Author: Eileen Townsend

If you’ve seen the film Into the Wild, Sean Penn’s 2007 biopic about doomed, Alaska-bound drifter Christopher McCandless (or read the eponymous book by Jon Krakauer), then you probably know about the artist Leonard Knight. On McCandless’ way to the great North, he briefly stops at Knight’s “Salvation Mountain”— a big, painted rock in the middle of the SoCal desert.

Knight passed away yesterday at age 82.

Knight’s mountain, visible on Google Earth, reads “GOD IS LOVE, JESUS I’M A SINNER PLEASE COME UPON MY BODY AND INTO MY HEART.” It is painted (in bright latex) to resemble an Eden, a waterfall, a valley of the shadow of doubt, a Gethsemene. It backs up against Slab City, a neighboring desert community of off-season Burning Man attendees and trailer-dwellers. Knight spent over 30 years crafting his mountain in ascetic conditions, and the result doesn’t look, or feel, quite like anything else in the world.

I got a chance to meet Knight a few years ago. He would have been about 79 when I passed through the area, and at the time he was still spry. He gave my friend and I (plus a prayerful full-leather biker and a group of wayward crust punks) a tour of the Mountain, pointing out sections that had been fabricated from old tires and rail ties, or else carved laboriously out of the rough ground. We brought him a bucket of hot pink paint because we’d heard it was customary to bring paint in exchange for his tour. He told us that his goal was to spread the love of God and that he was glad that his work was getting attention.

Knight has been written about as a visionary artist (an expansion on the term “self-taught artist”, as many informally schooled artists have been called). His work falls in with that of painters Howard Finster and Bill Traylor, as well as with Memphis’ own “Saint Paul’s Spiritual Temple”—or Voodoo Village. Much outsider work (as it is also sometimes called) is spiritually-themed and highly colorful. But Knight’s mountain is bigger and weirder and less salable than most outsider art, and so—even as it is the most visible piece in its genre—there are still concerns about its preservation.

Hopefully (and probably) Knight’s work will meet a better fate than “Saint Paul’s”, which fell victim to vandalism and abandon after the 1960s. For now, if you’re ever driving around in the desert south of Los Angeles, you can stop by and remember what Knight said about his work and faith in Into the Wild: “This is a love story that is staggering to everybody in the whole world.”

Architecture is supposed to be the most accessible art form. As New York Times critic Allison Arieff wrote in 2012, “Architecture…carries a burden that the other arts don’t — it must reconcile aesthetics and ideas with user functionality. A painting or a novel need only please or provoke its audience; it doesn’t then also require setbacks, parking minimums and LEED certification.” Buildings are everywhere. Not everyone collects oil paintings, but everyone uses buildings.

Arieff’s op-ed (“Why Don’t We Read About Architecture?”) goes onto criticize writers for using words like “demassification” and “attitudinally” to describe architecture. These words are inaccessible for the majority of people (who, assumably, didn’t have four+ years of theory education at the College of Their Choice.) Instead, she suggests writers use clean, simple, action-driven language to describe the functional arts.

But what to do when the architecture is not functional or accessible? Or, in the case of “Protoplastic,” Igor Siddiqui’s recently-opened exhibition at TOPS Gallery, when an architect has architected…well, art?

Siddiqui, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin, is a Yale-educated architect and the principal of Isssstudio, an architecture and design firm responsible for projects like “Mas Moss” (a curtain made from soy-dyed biodegradable cable and ball moss) and Ceramic Tesssseltile (an irregularly shaped tesselating tile that “produces the greatest degree of variation when multiplied across the larger field.”) His design work is mathy and techy and Green, and the online descriptions of his projects throw around terms like “morphogenesis.”

“Protoplastic” can be understood as a flexing of the same design muscles that shoulder the architect’s professional work. The installation, designed particularly for TOPS, involves custom acrylic moulds and biodegradable reliefs. Sheets of bright-white plastic are impressed with radial patterns of lines. The sheets are arranged in a free-standing pattern around the space. In the small basement gallery, the viewer could conceivably feel as if she were in the middle of a large, elegantly executed rodent maze.

