Author: Carol Knowles

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Art Art Feature

Another World

Photographer David Horan has traveled around the world and mounted exhibitions of his work in Japan, Czech Republic, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Venezuela, and cities across the U.S. His latest, “Earth: Abstracts from Life,” is now on view at the University of Memphis’ Jones Hall Gallery.

Horan has an eye for the ingenious shapes, the complex textures, and the light that inspire both abstract and landscape painters. In Homage to Rothko II, a golden sunset reflecting off concrete walls and floor transforms a downtown dress shop into a multifaceted abstraction that honors cubism as well as color-field painting. Golden rectangles glow next to blood-red triangles. Edges dissolve, and light floats in light.

Pollock’s all-over paintings, Kline’s bold blacks, de Kooning’s unedited grit, and Robert Motherwell’s Rorschach-like shadows — all can be found in Horan’s close-ups of the crumbling asphalt, tar patches, bird droppings, and house paint spilled on Home Depot’s two-acre parking lot.

In one of Horan’s most evocative images, D.C. Space, early-morning sun reflects off mica in a crumbling sidewalk that’s overlaid with shadows. D.C. Space projects our point-of-view from sunlit sidewalk to what looks like a planet backdropped by a splatter of stars, a meteor in deep space, and a panorama of the cosmos. Beyond metaphor and symbolism, D.C. Space captures a truth as inevitable as death and taxes: In this solar system, it’s all about texture, shadow play, and light.

“Earth: Abstracts from Life” at Jones Hall Gallery through February 15th

For his current exhibition “In the Quiver of the Kingdom,” Jon Rappleye, an accomplished draftsman and master colorist, fills Clough-Hanson Gallery with mesmerizingly beautiful works of art that look simultaneously Edenic and apocalyptic.

Rappleye’s delicate, detailed line work and nuanced shadows create worlds so fully realized that we see each scale, hair, and feather of the animals. Metal and mica ground into Rappleye’s acrylics become bronze mountains and iridescent blue seas.

The plume of a peacock trails off a gnarled tree in a painting also titled In the Quiver of the Kingdom. The distinctive eyelike pattern of the peacock’s plume hangs down the center of the painting looking incredibly soft and all-seeing.

But all is not well in this Eden. The scenery tells a story of oil spills, toxic dumps, and venomous nectars. A sinewy weave tight enough to serve as barrier against toxins covers the ground and trees. It also chokes off nutrients. Except for mushrooms as eerily iridescent as the visions these fungi sometimes induce, Rappleye’s plants and animals are nearly colorless and look anemic. Some birds lie dead on the ground. Other birds sprout antlers. Some of the birds’ necks become serpents, and the eyes of owls become starbursts of light.

Rappleye is an artist who plunges us into worlds so increasingly compromised that hallucination becomes reality. He immerses us in end times caused not by epic battles between good and evil but by our failure to be good and faithful stewards of the earth. We’re on a fast track to destruction, but we’re not there yet. The final chapter in Rappleye’s visual narrative of impending ecological disaster is not ordained nor etched in stone. It’s still ours to write.

“In the Quiver of the Kingdom” at Clough-Hanson Gallery, on the campus of Rhodes College through February 13th

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Art Art Feature

In with a Bang

There are no throwaways, no leftovers in Perry Nicole’s “1 x 41,” a group show featuring a recent painting or sculpture from each of the gallery’s 41 artists.

Susan Maakestad paints stark metropolises devoid of life. In Ramp #2, her world becomes even more existential. Gone are the crisply outlined parking lots, the concrete interstates, and the red nightlights of her earlier work. Pale blues and steel grays glow above the dark-green umbers of crumbling earth and blacktop. Nuanced colors of dawn and rich textures of decay are hauntingly beautiful, sobering reminders that the sun will go on shining on the face of the earth long after our demise.

A cow stands at the bottom of 1 x 25, Brandon Smith’s long, lean totem of a painting with a scumbled beige background that could be mist or the creature’s soft, flayed skin. Twenty-five blackbirds sit on an electrical line strung across the canvas like Christmas-tree lights. The wire on which the soothsayers sit pierces the cow’s spine like an electric prod. While Smith’s previous depictions of doe-eyed cows registered as kitsch or indecipherable koan, this painting transforms the creature into a symbol of the callousness of the world and its capacity for cruelty, including corporate America’s relegation of many of these creatures to enclosures so tiny there’s no room to turn around.

At Perry Nicole through January 27th

“Ted Faiers,” the current show of the late artist’s work at David Lusk, turns the clock back nearly 50 years. It’s 1959, and Faiers, a longtime Memphis College of Art instructor and ground-breaking artist, is experimenting.

Before Faiers’ powerfully satiric voice laid human foibles bare and chronicled the political/gender/racial revolutions of the 1960s, this artist recorded the exhilarating, unsettling malleability of the human figure.

