Author: Carol Knowles

Brilliance in the Lost Moment of Hesitation,” Ali Cavanaugh’s show at
L Ross Gallery, explores the courage and wisdom of Milly Naeger, a
teenager battling cancer. In the artist’s statement for her show,
Cavanaugh congratulates Milly on “a battle well fought.” At the time of
the photo shoots, on which Cavanaugh’s current body of work is based,
Milly did not know what the outcome of her treatment would be.

In Interior Light, one of the show’s most memorable works,
Milly’s arms are outstretched, her palms up and open. The striking
coral-and-teal diamond pattern of the teenager’s arm warmers brings to
mind the leggings worn by jesters at Renaissance fairs. Milly’s
movements, however, are neither antic like that of a Harlequin nor
frenzied like the jig of a memento mori designed to strike fear in the
souls of mortals. The slow, undulating movements of Milly’s wrist and
arms are similar to those flexible graces of the mudra dancers of
India.

Cavanaugh’s 50 or so layers of nearly transparent washes create
colors so luminous that Milly looks lit from the inside as well as
bathed in the pure light suggested by the stark-white plaster panel on
which Cavanaugh paints. Eyes closed and head bent to the side, Milly
appears to be listening, aware of the feelings and physical sensations
moving through her, experiencing each moment as fully as she can. In
spite of the knowledge that her body may fail her and that sooner or
later death claims all of us, Milly dances with gratitude and
grace.

This is a must-see show — not only because Cavanaugh is one of
the few accomplished fresco painters working in the U.S. today or
because she has mastered body language and light, but because
Cavanaugh’s themes are universal. In this pantomime, one of the
bravest, most honest statements regarding the human condition, Milly
dances for us all. Through June 30th The genius of
Wayne Edge’s best works lies in this sculptor’s ability to suggest the
whole cosmos in one piece but still keep his composition open and
elegant.

Empty space lies at the center of Sunrise on Glass Butte, the
largest, most supercharged work in Edge’s David Lusk exhibition,
“Gazing at Distant Mountains.”

Tiny pieces of quartz attached to a jumble of dark-brown, nearly
black sticks of wenge wood, pointing in all directions, could be a
shower of shooting stars or the first glints of sunrise. This evocative
work suggests kinetic and quantum as well as galactic energy. Sticks of
wenge at the bottom, tipped with bits of translucent, smoky-gray
volcanic glass, remind us that energy roils not only throughout the
cosmos but also inside earth’s molten core.

Large, slightly contoured pieces of wenge trace what looks like the
international flight pattern of an airline. Bottom left, a larger,
tautly arched bow feels like the bowl of heaven enfolding earth and
starlight into the palpable blanket of night.

Keep studying this remarkable work and you’ll see the last glints of
light in the universe sucked into the gaping mouth of a black hole and
the fast-frame action of two samurai warriors engaging in the swordplay
of kendo, another art form that Edge has mastered. Through July
3rd

One of the most moving paintings in “Caballo de Silueta,” Mary Cour
Burrows’ Perry Nicole Fine Arts show of equestrian studies and stray
dogs, is Perro Perdito.

In this encaustic on panel, the sheen of beeswax becomes the slick
sweaty fur of a dog Burrows photographed in Guanajuato, Mexico, last
summer. The subject of Perro Perdito looks up at us with eyes
clouded over with cataracts. A background of Van Gogh-like whorls helps
us feel what the dog feels — nauseous and dizzy from lack of
sleep and sustenance. Burrows paints only the front part of the dog as
he walks past us, left leg extended far forward, in a gait that feels
both desperate and determined. He will walk until he finds water, food,
compassion, or until he drops. “Perro Perdito” keeps moving because he
must. Through July 3rd

Currently at the P&H Café is Christopher Robin’s “Will
Work 4 Food.” This is a show loaded with social and sexual satire with
a beautiful nude, a motley crew of contemporary artists behaving like a
band of boisterous Renaissance minstrels, and a portrait of
singer/songwriter Davy Ray Bennett. Working in the style of
15th-century Northern Renaissance painters’ careful observation and
multiple layers of glaze, Robin lays the soul as well as the skin of
his nude model bare and captures Bennett’s unsettling synthesis of the
sensitive and the sardonic, which, like his songs, cuts to the bone.
Through July 7th

Mississippi River Flood by Saj Crone

Everything about the exhibition “Artists’ Link, Memphis Area Visual
Artists” is top-notch, including its venue, the Dixon Gallery &
Gardens, and the high-quality catalog. Barbara Satterfield, director of
the Baum Gallery of Fine Art at the University of Central Arkansas, has
chosen artworks representing a wide range of mediums and genres created
by artists pushing their signature styles in new directions.

