Author: Carol Knowles

A group of self-taught Memphis artists, not well-known in their own city but revered by folk-art aficionados around the world, are featured in Memphis College of Art’s “Close to Home: African American Folk Art from Memphis Collectors.”

For Cross the Line, Edwin Jeffery chiseled the portrait of a muscular African American, his blond partner, and their daughter into a chunk of wood that looks like a large, clenched fist. A Klansman, with the empty, wide-eyed stare of mob violence, grips the man who has “dared to cross the color line” and forces his head into a noose.

Over the course of his life, Hawkins Bolden made hundreds of scarecrows out of pots, bedpans, and hubcaps drilled full of holes and held together with brooms, rubber hosing, pieces of frayed fabric, and whatever else “felt” right to the artist who was blind since childhood. Bolden’s deeply textured testaments to life conjure up bullet-riddled WWI helmets on top of old wooden crosses, 5th-century German warriors, fierce and starving, dressed in animal hides, and Don Quixote, battered shield in hand, fighting injustice on top of his broom-stick horse.
Gallery talk by University of Memphis art history professor Carol Crown at 5:30 p.m. and opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m., Friday, January 23rd, at MCA.
Through January 30th

Jerry and Terry Lynn, identical-twin brothers working in tandem on the same canvases as Twin, reach a new level of mastery in their show “Recent Paintings” at David Lusk Gallery.  

In The Ark, white jabs of paint scatter like doves above the heads of four slaves dressed in soft, white muslin and standing in a golden ark. Light, refracted in a pool of water, shatters the ark into countless gem-like facets. For Twin, the ark is not a thing to be coveted like the golden calf but a metaphor for vision and possibility.
Through January 31st

Hamlett Dobbins is an accomplished painter known for his textile-like surfaces that appear lit from within. His milestone work Untitled (Notes on Gu. K1.), part of his exhibition “Every One, Every Day” at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens, not only demonstrates his technical skill. It allows us to emotionally connect with an enigmatic artist who encrypts his titles and creates motifs so inventive they often evoke alternate worlds, in addition to the deeply moving moments from movies and life.

Mary Burrows’ Caballo Obscura at Perry Nicole

Striped, textured totems frame the edges of Untitled (Notes on Gu. K1.), but the body of the work is in flux. Golden-white light moves across the face of this canvas. Far below, gray-and-white washes float like clouds. Deeper still, golden-brown, soft-edged striations bring to mind the Legos Dobbins used as a boy to shape and reshape scenes from movies.  

Instead of presenting us with a highly refined, crisp-edged simulation of one of his memories, Untitled (Notes on Gu. K1.) invites us into Dobbins’ process. There’s a fluidity, a largesse of spirit about this work that allows us to feel what moved the artist in the first place.  
Through February 8th

For Perry Nicole Fine Art’s January exhibition, “ARTifacts,” gallery owners Nicole Haney and David Smith challenged their artists to “create a piece of work and provide with it an object of inspiration or tool used in its creation.” Instead of treating the challenge as an academic exercise, Haney’s and Smith’s artists dug deep.

In Susan Maakestad’s abstracted landscape Corral, pencil-thin outlines of railings course their way through washes of turquoise and coral. An orange pylon in front of her painting brings to mind slick interstates and what the artist describes as the “traffic cones, speed bumps, and crosswalks from which we take direction every day … but rarely examine.”

Mary Burrows mixes beauty with tragedy. In Caballo Obscura, pigmented encaustic becomes the silken fur of a horse in profile on a beach — its head bent toward the ground, its eye a blacked-out orb. Burrows scrawls the animal’s story across the background and mounts a braid of horse hair closeby. She not only pays homage to the horse’s power and grace but also identifies with a creature that, like this accomplished artist, has lost sight in one eye.
Through January 31st

Edwin Jeffrey’s untitled scarecrow sculpture at Memphis College of Art

It was a great year for Memphis art. Exhibitions ranged from works by nationally and internationally acclaimed artists to shows by accomplished local artists and strikingly original newcomers.

