Author: Carol Knowles

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Art Art Feature

From Darkness and Light

For his exhibition of recent work at Perry Nicole Fine Art, John McIntire transforms smooth, cool stone into sexual icons, fertility fetishes, and sacrificial gods. Many of McIntire’s marble sculptures are complex syntheses of primal power and grace.

Voodoo Something to Me turns Belgian black marble into a two-foot-tall Venus of Willendorf with fertile bellies carved on her truncated body. Aztec Dreamer is a haunting composite of desert mystic, abstract masterwork, and sacrificial god. This large, supine figure with curved spine could be a yoga devotee practicing an advanced pose, a Buddha kicking back for a good belly laugh, or one of Henry Moore’s reclining figures. The title and posture of the piece also evoke Chac Mull, the Toltec god on whose belly humans were sacrificed.

In one of the most poignant and powerful works of his career, McIntire embodies Marilyn Monroe in white Georgia marble. Beneath a luminous floor-length sheath, we can just make out the sleek contrapposto figure with arched right foot on the verge of spinning across the gallery floor. Marilyn wraps her arms around her upper torso and forehead — an attempt, perhaps, to comfort herself or to better integrate mind/body/heart. With five feet of curvaceous white marble, McIntire brings to life the complex blond bombshell who counted playwrights and presidents as confidants, the comedienne who starred in some of the classics of American cinema, the aging ingénue who overdosed on drugs, and the Hollywood sex symbol who needed more.

At Perry Nicole Fine Art through August 15th

Anthony Lee’s American Out-Caste

Another visionary artist, Kurt Meer, immerses himself in alchemical and esoteric texts. Instead of turning dross into gold, in the exhibition “Voyage” at L Ross Gallery, Meer accomplishes something more personal and profound. He takes us downriver toward sunset in a body of work that attunes us to the subtlest of stimuli, baptizes us with light, and at the end the journey, eases us into night.

In Voyage I, river mist acts as a prism turning sunset into rainbow. Melon bleeds into teal into indigo into violet. White-hot yellow radiates from the center of the painting, creating a bowl of light that washes over and through the viewer.

In Voyage II, we move closer to the winding river, whose surface mirrors the sunset. No neons, no street lights, no strobes — above and below we are immersed in soft halos of light. The painting Solace brings us to the final bend in the river where Meer’s shadows are as nuanced as his colors. Earth’s edges dissolve into mist and darkening sky, palest peach streaks across the middle of the painting, and our own edges begin to blur. Still moving downriver, the last trace of color fades, as Meer enfolds us into the soft blanket of night.

At L Ross Gallery through August 31st

Anthony Lee’s vibrant colors, splashes of paint, and glossy surfaces bring to mind carnivals and the sunny beaches of Hawaii and St. Croix, islands where the artist has lived. In his exhibition “Under the Sun” at the Memphis Brooks Museum, Lee’s strongest paintings don’t depict tropical playgrounds but are, instead, scenes of hard labor, broiling suns, and the endless cycles of poverty.

In American Out-Caste, three large men lumber toward a livery stable that stood on Main Street in Memphis in the early 1900s. A fiery glow illuminates horses, wagons, and the stable, which are back-dropped by splatters of red paint and a silhouette of Memphis’ current skyline. A white-hot sun shines above the stooped right shoulder of one of the men. We can’t see his face. He could be looking for work, any kind of work, or this could be a showdown at high noon by men armed only with rakes and hoes.

Another punishing sun hovers above the heads of sharecroppers, circa 1930s, toiling with crude tools beneath skyscrapers in Work Ethic. The only thing unrestricted in Unrestricted are broiling temperatures. In this Dante-esque painting, faces floating in saturate red look stupefied by the heat.

In Mary and Son, 19th-century cotton pickers are also backdropped by heat and 21st-century architecture. Acrid greens glow around the heads of a mother and her son, who is strapped down with a large sack of cotton. The fetid halos suggest both polluted environment and tainted sacrifice. As more Americans fall below the poverty line, as generation after generation of the urban poor, undocumented migrant workers, and subsistence farmers are consigned to lives of quiet desperation, Lee’s 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century field hands become powerful portraits of poverty repeating itself.

At Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through August 12th

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Art Art Feature

Wild Abandon

You’ll find no provincialism, colloquial kitsch, or partisan bickering in the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s current exhibition, “Perspectives.” From its explosive beginning to its magnetic end, this regional art show, put together by globe-trotting juror/curator Michael Rooks, brainstorms possibilities.

Memphian Bo Rodda plops us right into the heart of -46m, 248m, -572, a computer-generated universe where thousands of viewpoints simultaneously explode toward and away from the viewer. There is no horizon line, no ground, no bumper-to-bumper traffic in this parallel world. Instead, swerving lines, printed on metallic paper in endless shades of gray, read like stainless-steel intergalactic freeways that have swallowed up every square inch of space.