In Annabelle Meacham’s acrylic-on-panel Paper Moon, a sharply
angled origami bird points up toward a bouquet of calla lilies taped to
burnt-sienna wallpaper printed with an ochre-gray flower motif.
Meacham’s high-flying paper bird, lilies the color of moonlight, and
sly title make this work a deeply satisfying meditation on the fine
line between illusion and reality.

Saj Crone’s C-print Mississippi River Flood slides our point
of view down the trunks of tall trees, deep into flood-stage waters,
and around the bend of a river. Blurred by mist and the soft ripples in
the water, Crone’s image appears more painterly than photographic. Tree
trunks floating along the banks look like they’ve been slathered with
brushstrokes of gray and green oils.

Two of the exhibition’s portraits — Sue Foell’s Girl with
Blue Pitcher and J. Powell Miller’s Melissa — are
poignant companion pieces regarding coming of age. Foell’s daughter,
age 9, gently presses a blue pitcher against her chest. Her beautiful,
gentle, contemplative face, tinged with sadness, records life’s
fragility as much as its promise. Miller’s model, “Melissa,” is close
in age but worlds apart in attitude. Her face, handsome and strong,
looks up at the viewer — lips pursed, chin thrust forward,
determined to meet life head-on.

Richard Bowman’s dead branches appear still full of energy as they
twist and turn across the surface of his painting Yellow Vase,
Orange Bowl. Bowman’s complex, often unorthodox palettes — in
this painting, orange, chartreuse, and blood-red backdropped by
brilliant lavender — and haunting syntheses of beauty and decay
are both upsetting and stimulating.

Mickey Hollis’ jazzed, crowded, nearly chaotic Ocean Series II,
Blue feels like a visual equivalent for the digital networks that
keep our world buzzing.

For her black-and-white oil on canvas Horsin’ Around, Betsy
Bird reaches deep into childhood and her knowledge of art history and
comes up with a herd of quirky but beautiful creatures that look like
hybrids of saw horses, stick figures, African motifs, and Franz Kline
abstractions.

There are no cross-outs or paint-overs in Bill Branch’s confident
watercolor Overlooking the Rio Grande. With minimal information
(transparent washes, touches of ochre, a pale blue ribbon), Branch
re-creates wisps of clouds, sheer rock faces, patches of sagebrush, and
the Rio Grande winding through an arid landscape.

Bill Bailey is a skilled Impressionist. In Rainy Day,
trolley-car lights bleed into the fog. With the work’s blurred-edge and
domed building topped by a sooty-ochre sky, Bailey evokes the mystery,
ambience, and perhaps early stages of pollution of a centuries-old
city.

In John Sosh’s abstract painting Hidden Agenda, Cy
Twombly-like doodles, by turns figurative, iconic, and calligraphic,
make the painting a powerful portrait of the
experimental/ephemeral/expressive.

The artistic sensibilities of Constance Grayson’s collage textile
La Primavera lie somewhere between those of the quilts of Gees
Bend and Chinese landscape painters. Grayson’s lean, lush, and layered
textile evokes the Italian countryside in Umbria with its mosaic of
pines, fields of sunflowers and wheat, and patches of blue for the
lakes that dot the region.

Some of the show’s most evocative works are the smallest, including
Phyllis Boger’s 5-by-7-inch oil on canvas Golden Day. Clouds,
quickly gestured, move across a Cezanne-like patchwork of craggy
mountains. In this tiny, pared-down landscape, the crimson and ochre
and stark-white color fields could be iron-rich deposits, meadows of
flowers, or roiling streams. This simultaneously intimate and majestic
scene suggests how we shorthand and downsize our experiences of
vastness and grandeur so that we can hold them in memory and the palm
of our hand. Through June 21st

Showing at David Lusk Gallery is Dwayne Butcher’s exhibit “The
Genius Hasn’t Killed Me Yet.” Butcher, a self-described redneck,
rabble-rouser, car thief, and painter/curator/activist/blogger/editor,
covers a lot of ground in this multimedia exhibition. His rapid-fire,
unabashedly honest poetry, passionately opinionated Top 10 lists, video
syntheses of kitsch and fine art, and luminous paintings — as
shiny and slick as the paint jobs on cars he stole as a youth —
reveal a supercharged mind that moves in dozens of directions and an
artist who finds beauty, irony, and pleasure in nearly every
moment.

