Author: Carol Knowles

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Art Art Feature

Up Close and Personal

In contrast to photorealist painters, plein-air painters use no hard edges. Light is constantly in flux, and trees vibrate with wind. “Path into the Wilderness,” John Torina’s exhibition of 14 large, consummately executed oils on canvas at David Lusk Gallery, captures nature’s endless play of color and light with slashes of pure pigment and passages of blazing impasto that punctuate and energize subtle tonalities and monochromatic color fields.

The Eternal Circle by Lisa Jennings

In the spirit of Monet’s studies, Torina follows the light of the Mississippi River Delta from season to season, from dawn to dusk. In Old River Channel, a band of pale peach is bookended by two stands of leafless trees. The channel’s slow-moving water, the silver-blue sky, the skeletal trees, and the pale, nearly translucent sunset capture the look and feel of a crystalline, cold winter day. In Scarlet Summer and Sunset Over the Delta, Torina captures the fiery temperatures, humidity, and haze of summers. Deep reds (cadmiums, crimsons, and siennas) fill the sky, tint the vapors above the river, and reflect off large swaths of the wet Delta lowlands.

At David Lusk Gallery through February 24th

George Shaw’s Study for Poet’s Day

For 26 days during the summer of 2006, Lisa Jennings hiked the west coast of Ireland near Galway. And she painted — producing a body of work that constitutes “Threshold,” the exhibition at L Ross Gallery.

In her previous shows, ghostly figures, black ravens, and white doves were often superimposed on ethereal dreamscapes. Painting the Irish landscape on site has taken Jennings to a whole new level of art-making. Her mixed-media paintings are rich with the colors and textures of Ireland: the deep-purple heather, the red jasmine, and the infinite greens of the rolling hills. They are rich with ancient iconography as well, recording sites of ritual, stargazing, and burial, where prehistoric peoples erected large stone megaliths and circles of standing stones.

Jennings’ new work is also filled with personal symbolism. In Crossing the Unknown Sea, one of the standing stones morphs into the silhouette of a woman standing in a shallow sea, her feet planted on the ocean floor, her head turned to the right and gazing out to sea. Next to the figure is a curragh, an open boat covered with hide, which transported the ancients and their megaliths between coastal islands. This curragh, whose golden oars nearly touch the luminous figure, stands ready to carry a visionary artist deeper into the Irish landscape, deeper into the mind-set of millennia of humans burying their dead, studying the movement of the stars, attempting to understand the universe.

At L Ross Gallery through February 24th

Since childhood, George Shaw has sketched and painted his birthplace, Coventry, England, and is internationally noted for his meticulously rendered paintings. For his exhibition “A Day for a Small Poet,” however, Shaw quickly executed 19 enamel paintings on small pieces of cardboard, which are tacked to the walls of Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College. This format is poignantly apropos for a body of work in which the remains of an ancient forest and 15th-century graveyards stand alongside strip-mall shops, prefabricated housing, and abandoned garages.

In one of the untitled works, a huge tree trunk, decayed on the forest floor for centuries, is surrounded by litter from a nearby housing complex. Study for Lychgate depicts eroding medieval gravestones and the gate where the dead were laid beneath shrouds (only the well-to-do could afford coffins) until the priest performed last rites. The exhibition’s most provocative work, Study for Poet’s Day, is a weathered, blood-spattered garage in Tile Hill, the public housing complex in Coventry that has gained the reputation of being one of the roughest places in the U.K.

“A Day for a Small Poet” is a fitting title for a show in which a respected painter returns to sketching and to his roots. This body of work pays homage not to the rich or famous but to small poets — like the talented youngster who lived with his working-class parents in Tile Hill housing and honed his artistic skills sketching the buildings and trees of Coventry.

At Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, through February 21st

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Art Art Feature

The Look

“Artspace,” a 5-by-6-foot wallboard at the P&H Café, is one of the world’s smallest galleries. It flanks a small stage where bands play bluegrass and rock music. Beyond the stage, artists and writers gather for late-night probings into the human condition. Emily Walls’ exhibition “Are You Still Holding?” is a perfect fit for such a place.

With small, untitled ink drawings, smaller scraps of Naugahyde, and even smaller pieces of unfired polymer clay, Walls creates poignant, passionate, ever-hopeful bits of life. Walls packs a lot into a small installation in which each stroke of pen and twist of clay feels sentient.

A thumbnail-sized sculpture with a Cornish hen body and a head that looks like a bright-red sexual organ sits on top of a piece of wood proclaiming, “Good times are coming.” In an untitled drawing, a little black-and-white mutt inside a tiny wire pen invites us to play. A discarded Christmas tree drawn on a piece of plywood (so delicately rendered we can almost feel its soft needles) hangs above a Naugahyde snake that coils out of the wall and sniffs us with its felt-tipped nose. And bits of clay scattered across a dollhouse-size mantel look like sections of an earthworm, that rudimentary but remarkable creature capable of regenerating itself after it has been cut in two.