Nashville artist Kit Reuther’s oils on canvas are as open-ended. In two of her strongest works, Blueline and Porcelancia, weeds scattered across crystalline cold landscapes become tours de force of painting and imagination. Dried pods morph into small urns, faded blue china, and hieroglyphs that wash into streams of ink excreted by squids and seaweeds floating in deep waters.

Memphian Jon Lee’s mixed-media paintings appear to reach a boiling point. Exotic animals materialize out of scraped and scumbled backgrounds, and venom drips from the mouth of a cobra. Acrylics and aerosols crash across his surfaces and drip over the edges of these 21st-century abstractions mixed with the raw energy and materials of graffiti.

Many of the works in “Perspectives” lie at the edge of art and consciousness. Memphian Terri Jones’ Stone’s Line is quirky, nostalgic, and so minimal you could miss it altogether. It’s worth finding for the associations it evokes, including the root-beer float you shared on your first date decades ago. Fifty-year-old paper straws thread together and disappear into the ceiling. As you move around Jones’ free-hanging strand of straws and memory, notice how it sways, creating shadows that ooze like colas onto gray carpet.

Patrick DeGuira’s Cannibal’s Makeover (detail)

Local artist Phillip Lewis’ installation, “Atmosphere,” both grounds us and arcs our point of view straight up. Droning sounds come from a speaker on the ceiling above a translucent blue rectangle that pulsates like an idle video monitor. Look up into Lewis’ ingenious mandala and acclimate to its sound. Your heart rate will slow to the beat of the visual pulse, and you’ll find yourself drawn some 300 yards above the museum where Lewis recorded winds with a parabolic mike.

Passionate, open-ended dialogue reaches a high point with Memphian Cedar Nordbye’s wall-filling installation that builds, explores, and destroys civilization. Two-by-fours inscribed with mind-bending mottoes climb up and over the top of a 10-foot partition. A cast of characters, including Billie Holiday, Abbie Hoffman, Franz Kafka, and Noam Chomsky, is exquisitely rendered in ink and acrylic on the surfaces of wooden beams that build both architecture and ideas. On the far right, 2×4’s tumble past cartoons of jet planes, replicas of the Empire State Building, and an image of a monk setting himself on fire.

A wry, informed mind is indispensable for deciphering Nashville artist Patrick DeGuira’s Cannibal’s Makeover, a small sooty room where shards of glass and human femurs are piled on the floor, hatchets are embedded in walls, human skulls are candleholders, a well-dressed man levitates just beyond reach, and almost everything (chairs, mirrors, bones, walls) is painted a dark gray. Humans feeding off humans will always be with us, DeGuira’s dark, deadpan installation seems to say. But ritual sacrifice is so passé. Imagine, instead, dark forces as heads of countries and corporations chew us up and spit us out, millions of us. Instead of devouring humans, one by one, in this high-tech world think global warfare, corporate takeover, and environmental devastation.

Memphis artist Niles Wallace works another kind of magic. He transforms hundreds of layers of shag carpet into two of the most moving works in the show. His cone-shaped Temple suggests many kinds of worship, including stupas, sweat lodges, and pyramids. Suspended a foot or so from the ground, his circular Portal suggests the hoops through which we must jump to reach subtler realms. You’ll find no ascetic, static perfection in Wallace’s heavenly visions. Instead, we get a comforting spirituality inflected with the frayed, shaggy, well-worn textures of life.

Murfreesboro artist Jacqueline Meeks explores our darker impulses with a series of ink drawings of a bejeweled, plumed aristocrat. Meeks’ metaphor for self-indulgence spinning out of control is political/social/psychological satire at its best. With her head covered by intricate petticoats and her elephantine bottom bared, an 18th-century French courtesan somersaults across the left wall of the gallery.

Above the entrance to “Perspectives,” William Rowe’s neon sign shouts “forget me” in ironic, electric-blue writing. Forget you? Forget this show which so beautifully reflects this mesmerizingly complex world? Not likely.

“Perspectives” at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through September 9th

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Cosmonauts

Located somewhere between mortals and the gods, George Hunt’s portraits of Southern soul at D’Edge Art include misguided devils, fieldhands who play the music of the spheres, and bruised Madonnas.

In Hunt’s complex cosmology, Satan is a creature more heart-broken and impish than evil. In Red Devil Blues, Satan wears his heart on his sleeve. His right eye is dilated and huge. Primal energy coils like a snake from his lower torso and sways to the tunes this horned, baby-faced devil plays on his purple ukulele.

Many of Hunt’s vivid, textured canvases combine wry humor with knowing nods to the masters. El-Roitan, The Man shows a grimacing, barefooted fieldhand whose neck and torso are an antique cigarette label seamlessly collaged onto the canvas. El-Roitan plays the music of his soul on a Greek lute surrounded by a Miro-like universe of dancing planets, insects, flowers, and stars.