Last summer, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art mounted a comprehensive show of masterworks by Andy Warhol, who transformed celebrity photo-ops and commercial logos into fine art and captured the best and worst of America with symbols that still resonate.

At the Dixon, in another summer show, the cast-iron figures by renowned Icelandic sculptor Steinunn Thorarinsdottir walked like Buddhas down the long sloping lawn of the gallery’s gardens. Last fall, one of New York’s most noted installation artists, Margaret Cogswell, filled the Art Museum of the University of Memphis with sounds, images, and stories of the Mississippi River.

For her December show at David Lusk Gallery, “Pieces of Sky,” Memphis-born Maysey Craddock surrounded us with gouache paintings of skeletal trees and homes destroyed by Katrina that were painted on paper bags stitched together with silk thread. With titles that read like poetry (Somewhere South of Violet and The Moon Is a Blanket on the Stars) and a slow-motion video of a flooded Gulf Coast that moved almost imperceptibly toward and away from the viewer, Craddock eased us into a deeply meditative space where we could acknowledge our own mortality but still feel buoyed by passionate art and ideas that survive from one generation to the next.

Fog and smog blurred the edges of fast-moving semi trucks and SUVs and clusters of bungalows along slick wet interstates in “Words Can’t Describe,” Mary Long’s February show at Perry Nicole Fine Art. There was something deeply satisfying about this Memphis artist’s nearly abstracted encaustic paintings that suggested a composite of all the trips along all the highways through all the towns seen out of the corner of our eyes and stored away at the edge of consciousness.

J.C. Graham’s ingenious “Conversations with the Children,” at Artists on Central in November, consisted of sepia tones and clapboard houses, ravens on watch and newspapers and musical scores collaged on images of infants. Memories from our childhoods rushed into consciousness as Graham’s artwork took us to places still in need of comfort or approval.

From Maysey Craddock’s ‘Pieces of Sky,’ at David Lusk Gallery

Carl Moore’s November show, “Project Genesis,” at L Ross Gallery was one of the strongest of his career. An Ethiopian princess with almond eyes and dark full lips held up the pale-green bittersweet fruit in Eve and the Serpent, one of A combination CEO/satan/viper, dressed in a slick-black suit, slithered against the small of Eve’s back and pressed its fiery-red head into her bare flesh. Moore performed a miracle in this age-old story, with 21st-century twists, by transforming egg-head-shaped cartoons into two of the most iconic, sensual figures of the year.

University of Memphis professor Niles Wallace’s 8-foot-tall pile of work boots, inexpensive sneakers, and low-heeled plastic pumps leaned against the wall like a large, hunched-over figure in “Nappy-Headed Stranger,” Clough-Hanson’s fall show. In this most poignant and apropos metaphor for 2008, these were Americans as scuffed-up and worn-out as second-hand shoes — Americans who had lost jobs and homes, Americans who were working too many hours for too little pay, Americans who were fighting an unpopular war overseas, while, at home, their civil liberties were threatened.

Memphis College of Art graduate student Alex Paulus filled P&H Artspace with some big ideas in another notable show, “The Truth About Theories.” By parsing words like “create” and “truth” and drawing humorous images of primates on pieces of broken slate, Paulus got us past the rancor and dogma that accompany most discussions about evolution and creationism into a mindset more playful, more expansive, and, probably, more akin to the force that created us all.

In bold print on one of the walls at Odessa’s November show, “Process and Documention,” newcomer Lance Turner asserted that his paintings were “a continually spinning record,” “the transformation of the Mona Lisa into Dust,” and the viewer’s “reflection behind a piece of glass beside a mirror” — claims that were difficult to envision much less paint, but Turner delivered. With full-length mirrors, sharply angled freestanding partitions, skateboards standing on their noses, intricate designs of Persian rugs, mathematically generated portraits that looked like schizophrenic Medusas, and wall-filling murals of archetypal images (including Escher-like images of endlessly replicating Buddhist deities), Turner turned an entire gallery into a fun house that was one of the most wildly imaginative shows of the year.