At the P&H Café through February 2nd

The sculpture in “Nancy White: New Ceramic Images” at the University of Memphis’ Jones Hall Gallery reveals another ceramic artist working at the top of her form. What comes across strongest is White’s deep love for the earth and its creatures. With smoked clay, chloride, glazes, and a finesse that comes only with years of experience, White creates an exquisite series of impressionist scenes of a sunny afternoon on Audubon Lake. Umber and off-white bodies of a flock of Canadian geese blur into sunspots, into light dancing on water, into a complex mosaic of blue-green-ochre that colors the grassy waters where the geese feed.

Rabbit Proof Fence? explores our complex relationship with a creature we adore, abuse, and consume. In this sculpted wall hanging, White’s smoked clay becomes the soft fur of three rabbits pressed against a barbed-wire fence. An actual strand of barbed-wire stretches across the rabbits’ bodies and attaches to the ceramic frame that surrounds the scene like a burnished altar to the beauty/danger that characterizes much of the natural world.

At Jones Hall Gallery through

February 16th

Nancy White’s Rabbit Proof Fence?

Another accomplished Memphis sculptor, Andrea Holmes Lugar, has mounted “Mixed Media,” an impressive exhibition of clay and bronze sculpture at the Levy Gallery in the Buckman Performing and Fine Arts Center. Some of the show’s strongest works are large bronzes. These are not polished monuments to the powerful and famous — Lugar is after something more personal and poignant.

Vissi d’Arte — Vissi d’Amore (“I lived for art, I lived for love”) looks like a ripe brown melon that has been peeled in one seamless motion, its golden pulp scooped out. This large bronze pulls us into its nearly empty shell, unwinds our point of view, and thrusts us back into the gallery. Art and love, Lugar suggests in this ingenious metaphor, are a ripening of feelings that sometimes comforts and shelters, sometimes reams us out, and almost always spins us off in new directions.

Lyre with Woven Landscape begs to be played. You may experience a strong desire to cradle the sounding board that looks like a scarred torso, to pull your fingers through the silken strings, and to imagine you have struck some soft, low notes that, like the artworks in Walls’ and White’s exhibitions, tell us about the world’s fragile and resilient beauty.

At the Levy Gallery through February 9th

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Art Art Feature

Back and Forth

In a recent phone interview, Jerry and Terry Lynn, identical-twin artists who paint together as the singularized “Twin,” spoke of their Southern roots, religious faith, and some 21st-century challenges, including the havoc caused by Hurricane Katrina and the violence in Darfur. Their new exhibition, “Twin: Paintings & the Story” at the David Lusk Gallery, bears witness to the ongoing struggles of humankind.

At first glance, the acrylic on canvas At the Sea looks like a group of Creole women dressed in white gowns and turbans standing at water’s edge performing the rite of baptism. But the acidic yellow sky looks rancid, a dark red sea is filled with rust, earth, and/or blood, and dead tree limbs reach across the top of the painting. In Twin’s apocalyptic landscape, the baptizers stand at the edge of a dying world.

Paint jabbed, impastoed, and flung across the top of The Journey: Refugees explodes above seven men and women, all in profile, who appear to move slowly, resolutely across the bottom of the painting. A patchwork of color becomes the hats, shawls, skirts, and shirts of this line of refugees whose will to go on in spite of chaos makes this poignant image a reminder of the more than 20 million people displaced in the world today.

The artists build complex metaphors and rich narratives in this body of work. For instance, in their retelling of the Genesis creation story, In the Beginning: Early Morning, a small white building that represents the church the artists attended as children (a recurring motif in Twin’s paintings) also looks like a medieval castle. Clouds surrounding the fortress-like church look heavy, pregnant with moisture. The aerial perspective, somber colors, fortress, and stormy sky depict a cosmos full of cataclysmic energy and mystery reminiscent of El Greco’s View of Toledo. As a final touch — one that feels free of satire or kitsch and full of respect for the unadorned power of the rustic — a large black rooster in the foreground stands guard over the primeval scene.

There are masterful passages of understatement in Twin’s paintings as well as images that roil. In The Temptation, another work based on a story from Genesis, tiny flecks of white and touches of umber on a scumbled brown background successfully suggest the stubble of a cotton field, the face/turban/bodice/skirt of a woman, and the shirt and trousers of her companion. Ousted from Eden, these two minuscule figures walk across a stark, barren world.

Women dressed in long white dresses have served as archetypes in Twin’s paintings throughout the artists’ career. In Strength: Manna, five iconic figures stand in a field as impressionist as Monet’s haystack series. Gallery lights reflecting off collage elements (frayed bits of burlap and dried grasses) suggest a harvested field and the loose weave of the women’s muslin dresses. The dark featureless faces of the figures contrast sharply with a landscape bleached out by noonday sun. The central figure’s large frame, stooped shoulders, and muscular forearms draped across her broad, skirted thighs speak of hard work, endurance, patience.