The women of Hunt’s work are as full of mojo, art history, and blues as the men. In Sister Madam Walker, an almond-shaped face combines the features of an African mask with those of a medieval Madonna. A sliver of pale moonlight cups her cheek. White cotton fabric collaged into a Sunday-best dress frames a face on which Hunt maps out life’s passions and dark passages with a stunning mosaic of purples, mahoganies, and midnight blues.

At D’Edge Art through July 31th

In her installation, “Jewels,” at Medicine Factory, Erinn Cox elicits intense visceral reactions and develops surprisingly rich metaphors with nine piles of dirt topped with small pieces of plaster painted with high-gloss enamel. Some of the plaster pieces are shaped like calcified kidneys or hearts. On other piles, the opalescent material clusters like pearls, suggesting that

from ‘Jewels’ by Erinn Cox

life’s irritants bring experience (“pearls of wisdom”) as well as disease.

There are no hierarchies, no special powers or privileges here. Thick strands of human hair twist like earthworms aerating the soil. Hanging from the ceiling above each mound of dirt is a naked light bulb like one sees in a room used for interrogations or as a growth light. Both images fit. On June 7, 2004, Erinn Cox almost died. Since that time, she has explored her feelings regarding death and disease through memento mori that ask tough questions. Cox looks into nine piles of death/decay (a number connoting the end of a cycle) and finds optimal conditions for another round of life.

At Medicine Factory through June 29th

In Lauren Kalman’s exhibition, “Dress Up Dress Down,” also showing at Medicine Factory, a svelte figure floats in pure white light on a tiny LCD screen that dangles outside its casing, its circuitry exposed. At first glance, we wonder if Kalman has jerry-rigged us into some celestial realm. Up close, we realize the angel is the artist dressed in a white suit and swinging on a rope in an overexposed video titled Drop. We never see Kalman let go, but judging from the strain in her arms and the grimace on her face, her fall is imminent. Hanging by the Teeth finds the artist, dressed in the same silken suit, hanging by her teeth from another rope.

Rows of medicine bottles, frog skeletons, jaw bones, and jars used to hold biological specimens line up against Medicine Factory’s walls. Far back in the gallery, Kalman imagines her own demise on a corroded mortuary table she welded to the dimensions of her body.

Look, really look, this artist seems to be saying, at the ideologies that drive you to excel, to climb some corporate or spiritual ladder. Death is inevitable. When you strive for perfection in a body subject to aging and disease and push yourself to the limits of endurance, you hasten your decline.

In another video, Kalman dramatically underscores her ideas by wrapping a skull around her genitalia with a long swatch of fabric. Rather than an affront, her measured movements, repeated again and again in a video loop projected onto one of Medicine Factory’s scarred walls, become a meditation on Eros/Thanatos.

At Medicine Factory through June 29th

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Art Art Feature

Roll With It

As pivot for the Memphis roller-derby team Legion of Zoom, Elizabeth Alley sets the pace for her pack and is the last line of defense against the other team’s jammer. She’s very good at this fast, furious sport full of spills, sharp turns, and colorful language. Alley is also very good at art. In works currently on view, she records the art and architecture of Europe with her signature style of vivid colors, evocative shapes, and skewed perspectives.

Mostly shown from the thigh-down, roller-derby skaters, decked out in thick black kneepads, striped socks, and short shorts, are the subject of several of Alley’s untitled paintings in her exhibition “Don’t Leave Anything Behind,” at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts. With night lights illuminating the sweat on her angled right leg, one of these figures swivels left, darts past another player, and races counterclockwise around a rink painted a pastiche of oranges to accentuate the energy of this high-speed chase.

Many of the other quickly executed, mixed-media paintings in the Marshall Arts show are fragments of French life reduced almost to abstraction. In a beautifully atmospheric cityscape, blurred gray rectangles jut into a cobalt sky next to an orange awning. The crisp-edged, saturate rectangles on the right are a nod to Alley’s love for ethnic restaurants. Block lettering on a bright-red and creamy-white sign announces Tibetan food in the heart of Paris.

In a bird’s-eye view of Paris, we look through the hands of a huge clock face inside a train station converted into one of France’s premier museums. Just to the left of 7 o’clock, Alley lays down washes of ochre and umber to suggest the mottled facades and irregular windows of 16th-century architecture on the other side of the Seine.

Alley’s wry humor is as skewed as her perspective. An amorphous pattern of umbers and grays is backdropped by a clear turquoise sky. Adjust your eyes to this painting’s shadows, and you’ll make out a muscular body folded in on itself. A gray forearm falls between the legs. An elbow rests on a knee. The figure’s head is missing, cut off by the top of the picture plane. It’s a painting of Rodin’s The Thinker, but in Alley’s version, this forever deep-in-thought man has his head in the clouds.