Deck the walls: Lance Turner turned a gallery into a fun house in his wildly imaginative show at Odessa.

Impressionism: Barbizon Paintings from the Walters Art Museum” at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens is an elegant exhibition rich in insight regarding how a loose-knit group of friends, known as the Barbizon painters, impacted the way we look at art.

All the key players are here: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Gustave Courbet, Jules Breton, and Rosa Bonheur, one of the most noted female painters of the 19th century.

Because Corot and the other Barbizon painters wanted to experience nature up close and personal rather than filtered through the mists of time or the noble deeds of the powerful, they fled a sooty, fetid, politically unstable Paris for Barbizon, a tiny village bordering 45,000 acres of wilderness known as the Forest of Fontainebleau. With sometimes loose and spontaneous brushwork, they attempted to capture the ever-shifting patterns of atmosphere and light in Fontainebleau’s ancient woods, rocky gorges, and marshy flatlands.

There are elements of Romanticism and classicism in Souvenir of Grez-sur-Loing, Corot’s serene, soft-edged, silver-toned painting of a medieval church and stone bridge, while Rousseau’s large, looming masterwork The Frost Effect pulls us into a wide expanse of frozen fields north of Paris. The horizon, directly ahead, is nearly black. Above us, windswept, golden-red clouds race like flames across the sky. Rousseau’s staccato brushwork allows us to feel as well as see nature’s immense energy and the sharp edges of the frozen earth.

In between the serene, silver tones of Romanticism and the light-filled landscapes of the Impressionists, Rousseau and the rest of the Barbizon painters forged a vision that brought them face to face with an implacably fierce and beautiful world.

Through January 11th

The comprehensive, beautifully mounted exhibition “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero,” at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, explores the genius of a sometimes misunderstood South American master best known for his oversized human figures that speak of the exuberance, the excesses, and ultimately the indomitability of the human spirit.

The 100 paintings, drawings, and bronzes selected from Botero’s extensive private collection include many of his masterworks, such as the frighteningly expressive 1959 painting, Boy from Vallecas, in which the features of a dead child appear to dissolve and flow down his misshapen face.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Souvenir of Grez-sur-Loing (ca. 1865-70);

The thin line between ripeness and rot is signified by the tiny worm that has eaten its way to the surface of Botero’s massive, pulpy, pale-green 1976 painting titled Pear.

Botero transforms a brothel in a small provincial town in his 2001 painting The House of Marta Pintuco into a memento mori and morality tale by introducing, at the far right, a cross-eyed baby sitting on the floor, unattended. Far left, an old woman, with a poignant expression of wistfulness and regret, looks through an almost closed door at the prostitutes and their clients eating, drinking, smoking, sleeping, and taking turns lovemaking.

Botero’s 2004 graphite drawing A Mother compresses into one image the terror and violence in Botero’s homeland, Colombia, a country torn apart by drug wars and extreme political factions since the 1960s. In this work, a woman lifts her child, throws back her head, and wails.

Trapped by pomp and circumstance, puffed up with self-importance, and dressed in the full regalia of royalty, the princess Margarita inflates to the point of bursting in Botero’s signature painting After Velazquez.

Some of Botero’s largest, most profound, and sensual works stand in front of the museum. The one-ton, seven-foot-tall bronze The Rape of Europa reenvisions the myth of the maiden raped by the god. Instead of whisking Europa away against her will, in Botero’s version of the story, Jupiter, who has transformed himself into a bull, stands powerful, patient, and ready. Europa caresses the bull’s rump with her left hand, strokes her own hair with her right hand, and twists in the direction of Botero’s nearly 12-foot- long Smoking Woman whose mounds of Rubenesque flesh look as soft as the bedding on which she lies.

Nearby is the 10-foot-tall bronze sculpture Hand with beautifully shaped, slightly bent fingers that appear to caress the air. This could be Botero’s ingenious portrait of himself as well as all painters/sculptors who sense the world with their fingers as well as their eyes.