In the Garden speaks of grace in the face of hardship. Two women dressed in wide-brimmed straw hats and long muslin gowns appear to glide across a landscape lathered with green and brown pigment and a splatter of white cotton bolls. A closer look draws the viewer into the strata of this 75-by-129-inch vision of a cotton field as Eden. It depicts the same fertile delta on which we stand.

With white paint in one hand and pink in the other, Twin poured, splattered, and looped multiple layers of pigment across the surface of Isaac’s Everlasting. There is no Isaac, no Abraham in the painting. At the center of this pink and white jubilation, a dark-skinned Sarah, dressed like a bride in the exhibition’s whitest-whites, looks full of hope and confident that life will go on.

The twins are also skilled portraitists who, early in their careers, painted large canvases of sportsmen and musicians. Instead of stylizing the figures in Trio, the artists capture the nuanced body language of three honky-tonk players, dressed in Panama-style hats and brown Sunday suits, bending over their guitars — strumming, listening, keenly aware of the sounds they are making. Shades of electric blues and smoky indigos envelop the musicians. Bits of frayed burlap and dried grasses collaged onto the surface of this huge (approximately 6-by-9-foot) painting bring to mind wooden floors strewn with debris tracked in by laborers who have come to hear music that is both a hallelujah and a wail.

At David Lusk Gallery through January 27th

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Art Art Feature

Riders of the Storm

It was a hot year, literally and figuratively. Global warming became an unassailable reality as temperatures reached record highs. There was much inflamed political rhetoric and patriotic fervor, and modern weaponry and car bombs blasted into soldiers and innocent bystanders around the world. Closer to home, local and national artists tracked and tried to comprehend the political/social/cultural/environmental chaos with fierce, piercingly honest works of art.

Two venerable voices from the past weighed in on the current drama with ribald and unabashedly politically incorrect exhibitions that, rather than feeling exaggerated or dated, cut right to the heart of the matter. “Red Grooms: Selections from the Graphic Work” at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis and “Pattern Recognition: A Ted Faiers Retrospective” at Power House depicted humanity as misguided/deluded/wounded creatures engaged in millions of simultaneously running tragicomedies.

Local artists continue Grooms’ and Faiers’ legacy. Jan Hankins’ searing paintings at Clough-Hanson in the November exhibition “Sleepless” documented the passions and instincts that drive humanity and threaten to destroy the fabric of existence. There were slender threads of hope in Sleepless 2, a large oil on canvas that retold a classic tale of imperfect beings who yearn for relationship and beauty. Water roared across a devastated landscape and around a stitched-together Frankenstein monster that strained toward his bride strapped on an operating table. Beneath the table, a panther devoured a human heart. In this scene of raging emotions and thwarted desire, another bandaged creature (or another aspect of the feminine) rose from the bride’s chest and reached for a rose engulfed in light.

Many artists refused to see 2006 as apocalyptic. They looked for ways to curb the ethnic/religious/political rancor. In “Lapses To Kill,” Greely Myatt’s June installation at David Lusk Gallery, a Styrofoam sculpture, Formal Arrangement, depicted a woman in a mauve taffeta gown balancing on the head of a man dressed in a tux. The couple stared at an upside-down steel word balloon placed on top of another balloon. Like this couple contemplating upside-down thoughts, Myatt asked us to laugh at our cockeyed notions, to turn things over in our minds and to see things anew.

For years Pinkney Herbert’s thick saturate paints have roared across large canvases. Several of these works were exhibited in “Three Paths to Abstraction,” a group exhibition at AMUM. For the show “Recent Paintings and Drawings,” which ran concurrently at David Lusk in July, Herbert created some of the most minimal works of his career. A wing billowed by air currents or soft sheaths of rain flowing diagonally down a large canvas left most of the picture plane wide-open and white. With the addition of the graceful Zen-like painting Wing to his repertoire, in 2006 Herbert both depicted the fierceness of the times and embraced a more contemplative state of mind.

Even in the most abstract and ethereal of works, there were intimations of the times. At Perry Nicole Fine Art throughout November and at Clough-Hanson Gallery in a show that ran from January to the middle of February, the eerie reds of unshielded night lights and chemical greens of corporate crosswalks colored Susan Maakestad’s cityscapes. Swerving highways in most of her midsized canvases connected one painting to the next and created a shorthand world of artificial colors, speed, and concrete that left us wondering: When/if we ever slow down, what will remain of our sense of community and self?

At the L Ross Gallery in June, photographer Ian Lemmonds took us beyond the turmoil. With images of cheap plastic toys, sunlight, and translucent curtains that hung lopsided in windows, he created luminous worlds of possibility and joy where small white ponies galloped along window sills, materializing out of and disappearing into pure white light. In “Altered,” a November exhibition at the Jay Etkin Gallery, Pam Cobb explored dark places and produced some of the most powerful paintings of her career. A trace of light in Thistle revealed faint feathery weeds set against a background so dark one felt swallowed up by rich umber earth fertile enough to regenerate itself even after nuclear catastrophe.