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In one corner, the computer-cut moulds that originally marked the plastic sheets are repurposed into a hanging sculpture. Their yellow, semi-translucent rubberiness feels dirty next to the white floor and other works. Spare blocks of concrete support the plastic reliefs, a detail that references the TOPS space but also, by contrast to the work it supports, reads as somewhat messy.

Siddiqui’s work is complicated. He designs he moulds using Rhino and Grasshopper, two algorithm-based architectural modeling softwares that require more than a little technical know-how. The design process is undoubtedly dense, and the materials interesting, but the results are not dense enough. The work doesn’t look simplistic, but it is oblique. It reads as a hollow celebration of the technology that created it. Perhaps more visual explanation of the process is called for — a corollary display of the original Rhino drawings or literature about the plastic.

With respect to Arieff and her opinions on architecture writing, it would be ideal to describe the work as “clean-cut meditations on form and function” or as “technically-designed art experiments that use compostable plastic.” But this is hard-to-read art, not architecture. Remote terms such as “vector-based biomimicry” may be a better match for Siddiqui’s work.

At TOPS Gallery (400 S. Front) through March 29th.

It is difficult to confess. Confessions can be genuine, but the “confessional” is a codified genre, with all the perks and failings of a genre. Starting with St. Augustine and perhaps continuing to James Frey, the confessional has seen some high and low points.

Chris Miner, the video artist and director of Crosstown Arts, knows this well. The artist’s latest show, “The Gospel According to a Young American” is a comprehensive retrospective of almost 15 years of video art. Over 40 videos, broadcast on 20 boxy televisions, comprise a record of Miner’s confessions— about marriage, faith and understanding. The pieces vacillate between Miner’s raw, un-ironic self-professions and deftly ironized portraits of his surroundings.

At its best, the work is both on-its-knees and conscious of that well-worn pose. At its weakest, (and, perhaps, in the most genuinely vulnerable pieces, such as when Miner critiques his Mississippi heritage) the work seems to not know to whom it is addressed: God? Fellow men? The artist himself?

The exhibition, open through February 15th at Rhodes’ Clough-Hanson Gallery, is loosely arranged like a church: pew-length tables and TVs are arranged in wings around the gallery, while a single alter-like television sits centrally in space. There is a small side-gallery with humble fabric benches and several televisions placed on low pedestals.

The televisions loop Miner’s grainy clips, all shot on a camera and in a style that the digital generation has dubbed, reductively, ‘VHS.’ Miner favors a slow pace— single frames with minimal action, shots of old photographs, or frames of an unmoving landscape. If there is action in the shots, it is only to show the minuteness of human movement in an otherwise unerring stillness.

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In The Best Decision Ever Made, Miner speaks over progressive shots of his late grandmother’s Mississippi home. It is a small, pre-war white house, the sort that still has a root cellar and outdoor laundry line. He films the neighbor’s dog pacing behind a wire fence, the sunset coming through winter oaks, the backyard garden shed and his grandmother’s immaculately blue kitchen. He speaks at length about the difference between his grandparents lives and his own, ungrounded experiences (“I’ve been to three different colleges and two different grad schools…I’ve had five serious relationships with women, none of whom I lived in the same city with more than three months…”)

There is an incredible moment in which Miner talks about his first time masturbating in his grandparents pink bathroom, and how, as a child, he imagined someone watching him through small holes in the door of a nearby laundry cabinet. He films the door. He films the holes. He films from inside the holes, looking out. The camera’s gaze explicitly mimics that of the silent, watching divine.