Sunlight plays across the polished peaks and valleys of all these bronze forms. Their green and golden-brown patinas are earthier and more sensual than the paler, porcelain complexions of Botero’s paintings. Surprisingly, these huge metal sculptures are some of the most electrically charged, alive works of Botero’s career.

Through January 11th

Fernando Botero, The Rape of Europa (1999)

In L Ross Gallery’s exhibition, “Sculpture,” artworks range from the comic to the sublime. Helen Phillips’ raku-fired ducks are both. Dressed in long, brown pontiff’s robes with collars of seaweed draped around the base of their slim necks, they appear to glide across the surface of ponds, graceful and magisterial, in a series of works titled Contemplating a World Gone Mad.

In her haunting homage to global warming, Water Rising, Nancy White sculpts a woman’s torso out of clay and plants it on the ocean floor. Waterbirds seek shelter in the seaweed growing from the woman’s wrinkled shoulders. Her mouth, attempting to suck oxygen from the sea, reminds us that all creatures, including humankind, are woven into the web of life. What we do to the earth, we do to ourselves.

In Eli Gold’s Peacekeeper, a work loaded with geopolitical implications, a nuclear-warhead hangs in a glass skyscraper beneath a human hand tied with golden threads to what the artist describes as an altar to “fear and greed.”

At L Ross Gallery through November 30th

At Marshall Arts, “Ties That Bind” includes works by four artists whose lives are bound together by friendship and a love for the expressive possibilities of line.

The sinuous lines and untouched passages of watercolor paper in Mel Spillman’s minimal but evocative portraits suggest the svelte figures, milky-white complexions, and bright lights of celebrity. No matter how matte the makeup or bright the lights, Spillman captures the soul inside the persona. In the 63-by-42-inch pencil-and-paper portrait What’s In?, the lower part of the face of the leggy youngster who became the world’s first supermodel is nearly washed out. In striking contrast, Twiggy’s large, dark eyes dilate and stare at us like a deer caught in our headlights.

Roger Allan Cleaves’ dystopian societies are inhabited by hybrids (part-human, part-heavy metal) with overdeveloped biceps and buttocks. Penises are projectiles; lovemaking looks lethal. Both the male and the female of the species obsessively cut, rape, and kill each other and anything else that moves. The mayhem is mesmerizing and unsettling. The titles of Cleaves’ ink drawings (As Time Goes By, History Repeats Itself ) suggest that these homicidal hybrids could be us — could be the next stage of evolution for a species increasingly adept at genocide, collateral damage, and global warfare.

In some of the most evocative works in the show, Lindsay Palmore turns the bittersweet and the saccharine into meditations on emotion and time by pouring black washes across floral motifs, art deco baubles, and doilies collaged onto the surface of paintings titled You know my heart — it beats for you and To be sure these days continue.

Every inch of Bobby Spillman’s paintings are filled with roaring rivers, bird houses, tree limbs, and telephone poles swept up by tornadic winds. Spillman’s quick mind and rapid-fire imagination generate conversations as energized as his paintings. At the center of the largest painting in the show, Gimme Shelter, you’ll find the artist’s alter ego as a Bambi look-alike leaping nimbly over and around flying objects, its fur ruffled by the wind, its huge eyes wide-open — not with fear but wonder.

At Marshall Arts through November 29th

In “Elemental” at Perry Nicole Fine Art, Martha Kelly so accurately observes atmosphere, light, and texture, we both see and feel Morning Shadows snaking their way through grass thick with dew and lime-green in the early light. Kelly’s depiction of rarified light in Vespers takes us to the edge of effable as gold fades to white at the top of the canvas.

Also at Perry Nicole, Chuck Johnson fills his “Recent Paintings” with microbes, amoebas, sunspots, phantasms, and botanical drawings so flawlessly rendered that the artist convinces us his exotic landscapes could be real. Johnson paints each canvas with encaustic and china markers, then covers the surface with a second landscape, leaving only traces of the first. He repeats this process, creating worlds within worlds that appear to be vast distances apart. 