“Don’t Leave Anything Behind” at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts through June 9th

This year’s Memphis In May poster saluting Spain reproduces six of Alley’s thickly impastoed oils on canvas arranged in three vertical rows. Two of these slices of Spanish life require footwork as agile as the leaps and sidestepping of roller-derby skating.

In the top right panel of the poster, a flamenco dancer’s red and black skirts and underskirts (in colors so thick they look squeezed straight from the paint tube) swirl in several directions around her legs and patent leather shoes. We see her from mid-thigh down. Her feet are flat on the floor, locked into place for an instant. Crisp strokes of raw sienna brushed in every direction add to the energy of the image and suggest the scuffmarks created as the dancer spins across an earthen floor.

We see a matador’s legs and silhouette in another panel. His feet are stationary but his shadow is full of arcs and angles. Like a dancer spinning left and right, like a skater negotiating a sharp turn around a rink, Alley captures another pivot as a bullfighter swoops his cape and abruptly pulls it back and behind him.

Rows of stucco-colored, hexagonal columns recede far into space as Alley takes us deep inside the Alhambra in the poster’s bottom right panel. At dead center in the composition, a tiny portal of light on a shadowed wall brings to mind the pinhole of a camera obscura and the eye of an artist exploring every nook and cranny, every scintilla of motion and light.

Elizabeth Alley’s poster saluting Spain is available at the Memphis In May offices, 88 Union Avenue, and at local frame shops.

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Art Art Feature

Readings

In each of Matt Ducklo’s six large color photographs on display in “Touch Tour Pictures” at Power House, a blind person explores a sculptural masterwork with his or her hands. A woman at the Museum of Modern Art presses her hands against the base of Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk, arches back her head, and appears to “see” (feel, intuit, sense) the huge piece of steel towering above her. In a photograph taken outside the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, a man traces the sinewy musculature of an archetypal figure killing an animal in Jacques Lipchitz’ Sacrifice III.

In a third image, a young woman hugs an eroded statute of Hatshetsup at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rather than evoking our inevitable decay and demise, she reminds us of our capacity to wrap mind and imagination around eons of time. Her long, slender hands bring to mind the sculptor who carved the stone. Her arms replace the appendages lying inert down the front of the ancient figure and remind us that Hatshetsup was once a woman who ruled all of Egypt.

Time stops altogether in one of Ducklo’s images. Light pours through a window of the Dixon Gallery, dissolves the right side of the picture, and shines along the body of a boy. Standing, his head bowed, he cups the face of Auguste Rodin’s 1868 masterwork, Girl with Flowers in Her Hair. In front of Ducklo’s beautifully composed, richly metaphorical images, we also pause and stand transfixed.

Matt Ducklo: “Touch Tour Pictures” at Power House through May 31st

In his exhibition “New Paintings” at Jay Etkin Gallery, Johnny Taylor captures the heroes, the memories and memorabilia, and the pop art/graffiti/kitsch that make up America.

At first glance, Taylor’s scrawls on multi-hued wooden panels look like graffiti on the sides of abandoned barns. Look closer. His layered, dripped on, stippled, and scraped surfaces are abstract works. Warhol-like repetitions of silk-screened baseball players, boxers, typewriters, and roosters add elements of pop art and Americana to this quirky, complex work.

Johnny Taylor’s riverrun II

Taylor’s titles add levels of meaning. Los Discos and No Mas remind us of Latino contributions to pop music and boxing, and the deeply shadowed face in R.C. #164 references Roberto Clemente, the legendary baseball player.

Taylor has noted that rows of vintage typewriters in riverrun II refer, in part, to the old trope about a thousand monkeys typewriting for a thousand years and, by accident, producing a masterwork such as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, whose first word is “riverrun.”

Another resonant reading for riverrun II is that Taylor (with his multi-lingual tongue in cheek and his fingertips on our country’s pulse) understands that in a thousand years of typing we would only begin to record the elements that make up our melting-pot lives and world.

“New Paintings by Johnny Taylor” at Jay Etkin Gallery through May 29th

Karen Jacobs’ exhibition at Perry Nicole Fine Art is another ingenious mix of culture and genre. For “Bokusho” (Japanese for abstract brushwork), this St. Louis artist painted thousands of calligraphic strokes onto hundreds of scraps of canvas collaged into complex grids.

At the center of a particularly evocative painting, Construct II, ragged rectangles float in a pattern reminiscent of a kimono with arms stretched-out. Rather than honoring biological ancestors, Construct II‘s nuanced background, irregular geometric shapes, and expressive gestures pay homage to abstract calligraphers and other artists who have influenced Jacobs’ style, including Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko, and Richard Diebenkorn.

