Author: Eileen Townsend

Valerie Piraino will be giving a talk at Crosstown Arts tonight (Wednesday, Nov. 20), 6 p.m.. The emerging artist, who lives and works in New York, was previously a resident artist at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and has shown work at Queen’s Sculpture Center and Chicago’s Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. Her Crosstown show, “Reconstruction” combines recent works with earlier installations.

Piraino works largely with transfer process, a method that she says is “very much embedded with photography.” Most recently she has been working with fabric transfers, though her Crosstown show contains earlier iterations of this interest: slide projection, printmaking, even embossed wax seals.

The show consists of five correlated installations: an array of small, handmade prints depicting old furniture; a row of vignette-shaped, framed mirrors; 11 wooden frames that contain projected slide images from several decades ago; and another slide image, projected into a corner at slightly below waist-height. The gallery space is bisected by a makeshift wall, giving the room a sense of front and back.

The idea of a transfer operates in “Reconstruction” in a couple different senses. There is the obvious transfer of one material to another, but there is also the thematic transfer of memory, both personal and historical. Piraino’s work attempts to reconstruct personal and family history but pays material reference to Victorian-era (read: American Reconstruction-era) furniture.

Piraino began this work when she inherited a large collection of family slides. She says, “Much of the context [of the photographs] has been lost as family members passed away. All of that has since been folded into the work and has really become a central question for me… how to you reconcile having personal objects with very little context?”

History, in Piraino’s work, is repressed, evidenced only by its inexplicable leftover objects. Her row of vignette-shaped mirrors are marked with a centered, creme-colored wax seal. They cast ovals of light onto the gallery floor. There’s a domestic simplicity and beauty to the mirrors, but the work is frustrating. It doesn’t tell a viewer what she or he wants to know. It does so purposefully, with reference to one of the most egregious “forgetting” of civil rights for African Americans, post-Reconstruction era.

Piraino’s work elegantly conveys a sense of muted history, the artifacts of which have an undeniable coldness. Her installations are less about what were, than what could have been, were history better remembered.

Memphis-based illustrator and comic artist Derrick Dent has drawn for Wired, The New York Times, and The Oxford American, among other publications. His brush and ink illustrations have the technical edge of a careful paintings and the caricatural verve of comics. His distinctive comics style takes its cues from the American graphic underground but deals with text and pacing in a way reminiscent of classic Japanese Manga. Dent’s most recent work, a graphic novella entitled MAJOR SLUG 2, follows the ups and downs of a “guy who compulsively punches people.”

I sat down with Dent recently over a cup of Otherlands’ coffee. We talked about dive bars, social media, MFAs, and brush quality. Dent, who is in his late 20s, likes “internet diets” (diets from the internet, not diets found on the internet), teaching, and character studies. He doesn’t like weird pick-up lines or artistic comfort zones.

On sketching:

Memphis Flyer: You brought your sketchbook. Can I take a look?
Derrick Dent: Sure, sure. At one point I fancied myself the kind of sketchbook artist and illustrator who would go to dive bars and draw people. The activities always ended up being mutually exclusive— I never ended up drawing and talking at the same time. Sometimes people would tell me weird stories. Sometimes [the stories] were complete non sequiturs.

… And you would end up illustrating those?
I would end up with the story in the back of my mind, but I always wished that I’d recorded it, if only for posterity, so that I could have held on to the narrative for some illustration project. It was a fun thing, for awhile. It was always a way for me to get out and talk to people.

Somebody is always going to talk to you if you are drawing in a bar.
Yeah, yeah. At the very least it is a “What are you doing?” or “I don’t see that happening very often.”

Anyway, this sketchbook is for this really informal community thing online called InkTober. This concept artist named Jake Parker started it and basically you’re making an ink drawing for every day of October, until the month is over. … That’s what this sketchbook mostly has been. There are times when a note or a small anecdotal detail slips in there.

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On school:

Did you train in Illustration?
Yeah, I studied drawing and illustration at MCA. When I was in school, the illustration students [at Memphis College of Art] really held together. There was a common personality type in the illustration department. Just a bunch of people who cared about drawing, and painting and their craft, obviously …

… But who weren’t totally into theory?
Definitely not. Which is not to say that we were the dumb jocks of the school; I guess we all had a certain attitude about image making, and why we should be doing it, and what it should be all about.

On social media:

Dent: I just had a conversation recently with my friend Jon Lee, who is an illustrator about social media stuff; about “personal branding” and putting yourself out there as a professional. I try not to build too much of a character. [laughs] I don’t post often enough; I don’t live on the internet. I give myself internet diets, sometimes, to avoid that cult of personality.

That seems important, especially if you’re trying to do something that takes a lot of concentration, like drawing. You really have to focus.
It’s about establishing a flow in the first place and not getting online and then waking up 2-3 hours later, staring at my browser saying, “What was I doing? How did I get here?”