Dwayne Butcher’s She Woke Me Up To Say She Charged by the Hour

Among his videos is Truck Pool, showing the artist drinking
beer and smoking stogies while listening to classical music and
floating in a makeshift pool in the back of his pickup. Then there’s
his abstract painting She Woke Me Up To Say She Charged by the
Hour, a work with thick, light-blue acrylic dripping into pale
peach, like consciousness slowly moving into the light of dawn. Grids
of black ink marks look architectural, like long barracks and lean
skyscrapers. The dense black mesh also suggests window or door screens
through which we glimpse endless stories in the big city.

There are no ink marks, no lines of narrative in Butcher’s
Soothes the Palette, a seamless work in which lavender morphs
into an even paler peach. As always, you’ll find a touch of Butcher’s
trademark irony — his most ethereal work is painted on a hinged,
free-standing sandwich board instead of canvas.

Jana Joplin’s Elaborate

Linda Disney’s latest show, also at David Lusk, includes some of the
best works of the artist’s career. Her mastery of plein-air painting is
especially apparent in View From the Bridge. Disney nails the
scene of a river at sunset, not with the crisp-edged hues of
photo-realism or the blurred approximations of impressionism. Instead,
she records shadows within shadows to capture half-lights and afterglow
as a crimson, then mauve, then lavender sunset is reflected in the
slow-moving waters of a river and the foliage along the edge of its
banks. Both Butcher’s and Disney’s shows are through May
30th

Perry Nicole’s current show, “The May Exhibition,” is a satisfying
mix of Linda Cordner’s lyrical floral abstractions, Ellen Fink’s
paintings of birds and butterflies, John Whipple’s strikingly original
mixed-media sculptures, and Lynn Whipple’s darkly funny combinations of
folk art, fairy tales, and photos of relatives several generations
removed.

Lynn Whipple’s Slightly Scary Sally

In the mixed-media painting Slightly Scary Sally, one of Lynn
Whipple’s ancestors looks haunted, hamstrung by rigid moral codes and
class distinctions. The outline of a fine gown is drawn in graphite
around Sally’s gray woolen skirt and high lace boots. Her hair is
pulled back into a tight bun. Dabs of white paint become a string of
pearls; polka dots on translucent insect wings sprout from Sally’s
back. Two polka dots turn Sally’s pupils into super-luminous, ghoulish
eyes. Faint lines of graphite extend from her head and mouth like
antennae, and her tongue coils, ready to snag the tiny gnat close to
her face or to reach deep into a flower. Behind Sally’s spartan facade,
we glimpse, perhaps, a woman driven to distraction because she never
got to taste the honey. Through May 30th

View From the Bridge, by Linda Disney: on view at David Lusk Gallery through May 30th

One of the most evocative works in “Bloom,” Jana Joplin’s
current exhibition at Gallery 56, is the deep-purple, white-tipped
iris, titled Elaborate. Painted up-close and at an angle, at
first glance Elaborate looks like a full-figured, wasp-waisted
can-can dancer kicking her leg high in the air, revealing layers of
petticoats beneath her purple skirt. Set against an umber, almost
ebony, background this brilliant flower (or dancer) is a striking
metaphor for the fertile earth that nourishes, the brief moment of
glory, for both plants and animals, and then the letting go.
Through May 30th

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s current exhibition, “Pieced and
Patterned: Southern Quilts 1840-1940,” covers a pivotal century in
American history. The materials and designs on display as well as the
texts and placards that accompany them are full of rich asides and
insights into the political, economic, and social upheavals and the
dramatic changes in attitudes regarding race, class, and gender that
occurred during those 100 years. But what makes “Pieced and
Patterned” a must-see show is associate curator Stanton Thomas’
assemblage of quilts created with skill, passion, and originality.

Quilt – Snakes, by an unknown maker: on display at the Brooks in the museum’s current exhibition, ‘Pieced and Patterned: Southern Quilts 1840-1940’

In Eva Lena Harrington’s Quilt – Hatchet, nearly seven square
feet of row after row of small, white “hatchets” pieced on top of an
ebony background look more like a huge work of Op Art (stark, crisp,
geometric, pulsating) than a soft, hand-sewn quilt.

Hundreds of diamond-shaped pieces of silk, needle-pointed and pieced
with consummate skill, suggest facets of light in Quilt – Touching
Stars. Gaze for a while at the complex palette and kaleidoscopic
shape of nine stars radiating across 83 square inches of pale blue
silk, and the work begins to look like fabric art’s answer to the Big
Bang. The maker of the quilt is unknown. She was perhaps someone’s
wife, someone’s mother but not an artist in her own right. Her
anonymity speaks volumes about gender in the early 1800s.