Enso is the Zen symbol for circle of enlightenment. In one of Jacobs’ most powerful works, Enso Red, the dark-red background looks like the page of a book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again and again. The large calligraphic gesture at the center of the painting is frayed and scumbled. Pieces break off near its nadir. Instead of suggesting Platonic or Zen perfection, Jacobs’ circle brings to mind the Japanese aesthetic of “wabi-sabi,” the beauty of the natural cycles of growth, decay, and death. Here is the passion and pathos of existence, of life devouring life to sustain itself.

Karen Jacobs: “Bokusho” at Perry Nicole Fine Art through May 29th

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Lessons Learned

One of the most powerful and unsettling bodies of work in the Memphis College of Art MFA thesis exhibition consists of six small oils on panel by Kendra Bulgrin. In one painting, a cow stiff with rigor mortis lies on its side. Nearby, a chicken stuck in its own yellow-green excrement bends over to drink from the purple swill that drips down the panel. The work’s title — To turn from some gesture/that seemed urgently felt, but opaque/as a forgotten language — are lines from Susan Stewart’s poem “The Forest.” Bulgrin’s work speaks of the loss of animals grazing on family farms, of the cruelty of corporate farming, of a poisoned environment. Her hypnotic colors, devastated landscapes, and haunting titles ream our individual and collective consciousnesses to the core.

A 12-foot-tall, vaguely figurative bolt of satin filled with the pungent smell of decaying daylilies is the centerpiece of Erinn Cox’s Memento Mori. The installation also includes small, ominously beautiful pillows on which Cox has woven the design of several disease processes. A fisheye lens placed on the gallery wall creates the impression that we are looking deep into the body/mind of an artist whose work is filled with the dualities of existence — joy/pain, fear/relief, beauty/decay — that she experienced during a grave illness and recovery.

At On the Street Gallery through May 13th

Some of the most haunting works in the University of Memphis’ MFA exhibition are in “Ephemera,” Nancy Cheairs’ quickly executed watercolor washes that include an infant flying Chagall-like through the air, a woman on her knees praying, a headless figure in a pose of crucifixion, and a woman floating in infinite shades of gray. In Cheairs’ large, untitled oil on canvas from the “Floating World” series, a green aura surrounds an armless woman. Nearby, the branches of a tree reaching out like arms complete the body of the figure and suggest a world full of interconnection, healing, and grace.

In Just Desserts, one of strongest paintings in Jada Thompson’s MFA thesis work, a foreshortened body seen from the waist down relaxes into new growth. Graceful tendrils winding around the body are repeated in the curvature of the kneecaps and the turn of an ankle. Like Cheairs, Thompson finds her own voice, faces her own demons before she embraces the world around her.

At AMUM through May 19th

More student work from recently closed shows at Rhodes, the U of M, and MCA are too good to pass without mention.

Jeff Simmons’ Metal Construct 6 is part copper wiring, part vintage typewriter, and part motor and electrical components of an organ. This quirky sculpture evokes the cogs and complex wiring of a creative mind.

For his U of M BFA exhibition, Scott Fulmar has created surreal landscapes where Magritte meets Dr. Frankenstein. Fulmar’s computer-manipulated inkjet prints of naked and sometimes dismembered bodies are neither pornographic nor horrific but sardonic comments about an impersonal, industrialized world. In The End of Space, a woman is hoisted into the air on a sharply angled billboard. Rather than evoking a sexual response, she generates feelings of empathy as we observe yet another consumer being consumed by an out-of-kilter capitalism.

MCA BFA candidate Erica Page blew holes through three pairs of back-to-back cotton panels onto which she printed larger-than-life images of students and middle-aged professionals. Their expressive faces are powerful indictments: Viewers witness all the beauty, experience, and potential that are about to be compromised or lost. Slender filaments woven at the edges and across the wounds bring to mind the growing web of violence that threatens to enmesh us all.

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Off the Wall

Where to start with an exhibition as powerful as “Veda Reed: Daybreak/Nightfall” at David Lusk Gallery? I could tell you how Reed’s complex glazes and subtle gradations of color in her large oils on canvas create optical illusions that dance like the Northern Lights across the gallery walls. I could describe how weird, beautiful, and surreal her skyscapes become as she mixes day with night, memory with vision, and what looks like the cosmos with the volatile and wide-open Oklahoma skies of her childhood.

I could tell you how in Daybreak: The edge of dawn, 2 a huge planet dwarfs a sun that splits into two and spews cadmium yellow, then crimson, then mahogany, then burgundy into the darkness, or how some of Reed’s suns and planets break into shards of light that are satisfying patterns of abstraction, or how soft billows of gray vermillion in an elongated sky in Nightfall: “Earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away” ease us into an eternity envisioned, in part, by Henry F. Lyte’s hymn, “Abide with Me.”