Johnson’s ability to make two-dimensional surfaces look fathoms deep and the magic he weaves into his worlds are particularly memorable. He paints nature in all its infinite variety, endlessly recreating itself.

At Perry Nicole Fine Art through November 28th

Jed Jackson’s show at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens, “Toujours l’Audace,” runs the gamut — from propaganda and satire to masterwork and portraits of the best and worst of humanity.

Jackson’s bright colors, crisp outlines, and harsh shadows reveal every feeling and flaw. His green and red flesh tones suggest unbridled passions as CEOs daydream about power, money, and sex, Bad French Girls poison the wine of an unsuspecting victim, and wealthy young Brits enjoy a drawing room beautifully furnished with colonial plunder.

Jackson is a tousled-haired tourist wearing a black sweatshirt and a day-old beard in Aides Memoires. Insets that float around the artist suggest that the memories of Europe that linger are not the grand palaces but encounters in coffee shops and crowds of French people on the boulevards. Saint Francis in Ecstasy, Bellini’s 15th-century masterwork, is painted in a bubble on Jackson’s chest at heart level at the center of this painting. Jackson has seen the world’s best and worst.

What makes this accomplished painter’s work most powerful is not his scathing satire but his ruthless, relentless drive to lay the soul bare, to get to the unsullied cores. U-Bahn ends the show on a note of hope in a painting in which Jackson’s greens and reds read as vitality in a rumpled, sweaty bunch of Germans crowded into a subway. Look at the guy in the center wearing thick-rimmed glasses. The subway rider’s eyes are closed, his face relaxed. In the midst of chaos, he seems calmed by some inner vision. U-Bahn is Jackson’s portrait of a generation of young Germans who vie to rule not militarily but as one of the world’s great centers for art.
At the Dixon Gallery & Gardens through November 16th
 
Best known for his multimedia, collaborative community art projects, Richard Lou, art department chair at the University of Memphis, reveals a more poetic, personal side in his current installation, “Stories on My Back,” at the Power House’s Fuel Room Gallery.

Richard Lou explores multiculturalism in ‘Stories on My Back’ at the Power House

Fuel Room’s crumbling stonework is a perfect venue for a show that is both personal and universal. At the back of the small room, incense sticks placed in bowls half-full of dried beans or rice honor Lou’s Mexican mother and Chinese father. Cornhusks shaped around the entranceway bring to mind thatched huts and homes made out of materials at hand. The husks covering the long, lean light fixtures above the entrance and across the ceiling look like the scales or feathers of luminous creatures streaking over and through the modest home like Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent god of numerous Meso-American cultures or, perhaps, a Chinese dragon bringing good luck and long life.

The small home is lit by four lanterns, each of which contains an image of one of Lou’s four children juggling small stones imprinted with a single word. With the fewest words possible — “grind,” “smooth,” “river,” “sounds,” “uttered” — the stones capture the pleasure, pain, and flow of life. They also tell the story of Lou’s father who practiced speaking English with pebbles in his mouth and became a respected mediator who settled personal disputes and represented family and friends before the Board of Immigration.

On the left side of the lanterns, Lou’s daughters, Gloria, Maricela, and Magda, and his son, Ming, are back-dropped by aerial views of the world. A small stone inscribed with the family name rests on each of their tongues. The stones are deep red — red like the fiery temperament of Lou’s Latin-American mother, red like the Chinese symbol for good fortune, and red, perhaps, like the blood that flows through generations of Mexicans and Chinese who successfully raised families, no easy task when living in poverty or near-poverty with little medical care.

As professor, mentor, and member of multiple groups encouraging dialogue among Memphis’ Mexican, Asian, black, and white populations, Lou honors his ancestors by continuing and expanding their role as mediators. And he creates powerful artwork that shows us how to navigate our increasingly complex multicultural city and world.
At the Power House through November 29th

In the Art Museum of the University of Memphis’ current installation “Mississippi River Fugues,” Margaret Cogswell turns river sagas and Greek drama into powerful 21st-century archetypes.