The embroidered and pieced surface of Quilt – Snakes
accentuates the rise and fall of serpents slithering across a
blue-green background. Their complex bands of color suggest poisonous
vipers. The quilt’s vibrant colors and associations with warmth, deep
sleep, and dreams mesmerize even as we squirm and try to look away.

Through May 17th

Closing reception, Thursday, May 14th, 6-9 p.m.

In her L Ross Gallery exhibition “Footprint of the Ancients,” Lisa
Jennings gessoes fine handmade papers onto canvas, paints them with
acrylics, then scumbles and scrapes back through layers of paper and
paint to suggest Ireland’s limestone cliffs, cobalt waves churned by
Atlantic squalls, and curraghs, the ancient boats used to carry the
Irish between islands and along the coast.

With each successive exhibition, Jennings further masters
nuances of color, texture, and subtle figuration. Her gradation from
cadmium yellow to palest lemon in Green Days in a Forest
registers as luminous, nearly seamless light. We can almost feel the
biting cold in the frozen white-gold mists that fade to blue-gray in
Winter Moon. Light shining off what could be a slanted shoulder
and shin suggest the lift and turn of a body about to step out of
crumbling limestone.

The artist’s strikingly original motifs are complex enough to
suggest lines of narrative as well as psychological and physical
terrain. In Vessel, a blue-gray figure elongates, refracts, and
dissolves into a thalo sea. Complex patterns of drips and washes take
us down to pitch-black waters. Diagonal shafts of energy thrust us back
up to the surface where sunlight filters through Ireland’s ever-present
coastal mists, turning the oars and prow of an empty curragh into
gold.

Richard Gamble’s People Are Generally Trustworthy

Through May 31st

Artist, activist, and social satirist Niki Johnson has gathered
together works by 13 noted painters, sculptors, photographers, and
videographers for “Baker’s Dozen: An Unorthodox Benefit for UrbanArt,”
being held Friday, May 15th, in three Broad Avenue venues: Material,
UrbanArt, and Odessa. If you like your art layered with complex ideas
and irony, this is your kind of auction.

Liz Daggett’s recipe for art calls for equal parts passion, skill,
and originality as she projects her four-minute, multi-screen video
James Baker’s Dozen into the rounded cups of a six-muffin baking
tin. One of the round screens shows environmentalist James Baker’s
passionate, intelligent face as he shares 12 tips for saving energy and
the world. Some of the muffin-cup screens are portholes into the lives
of animals struggling to live in increasingly compromised environments.
Others serve as wormholes in time as Daggett splices in an early
television commercial asserting that particularly caustic cleansers are
safe as well as effective.

In Christian Westphal’s Nightlife, a man in silhouette
strides across cracked pavement backdropped by trash and glaring
streetlights. Westphal pulls off this noir scene of crumbling American
infrastructure with a can of industrial-grade spray paint.

In Richard Gamble’s unsettling and sardonic People Are Generally
Trustworthy, dark-red crime-scene tape is painted across the
urine-yellow bodies of two rabbits dressed in outfits that bring to
mind clowns and vaudeville performers. As we decimate rabbits’ warrens
in the name of urban sprawl, we defile these creatures in ways that
bring plenty of adjectives to mind (none of them synonymous with
“trustworthy”).

With humor and style, the exhibition’s 13 artists have also designed
limited-edition T-shirts. At 10 bucks per T, they’re the best art
bargains in town.

“The Baker’s Dozen” opening reception at UrbanArt, Material, and
Odessa, is Friday, May 15th, 6-8 p.m., $5. The silent auction is at
Odessa from 6 to 8 p.m. To preview auction items, go to nikijohnson.net.

Old Yeller by Niki Johnson

Daughter of an Immigrant by Jeff Zimmermann

Papaya and Sugar by Brendan Hudson

The Lost Scrolls of Poverty: Prayer Cloths and Altarpieces,” Nancy Wellington Bookhart’s exhibition at CBU’s Beverly and Sam Ross Gallery, is a soul-searing mix of religion and memoir. Across frayed, heavily painted canvases that look like ancient scrolls, Bookhart writes some of the Bible’s most poignant passages. In Pieta, she scrapes through burnt-sienna ruins, through burnt-umber palimpsests of souls, back down to the nap of the canvas where she writes, “They crucified him — King of Kings — drink the cup.”

There is passion here as well as pathos. In The Prayers of My Mother, Bookhart clips prayer cards with clothespins and collages them to tattered clotheslines. Some of the cards are blank. Some are scrawled with notes to God, to the artist’s mother, to herself. Red paint, dripped down the cards and smeared across the dark scumbled background, looks like fresh blood on old wounds. In The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, deep-red prayer cards give way to crimson brushstrokes swirled across a golden band at the top of the canvas.