The stylized motifs of his “Indian Space Paintings” series are shape-shifting into rocks that whorl like seashells that spin into waterfalls that flow into hourglass figures and silhouettes of breasts.

In Orange Figure, black hair cascades over breasts, waist, and thighs that look like ripe melons scooped out of rinds. Pulp drips down the right thigh of a figure that floats in a stark-white background of possibility.

At David Lusk through January 26th

Early in 2003, Artists on Central began as a community of hobbyists, retirees, and part-timers passionate about art. As evidenced by work in their current exhibition, “Deja New,” many of these artists are maturing into painters of note.

Jane Croy’s simultaneous evocation of earth’s grit and complicated geometry makes Field a particularly satisfying work. Kathryn Abernathy’s Becoming evokes misty riverbanks and meadows seen through windows streaked with rain. A stark-white ice machine topped by a green-and-white-striped awning and back-dropped by deep-red facades of a liquor store turn Franks, John Sadowski’s depiction of that store, into the primary colors and reductive shapes of abstraction.

Artists on Central through February 29th

“Interactions/Interruption” is the UrbanArt Commission’s 10-year retrospective at Memphis College of Art. The collection of DVDs, drawings, models, and photographs give us some sense of the vision, planning, and hard work required to bring public-art projects to completion.

During the past decade, the UAC has worked with 56 artists and completed nearly 70 projects that run the gamut from satire to sublimity, including John Salvest’s cast-aluminum toilet-paper rolls stacked in the Cannon Center’s restrooms; Alonzo Davis’ and Pinkney Herbert’s bold, 60-foot-long terrazzo floor abstraction in the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library; and James Carpenter’s Light Veil, a dichroic glass sculpture that turns the library’s stairwell into medleys of color and light.

Many UAC projects, including Jill Turman’s sculpture of homes and buildings mounted on a train trestle, represent a nearly seamless partnership between artistry and place. Turman’s Cooper-Young Trestle ushers us into a neighborhood where there are no strip malls, no chain restaurants, no large department stores. Each home, coffee shop, gallery, and cafe are as individual as the artists and small-business owners who live and work there.

At Memphis College of Art through
January 30th

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Art Art Feature

Taking Stock

From rockabilly and Philip Glass to diamond mines in Africa, this year’s exhibitions ran the gamut of culture, art, and current events, and some of the most evocative artworks were created by already accomplished artists moving in new directions.

For “Perspectives,” the Brooks Museum’s juried exhibition this summer of regional artists, abstract painter Bo Rodda filled an entire wall with a computer-generated world, one with laws of physics different from our own. There were no horizon lines, no solid ground in this alternate universe. Instead, swerving lines, printed on metallic paper in endless shades of gray, read like infinitely complex galvanized interstates careening simultaneously toward and away from the viewer.

Warren Greene, an artist best known for saturate pigments oozing down large canvases, also went beyond color and form to infinite shades of gray in three of his strongest works in “Paleoscapes” at Perry Nicole Fine Art in December. Like a Phillip Glass symphony, the subtle rapid shifts in tone in “Searching for P. Glass” generated unexpected images as what looked like trails of electrons, interference patterns, jet streams, ectoplasm, and snippets of dreams slid our point of view across surfaces sanded as smooth as glass.

David Comstock’s exhibition “Flow” took black-and-white abstractions to new levels of raw power at L Ross Gallery in March. Rods pierced egg-like shapes on frayed and torn canvases in what looked like moments of procreation and checkmate in the well-worn board game of life.

Jonathan Postal’s Waitress, Roadside, TX

Also in March, in an otherwise empty David Lusk Gallery, Terri Jones drew delicate, nearly invisible lines on the wall and on large sheets of vellum that were bathed in the sunlight pouring through plate-glass windows. Those of us who stayed awhile in Jones’ spare luminous space experienced something akin to Buddhism’s Sky Mind.

Bob Riseling’s “Halcyon Days” premiered Memphis College of Art’s new gallery On the Street in November. Pale colors, deep shadows, and haunting monolithic shapes paid homage to the dead trees standing sentinel on Horn Island’s post-Katrina beaches, an ancient hulk of a barge stranded on one of its sandbars, and countless pieces of driftwood washed up on its shores.

Highlights of the year also included Hamlet Dobbins’ luminous textural abstractions at David Lusk in October and John McIntire’s summer show at Perry Nicole that transformed smooth, cool stone into sexual icons, fertility fetishes, and sacrificial gods. And at L Ross Gallery in November, in some of the best works of his career, Anton Weiss scattered scratched and gouged scraps of metal across large earth-toned paintings accented with thalo blue, scarlet, and cadmium yellow.