DVD players inside hand-crafted copper-and-tin lanterns hang in AMUM’s antechamber. There’s footage of candles flickering on and off and voices fading in and out, telling stories about life on and along the Mississippi. A man talks about the river’s depth, another describes moving a barge over a sand bar, and a third talks about the earlier paths of the Mississippi.

Inside the darkened museum, oscillating buoys cast beams of light that flow in fugue-like patterns, weaving in and out and building upon one another. The spotlights also tell stories about the Delta and the river. We can make out moving images of the moon breaking through the mist, Caterpillar harvesters scooping up mouthfuls of cotton, planes dusting fields with insecticides, fields burning, and startled cattle racing across the landscape. Audiotaped sounds of the river grow louder and louder. A six-foot-long galvanized ductwork sculpture writhes in the middle of the museum floor like a prehistoric predator, its wide-open mouth lined with metal spades.

A video of a naked man projected onto the face of a massive wheel adds elements of Greek myth to the mix. Unceasingly, the man trudges on a treadmill that appears to turn the wheel. Like Sisyphus trying to roll a boulder uphill, the man’s relentless labor feels numbing but not particularly productive.

Cogswell asks us to feel the bite, the shadow side of modernity: nature out of balance and raging, humankind’s relentless drive for profit and power, and technology’s capacity to enhance the earth and destroy it. Cogswell invites us to stop spinning our wheels, to get off the treadmill, to consider the crossroads at which we stand.

Margaret Cogswell’s ‘Mississippi River Fugues’: nature out of balance

“Mississippi River Fugues” at AMUM through November 1st

In David Lusk Gallery’s current exhibition, “The Fun Show,” Tad Lauritzen Wright replays the stories and sensory impressions of a lifetime. On the wall to our left, a grinning, snaggle-toothed boy stands in the nose of a jet plane taking off at a 45-degree angle. Lauritzen Wright’s 6-year-old alter ego takes us on an adventure filled with playgrounds, amusement parks, cross-country road trips, camping, and trips to the big city.

Lauritzen Wright replays childhood with two art forms. In the first, single-line, child-like drawings of objects and figures weave across large blank canvases. In these, Lauritzen Wright captures the wide-open possibilities of youth and the way memories flow in streams of consciousness, fluid and interconnected.

Lauritzen Wright also recreates childhood with large mix-media paintings. Grids of colorful squares with porous boundaries allow ideas and images to flow into one another. Aliens, fire-spewing dragons, and redheads play on top of train cars that roar across the bottom of Planned Distraction. The Empire State Building thrusts its way up the right side of the painting between traffic cops, flying saucers, checkered taxis, patchwork quilts, and a blond girl’s blue tears, which fill a small lake floating a couple of tug boats.

Another part of the painting combines elements of the story of William Tell with Goldilocks and Eve in the Garden, as a girl with one long lock of gold for hair looks out at the viewer with eyes as green as the apple that sits on top of her head.

By turns sassy, sardonic and richly symbolic, Lauritzen Wright’s endless cast of comic-book and Saturday-morning cartoon characters play out syntheses of legend, fairy tale, Bible story, fantasy, and sci-fi that take cartooning to the level of fine art.

“The Fun Show”at David Lusk Gallery through October 25th

For “Plus One,” at Marshall Arts, Niki Johnson has curated a show in which she and eight other artists shake things up with panache and humor. “Plus One” refers to the single male artist in the lineup, noted sculptor Greely Myatt, who put together Lucky, the exhibition’s funniest, most loaded (metaphorically and literally) artwork.

Like Odalisk, Robert Rauschenberg’s stuffed chicken and tongue-in-cheek response to Brancusi’s sleek Golden Bird series, Myatt’s Lucky lacks classical grace. His plastic duck body is stuffed with matchsticks. He sits on a tall plinth, which rests on a three-legged stool placed over sticks of dynamite, which render Lucky’s position even more precarious.

