These spare works were poignantly apropos for challenges we face today. In screenprint No. 1, Christ hangs on the cross back-dropped by what looks like fast-moving storm clouds, the wings of a large raven, or an omen — readings that reminded us that Christ’s crucifixion was a dark drama about government brutality and warring religious factions as well as the hope for redemption. 

“Lichtenstein in Process,” on view through January 17th at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, includes eye-popping, comic-book-inspired collages, etheric landscapes, wry homages to modern masters, and one of the most moving works of Lichtenstein’s career, Collage for the Sower.

Lauren Coulson’s fall show at Jack Robinson Gallery featured photos taken in Europe. By manually winding the black-and-white film in her inexpensive camera, Coulson made multiple exposures of crumbling statues and eroding architecture and clock towers. These blurred and distorted images were powerful portraits not of grand cathedrals or great generals but of time itself.

Jason Miller filled the rest of Jack Robinson’s fall show with kaleidoscopic mixes of digital images that included department-store Santas, Sunday school portraits of Christ, and corporate logos. Initially dizzying, the open-ended symbolism of Miller’s “Energy Fortress Series” and his free-flowing “Digital Mandalas” ultimately celebrated humankind’s ability to cut through corporate spin and childhood fantasy, to embrace what Miller described as “a more open form … where imagination and spirituality outweigh the need to belong to particular religious sects.”

Nine September exhibitions, collectively titled “Greely Myatt: and exactly Twenty Years,” celebrated Myatt’s sly humor and down-home wisdom in venues as varied as the Clough-Hanson Gallery, the National Ornamental Metal Museum, and the P&H Café. In A Brief History of Sculpture at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, soap bubbles spilled down the sides of a worn wooden plinth as Myatt took sculpture off its pedestal and suggested that art, rather than being concise or categorical, is effervescent and ever-changing. For his show at David Lusk Gallery, Myatt carved a wooden beam into a freestanding pair of pants titled Like a Lighthouse, which he mounted on a table. This wry, viscerally compelling sexual icon also served as a poignant symbol for the emptiness and isolation we sometimes feel in spite of the stimuli that flow 24/7 in our wired-up, plugged-in, cyber-spaced world.

John McIntire was at his quirky, cutting-edge best in the nearly seamless syntheses of the cerebral, the spiritual, and the sensual that shaped his female torsos in a November show at Perry Nicole Fine Art.

The most resonant metaphors for 2009 were the brambles and weathered branches that worked their way out of underbrush and crossed a sometimes arid, sometimes golden-ochre earth in Jeri Ledbetter’s November show of paintings, “Mano a Mano II,” at L Ross Gallery. Charcoal washes coalesced into the death throes of some prehistoric beast in Cielo II. Above the creature, in wild scribbles that arced and jabbed across a piercingly blue sky, we could feel both the artist’s and the ancient beast’s rage for life.