Last year’s most riveting works of art confronted brutality and oppression. Memphis College of Art’s March exhibition, “Reasons To Riot,” included Zoe Charlton’s searing mixed-media drawing Destiny, in which a man leaned back on his haunches. His face and upper body were whited-out, and the prow of a 17th-century slave ship was strapped around his waist like a dildo. Humanity’s unexpressed (repressed, denied, watered-down) passions were crammed into his phallus, which was as pointed as this artist’s insights, as unadorned as truth, as double-edged as our species’ capacity for cruelty and joy.

A work from David Comstock’s exhibition at L. Ross, ‘Flow’

In early fall, Clough-Hanson Gallery showcased 15 works from Eliot Perry’s collection of contemporary works by African artists, many of them internationally acclaimed. Among them was Wangechi Mutu’s sinuous, cinematic, horrific collage Buck Nose. The images depicted an antelope shot with a high-powered rifle, blood exploding around its head and horns and entrails coiling around a starving girl curled in a fetal position. Most chillingly there’s a manicured hand caressing a gemstone, reminding us that in today’s global market, African diamonds are prized, but life is still cheap.  

In “Two Years,” Jay Etkin Gallery’s December show, we saw Sandra Deacon Robinson’s paintings evolve from Klimt-like mosaics of glittering gemstones to abstractions of Louisiana wetlands. At the top of one of her most beautiful works, the 40-by-60-inch painting Protected, wisps of ochre almost brushed our foreheads, delicate tangles of lines at the bottom reached toward our torsos and legs, and muted golden light at top right suggested we were at the edge of a moist, dark cocoon with a clearing just ahead.

Also at Jay Etkin in December was photographer Jonathan Postal’s “On the Road.” In one of the show’s most disarming images, Waitress, Roadside, TX, a woman with jet-black hair dressed in a white apron and light-pink uniform stands at the side of a thoroughfare. Whether she waits tables in an upscale diner with a retro theme or is working in a smalltown café that looks pretty much like it did when it opened in the Fifties, this woman looks comfortable in her own skin. With a wry, sensual smile she leans back and sizes up Postal (and any gallery viewer who dared to look her in the face).

Postal is best-known for his black-and-white photographs of people living at the edge. While his images of burlesque queens scowling after a swig of hard liquor and wrestling fans howling for blood are fever-pitched and powerful, this body of work’s wide-open spaces and wry waitress boded well for a country at moral and political crossroads in need of citizens, whatever their lifestyles, who can step back and see things clearly.

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Art Art Feature

Plant, Animal, Mineral

In her exhibition at Clough-Hanson Gallery, “The Solid Matter of a Celestial Body,” Jillian Conrad leaps from high to low art and from the utilitarian to the metaphysical as she messes with the meaning of art and asks, “What is real?”

In the first moments of viewing Conrad’s Flat Earth Projections, we see every nuance of color, every chasm, every mineral vein of what could be a stone, a mountain face, or a meteor hurling through space before it burns itself out in the atmosphere. As we adjust to the darkness in the small room in which Flat Earth Projections are placed, we realize the crispest, most detailed artworks in the show have no substance. Conrad has magnified pieces of road rubble and projected their images on the wall.

For Horizon Line, Conrad placed a stone on a plywood shelf and then outlined the stone’s shape on the gallery wall. The jagged and soaring lines of Conrad’s elegant drawing remind us that the forms of abstraction, as well as landscape, as well as figuration, derive from nature.

Conrad then takes us inside Oz, three gleaming mountain-shaped panels propped up with wooden scaffolding and stones. With this work, she evokes abstract art’s holiest of holies — flat luminous fields of color — then knocks down the facade by revealing the nuts and bolts of mounting a show.

This is an artist who finds art not in discrete objects or esoteric aesthetics but in the way ideas and objects bounce off one another. So what is art; what is real? Conrad’s elegant, iconoclastic exercises in seeing suggest the answer is simple and unknowable all at once.

“Jillian Conrad: The Solid Matter of a Celestial Body” at Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, through December 5th

“Plants: Interior & Exterior,” Montyshane Gallery’s current exhibition, is not your garden-variety plant show.

Nancy White’s ceramic figure Owed To could be a metaphor for Mother Earth or for the Eve-in-us-all, still in the garden, still intimately connected to life. Eve’s slender green body looks freshly hewn from swamp moss and clay. She sits on the earth looking down; small animals rest on her shoulders; flowers sprout from her womb and limbs.

Melanie Spillman, an artist known for her delicate, sensual watercolors of troubled celebrities, chose flowers as her subject for the show. She paints darkness and grit as well as bright petals as she simulates umber weeds and earth with pigmented Mississippi mud.

Owned To by Nancy White, a work in ‘Plants: Interior & Exterior’ at Montyshane Gallery

With the adeptness of a basket weaver, Marian McKinney works the teals/taupes/turquoises of patinaed copper into complex mosaics. Her five-foot-tall copper Birdfeeders stand at the center of the gallery. Their large sunflower faces bend toward one another like human figures in conversation.