Like the Aflack duck furiously quacking about the importance of good insurance, this unlucky duck whose goose is about to be cooked seems to proclaim, “Quack, quack!! Your faith and loyalty are misplaced, another monument is about to topple, and another of your best-laid-plans is about to blow up in your face.”

Johnson created Corner Drug with outrageously unorthodox materials that tell Amy Winehouse’s story. Ten square feet of tinted plastic bags held together with netting replicate Winehouse’s features and dark, unruly hair. Up close, this talented singer/songwriter’s face pixilates and puckers, and the bags serve as reminder: As Winehouse battles addiction, her professional and personal life are coming undone.

Through September 28th at Marshall Arts

With the simplest of materials, Rebekah Laurenzi plays with reality and illusion in the Jones Hall Gallery exhibition “I Measure the Shakes.” In her installation As They May, white threads fan out from the Arkansas fieldstones strewn across the gallery. Shards of mirror, attached to the ends of the threads and tossed over a partition, hang a couple of inches from the floor. These gently swaying pieces of mirror reflect and refract gallery lights and the fieldstones. Light glistens like water cascading over rocks in a stream as our point of view is shifted from rock-solid to random to hanging-by-a-thread to world as illusion.

Through September 26th at the University of Memphis’ Jones Hall Gallery

For “Evidence,” the current show at Jack Robinson Gallery, Yvonne Bobo captures mystery and yearning in her sculptures. The maple seeds, cicadas, and wasp nests she’s created are hundreds of times larger than the actual objects — large enough for viewers to imagine riding on top of winged seeds, climbing out of the cicada shells, and tumbling into the mouths of wasp nests like Alice down the rabbit hole.

Corner Drug by Niki Johnson, at Marshall Arts

Bobo’s descriptions read like poetry as she imagines the wasps that will die long before their mud homes crumble: “It pleases me to know this nest we shared will endure its short shadow growing then fading down the wall, day in and day out, long after we are once again only dirt.”

Through October 3rd at Jack Robinson Gallery

Libby Johnson’s show “Sanctum” at David Lusk Gallery finds this still-life and landscape painter working at the top of her form as she flawlessly recreates the soft translucency of flower petals, sunbeams on polished wood, and clouds backlit by golden-white light above a dark-green arbor in Lullaby, a painting with the serene elegance and balance of warm and cool colors of a 17th-century neoclassical landscape by Poussin.

White peonies against a blue-black background in Caprice bring to mind cumulous clouds in several of Johnson’s skies. Sanctum blurs the boundary between still-life and landscape further with lilies filling the painting like billowing clouds and rolling waves as well as flowers buffeted by the wind.

Through September 27th at David Lusk Gallery

Kurt Meer creates some of his most nuanced landscapes to date for his L Ross Gallery exhibition, “Eidelon of Memory.” Instead of horizontal glints of light or bands of color suggesting sunrise/sunset, Meer illuminates his paintings with aureoles of light radiating from the center. Stand in front of Verge or Cusp or Waken IV. Watch the riverbanks dissolve in continuums of softly glowing teals, mauves, golds, and gray. You may experience some of the openness, lightness, and joy Meer mentions when he talks about painting this body of work.

Through September 30th at L Ross Gallery

Perry Nicole Fine Art’s September show, “The Figure & Abstractions,” also contains some of Mary Reed’s most evocative and satisfying paintings to date. In Separation, a woman sits cross-legged on the ground. Pinks and ochres wash across her nearly featureless face, her dress dissolves into a coral-crimson color field, and loose expressive lines define her armless torso and slender shins. In this and 18 other works, Reed’s thickly collaged canvases, complex palettes, and expressive titles beautifully capture women.

Through September 30th at Perry Nicole Fine Art

In December 2007, Memphis artist David Hinske moved to Taos, New Mexico, opened a gallery in March, and a month later, took a 2,400-mile road trip. When Hinske returned home, he processed the previous six months by painting and putting together “Road Work,” the exhibition now on display at Jay Etkin Gallery.