Or we could go straight to the disturbingly beautiful Nightfall: “fast falls the eventide …”, where a black dome arches over a neon saucer of light hovering between a vermillion sky and seamless black sea. Beginnings and endings simultaneously play out as we glimpse first light through the mouth of Plato’s cave and peer at the last rays of the sun over the lip of a vault whose domed lid is closing.

With endless aureoles of yellow and vermillion fading into smoky crimson and black, Reed reaches higher and deeper into the cosmos than she ever has before.

At David Lusk Gallery through April 28th

As demonstrated in “Annabelle Meacham: Recent Work” at Jay Etkin Gallery, Meacham can do just about anything with paint and canvas. In her rendition of art deco’s sheer beauty, Hope and Desire, a pink lily is set against porcelain skin on a jewel-toned background in which every millimeter is gilded and faceted. In The Portrait, a matron with a stern expression sits with her white Persian cat in a fishbowl existence wryly emphasized by the goldfish swimming Magritte-like around her head.

What makes this body of work most powerful is not the surreal surprise or hyper-real detail but Meacham’s poignant and astute observations about the natural world. In Revelations, a woman sits at a grand piano that has sprouted a lush garden. She and her small hound look at the full moon through the large windows of the sanctuary/prison of their beautifully appointed drawing room.

In the whimsical Reflections, tiny deer painted on a Qing dynasty vase leap across precipices of mountains that jut straight up from flat land. White flowers pattern the chartreuse vase to the right. At center a butterfly flies past another finely sculpted vessel: a bare human derriere. Tendrils sprout from it in an image at the edge of propriety that weaves fertile bodies, the fertile earth, and fertile imaginations into one organic whole.

At Jay Etkin Gallery through April 21st

During the past year, Dwayne Butcher married, traveled widely, and began graduate studies at Memphis College of Art — all of which is reflected in Butcher’s exhibition “Art Made with a Ring” at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts.

In each of the 16 panels of Multi-Scully #1, a drip of enamel flows down, thrusts up, or oozes across art that is, in all other regards, stark and geometric. Placed side-by-side, the panels become kaleidoscopic metaphors for life undergoing change.

Several of the show’s strongest paintings reference Marfa, a Texas town whose landscape is as stark as any abstract artwork. Marfa is also the permanent site for the work of minimalist Donald Judd, one of Butcher’s major influences. The soft earth tones, round edges, pale mauve drips, and blue background of Blue Door at Marfa #3 evoke Marfa’s adobes, buttes, mesas, and clear-blue skies.

This painting is a welcome addition to Butcher’s art. Last year’s exhibition, “Supermandamnfool,” was sharp-edged and saturate. Add to that body of work Butcher’s Blue Door at Marfa series, and you get an artist whose expanding vision is rethinking minimalism.

At Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts through April 28th

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Outside the Box

The artworks in Memphis College of Art’s group exhibition “Reasons To Riot” tease, rankle, inspire, and horrify. In Hank Willis Thomas’ Jordan and Johnnie Walker in Timberland circa 1923 (inkjet print on canvas), a black man, with a basketball in his right hand and a noose around his neck, swings from the limb of a tree in a slam-dunk position. A dapper, well-dressed gentleman (the Striding Man logo for Johnnie Walker Scotch Whisky) walks past the lynched man with blithe confidence. “Just do it,” the signature advertising slogan for Nike sportswear, is printed at the bottom of the canvas. “Keep Walking” is printed beneath the Striding Man.

Slick advertising combined with sadistic slapstick is hard to take, but Thomas has created one of the most telling works in the exhibition. It slaps us in the face with a crass brutality that incites riot/revolt/rebellion. It brings us face-to-face with a callous mindset (“Just do it and keep walking”) that makes ethnic cleansing, holocaust, and apartheid possible.

Many of the artists challenge us to think outside the box. Derrick Adams’ installation, Playthings, invites us to get down on the floor and into a town painted on a rug. Possibilities for playacting are wide-open in this small community whose citizens are Kenyan tourist figurines as slender as Masai warriors, as sleek as gazelles. These 12-inch-tall wooden figures are dressed as McDonald’s fry cooks, divas in designer evening wear, basketball players, National Guardsmen in camouflage fatigues, and cross-dressers in pink feather coats. At the Internet café painted at the edge of the rug, you can join in the free-wheeling debates about beauty, politics, and fashion.

Chris Scarborough’s untitled portrait of ‘Sara’

With hips moving gracefully from side to side and books balanced on top of her head, digital video artist Leslie Hewitt records herself walking slowly across a landscape of deteriorating concrete, rubble, and weeds. Played again and again, this sparest of narratives gives us time to reflect and to wonder whether the burden the woman carries is a metaphor for the limiting effects of illiteracy or if the books (and the knowledge they contain) serve as her stepping stones out of the ghetto.