Unlike the proverbial young woman who fades into the woodwork and never gets asked to dance, Bryan Blankenship’s white-on-white Wall Flowers are anything but shy. In many flowering plants, female as well as male reproductive organs are phallic shapes. The pistils and stamens of Blankenship’s white flowers come in all shapes and sizes. They reach out from the center of open-mouthed petals producing sexual energy that is palpable.

Bluebells & Blueboys is Blankenship’s large, mixed-media work of painted and sculpted flowers climbing to the top of a ceramic trellis. The title’s allusions — to Gainsborough’s portrait of an 18th-century youth, an underground magazine, a gay night club, and the beautiful bell-shaped flower — remind us of the wide variety of sexual expression in humans as well as plants.

“Plants: Interior & Exterior” at Montyshane Gallery through December 15th

“Anton Weiss: Pursuit,” the current exhibition at L Ross Gallery, includes some of the most evocative abstractions of Weiss’ career.

The works are on large sheets of aluminum. The pigments, instead of soaking into cotton canvas, stay on the surface of the aluminum, accentuating the mutable, free-floating quality of paint and suggesting the constant flux and the nervous energy of our times. Small saturate patches of thalo blue, cadmium yellow, and scarlet are scattered across muted color fields.

Weiss also scatters scratched and gouged scraps of metal across the picture plane. Unpainted patches of aluminum reflect light. This is not the sunlight of the Impressionists or the luminous color fields of Abstract Expressionism but something more brooding and complex.

When Weiss was a child in Europe during WWII, he made a promise to himself “to create rather than destroy, to give back.” What Weiss gives back now — as the world is once again at war — are portraits of life as compelling as any literal or figurative depiction could be. Here are glimpses into truth, the moments of intense pleasure and pain, the forgetting and the letting go.

“Anton Weiss: Pursuit” at L Ross Gallery through November 30th.

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One for All

It’s all uphill for the peasant who carries a large load of sticks on his back and walks up a plowed field in the early-morning light. We can almost hear the crunch of the man’s feet crossing the frozen furrows and feel the biting cold penetrating his simple cotton jacket and britches in Camille Pissarro’s painting Hoarfrost at Ennery, which now hangs with 39 other groundbreaking works in Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s exhibition, “Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape.”

“There’s no focus; the subject’s inconsequential; and the painting’s dingy and vile,” railed the critics when Hoarfrost at Ennery appeared in the “First Impressionist Exhibition” in Paris in 1874, but novelist and social reformer Emile Zola found Pissarro’s art powerful because of its “extreme concern for the truth.”

It is a fitting footnote to history that 70-plus years after the French Revolution, a self-taught outsider and social anarchist like Pissarro jumpstarted a revolution in art that successfully challenged the social, cultural, and aesthetic attitudes of the day. Curator Katherine Rothkopf’s beautifully nuanced show thoroughly acquaints us with this lesser-known painter whose innovative brushwork, iconoclastic subject matter, and mastery of atmosphere and light rival those of the more famous impressionists: Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Cezanne.

Disenchanted with social and religious as well as artistic hierarchies, Pissarro painted peasants as large as gentry and smokestacks as large as church steeples and found all people, all employment, all weather, all terrain worthy of his art.

Effect of Snow at L’Hermitage, Pontoise

In the evocative, ephemeral Banks of the Oise, Saint-Ouen-L’Aumône, a river flowing past smokestacks in the Paris suburbs reflects the fumes billowing up, blending with clouds in the sky. Homes and landscape are obscured by heavy snowfall in Effect of Snow at L’Hermitage, Pontoise. At the center of View of the Village of Louveciennes, the viewer’s attention is captured and held by thousands of dabs of color that look like brown summer grasses quivering with light.

While all the show’s paintings were created from 1864 to 1874 — the decade leading up to the Impressionists’ first exhibition — the video accompanying the artwork explores Pissarro’s childhood on the Caribbean Island of St. Thomas, Pissarro’s search for the new and unorthodox until his death in 1903 at the age of 73, the impact the Impressionists had on each other’s work, and how these upstart painters dramatically changed the way we look at art and life.

One stunning example of Pissarro’s command of the picture plane is his masterwork Côte des Jalais, Pontoise, with its descending/ascending perspectives. Point of view is plunged into a Paris suburb lining the floor of a valley far below. With a dramatic play of billowing gray clouds backlit by bright white light, the artist draws attention back up to the top of the canvas. An umber, then ochre, then deep-green field of crops covers the slopes of the valley. At the bend in an unpaved road, two strollers come into view. The road’s loose patchwork of dirt and grass fans out at the bottom of the painting, encompassing viewers and reminding us that we, too, are part of these ever-changing patterns of earth, atmosphere, color, and light.

“Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape” at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through January 6th

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Just Desserts

To fully experience Delta Axis @ Marshall Art’s current exhibition “Activation,” you had to be there opening night eating cake and looking at brutal images of war.