The Ross Gallery’s long hours give viewers time to sort through these bruised testaments in ways the artist intended. With words as searing as her work, Bookhart writes, “If one could but endure the depth of hell — and arise from this darkness, they would become the very procurer of their fate.”

Through May 1st

You’ll find no generals, no celebrities, no corporate logos in the 58-by-152-foot mural Note of Hope, one of Memphis’ most monumental works of art. Funded by entrepreneur Chick Hill, organized by Rhodes College’s Center for Outreach in the Development of the Arts, and designed and painted by noted Chicago muralist Jeff Zimmermann, Note of Hope stands instead as a monument to all Memphians. The red, yellow-green, and gray-blue hands materializing out of a rainbow at far left of the work suggest not only the rich mix of races that make up our city but also the passion, potential for growth, and dark passages that make up all our lives whatever our nationality or creed.

The open hands hover above the waves of an ocean and beneath a skull-and-crossbones — open-ended symbolism that evokes the nearly infinite possibilities, positive and negative, that play out every day in a large metropolis. Two mothers — one African-American, the other white — mirror one another’s love and pride and aspirations for the infants they cradle. Their partners, painted in monotone, are emotionally unavailable, perhaps too absorbed in work to enjoy the present moment, or they could be mere shadows of what they were because of limited opportunities, dead-end jobs, dreams never realized.

Zimmermann continues his exploration of awareness and opportunity with a series of teenage faces — one in shadow, another in full sunlight, eyes closed. A third youth looks far left and appears to be scanning the horizon, wanting to take it all in.

Zimmermann’s cinematic stories and symbolism invite multiple interpretations and viewings. You can drive by the corner of Madison and Third anytime to see Note of Hope or park your car and sit on the grassy hill across from the mural that also serves as a left-field berm for the Memphis Redbirds. This open-air gallery never closes.

Opening reception: Sunday, April 26th, from 2 to 4 p.m.

The Marshall Arts one-night-only exhibition “Off the Wall” features work by Zimmermann, as well as Memphians Niki Johnson and Anthony Lee and Chicago muralist Brendan Hudson — three talented artists who are also helping Zimmermann mount the Note of Hope mural. 

Zimmermann’s startlingly alive Daughter of an Immigrant captures a teenager’s rich inner life. The young woman’s mouth relaxes, and her eyes, deep pools of blue and brown, look inward. Drips of paint along her cheeks, her face’s scumbled edges, and the tabula rasa in which she floats all heighten our impression that new ideas and feelings are just taking shape.

Old Yeller, Niki Johnson’s appliquéd portrait of Donald Trump, is a powerful counterpoint to Zimmermann’s art. Johnson masterfully handles a difficult medium as she convincingly replicates Trump’s thinning hair, flushed face, and the textures and colors inside his wide-open mouth. With trademark irony, Johnson chooses a title that brings to mind not only a senior citizen having a power tantrum but also the classic American movie about a brave and faithful dog.

Brendan Hudson’s moody abstractions of South American cityscapes, such as Papaya and Sugar, capture the lurid, beautiful colors of light shining through the haze of pollution. His translucent patches of color floating beside one another but never quite coalescing suggest the ephemeral, unsubstantial slums lining the hillsides of São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro.

In Anthony Lee’s painting Glyph-1.aop, the opalescent body of a seahorse curves into a Henry Moore-like nude reclining on a 1950s chartreuse divan beneath which Lee paints the sole of one of Philip Guston’s shoes. Lee’s synthesis of Art Nouveau grace, Henry Moore heft, and luminescent cartooning is a new direction for this artist and a mind-bendingly beautiful one.

Opening reception: Friday, April 24th, from 6 to 10 p.m.

above: Larry Edwards’ Wild Dog Pack

The 26th Annual Juried Student Exhibition at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis is a great opportunity to see in one venue some of the best young artists working in Memphis today.

With a tremendous level of skill, Christopher Robin replicates the glaze-on-panel techniques of 17th-century northern Renaissance masters who painted archetypal figures lit by candlelight. Robin’s painting Bugger’s Brawl, winner of the Undergraduate Award, wryly updates Georges de La Tour’s Beggars’ Brawl. Using his friends as models, Robin has created a motley crew of modern prophets, philosophers, brawlers, and troubadours dressed in T-shirts. On the far left, Robin replaces La Tour’s elderly matron who trembles and prays with a woman whose luminous face looks both addled and awestruck. The troupe’s traveling minstrel clutches his stringed instrument and laughs, presumably telling stories not of chivalry but 21st-century high jinks.