Much of last year’s local artwork celebrated the potential and indefatigable spirit of humanity. For the exhibition “Origin” at the L Ross Gallery, Kurt Meer paired accomplished, ethereal landscapes with small figurative works. In Voyage III, a young woman, head tilted down, looked absorbed in the moment. The light and color that swirled around and inside her suggested that consciousness, fully engaged, could shape the cosmos.

She Spoke Softly, a self-portrait that was both Eden and primal scream summed up Memphis College of Art freshman David Gillespie’s eight-day sojourn on Horn Island. A blue-green human heart floated in an idyllic turquoise sea. A beautifully crafted ceramic torso sat on top of the painting. Its chest, throat, and mouth were wide open. Like many other artists in 2006, Gillespie became a channel for our times, opened up his heart, and roared.

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Art Art Feature

Gimme Shelter

CREDIT: Wangechi Mutu's work courtesy the Artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co. New York

New York collage artist Wangechi Mutu and Nashville sculptor Adrienne Outlaw have filled two towering Memphis galleries with works of art that are both disturbing and beautiful.

In the cavernous Art Museum of the University of Memphis, a million points of light dance on the nail heads that cover Shelter, the centerpiece of Outlaw’s exhibition. More than 350 volunteers worked 10 hours a day for just over a year hammering 1.2 million nails into the nylon mesh of Shelter‘s 7-by-3-by-5-foot rib-vaulted frame. Bigger than a rib cage and smaller than a Gothic church, this shimmering piece of sculpture/architecture is just large enough to cup the viewer who steps inside.

To create a haunting mock-up of the temporal world just outside her small sleek sanctuary, Outlaw wrapped worn bed sheets soaked with acrylic resin around student volunteers and created 14 ghostly body forms that lie on the gallery floor or hang from AMUM’s ceiling like vigilante lynchings, carcasses in a meat locker, or giant pupae struggling to free themselves from cocoons. The rusty barrel hoops cradling several of the muslin shrouds bring to mind nature’s cycles of life/death/decay/life.

Near the ceiling, a cocoon Outlaw cast from silken, translucent material shimmers like a chrysalid Shroud of Turin carrying the hope of new life.

At AMUM through January 13th

There is no shelter, no safe haven in Wangechi Mutu’s “Sleeping Heads Lie.” For this exhibition, Mutu gouged holes in Power House’s already deteriorating walls, spattered them with red paint, and created a war zone.

Acrylic paint, ink, and images from National Geographic, high-fashion journals, and pornographic magazines make up the eight untitled collages from Mutu’s “Sleeping Heads” series, which lines the walls of Power House’s upstairs gallery.

In each collage, a prone, graceful figure’s armless torso and shaved head are crammed with wildly disparate images that read like dreams, the rush of images that sometimes accompanies the throes of death, and the memories of a New York artist who grew up in Eastern Africa in Kenya’s capital city, Nairobi.

Snakes crawl over the cheek and chin of one of the “Sleeping Heads” collages. Rivers of red flow throughout the cranium of another, and a head wound splatters blood across the collage’s translucent Mylar surface. The beautiful mahogany and ebony skin tones of another figure are mottled with disease, and the teeth have been replaced by the incisors of a large predator. Severed arms and hands that lie across a fourth figure’s open mouth, cheek, and throat reference Africa’s children and adults who have been mutilated because they refuse to mine diamonds or fight as soldiers.

Black and dark-blue mourning apparel hang from eight clothes lines that stretch across the walls of Power House’s south gallery. The gallery is silent, empty — the mourned and the mourners have vanished. Clothing left on the lines and pans of water left on electric hot plates suggest the people were taken suddenly, hauled off, perhaps, to work in mines, to fight, or to be executed and buried in shallow graves. Mutu alludes to Africa’s killing fields by tinting the water in the pans a rusty red (suggesting pollution and blood) and painting the concrete floor, in an otherwise somber gallery, a dark saturate red.

Reds no longer splatter from the wounds of a maimed people in Mutu’s largest collage, The Jini. Instead, they flow as ebullient washes that take on the shape of a sultry-eyed, whiskered, fiery serpent. This aroused dragon spews out jewelry and motorcycles in what could be Mutu’s vision of an awakened Africa sloughing off brutality and the slave labor that produces expensive baubles for the West.

At the Power House through December 23rd

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Eyes Wide Open

In “Sleepless,” the current exhibition at Clough-Hanson, Jan Hankins, an accomplished painter known for his astute and sardonic mural-sized observations regarding politics, plumbs the dark waters of the subconscious. Hankins’ methodology is ingenious. With plastic replicas of characters from science fiction, classic tales of horror, and adventure films, he creates scenes of apocalypse that represent the conflicted impulses of the human psyche — the desire for relationship, for power, for pleasure, for immortality.

The psychic battles that rage in Hankins’ paintings are often complex free-for-alls between morality, instinct, and reason. In Lamb O’ God, the sacrificial lamb becomes a 22-karat, testosterone-filled ram that looks down from a high precipice as an F16 bombs an already devastated landscape. The head of a scientist becomes a gun turret from a battleship in Madness, and in The Blind Beating the Blind, God (with white hair and beard and a halo as heavy as an anvil) whispers prohibitions in the ear of a hunchback who is jacking off.