Creatures flayed beyond recognition were strewn across a butcher block in Rob Canfield’s savage, beautiful oil Slaughterhouse, and the figure that screamed in Canfield’s Thin Red Line looked like the old woman undone by treachery in Bronzino’s 16th-century masterwork Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time.

Jonathan Yablonski’s sleek, 21st-century image of war hung on the opposite wall. Slender lines soared skyward and narrowed at the top of a black skyscraper backdropped by a blood red sky. A human skeleton as large as the high-rise brought to mind the hordes of humanity whose toil and blood build economic and military empires.

In her mixed-media collage, Native, Leila Hamdan painted what it feels like to be hidden away, shamed, and treated like disposable property. A woman totally covered by a black burka, except for eyes that smoldered with rage and regret, shapeshifted into the thick neck, squat torso and stubby legs of a work-horse.

Conceptual artist Sanjit Sethi baked three large cakes for viewers, including one titled “Axis of Evil,” which was decorated with silhouettes of North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. We ate the cake from paper plates that were imprinted with the American flag.

Colored pencils and John Morris’ sardonic color-it-yourself print Coloring Colonialism lay on a table against the far back wall. Some viewers added a line or a touch of color to bear witness to the horror depicted. Some viewers turned away. Others, intoxicated by this show’s heady mix of celebration, patriotism, and brutality, colored the scene in ways that further debased the men and women being burned alive by Spanish Conquistadors.

The cakes have been eaten, but the provocative, brutally honest paintings and prints are still on view.

At Delta Axis @ Marhall Arts through November 3rd

Rob Canfield’s Thin Red Line at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts

Emotional battles are fought in Memphis College of Arts’ exhibition, “Threads 11×1, Eleven Artists A Single Vision.”

We see the inner turmoil in Gwyneth Scally’s sienna-red painting Raven, in which a woman howls, tears at her flesh, and tries to crawl out of her skin as her left foot morphs into a bird of prey. We see foreboding in the stern, sad face of a little girl whose left arm is tied to a billowing black cloud in Emily Kalwaitis’ pencil and acrylic wash titled Held. Kristin Martincic’s ceramic sculptures are filled with unresolved longing. Two white legs in Waiting materialize out of an equally white wall, bend at the knees, and strain to touch the plot of real grass just beyond reach on the floor below.

Conceptual artist and writer Buzz Spector tops off these hauntingly noir works with Black Waterfall, a mixed-media sculpture in which tattered threads unravel and cascade down seven feet of black denim, bringing to mind torn curtains and pierced veils. Instead of white light, Spector and the other artists in this exhibition explore the shadows, the unresolved angers and fears, the dark clouds that gather inside and above us all.

At MCA through November 8th

Running in conjunction with this weekend’s RiverArtsFest in South Main is the “RiverArtsFest Invitational Exhibition” at Jay Etkin Gallery. Roger Cleaves’ robotic, cartoon-like characters skulk, stalk, strangle, and stab each other across every square inch of his paintings. In sharp contrast to Cleaves’ sly satire, Cynthia Thompson sculpts delicate understated paper works that tell us about the quiet, gentle wisdom of the body, and Ian Lemmonds’ images of plastic toys combined with evocative light create a tableau of possibility and joy. At Jay Etkin Gallery, October 26th-October 28th

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Something Old, Something New

Adolph Gottlieb: Early Prints,” the current exhibition at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, chronicles a pivotal moment in the history of art. The prints’ titles (Pictograph, Hieroglyph, Omen, Voyage, Aura) tell the story. From 1933 to 1948, the time frame during which these works were created, Gottlieb printed and painted his way through other artists’ styles and the motifs of other cultures and, with the help of surrealism, recorded images from his own dreams and personal visions.

In the 1945 etching Untitled (E # E), two necks grow from each side of an upside-down face whose features have been rearranged by cubist distortion. Whorls morph into waves into phalluses into snakes into fingers. One of these fingers presses into the body of a large fish-like creature whose mouth opens wide with surprise.

In this and many of the other prints in the show, Gottlieb develops an increasingly original, gestural, nonrepresentational style that foreshadows the work of the abstract expressionists (Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline et al.), artists who changed the face of art in this country and around the world.

At AMUM through October 20th

You’ll find the most unsettling, show-stopping symbolism at L Ross Gallery in Margaret Munz-Losch’s exhibition, “Damnatio Memoriae.” An armadillo sits inside a rotting cypress stump in Munz-Losch’s primordial six-foot-tall painting Lullaby: Madonna of the Moss. Instead of her own litter of pups, the armadillo holds an armless human baby whose left eye is milky white. Fire ants march around the infant’s forehead like a crown of thorns.