The figure with the long auburn hair in Raleigh Rodger’s Graduate Purchase Award-winning Deflection could be a young woman from almost any century. The most saturate, crisp-edged shape in this digital inkjet print is the deep-purple shadow that appears to split the woman in two. What is illusion? What is most intense, alive, and real? Perhaps, as Rodger’s photo seems to posit, it’s that ephemeral, almost ineffable moment when sunlight turns splashing water into starbursts and the palm of a young woman’s hand into molten gold.

The Best of Show Award-winner, Robert McCarroll’s Fiesta™ware, blue is a glowing, dark-blue ceramic piece that arcs back like the head of a cobra and writhes on top of a white pedestal. This sleek serpentine shape is punctuated not with fangs but with what look like the nuts and bolts of machinery. In an era of increasingly sophisticated robotics, artificial intelligence, and heat-resistant ceramic computer parts, McCarroll’s surprising synthesis of the phallic, mechanical, and the ceramic walks the fine line between the inanimate and animate, between high and low art.

Through April 18th

For the Memphis College of Art’s exhibition “A Dog’s Life,” University of Memphis painting professor Beth Edwards gathered works by talented artists from across the country. Their paintings and drawings tell stories about the deep bond that has existed between man and dog for millennia and the plight of animals displaced by recent economic crises and political and ecological disasters.

You could easily miss Rudy, the small gray dog in Katy Schneider’s oil on canvas Rudy’s Kitchen. In this poignant, uncompromisingly honest look at animals and owners who are just getting by, Rudy is as integral a part of the scene as the industrial-grade cookware, the peeling windowsill, and the gray window panes framed by chipped woodwork. Not that Rudy is complaining. The title as well as the image are worth a thousand words. This is Rudy’s kitchen, his world, his life.

As the title of Riva Lehrer’s charcoal drawing Family: Tom O’Dowd and Buddy suggests, Buddy is both a pet and a beloved companion. He sits on a bed next to his master who lies motionless beside him. Whether O’Dowd is asleep, disabled, or temporarily incapacitated, he can rest assured that this wet-nosed, bright-eyed mixed mongrel (one of the most alert, alive creatures in the show) will be there for him.

In Robert Warrens’ apocalyptic painting S.P.C.A. Pet Rescue, an old hound hunkers down in the bottom of a boat, a large black dog with wolf in its lineage stands at the prow, and pedigrees and mutts pile on top of each other. Another flood and another ark. But, here, instead of Noah, S.P.C.A. volunteers row past flooded homes gathering up animals. With lurid pinks, metallic blues, and folk-art-like figures, Warrens, an artist who experienced Hurricane Katrina firsthand, bears witness to the nightmarish, psychedelic landscape created by the storm that destroyed a major American city and turned New Orleans’ waters into a cesspool of chemical and animal waste.

The jagged lines, fragmented body parts, and howling faces in Larry Edwards’ pastel work Wild Dog Pack V create the impression that we are surrounded by creatures moving so fast we only catch glimpses of them. Edwards’ “wild” dogs could be feral, or perhaps they are ferocious because they are starving.

If the exhibition’s compelling visuals and poignant narratives move you to make a donation to the Humane Society of Memphis & Shelby County, that’s a good thing. For a $10 donation, you’ll receive the exhibition’s poster; for $15, the catalog; and for $20, the poster and the catalog. For more information, go to memphishumane.org.

Through April 10th

In his L Ross Gallery exhibition “Fortitude,” Anton Weiss takes the long view. Dark, cratered moons float above sienna and umber worlds. Loosely knit, ragged rectangles look like city-states coalescing and decaying, like civilizations rising and falling.

A scarred metal rectangle reinforces the bottom edge of one of Weiss’ most expressive works, Fortitude #5. Long slender lines of horizon, cut deep into the painting’s metal surface, divide a glowing earth from a luminous sky. Another rectangle at the top of the work dissolves into the soft-gray background.