A Day in the Life looks like a ribald simulation of the evolution of the id/ego/superego in which the Creature from the Black Lagoon emerges from primordial waters with gun and money in his webbed hands, a policeman with angel wings points a gun in our face, and a mummy dressed in the American flag leaps out of a pile of manure, roll of toilet paper in hand.

No humor seems too dark, no exaggeration possible in a world where nuclear weapons and self-righteousness proliferate, genocide is alive and well in Darfur, and cloning humans is a distinct possibility. The surreal is tomorrow’s reality, and many of Hankins’ works have this at-the-edge quality, including Dominion Over, in which nightlights on the tanks of a chemical plant shine like Christmas lights in an otherwise blacked-out world. A giant ant straddles a flask and towers above Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory table. Bambi crouches below on a tiny island surrounded by black water.

Dark waters (an appropriate symbol for pollution, global warming, and clouded psyches) inundate much of the landscape in this body of work. A few survivors stand on top of rocks, stone pedestals, and piers. Fifi the pampered poodle (Yak with Fifi, acrylic on canvas) sits on top of an ice floe all dolled up with ribbons and flowers in her hair. She’s bright-eyed and slap-happy and oblivious to the snarling wolves that approach her.

Black water almost covers the stone pedestal on which the muscle-man in Blauburgunder stands. This Schwarzenegger look-alike has one foot on a treasure chest and is wrapped in the colors and stars and stripes of the flag. His tattered trousers are red-and-white-striped. His arms have become wildly gesturing, brawny legs that wear blue boots covered with gold stars. Blauburgunder — an Austrian word for the red Pinot Noir grape — refers, perhaps, to a politician drunk with power, money, and patriotism. In spite of the black water lapping at his ankles, he’s still grinning, still swaggering, as clueless and excited as Fifi.

Mirrors placed beneath three untitled toy models (including the one on which Blauburgunder is based) reflect gallery lights and cast shadows of figures onto the wall, creating dramatic plays of light and dark that intensify our sense of the struggles that go on within the heart and soul. Light streaming from beneath the plastic replicas and climbing up the gallery wall, rather than shining from above, brings all kinds of truisms and metaphors to mind, such as removing the sty from our own eyes and looking for truth inside.

In a series of oils on canvas (Sleepless 1, 2, and 3) and in two untitled plastic models, hope regarding the human condition can be gleaned from Hankins’ retelling of a classic tale of horror and romance. In Sleepless 2, water roars across the landscape and around Frankenstein’s monster, a stitched-together creature whose head is sewn on backward. The creature’s arms and torso reach toward the gravesite on which he stands. His head and lower body strain toward his bride, who is bandaged from neck to foot and strapped to an operating table. Beneath the table, a panther devours a human heart. In this scene of raging emotions and thwarted desires, another bandaged creature (or another aspect of the feminine) rises from the bride’s chest. Its swollen right hand reaches for a rose engulfed in light.

Wide-eyed and wide-awake in “Sleepless,” Hankins goes into the dark and shines light on wounded, misguided, deluded creatures who can still reach for beauty. His cast of characters — by turns funny, frightening, and poignant symbols of the human psyche — provide a blueprint for us all.

At Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, through December 6th

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En Route

There are no people, no cars, no buildings in Susan Maakestad’s spare visions of modernity. Swerving interstates, eerie colors, and complex textures make for compelling abstractions that look like the opening scenes of a film noir and recall the cityscapes of Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud.

Sunset and unshielded streetlights turn Culvert #3 smoky-red. A glowing pink ribbon of sky tops the concrete rubble of the sharply inclined Ramp #1, and in Street, Maakestad’s dry brush lets the fibers of cotton canvas show through to suggest gritty pavement narrowing to a point under a stormy, sooty sky.

Eighteen of Maakestad’s midsized canvases lining the right wall of Perry Nicole’s front and back galleries create an impression of unbroken movement. We speed past a blur of ochre fields and distant tree lines in Concrete & Trees #2, swerve around waterfronts in River and River #2, and in Speed Bump #2 we glide on a surfboard-shaped section of highway above a pitch-black sky.

Many of the works are painted low-to-the-ground and angled up, suggesting the perspective of a motorist focusing on the road ahead in a long drive that invites meditation. At the apex of Overpass, the highway disappears into an equally pale sky, reminding us of the impossibility of shoring ourselves against boundless energy and space no matter how sophisticated our concrete and steel infrastructures. Dusty pink expressways crossing smoky-red rivers (Barrier and Barrier #2) bring to mind the turmoil and emotional intensity in the cities Maakestad’s interstates connect.

When we end our journey at Parking Space #3 (a scumbled lot bordered by barren gray sky and an equally barren patch of yellow-green grass), there are still no people, no cars, no homes, no trees. Maakestad’s stark interstates have taken us for a mesmerizing ride that seems to ask: Beyond the concrete and beyond the frenetic pace of modern life, when/if we finally slow down, what will remain of our sense of community and self?