The show’s longer pieces allow the artist time to present a complex picture, and to guide the viewer through multi-layered (but rarely meandering) introspections. Many of Miner’s shorter pieces are performative, such as Via Dolorosa (As Made Famous by Sandi Patti), in which the artist dresses up like a Christian-channel church marm and sings Sandi Patti’s end-of-times dramatic ballad about the life and death of Christ. Via Dolorosa is a great piece— funny, uncanny and accessible.

Others of Miner’s short works are less successful. In, Understanding the Complex, Miner interviews a white woman (assumably living on a military complex) who tells stories about how the racial diversity of the complex has shocked her. The woman, framed from a low angle, sits in a black recliner. It appears that her left hand is disabled— a detail that could only be captured from that specific angle. Miner is not present in the video.**

The problem with this piece, and several others like it (one where an old man, surrounded by plaques that say “JESUS” and hunting ephemera, speaks colloquially about his health; one where Miner’s mother takes his elderly grandfather on a tour of a Native American craft museum), is that they are a part of the same self-reflexive project as the works that actually feature Miner. They are included as a part of his “Gospel.” But, unlike the works in which Miner turns the camera on himself, they lack the important, slippery, narrative quality makes a confession into something more than just a confession.

This February, Memphis will see the return of gallerist, art consultant, and painter Jay Etkin. Etkin previously operated first-of-their-kind galleries in the Cooper-Young and South Main neighborhoods. His South Main gallery closed in 2008, and Etkin relocated from Memphis to Santa Fe. After six years away, Etkin will re-enter the Memphis art scene by opening another Cooper-Young space, at 942 S. Cooper, only a stone’s throw away from the location of his first Memphis gallery.

The new Jay Etkin Gallery is an old storefront space (formerly an overstuffed odds-and-ends shop) incarnated into a large, track-lit white room. Floating display walls are buttressed by steel columns. Etkin worked collaboratively with architect Jeff Blackledge to leave parts of the building’s original structure revealed: cement floors and wooden rafters provide some context for the white box gallery space.

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Says Etkin, “I didn’t seek out Cooper-Young until I knew there was an available space. But as soon as I heard that this place was available, I said, ‘Hold the space for me!’ It had my look.”

Etkin’s new gallery is slightly smaller that his South Main space, but it has a characteristically “open around the edges” feel. It is easy to imagine the new gallery as a home for the sort of traditional abstract work that Etkin has shown in the past.

The gallerist says that he envisions this new space as an ideal place for group shows. He hopes to be able to give emerging Memphis artists gallery representation and more exposure to potential buyers. He sees the gallery as ideal for multimedia work, and wants to host dance, music and theater performances alongside fine art shows.

In a city with relatively few galleries (and particularly few galleries designed to represent and sell for artists), Etkin’s presence will certainly be felt. This new gallery offers something slightly different than any other arts venue in Memphis: a commercial space with an eye towards collaborative and multidisciplinary work.

The gallery will open sometime in late February with work by several veteran Etkin-represented artists, including Roy Tamboli, Pam Cobb and Marc Rouillard.

As a part of its ongoing “Tributaries” series, the Metal Museum is currently showing the work of Andrew Hayes, an emerging sculptor and metalworker with a distinct eye for form.

Hayes uses steel and “altered books” to form his works. The steel is exactingly cut to form parameters for old book pages. The pages are arrayed so that attention is drawn to the mass of their edges— gilded, watermarked or tiered, drawn from antique reference books. The steel pieces that support the pages could be seen as parabolic book covers, but the visual analogy is not a heavy-handed one.

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The works are titled associatively. One piece, Spectrum, has a form that loosely resembles the curve of light when refracted through a crystal. It is one of the more traditionally sculptural works in the exhibition, perhaps because it calls to mind the open-ended geometries of many 20th century modernist sculptors. Ballistae, on the other hand, looks almost instrumental: thick-hewn metal pieces are folded in a harp-like shape around marbled pages. The name is a reference to a medieval weapon.