Adolph Gottlieb image: Adolph and Estther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by Vaga, NY, NY, AEGF #4682P

The armadillo is either cradling or consuming the infant. Both readings are possible in a world where life, death, and decay are inseparable. Saplings grow out of rotting logs; cypress knees thrive in fetid, microbe-rich waters. This work’s subverted religious symbols, swampy environment, and green vines wrapped around cars and a school bus suggest that the lullaby the Madonna/armadillo croons to the infant goes something like this: Neither textbooks nor creeds nor motorized vehicles can deliver us from nature which, ultimately, reclaims everything. The more we try to insulate ourselves inside our books, inside our minds, inside our cars — the more we miss out on life’s raw beauty and power.

At L Ross Gallery through October 27th

Using skills and sensibilities learned from Chinese landscapists and sculptors of miniature stone mountains, Michael Costantini casts lean weathered bronzes whose irregular surfaces look architectural, organic, and geologic. In Perry Nicole Fine Art’s current exhibition, “Michael Costantini,” these evocative totems look like beams of a skyscraper excavated in some distant future, 200-year-old saguaro cacti whose wounds have been faithfully recorded, and/or vertical rock faces blanketed with moss and lichen.

Costantini’s acrylic paintings are also composed of rough-edged, irregular geometries. Scumbled and overlapping blue, beige, and indigo rectangles in The Outer Banks hover and shift like the seas/sands/storms of the coastal community in North Carolina where Costantini lives.

At Perry Nicole through October 29th

Hamlett Dobbins’ abstract paintings are visual shorthands for patterns as simple as the shape of a friend’s head and for processes as complex as the evolution of friendship. In his David Lusk Gallery exhibition, “Every One, Every Day,” Dobbins digs deep into mind and matter and paints what look like shadows moving across mental and physical landscapes, moisture oozing through cellular membranes, the centrifugal force of orbiting planets, and worm holes in facets of light.

Two of the show’s most understated works clearly demonstrate Dobbins’ mastery of color and light and, like much of Dobbins’ art, evoke a synesthetic response. A 3 o’clock sun blazes at the bottom of Untitled (for L.T./G.M.). Alternating layers of transparent yellows and greens turn the canvas into a meadow shot through with light. What looks like a piece of fabric, stained green and gold, billows at the top of the painting. Stand in front of this work, and you’ll feel sun on your body, breezes in your hair.

Two golden diamonds overlap and fill Untitled (for L.T./J.V.T.). At each of the diamond’s tips are small portholes. Like the view through a keyhole in a Dutch masterwork, you’ll see detailed worlds through these portals. Complex patterns of cumulus clouds float through 10 different shades of blue above forested hillsides, crows on pitted stone walls, and meadows covered with grains and grasses.

These small, surprisingly complex scenes demonstrate Dobbins’ skill at landscape as well as abstraction and prove him to be a magician whose sleights of hand and mastery of materials teach us to look, really look, at each scintilla of shape, color, and light.

At David Lusk through October 27th

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Upside Down and Inside Out

In her exhibition “Beth Edwards: Inside Out” at David Lusk Gallery, Edwards’ saturate, surreal paintings take us deep inside memory and the creative process and, along the way, turn some of Baudrillard’s postmodern notions inside out. Instead of viewing representations (what Baudrillard calls “simulacra”) as perversions or pretenses of reality, Edwards welcomes all images as raw materials that feed her imagination.

All color schemes and combinations of high-and-low art are possible in Edwards’ worlds. In Happy Day, an exuberant anthropomorphic mouse stands in front of an orange divan and plastic plant and looks at the painting of a human figure fractured by cubism. In Annunciation, a baby doll with a green face and orange hair stands in a royal-blue room looking out an open window. In Edward Hopper-like fashion, sunlight pours into the otherwise empty room creating a geometric pattern on the wall.

All of Edwards’ art is filled with spirit and anointed with light. With the vintage dolls, cartoon characters, and modernist paintings of her mid-20th-century childhood, Edwards builds highly expressive worlds that suggest what is most “real” is unfettered memory and imagination.

“Beth Edwards: Inside Out” at David Lusk Gallery through September 29th

“NIA: Salon 3,” Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts’ current exhibition, showcases established artists and newcomers in an unsettling, exhilarating group show that depicts the world at a boiling point.

Frank D. Robinson’s mesmerizing installation, Full Support, covers the entire back wall with 21st-century posters and paraphernalia. In the large mixed-media painting, Baby Jesus, Ron Herd creates a mosaic of the hopes/needs/fears that drive us all. Crowns, crosses, and doves are everywhere. Large transparent wings flank Christ’s body. Red flames burn inside him, and his crucified feet cradle an ebony baby with an all-seeing eye.

Ron Herd’s Baby Jesus

A charred lump of clay, dressed in crudely stitched burlap, stands at the end of a road blown into rubble in Dail Chambers’ mixed-media installation Crossroads. While Chambers records what happens when disparate points of view collide, Aundra McCoy’s Spirit Dolls provides hope that the world’s cultures and creeds might find a way to co-exist. McCoy’s beaded and feathered fetishes are filled with spirit all-embracing and all-encompassing enough to weave Middle Eastern, Native-American, and African motifs into one exquisitely beautiful work of art.