Tested and tempered as a child in Yugoslavia during WWII, Weiss has learned the art of “fortitude” — how to live creatively and with conviction — what Weiss describes as being “always in revolt, looking for new, individual forms of expression.”
Through March 31st

Jared Small’s David Lusk show “Ramshackled Perfection” strikes viewers with a revelation: Sunlight transforms the most modest dwelling into a thing of beauty. Small also paints complex portraits of childhood. The child crowned with a silver tiara in It’s My Party folds her arms across her pink taffeta gown and slumps against a wall that sags, bleeds, dissolves. She looks baffled by her parents’ demand that she play the part of princess when her home is no castle.
Through March 28th

In her Perry Nicole exhibition, “Color Me Beautiful,” abstract impressionist Cathy Lancaster paints orange-reds that glow like hearths next to melting fields of snow in Winter. Her greens pulse with the light of sap rising in the fields of Spring. But the power of these paintings lies in their subtlety. Lancaster’s faintly drawn boundaries feel permeable. Her amorphous shapes hover and brush gently against one another. There’s lots of room in these paintings to pause and breathe, to immerse ourselves in Lancaster’s radiant washes of color.
Through March 31st

Demetrius Oliver asks us to entertain several points of view simultaneously as we explore worlds within worlds in “Sidereal,” his mixed-media exhibition at Clough-Hanson Gallery.

For the hauntingly original installation Almanac, scenes from the artist’s studio were reflected onto the surfaces of teakettles and photographed.

In one of the “teakettle” images, the artist’s camera sits on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and in another on top of Hazrat Inayat Khan’s The Mysticism of Sound and Music. The camera’s viewfinder looks at viewers looking at Oliver looking for new ways to understand the world.

Just when we think Oliver’s getting too esoteric, he pulls us back into the “real” world with wry, raw humor as he wraps uncooked bacon around his finger and blows into a trumpet.

Instead of sublime music or angelic choirs in the digital video Harmonic Spheres, you’ll hear what sound like tectonic plates grinding, foghorns blasting, and muffled trumpets wailing. The camera zooms in and out of smoke and slowly pans a dark globe that proves to be the back of Oliver’s head rather than the orbiting planets suggested by the title.
Through March 27th

Odessa kicked off 2009 with a “Painting and Politics” symposium the same night it opened the exhibition “Fearless Speech.” Art enthusiasts and activists packed the gallery. Instead of agenda-driven diatribes or political posters, Robin Savage and John Yoblanski presented paintings as passionate and complex as the ideas developed by the art professors who paneled the symposium.

Savage (aka Rob Canfield) blends art and activism with philosophy and history. Hordes of humanity press into one another as Conquistadors burn natives at the stake, Christ is crucified, and laborers work relentlessly in sugar-cane fields. In a painting titled Cain, one figure steps back from the mayhem. Instead of raising a dagger, Cain raises an apple and bites into the forbidden fruit, refusing to obey any power (God or country) that asks him to slay his brother.

The masses also press into one another in Carnival, but here the emotional tone is one of celebration. African masks and medieval hats remind us that a passion for life runs through all peoples at all times in all places. At the center of the work, an aging woman of color raises her arms and joins in the dance.

In Yoblanski’s Buy More, Consume, Be Happy, white girders supporting a metropolis of high-rises also serve as stripes for the American flag, while in Today’s Empire, Tomorrow’s Ashes, a white domed and columned capitol building stands on charred facades that reach deep into the earth. Like Yoblanski’s skeletons, like his scorched earth, the blood-red skies flanking the monuments to corporate and government power tell us about the expendable humanity that fuels them.

Closing reception on Friday, February 27th, 7 p.m.

John Hawk’s Black on Black #1, at Jack Robinson Gallery

David Lusk Gallery’s current show “The Angelus” contains some of the most assured work of John Torina’s career. After years of painting plein air, Torina has mastered loose, rapid-fire brushstrokes and developed palettes complex enough to capture the kaleidoscope of color and movement of windswept skies and river currents.

In Light on Eastern Clouds, banks of deep-purple clouds move in, turning peach into gray into an ultramarine violet that backdrops a golden-red sunset. When Torina repeats the staccato patterns of darks and lights at the bottom of the painting, the earth appears to move as well.

Through February 28th

Adam Hawk’s “Iron Paintings” at Jack Robinson Gallery hover at the edge of abstraction and somewhere between the two- and three-dimensional, somewhere between painting and sculpture.

As our eyes move across their surfaces, trying to make sense of artworks that look sentient but abstract, iconic but alien, we notice the slim rods that attach forged-steel shapes a couple of inches from the surface of the paintings. Hawk’s sculptures cast shadows and appear to float, to move across textured acrylic backgrounds painted deep-red, spring-green, white, and a particularly evocative palette-knifed and pitted gray background in Black on Black #1.

Buy More, Consume, Be Happy by John Yoblanski, in ‘Painting and Politics’ at Odessa

Hawk’s paintings can be read as satisfyingly complex abstractions. They also look like ancient skulls on stakes. Others look sentient: robotic insects with menacing stingers and long metal legs moving across alien landscapes.