Hayes work is slightly uncanny. His pieces have the feel of well-executed tools— they are clean, simple, unpretentious. They could almost be a lot of things; almost call to mind many forms. But they don’t. Hayes’ artistry happens in the quiet space around his works’ uselessness.

The viewer is left face-to-face with simple materials that have transcended themselves. Hayes’ books lose their bookishness but gain a kind of ineffable material presence. The weighty steel appears defiantly light. Looking at Hayes sculptures is like trying to make out shapes in a dark room— the tired character of objects is replaced by a searching form. There is a particular psychic sensation that goes along with this sort ‘unearthed’ formal work, one that is difficult to achieve and that Hayes plainly understands.

Joel Parsons, the Metal Museum’s exhibitions designer, says, “[the artist] is something of a formalist. He sets up parameters and works within them.”

Hayes works read like deceptively simple proofs for complex ideas. The young artist, who just completed a core fellowship at the prestigious Penland School of Crafts, may not be doing anything particularly new, but his work is something more special than new: it is rare.

Through March 2nd

Lester Merriweather has been doing a lot with Memphis art for the past decade, but 2013 may have been his most remarkable year to date. In addition to curating the University of Memphis’s new Fogelman Gallery, he was featured in group shows at The Cotton Museum and Material and held two excellent solo exhibitions, “BLACK HOUSE” and “WHITE MARKET”, at South Main’s TOPS space. He produced an entirely new body of collage pieces, worked with ArtsMemphis and the UrbanArts Commission, and was a constant presence at openings and events throughout town.

The first time I visited Lester’s studio, I found him standing several rungs up on a ladder, affixing a picture of a bejewled female wrist to the top of a 12 foot canvas. He was putting the finishing touches on the body of collage work that would form the first half of his solo exhibition at TOPS. Around us, glossy magazines were stacked floor-to-ceiling, along with Tupperwear containers full of carefully extracted clippings.

The collages, many imposingly large yet sparse, feature delicate wreaths of jewels, sunglasses, watches, lipstick, and other luxury ephemera. These images are interspersed with deconstructed pictures of celebrities, or parts of celebrities. The works are about wealth and race and pop culture, and about how human bodies are co-opted by the brutality of capitalism. In following weeks, hanging in the grimy TOPS basement, they looked both bleak and luxe.

I recently visited Merriweather in his studio for a second time, to talk about 2013 in Memphis art and in his work.

Flyer: You devoted this year to making work and showing work in Memphis. As an artist who has shown internationally, but who has spent his career here, what was that like?
LM: It’s a mixed bag. You always have positives and negatives from situations in which you are exhibititing work. There were high moments, like being able to do the 100th show at Material. I think everything came from just wanting to focus on changing things in my studio, and developing different bodies of work that I had started on, and just wanting to get actual ideas materialized.

There is a long way to go for Memphis’s communities, in terms of how they receive, understand, and support art. But a lot of my work, this year, was to achieve that specific goal [of making and showing work in Memphis]. TOPS was a highlight, because I felt like I got a chance to do several different types of work, and make them all work within the space. There are two other Memphis shows coming up on my radar. But I want to use this next year to travel [my work] to other museums and other spaces, and other places….The thing about Memphis is— you could say sometimes— the audience is relatively particular… it is not like you will be blackballed from the art world if you make a misstep here in Memphis. I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted to do.

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How are things in Memphis for artists now and where do you see things going?
There have been setbacks, like what happened with the Powerhouse [closing]. There have been major positives for what could happen, like for instance, the crowd that was at the Theaster Gates talk, or the Eggleston Museum that is coming in the future. There is always a fluid motion for what the audience could be. I think once there is an actually financially supportive audience, then we will be able to talk about what Memphis really could be.