Many of Hinske’s beautifully modulated paintings are punctuated with small crevices and openings so scumbled, translucent, and free-form they seem to appear and disappear before our eyes. The blurred yellow squares and rectangles in the deep-blue acrylic-on-plywood 560 Rooms, 28 Miles bring to mind the lighted windows of the rows of motels Hinske drove past at dusk looking for a place to sleep.

In an interview, Hinske described pumping gas at midnight, dressing as casually as he wanted, and sleeping and eating whenever he chose. Freedom of the road is beautifully recalled in Red Shirt, No Shoes, a deep-red acrylic-on-canvas dotted with green fields and darkened windows of mostly vacant motels in small New Mexican towns like Tecumcari. On the right side of the painting, a stroke of pale pink slices the crimson background, underscoring the range of Hinske’s feelings, vibrating the entire chord of red.

Forty washes of white acrylic tinged with yellow simulate linen sheets in Sleep in Your Own Bed. Delicate cross-hatched portals open from the inside out as impressions of the past six months float into consciousness and are assimilated. The artist’s mind clears, and while driving across endless expanses of Texas, an eye-popping, purple-red sliver floating in yellow in Amarillo strikes Hinske’s retina (and ours) with the force of revelation.

Through September 22nd at Jay Etkin Gallery

In Jean Flint’s exhibition “Surface Attraction” at On the Street Gallery, energy arcs across time and space, explodes from the wall, and snaps objects like toothpicks in its wake. We can feel the energy building low to the ground in the eight-foot-square metal quilt Ring Cloth. Circles of baling wire at the center of the metal fabric lean toward one another as they are lifted several inches from the floor by a nearly invisible wire attached to the ceiling.

Jean Flint’s Surface Location

Large tornado-shaped cones fashioned out of 19th-century mailbags balance on top of early-20th-century topographical maps in Surface Location and create a sense of energy and information spiraling across expanses of time and space. Under the gallery lights, Couch Springs (37 of them) cast shadows and the distinct impression that the springs are coiling and recoiling across an entire wall.

Flint suggests the aftermath of destructive force in the mixed-media work Attraction. Multiple lines of slender string pinned high on the wall arc like cables of a suspension bridge. Some of the strings attach to sandbags piled on the floor. Others lie loose and serve as haunting reminder: For all our attempts to shore up levees and bridge large bodies of water, when water and wind combine, bridges can snap and lives can unravel like thread.

Through September 20th at

On the Street Gallery

David Hinske’s 560 Rooms, 28 Miles

The centerpiece of “Transformations,” April Wright’s exhibition at Artists on Central, is a nearly 800-pound, five-foot-tall ceramic sculpture Let Me Live Again, which looks like an ancient tomb and a huge, hollowed-out human torso. Every square inch, inside and out, is molded into fungi, coral, roots, tentacles, or the claws and incisors of predators — an entire evolutionary phyla that suggests the persistence of life.

Wright’s visionary works fill the gallery to near-capacity. A ceramic slab of the Mississippi River, Let the River Flow, evokes the heft and weight of a fast-moving current oozing deep into a riverbed, carving silt/sand/stone into oxbow lakes, sand bars, and canyons.

The large mural Let the Balance Begin consists of seven concentric circles — symbols for God, the sun, and a womb. Instead of precious stones or monumental slabs of granite, like those found at Stonehenge, Wright creates her circles out of fist-sized chunks of clay that look like Precambrian trilobites, Idaho potatoes, or dried dung. This complex work evokes Eastern and Western worldviews and some of the Bible’s most poignant passages: As above, so below the least of these God in all things.

Three of the show’s smallest, most evocative works a triad of anemones — titled Let Me Hide No More — suggest the creative process of all artists, particularly that of sculptors.

These sea-creature tentacles could be Wright’s long, expressive fingers, poised, slightly bent, reaching in all directions, waiting for the next creative impulse before she sinks her hands back into the clay.

Through September 30th at Artists on Central