“NIA: Salon 3” at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts through September 29th

Two of the most cogent images in Jonathan McNabb’s exhibition “New Works,” at Eclectic Eye, take us inside a cathedral and an abandoned prison.

In the silver gelatin print, Notre Dame Cathedral, Christ still hangs on the cross near the ceiling but is almost lost in the shadows. Candles burn far below.

In Prison Interior, light pours through the crumbling walls and jail cells of an abandoned correctional institute, where pictures of family members, Hollywood stars, and comedians are still tacked to the walls. The sunlight pouring through empty jail cells brings to mind Christ’s message — more powerfully than the shadowy scene of the crucifixion in a grand cathedral — of stones loosened, tombs emptied, and darkness pierced by light.

“Jonathan McNabb: New Works” at Eclectic Eye through October 3rd

Photo artist Ian Lemmonds is another artist who finds beauty and hope in unexpected places. Five out of eight prints in “Serial Monogamy,” Lemmonds’ current exhibition at L Ross Gallery, consist of piles of Barbie doll legs backdropped by various shades of monochromatic tiles. Light reflecting off the plastic and ceramic surfaces transforms the legs into glowing bouquets. The slender, long-stemmed shapes counterpoint the square tiles on which they lie. Lemmonds captures our attention with body parts placed in obscure settings. As we stand transfixed, searching for metaphor and meaning — is there something titillating, prurient, or brutish about these dismembered limbs? — he surprises us with an experience of beauty that means everything and nothing.

Another untitled print has a similar effect. Two minuscule human figures look at a huge luminous plastic rabbit materializing out of the floor. This is not the radioactive creature that ate New York. Instead, a father hoists his son onto his shoulders to better see the limpid-eyed creature embued with something like hope and the suggestion that beauty and wonder are all around us.

“Serial Monogamy” at L Ross Gallery through September 30th

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Art Art Feature

Great Outdoors

Currently on view are two exhibitions inspired by Horn Island, the tiny Mississippi Gulf atoll made famous by Walter Anderson’s visionary watercolors and woodprints.

In “Horn Island 23” at the Memphis College of Art, a storm rages on the wall in the form of Trice Patterson’s mixed-media work Some Early Morn. A long piece of frayed canvas fastened with twine to weathered wood looks like a battered tent onto which the artist has scumbled and scrawled charcoal dust, ink, and black Conté crayon. At bottom right of the storm, we can just make out two delicately drawn pines — Patterson’s haunting tribute to Horn Island’s trees, many of which were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Don DuMont, the MCA adjunct instructor who led 30-plus colleagues, students, and alumni during the eight-day stay on Horn Island in June, contributes a well-crafted piece of whimsy to the show. A large raven, mouth open and cawing, strides across the top of DuMont’s Box of Squalling Riches. Crows carved into the sides appear to fly around the box in all directions. Instead of a golden ark, these squawking, intelligent keepers of the covenant guard a freshly hewn cedar/cypress container that could be a coffin for a small animal or a Pandora’s box full of Horn Island mosquitoes, blistering temperatures, high winds, freedom, and excitement.

Much of the artwork in “Horn Island 23” is a microcosm of the island. The sleek, steel seabird torpedoing in for the kill in Bill Price’s Cooling Wind is backdropped by Lance Turner’s large acrylic abstraction of ebb tide in Map of Horn Island Sand. Close by, Richard Prillaman’s copper Toad simulates the glossy slime covering the creature and the iron-rich mud in which it wallows. Matt Wening’s stark digital prints line the gallery’s right wall with dead trees that stand like sentinels on deserted beaches.

Untouched paper becomes a large sand dune in Jason William Cole’s accomplished watercolor Palms. At the crest of the dune, Cole gestures tufts of dead grass and a knee-high cluster of scrub and dwarf trees. Above deep-green palm blades, blue and purple washes create the impression of windswept sky.

Black lines of acrylic, twisting furiously in all directions, record the fight for life, the futile attempts to fly, and the death throes of Lisa Tribo’s Broken Wing Crow. A Spiral in the Sand, Lance Turner’s large acrylic on canvas covered with hundreds of hand-painted, near-white concentric whorls, creates the sensation of being sucked into and spit out of swirling sand and water.

Several of Tessera Phipps’ giclée prints look like pure geometry. Look closer. Puckers in the material of her white triangles and pointed arches, her brown “Xs,” and her titles (Inner Sanctum, Temple Door) suggest the artist was flat on her back looking up at securely fastened tent flaps when she conceived these images.

To photograph his unsettlingly existential Night Sky Over Main Camp, James Carey stood close to shoreline. With a wide-angle lens and a 30-second exposure time, Carey captured a band of artists under thousands of tiny points of light at the edge of civilization and infinity.