In the searing, sardonic, overtly sexual mixed-media drawing Destiny, Zoe Charlton whites-out the face and upper body of a man leaning back on his haunches. She straps what looks like the prow of a 17th-century clipper ship (crammed with human cargo for the slave trade) around the man’s waist like a dildo. A small undecorated Christmas tree dangles from its tip. Charlton takes the unexpressed (cut-off, repressed, denied, watered-down, expurgated) passions of humanity and channels them into a phallus as pointed as this artist’s insights, as unadorned as truth, as double-edged as our species’ capacity for cruelty and joy.

“Reasons To Riot” at Memphis College of Art through April 6th

Chris Scarborough’s exhibition “Living on Cloud Nine” at Clough-Hanson explores gender stereotypes. Scarborough’s most expressive works are digitally altered photographs of a girl named Sara. With subtle computer manipulations, Scarborough reduces her mouth, enlarges her eyes, elongates her limbs, and transforms her into a petite princess of Japanese anime whose kingdom is the cosmos or that vaguely remembered part of ourselves that at age 5 or so was astonished by just about everything.

One of Scarborough’s Saras sits in the sand looking out to sea, another is completely surrounded by darkness, and a third stands in black water looking up into an equally black sky. All three Saras are wide-eyed and open-mouthed with wonder.

Scarborough also digitally alters photographs of a blue-eyed, platinum-blond teenager named Shannon whose matte complexion and broad, photo-op smiles replace Sara’s freckles and look of amazement.

Hair-tousled and dressed in form-fitting sweater and slacks, one of the Shannons lies on a thick white rug looking up at the viewer with sex-kitten coquetry. Another image of the same young woman hangs on the wall to our right as we leave the gallery. This Shannon is slimmer; the texture and tone of her complexion has gone from matte to plastic. With the same seamless manipulations that transform Sara into an archetype of unadulterated awe, Scarborough turns Shannon into a Barbie doll lying in a trash-strewn lot, her limbs bent in exaggerated positions. Scarborough’s Shannon/Barbie composite could be a victim of drugs, foul play, or suicide, or she may stand as a metaphor for the soul-numbing effects of focusing on surface beauty.

And then there are the faces of Sara. Once you’ve recovered from the longing and regret these images engender — look again. In small increments (like Scarborough’s digital manipulations) relax and let Sara take you back to a time when you could see worlds of possibility inside and out.

“Living on Cloud Nine” at Clough-Hanson Gallery through April 4th

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Art Art Feature

Best in Show

The black rods and white ovals that make up David Comstock’s large enamel paintings in the exhibition “Flow” are some of the most expressive and sexually charged artworks currently on view.

The stakes are high in the thickly impastoed board game of life and death that Comstock plays out on the walls of L Ross Gallery. Large ovals look like inner sanctums and the lens through which we look at life. Everything feels slowed down, and every sensation is recorded on Comstock’s collages of frayed canvases that resemble torn membranes and scarred skin.

A thick black rod surrounds the ovum at the center of Untitled Green 003. Other lines slash across the canvas. One of these lines arcs down, pierces the egg-shaped core, and infuses the canvas with spring greens.

Negative Positive 002, the smallest canvas in the show, is the rawest. In this X-ray (and x-rated) version of the game, a white rod explodes inside the painting’s pitch-black core. In Passing, we don’t see the rod pierce the “egg,” but the yolk is broken and flows across the surface of the painting in washes of ochre and lemon.

An ovum gets pierced in David Comstock’s Untitled 003

In Comstock’s board game, every rectangle and square looks like a moment of psychological, emotional, or physical checkmate. In painting after painting, the thick black lines that surround, slash across, and penetrate egg-shaped centers simultaneously suggest not only injury/death but also birth/nurturing/sexuality, making “Flow” one of the boldest games in town.

At L Ross Gallery through March 31st

Glennray Tutor’s meticulously rendered oils of brand-new toys tightly packed into heart-shaped boxes make me long for the gunk and disarray of burnt-out fireworks and broken action figures. The three extraordinary pieces in his current exhibition, “Recent Works,” at Jay Etkin Gallery, plumb the depths of human experience with marbles and comic books.

Three iridescent marbles, painted equidistant from the center of Trio, orbit like tiny planets on top of a romance comic book published in the ’50s. The shadow of a purple-pink cat’s eye falls across the faces of two lovers about to kiss. Another marble, a swirl of yellow-orange, tops the final frame where much of the image and many of the words are cut off by the edge of the painting. What’s left are bits and pieces that read, “Lovely sweethearts … Moon … down on us … so softly, so wisely … came true all over again.”

The course of love in Glennray Tutor’s Trio

Since the publication of this romance comic some 50 years ago, many moonstruck sweethearts have discovered that the course of love is not as predictable as that of the planets and their moons. Tutor’s experiments with marbles and true romance establish that this artist, in addition to being a skilled hyper-realist, is also a campy metaphysician whose insights are bittersweet and wise.