Susan Maakestad’s Overpass

Elizabeth Alley also takes us for a ride with eight small oils on canvas depicting commercial signs, the flat roofs of small businesses, the tops of treelines, and an occasional telephone pole.

The signs’ simple geometric shapes, vivid colors, and crisp lettering allow us to process their information and read their words quickly. Their oblique angles suggest the world we see when we crane our necks in fast-moving cars scanning strip malls for grocery stores (Ramona’s Tomato), candy shops (Flower’s Kiss #2), and fast-food restaurants (Pocky). Oriental lettering and the word “Pocky” printed on a maroon sign back-dropped by a clear blue sky bring to mind a combination gas station/fast-food restaurant that serves up sushi and Southern-fried chicken.

Nine of Alley’s figurative works hang in Perry Nicole’s front gallery, including the tiny, provocative Fishnets. In this 8-by-8-inch dramatically cropped portrait, a woman’s legs are bare except for a pair of wide-mesh stockings. Another figure’s high-heeled foot straddles the first woman’s thigh in a close-up that raises more questions than the scene’s modicum of information will ever answer.

Paintings derived from vintage family photos prove Alley a magician of memory. In the particularly resonant, conceptually rich Family Car, crisp shadows and confident strokes of impastoed paint make a scene from the early ’60s come alive. Bright gallery lights shining on the thick oils convincingly replicate the gloss of patent leather shoes, bronzed skin, the glare of sunlight on metal bumpers, and the brilliance of new car chrome.

An unusually lean and long 2-by-5-foot canvas accentuates the shape of a family sedan circa 1960s and crops the heads of two leggy teenagers, allowing viewers age 40 and over to become these youngsters and to reclaim the memory of a summer road trip complete with new shoes, new roadster, and Coppertone tans.

A shadow in the painting’s foreground suggests the silhouette of the mother/photographer who memorialized this scene for family archives. A photographer takes a picture that becomes the snapshot that becomes the work of art that depicts the photographer taking the snapshot that becomes … ad infinitum … a family portrait that goes beyond nostalgia to play with our notions regarding creativity, memory, time, and reality.

At Perry Nicole Fine Art through November 27th

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Art Art Feature

It’s Only (Un)natural

In “Material Terrain: A Sculptural Exploration of Landscape & Place” at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, 11 cutting-edge, nationally recognized sculptors pay homage to the textures, smells, and rough-hewn lyricism of nature. Their work is a testament to the ability of artists to persuade without moralizing, finger-pointing, or heavy-handed eco-agendas.

Valeska Soares sets the tone for the show with Fainting Couch, a sleek slab of shiny metal topped with a small white cotton pillow. The artwork’s pungent smells make no sense until we bend down and glimpse daylilies through the tiny perforations in this stainless-steel, casket-sized sculpture. The work hints at incapacitation and catastrophe and requires us to look deep and asks us to reclaim beauty in an increasingly sterile world.

Donald Lipski’s mixed-media Exquisite Copse (Big Knot) flawlessly simulates a tree limb tied into a knot tight enough to cut off the flow of resin. There are no smells of cut wood, no suppleness where the bark curls back from the grain. This cast-resin limb could be a poignant icon for the clear-cutting of the world’s forests and deaths of millions of trees. It’s as hard and lifeless as the concrete walkway on which it lies.

Many of the sculptors pose possible futures in which industrial-grade materials have replaced much of nature. John Ruppert’s Three Aluminum Pumpkins, scattered across the museum’s front lawn, look like artificially engineered, super-sized vegetables (each sculpture weighs 700 pounds) tailor-made for environments that can accommodate only the toughest materials. Wendy Ross’ Bloom resembles a 17-foot dandelion. While Ross’ flower is mesmerizing (each metal petal is dimpled and powdered), her maze of cross-hatched steel can’t

capture the feathery weightlessness of dandelion seeds.

The campy, outrageous, appropriately titled Digestion, Sculpture is tough on animals as well as plants. When Dennis Oppenheim’s assemblage of fiberglass, copper tubing, and a propane tank is fully operational, antlers burst into flames on top of the heads of two small deer whose pockmarked and blackened fiberglass bodies look chewed up and spit out by an ecosystem so compromised that its natural processes have degenerated into surreal, apocalyptic kitsch.

Donald Lipski’s Exquisite Copse (Big Knot)

Standing at 10-by-9-by-12 feet and weighing in at 900 pounds, Ursula von Rydingsvard’s Hej-Duk is a powerful presence in an exhibition filled with synthetic simulations of nature. This stair-stepped cedar pyramid is a monument not to the gods but to the real world and the personal memory of the artist who grew up in the 1940s in rustic barracks in refugee camps in the dense forests of Poland. Wooden beams ripple diagonally down the steps of this pyramid which begs not just to be touched and smelled but climbed so that we can sit on top of a chiseled, pungent mound of cedar and contemplate changes in behavior that may be necessary to salvage ourselves and our world.