What do you think we need? Could you elaborate on that? Buyers or institutional support?
We need both. Artists need to have more opportunities. I just sat in on an ArtsMemphis [ArtsAccelerator grant] meeting, and it was its own process, but there was a strange feeling, when it was over, that there were so many artists who needed to be supported. There were so many artists who deserved to be supported. It was, what’s the phrase? —a double-edged sword. I saw that whole process from beginning to end. A lot of people deserved to be fought for more, vouched for more. Not that the people who won didn’t deserve it. There were just a lot of people who deserved it.

Moving focus, there is an overt discussion in your most recent work about racial history. But, maybe as a corollary, I also noticed that many of the scenes have a mythic quality… multi-armed women, or shining blue seas. It is almost Odyssean. It feels like a deconstructed hero-myth. Am I right about that?
I don’t know that I would call it a myth. It is more that these [historical] things have not had a chance to be realized, or that the ideas have not come through. And it kind of becomes obvious in the way that we still look at these magazines, and we still see all of these specific ads, and we don’t neccessarily connect the history between why these ads exist now. We don’t connect them back to the original conquests and voyages.

You know, all of those things also tie into how society is right now, about how hierarchies exist, but no one talks about it. It’s talked about in terms of, “Oh, this is everyday society and this is how things are”, but there are these connections that really ought to be made. Some of those pieces had a “mythical quality”, but I think it is only because no one wants to talk about the multi-headed monster of consumer nature, or capitalism. No one wants to talk about those things in terms of what they really are, from a historical standpoint. While they have a mythic individual nature, when you look at them together, the reality sets in about why we are where we are today.

It it interesting that you can make something that is explanatory of violence, but have it be beautiful. Particularly in light of a discussion of capitalism, that these pieces can be works of art, but also beautiful objects.
You have the idea that things are attractive as pieces of art, as quote-unquote luxury goods. But at the same time, I guess that is where the politics come in. You communicate bigger picture issues with that beauty, but you don’t neccessarily have to beat anyone over the head to come up with a way of communicating.

Can you tell me about your work as a curator, versus your work as an artist? Does being a curator change the way you think about making work?
I wouldn’t say that [working as a curator] changes my own specific work, because I approach Fogelman’s gallery as an artist. There is this list of really specific things that any artist wants. They want to be able to come into the space, envision their work, see it shown the way they want to see it. They want to not have to worry about where they are going to stay or what they are going to eat, the flight, the per diem, all of those basic things that any artist really cares about. At the end of the day they want to see their work shown the way they want it, and they would like for it to be reviewed…favorably, they hope. [laughs]

As an artist, I come into the Fogelman situation understading what artists want. So that is what affects the majority of what I try to do with the gallery. I try to find the best possible artists for that space, for that situation, the best possible installation artists — people who are making cutting edge work, who give prime examples for the students to be inspired by.

“I just enjoy all of my paintings. When I started assembling the wall grouping, friends said ‘you’re not going to group all of these in one large grouping?’ I did because I just like to be able to sit and look at all the works at one time.” — Mrs. Joe Pless, from a 1970s Commerical Appeal article

I recently ran across this headline while looking through old clippings in the Memphis room of the Central Library. It got me thinking: who collects art in Memphis these days? We have big-time collectors, like retired NBA player Elliot Perry, or businessman John Jerit, whose folk art collection I covered for the Flyer earlier this year. We have out-of-town art enthusiasts who lend parts of their collection to the art museums around the city. But whenever I ask, “What does the Memphis art world need?” I hear a chorus of “more buyers, more buyers, more buyers.”

Memphis does need more buyers, and not just big time collectors, but micro-collectors: those of us who choose to spend any extra cash on a painting rather than a new margarita machine. I am curious about Memphis’ every day art collectors. How do we come by our mini-collections? Galleries? Kickstarters? Friends? How do we display the works? Does anybody still display art in “groupings”, a la 1970s home design?

My guess would be that people buy art because they know the artist, or because they fall in love with a particular work, or because they need some decoration for above their couch. But maybe, with Etsy and Kickstarter and the strange art-purchasing animal that is Saatchi Online, the landscape for art buyers has changed.