At Jay Etkin Gallery through March 24th

At first glance, Kit Reuther’s six large oils on canvas look like depictions of weeds blown across barren landscapes. A closer look at her exhibition “Organikos” at Perry Nicole reveals a seemingly inexhaustible variety of colors and forms scattered across expanses of canvas.

One idea leads to another in works such as Blueline, in which blue washes and expressive shadows create giant squids that shoot out streams of ink, dried grasses poking through crevices of snow, and the tendrils of seaweeds floating in a deep-blue sea.

Shapes in Marabisque morph from doodles to pearls in oyster shells to peas in pods into an oval mirror. Scumbled gray lines lie near the center, with the artist topping off her fertile free-associations by floating a child’s bright red whirligig above the briar patch of lines, while at the bottom, she sprouts daisies from an impasto of primordial green ooze.

Reuther’s method of generating a form then building on that idea to invent new forms reminds us that consciousness of the ever-evolving environment is not always best expressed by hyper-realism, vague impressionistic play of light, or the reductive geometry of minimalism. Reuther, with rich imagination, captures dynamic interaction in life between sensory stimuli and response.

At Perry Nicole Fine Art through March 31st

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Art Art Feature

Breathe In

“Inhale … From the Corners,” Terri Jones’ exhibition at David Lusk Gallery, consists of three corroded sheets of metal, three sheets of vellum, two bottles, a black string, a piece of paraffin, a glass marble, and two long strips of gray felt. The show is so spare some viewers may wonder if the work has already come down. Those who stay long enough to explore Jones’ delicate lines, remarkable economy of gesture, and translucent materials will find themselves immersed in a nearly seamless symphony of light and space.

This symphony’s allegro movement occurs early in the morning when sunlight pours through plate-glass windows and bathes two large sheets of vellum titled Inhale. Hanging from the gallery’s 20-foot-ceiling and swaying with the slightest breeze, Inhale‘s large expanses of glowing, undulating vellum (a material used for sacred texts and ancient manuscripts) produce a quality of light bordering on the sublime.

Jones attunes our senses to the subtlest of stimuli. Tiny, nearly invisible ovals fount up and flow down Inhale‘s surfaces two at a time, then single file, farther and farther apart, until they disappear like drops of water in a translucent, silky-smooth vellum sea.

A black string draped over steel rods protruding from the far back wall teems with metaphor and perceptual play. Two identical golden bottles are hidden behind the reception desk close to the floor. They hang from the ends of the string, pulling it taut and creating the outline of a three-sided square. The title of the work, Fair, and the hidden gold (the only touch of color in the show) suggest layered meaning and special significance.

While many of Jones’ titles, such as Reach, Trace, Inhale, and Pause, are verbs that indicate subtle, incremental movement, Fair is a descriptor loaded with aesthetic and ethical evaluation regarding beauty, equity, and common decency. What holds the string structure in place, Jones seems to be saying, is the same delicate balance and careful handling that hold together any artistic composition, psyche, relationship, or community.

Part of Terri Jones’ exhibit ‘Inhale…From the Corners’ at David Lusk Gallery

From its starting point at the center of the gallery, Course, a long, narrow carpet of gray felt, crosses the floor diagonally and dead-ends beneath three sheets of metal titled Gift. Instead of forming the sides of one of Robert Morris’ inert gray cubes or standing alone, powerful and iconic, like one of Richard Serra’s steel slabs, three small, corroded metal squares are hinged like the panels of an altarpiece whose images and written doctrines vanished long ago. Corrosion has dissolved colors, words, shapes, even the gouges and scratches, transforming Gift into something veiled and haunting.

A slender eraser placed between two panels brings to mind the crayon drawing that Willem de Kooning allowed Robert Rauschenberg to obliterate: Forty erasers and one month’s labor later, Rauschenberg reduced the drawing to a nearly blank sheet of paper.

Instead of erasing a work of art, Jones reduces David Lusk Gallery to a nearly blank canvas, a tabula rasa full of residual energy that begs to be shaped and reshaped. Two graphite lines titled Reach and Pause drawn directly on the left and back gallery walls are punctuated, respectively, with a fresh slab of paraffin and a cast glass ball. The marble-sized ball looks poised for action, ready to complete its roll down the wall and across the floor.

The 19-foot-long portal titled Trace, delicately drawn on vellum and nailed to the right wall just above the floor, allows us, like Alice, to go through the looking glass down the rabbit hole into an open, luminous vision of reality where we not only think about but experience Milan Kundera’s “unbearable lightness of being,” Buddhism’s Sky Mind, and T.S. Eliot’s transpersonal vision described in the final segment of Four Quartets:

“When the last of earth left to discover/Is that which was the beginning;/ … Not known, because not looked for/But heard, half-heard, in the stillness/Between two waves of the sea./Quick now, here, now, always –/A condition of complete simplicity/(Costing not less than everything).” Through March 31st