Ming Fay’s works of art are complex metaphors for some of the reasons our world is at risk. His paper and wire Money Tree is a delicate arbor of overhanging boughs, plump dark-red cherries, and golden leaves imbedded with small coins. For the exhibition, Fay also sculpted Monkey Pots, unsettling works named for Amazon jungle plants that trap the heads of monkeys who eat their seeds. One of these coiled, garish globs of pigmented foam hangs in Fay’s arbor like a cancerous cherry or a desire for prosperity that has degenerated into what the sculptor describes as humans “caught by their obsessive need to consume, acquire, and conquer.” Ninety Monkey Pots hang in the fine old trees surrounding the museum, bringing our attention to a real arbor at risk. Overton Park’s 175 acres of “Old Forest” is what’s left of a dense forest that grew along the banks of the Mississippi for millennia.

By flawlessly simulating Dry Rot and hanging it on a gallery wall, Roxy Paine introduces us to an aspect of nature we may have overlooked in our clear-cut, concrete-and-steel cities. His fiberglass-and-epoxy depiction of the rings of a tree disintegrating into fine burnt-sienna powder studded with the smooth skins of off-white mushroom is, surprisingly, one of the most beautiful artworks in the exhibition.

James Surls’ art is delightfully silly but profound too. The petals of his Big Walking Eye Flower are large eyes that are also the multiple feet on which this nine-foot-tall steel and pine sculpture appears to spiral clockwise along a strip of grass next to the concrete walkway leading up to the museum entrance. Surls’ all-seeing tumbleweed propels us toward an exhibition that asks us to look at nature from the inside out, to feel its rhythms, and to look again and again at a world worth saving.

At Memphis Brooks Museum of Art though

November 26th

Categories
Art Art Feature

Desirables

In “Philosophy of Beauty,” the current exhibition at David Lusk Gallery, Tad Lauritzen Wright reveals strong, if not completely serious, feelings about art, life, and beauty.

In 2nd Chance Series: The Fate of Beauty, he invites viewers to play shuffleboard with a game whose point-zones include “hot as a two dollar pistol,” “drop dead gorgeous,” and “ugly as sin,” the kinds of slurs and adulations that start barroom brawls and mark intense infatuations.

In a body of work that contains no sacred cows, no designations between high and low art, no hierarchies of any kind, Lauritzen Wright turns beauty inside out and upside down. Doodles and cartoon characters stand alongside advertising slogans, masterworks, and redheads. In the large grid painting Redhead Discount, redheads include jackrabbits with fuchsia ears, bright-red sunburned faces, and Hershey-brown hound dogs.

Lauritzen Wright’s cosmetically imperfect figures are sassy and alert. A Minute of My Time is composed of 1,440 self-portraits, one for every minute in a day. The artist records almost every expression, body posture, and bad-hair day known to humankind. In Beautiful Headrests, 1 and 2, tall, lean, squat, round, and oval bodies tumble and play on pillowcases embroidered with Kama Sutra free-for-alls.

Mona Lisa’s umber hair and robe have been replaced with a mosaic of cartoon figures, word games, and handwritten lists in the multi-media collage 2nd Chance Series: Mona Lisa. In Lauritzen Wright’s version of the masterwork, there’s a lot going on inside Leonardo’s laid-back, enigmatic icon of beauty. There are things to do, places she wants to go, people she cares about, favorite movies, and favorite recipes.

On scraps of paper, on pillowcases, in colorful grid paintings, and in the face of the artist, we piece together Lauritzen Wright’s philosophy of beauty. His sassy, sexy, all-systems-go philosophy is as hot as a two-dollar pistol. It’s as hot as minute-to-minute awareness of one’s being.

At David Lusk Gallery through October 28th

Leandra Urrutia’s wildly imaginative figurative works in the exhibition “Ceramic Sculpture” at St. Mary’s Buckman Performing & Fine Arts Center record pleasure at the edge of pain, life at the edge of death, and beauty that is all the more desired because it is temporal and uncertain.

Bulbous white orbs in axis x simultaneously suggest voluptuousness, cancer, and pregnancy, and in variable b, the shins and feet of babies (some with missing toes) hang like trophies from what could be umbilical cords, intestines, tentacles of an octopus, or nylons stuffed with dried brown grasses. In axis y, on the far back wall, Siamese twins or a fetus with an encephalitic head and four legs attempt to push through the membrane of an ovum.

If you can stand being ping-ponged between desire and repulsion, birth and disease, ecstasy and pain, you’re in for one of the most daring and original shows of the year.

At the Buckman Performing & Fine Arts Center through October 27th

Jenny Balisle celebrates beauty with meticulously layered paintings that feature surfaces that look wet to the touch, the application of oil paints similar to those used by the 17th-century Dutch masters, color fields and drips of the abstract expressionists, complex surfaces of Art Brut, and semi-abstract landscapes that possess the scale and atmosphere of Chinese scroll paintings.