Through March 20th

Caricaturist Mike Caplanis’ exhibition “Work and Play” at L Ross Gallery reaches deep into history and larger-than-life personalities to get at truths more complex than just-the-facts or photographic likenesses.

Marlene Dietrich shows up in Caplanis’ gallery of history’s most Surprising Spies. Great actors taking on the personae of great artists in Movie Painters include Ed Harris’ depiction of Jackson Pollock’s addled genius.

Instead of the faces of American presidents, in Mount Rushmore of the Blues, Caplanis turns gouache, ink, Clorox, coffee, and crumpled paper into four blues greats — Son House, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Lead Belly. Their craggy, coffee-stained faces are etched with equal measures of genius and grief. Beneath Rushmore‘s white rocks, beneath white tuxedos rumpled by an evening of playing all-night clubs, eight gnarled hands smoke the cigarettes, tune the frets, and play the blues on one oversized guitar. Their music tells us more about the state of our union and the travail of our citizens than the rhetoric of most politicians.
Through February 28th

Light on Eastern Clouds by John Torina, at David Lusk Gallery through February 28th

Double Date,” at Marshall Arts, is an exhibition mounted by partners who are passionate about art and each other.

Clare Torina’s funny and fierce painting, Fodder, filters 16th-century religious fervor through 21st-century sensibilities. Like Matthias Grünewald’s masterpiece, The Isenheim Altarpiece, Fodder pays homage to life/death/regeneration, but, as the title suggests, Torina’s emphasis is on natural processes. Instead of Christ entombed, Torina acknowledges her own demise by painting a cadaver at the bottom of her multipanel work with the same white-blond hair, pear-shaped face, and svelte body as her own. Sebastian and Anthony, the saints who flank Christ in Grünewald’s painting, are replaced with portraits of Torina and her husband Steven Almond, painted with such convincing nuance they look alive.

Elizabeth Owen’s colored pencil portraits explode with energy. Waves of blue satin billow around bare legs, foreshortened toes nearly touch the face of the viewer, and bright-pink underwear, candy-cane striped socks, and ruffled dresses fill the paperwork Panties with a kaleidoscope of color and movement.

Owen’s husband, sculptor Tim Kinard, is well-known for his savvy, sassy statements about relationships. Kinard delivers one of his wryest works yet with Up and Down, Round and Round, an installation consisting of a doe and a bear-like creature, escapees from a merry-go-round with carousel poles still implanted in their bodies. The bear’s pole looks phallic; the young deer looks pierced with a hunter’s spear and her posture — head lowered, flanks held high — can be read as submission or prelude to flight.

Somewhere between bear and Bigfoot, this creature is beginning to ask the big questions — about meaning, about purpose — and, like the rest of us, looks a bit baffled by life.

Clare Torina’s Fodder: part of ‘Double Date’ at Marshall Arts

Steven Almond’s stop-animation video Two in the Trunk starts out with a breakfast of pancakes, escalates into a fork-fight to the death, pauses for a moment of angelic intervention, and ends with an act of cannibalism so frenzied and primal that viewers play and replay the video in order to digest (pun intended) the final scene. Almond’s four minutes of mayhem, played out by characters fashioned from eyeglasses stuck into feet of clay, is an unsettlingly funny reminder of the tenuous nature of a “civil” society, whose members are evolutionary patchworks of intellect and instinct.
Through February 16th

For his exhibition “Stills: Photographic Paintings & Sculpture,” Jonathan Postal mounts brutally beautiful syntheses of noir, fantasy, and reality on the brick walls of Automatic Slim’s. The vintage televisions that frame several of Postal’s photographic paintings are nostalgic, but they are unnecessary props for already powerful works of art in which members of car clubs, camera clubs, and nightclubs “play” part-time at being tough and sexy.

One of Postal’s most powerful pieces, Fallen Angel, combines photography’s shades of gray with the golden-whites of acrylic glazes. A bargain-basement chandelier casts a soft glow across an old mansion’s paneled walls and highlights the blond hair and porcelain thin body of a girl. The blurred white wings spread across the center of the painting suggest the angel has just completed her fall. Postal’s descent into hell is also the swan song of a girl too inexperienced to extricate herself from a diet of drugs and casual sex.

Outside the Hi-Tone Café in the late 1990s when countercultures flourished, Postal shot Memphis Confidential, an image of a young woman with artificial flowers pinned to her long white gloves and a black feather boa draped around her shoulders and thighs. Like Postal, this woman is a savvy local artist (and a sometime burlesque dancer) who knows how to mix the classy with sensuality and kitsch, how to dive into life without drowning.
Through February 28th

Jonathan Postal’s Memphis Confidential