“Horn Island 23” at Memphis College of Art through September 21st

In “Eight Days in Exile” at Studio 1688, Willie Bearden, using infrared filters, lens flares, and Photoshop manipulations, transforms Horn Island’s already exotic landscape into post-apocalyptic visions of Eden. A horizon lined with leafless black trees stands in stark contrast to the luminous white scrub bushes, sand, and clouds in Bearden’s giclée print, Horn Island Reflection.

Robin Salant’s archival prints of shell and bone floating in black space bring to mind Edward Weston’s images of nautilus shells. But, instead of pure form, polished surface, and the graceful curve of Weston’s shells, Salant’s shells and bones, all broken and scarred on Horn Island, are more idiosyncratic and provocative.

The back of a catfish skull, picked clean by predators and bleached by the sun in Bone Study #1, looks like a pig snout, a satanic icon, the face of a wolf, and/or webbed wings wrapped around the body of an albino bat. Salant’s image of the orange-red incisors and pitted skull of a rodent, Bone Study #3: Nutria, brings to mind talismans that tribal people believe can channel the forces of the universe.

“Eight Days in Exile” at Studio 1688 through September 20th

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Art Art Feature

By Design

The invitation was irresistible. Memphis artist Sasha Barr and John Weeden, assistant director for Rhodes College’s Center for Outreach in the Development of the Arts, asked poster artists and designers to contribute prints from their personal portfolios to “Agents of Timbre,” the current exhibition at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts.

Respond they did. Given the chance to create art unconstrained by the expectations of customers or clients, these artists/designers have become 21st-century soothsayers whose sassy/sexy/sardonic posters reflect our times.

For their collaborative contribution to the exhibition, Pasadena artists Michael Motorcycle and Michael Hammond infuse fairy tales with 21st-century angst and create narratives about damsels and a world in distress. In the screenprint Into the Backyard Forest, a masked villain with a dagger runs through a stand of trees. A woman who is also a lush flower who is also a lioness tears at her hair. In the middle of the composition, in the middle of a tree, an all-seeing eye looks out at the viewer and weeps blood. Beyond adventure films and soap-opera dramas, Motorcycle and Hammond ask us to feel the world’s pain, including that of trees whose pulp feeds the endless flow of leaflets and posters.

The most ribald work in the show, Atlanta-based artist Mark McDevitt’s screenprint Weiner, looks like an underground poster for out-of-control consumerism. “So, who wants meat?!” the wild-eyed and grimacing weiner seems to exclaim as he squirts mustard on a long string of hot dogs spewing from his belly.

Many of the exhibition’s prints allude to excessive marketing and compromised environments. In The Conversation, Chicagoan Dan Grzeca packs skyscrapers into a wooden cart like those used by medieval peddlers. Grzeca’s marketplace has grown huge and threatens to roll over anything that gets in its way.

In a vision of economic and environmental collapse, 12 tiny cartoon legs support Rhode Island artist Jesse Ledoux’s screenprint Giant Hand. On the wrist, a business suit and tie are emblazoned in red, and inside the humongous hand is a complex world of gnomes, exotic landscapes, and octopus tentacles reaching up into tsunami waves, which are also squeezing a tiny human head.

Cityscapes burn dark red and roil with Van Gogh-like swirls in Kathleen Judge’s world. In her monoprint Westside, Chicago-based Judge steps back from the inferno and looks into the smoke and shadows of one of the most haunting images in the show: It’s twilight. We can just make out the sooty, swirling ether and a river flowing between silhouettes of factories, cranes, and smokestacks. At first, Memphian Kim Hindman’s consummately executed nude torsos seem out of place in a show full of satire and sociopolitical observation, but one of Hindman’s untitled prints, scumbled and shaded almost to abstraction, reminds us that for all our bombast and desire to control and consume, ultimately we are just one more ingredient merging into and morphing out of the primordial stew.

In Tweedy, Sasha Barr symbolizes the idiosyncratic views of rockers Jeff Tweedy and Glenn Kotche. A full moon flanks a huge eye looking down from the top floor of a theater, which lists to the right as if to accommodate these musicians’ experimental sounds and what a Rolling Stone article described as the “hell hounds in their heads.”

As we exit the galley, the wall on our right is filled with Philadelphia artist Tim Gough’s screenprints of alien/animal/human hybrids in whose breasts the battle between reason and primal instinct still rages. In the particularly poignant work, Guy with a Hole, a Big Foot-like creature rips open his own chest. Inside is stark-white space, a blank canvas. Getting to the guts of things and having our say are important, sometimes life-saving, desires.

Curators Weeden and Barr have created a venue that allows for that kind of wry, raw truth-telling. The results are powerful.

Closing reception Saturday, August 18, at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts from 6 to 9 p.m.