“Process,” Balisle’s current body of work at the L Ross Gallery, suggests this artist can simulate almost anything on the surface of a painting, including the complex colors and textures of erosion. Chemical blues and iridescent siennas look like patinas of weathered metal in one of her untitled mid-sized oils on panel. In a triptych of oils (each panel measuring 21-by-45 inches), lemon yellows next to deeply scratched sienna and umber surfaces evoke bright sunlight pouring through chinks in walls encrusted with eons of corrosion.

One of Balisle’s most successful works combines the techniques of the modernists with an Eastern aesthetic. While this painting’s drips and color fields can be read as pure abstraction, its large size (5-by-7 feet), layers of paint shot through with sienna, yellow, and light green, and smudges that resemble stands of bamboo also evoke the scale, atmosphere, and images of Oriental landscape.

Thick impastos of umber on the left side of the work look like touchstones through which we might access this ethereal landscape. The desire to rub one’s hand across the weathered rutted earth and bark is almost irresistible.

At the L Ross Gallery through October 31st

Categories
Art Art Feature

See the Light

If you think that seven-plus decades might have mellowed Larry Edwards, think again. For more than 25 years, Edwards, a well-known painter and former art professor at the University of Memphis, has been observing and recording what he calls the three “F’s”: Foolishness, Foibles, and the Frailties of human behavior.

In “Now and Then: Works Not Seen” at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts — an exhibition of pastel and watercolor pieces created from 1991 to the present — Edwards proves himself to be a prophet as well as a social and metaphysical satirist. (“If you think my art is too exaggerated, just look at 21st-century politics and religion,” the artist remarked in a recent interview.)

In Evil Slot Machine (2006), there are no lucky rolls of the dice, no winning combinations. The jackpots in this gambling hall combine Hieronymus Bosch-like demons with M.C. Escher’s infinities. Horned, fanged monsters spew out more horned, fanged monsters, which spew out still more of these creatures. In Hell Mouth II with Imps, Sinners and Roller Coasters (2006), the imps look like putti, the plump, naked baby angels depicted in Renaissance and Rococo paintings. In Edwards’ cosmology, instead of celebrating celestial or earthly love, they stoke the fires of hell and push human heads deeper into the flames.

All three F’s are abundantly present in the creature of Transvestite with Wig and Corset (2005). She’s wearing a pink corset, silk ribbons, and frazzled magenta hairpiece, and she winks at us through a large cancerous growth covering her right eye. The tusks, the huge face, and tough hide are distinctly rhinoceros. The creature’s attempts to cover her lumbering carcass and the ravages of life with fashions and dye jobs are unmistakably human.

When Edwards is not using garish color and caricature to accentuate one of the three F’s, we see an accomplished colorist and subtle draftsman at work. In Fishing Pond (gouache, watercolor, pastel and ink, 2000), sunlight filters through paler and paler shades of blue. Exotic fish and tiny white minnows swim through a silver-and-dark-green underwater forest. From pond floor to the surface of the water, every scale of fish and frond of seaweed is delicately and accurately rendered.

More impish angels cavort in the 1991 work Queen of the Grotesqueries & Her Court. They circle above an ancient woman dressed in a pink frock and tiny yellow sandals. Sharply angled wooden floor planks thrust our point of view past the winged, skull-headed babies, past the aged woman, past human heads skewered by metal spikes. An intense white-gold light streams out of the far back room of the ramshackle antebellum home in which the queen holds court.

But also in this painting is a hunchback crouching in the penetrating, possibly divine, light. This iota of hope in Edwards’ house of horrors — might there be some meaning, some transcendent function to all the pain? — makes this grotesque painting unbearably poignant.

Procession by Pamela Hassler

“Larry Edwards: Now and Then: Works Not Seen” at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts through October 21st

In “Stir Crazy,” the current exhibition at Jay Etkin Gallery, each of Pamela Hassler’s 12 paintings and eight studies (oil pastels on paper) is a striking abstraction and an homage to light.

Light glows at the center of much of Hassler’s art. It flows as pale washes in Study V, lasers down the center of Tryst, and reflects off a sheer rock face in Echo.

In Turquoise Ray I, II, and III — a stunning triptych that evokes the minerals, magmas, and rock faces of the American Southwest — streaks of turquoise and fragments of purple and green-ochre float Hans Hoffman-like across the burnished fields of three small oils on canvas.

Translucent blue outlines a chasm of ivory-black in Blue Line. This five-by-six-foot painting, one of the largest in the show, brings to mind the thin blue line of atmosphere that marks the boundary between the blackness of space and earth’s atmosphere.

Reds and yellows search out each other’s edges in several large paintings. In Echo, adobes morph out of red rock and desert ochres. Near the center of Procession, reds and oranges blaze behind tall, slender rectangles that blur into a limpid pool of yellow. Sprawling lines of conté crayon further activate the work.

In “Stir Crazy,” the hand of the artist sweeps across blank canvas and shards of light move across the abyss in a body of work that seems to be about the joy of envisioning the cosmos and creating something out of nothing.

“Stir Crazy: Pamela Hassler: Recent Paintings” at Jay Etkin

Gallery through October 21st