On his new work:

Dent: MAJOR SLUG 2 is probably the most earnest, and in-depth, and sustained effort that I’ve made to make something really silly. It’s essentially just a really long 30-page gag comic about a guy who compulsively punches people, and it is a sequel to a character comic I made last year, when I was teaching comics at MCA. [At MCA] I volunteered to do a “24-hour comics” day, and I made this 10-page comic. Ideally you can make a 24-page full-color comic, but few people have ever actually finished in the history of comics, ever. But I made this fun comic, and I went through a bunch of pretty much random character generation. I was like, “Okay, dude dressed like a dough boy…” [points to drawing]

That guy is awesome.
He is actually based on the sketch of a dude that I met at the Lamplighter. He comes in with his wife… or someone. This one [points to another drawing] is based on a guy who used to come into the art store I worked in and he would always try to hit on my roommate, and he would say the weirdest things to get her attention. We were at the Cooper-Young festival one year and he walks up to her and he looks at her and says, “Hey, how you doing? I just got stabbed six times.”

On his drawing process:

Dent: Usually it is a weird, Frankenstein’s monster of different processes. I use a really light lead pencil to do the sketches, and then I do the brushwork afterwards, and depending on how clean I want to final product to be, I’ll either leave it this way [with pencil marks] and clean it up in photoshop, or, sometimes, I’ll do the work with rough outlines, and then I will go back in and lay them in digitally. That gives me some flexibility.

I don’t have to worry about drawing outside the edges or being meticulous where I don’t want to be meticulous. It’s not so much “sloppy” as I want it to be fluid. I hate when my working surface gets in the way of marks I want to make.

I use a cheapy little flat brush with synthetic bristles, which have a little bit of spring, so I can quickly lay those marks down and the brush doesn’t give. For the line work, I use a series 7 Windsor Newton brush, and those are an industry standard. Comics people swear up and down by those.

With your comics, do you work more long-format, or do you do small panel comics?
I enjoy the long-form pacing with the stories that I like to tell. I’m still refining my storytelling skills. I still feel like my stuff is weird kind of character studies. I adopt Eastern storyteller sensibilities. There is an idea in Manga and Eastern films… a kind of emphasis on the moment or slow, mood-setting scenes. I feel like with longer-form comics it is easier for me to have those kind of contemplative pauses. Even when I am working with absurd comedy, it’s difficult for me to condense my work into a three-panel stip comic.

I just read a big graphic novel by Tatsumi, all about the history of Manga, about how it moved from slapstick stuff to taking after film more, post-WWII.
Oh, I’ve read that too— A Drifting Life. It’s incredible! I love [Yoshihiro Tatsumi] talking about how prolific he was, and the other guys he worked with. It’s hard for me, even now. If I crank out a couple pages in a day, after storyboarding, I’m like, “YEAH!” It’s amazing how fast some people’s hands move and how nimble some minds are.

On commercial illustration:

When you are doing basic illustration [not comics], how does that process differ from your comics process? Do you write to hash out your ideas?
I have to. Sometimes it’s really linear exposition, you know, in paragraph form, but sometimes I’ll just do word maps. If it’s for an article (like, if I am doing an editorial illustration), you always want to think about what the article is about. You don’t want to lose sight of what the crux of the information is. From there, it’s a matter of taking from your personal experience. I take what I know, and I think about what my immediate associations are with that. It is me plucking my memories, then making further associations. You’re kind of grasping for straws when you’re in ideation mode. But that’s where the meat of the work it. You know how to draw…it’s all about the content. You’re trying to make a concise visual decision. Sometimes the danger is that you have so many ideas.

I imagine that your illustration takes cues from your comics, and your comics take cues from your illustration.
Yeah! The thumbnailing and preliminary stuff I do for my illustration has made my comics much better because I consider the composition of each panel and each page, even. The page is a unit itself. The illustration benefits from a certain level of speed you pick up from working in comics.

Doing a comic, making all these little sketches, going in different directions…that’s kind of like jam band stuff. But you’re composing a song when you make an illustration.

You can download MAJOR SLUG 2 via derrickdent.com.

Two very different exhibitions currently on display in Memphis galleries share a formal attention to shape, light, and color. Huger Foote, a photographer of the understated, makes work that matches something in the character of Holly Cole’s rhythmic, geometrical sculptures.

Foote, a Memphis-born and New York-based artist, is showing a new collection of color photography, “Sixteen,” at David Lusk Gallery. The show runs through November 16, with an opening reception tonight, October 18th, from 6 to 8 p.m. Displayed alongside is work by painter Libby Johnson.

Foote’s lens is focused on moments of long-lit quiet. In one photograph, a metal fence casts an array of shadows. In another, grass grows patchily near the lip of a sidewalk.

The work pays clear tribute to William Eggleston, but is less atmospheric and more formal. In many of Foote’s photos, a single, vertical element divides the frame. Spare instances of saturated color are noted against pale backgrounds, a technique that serves to emphasize shape and line within the composition.

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Foote’s photographs are not scenes so much as they are details that suggest scenes. Or, they are details that suggest other details— a group of peaches in one photo echo the curvature of a pedestrian traffic arrow in another. The collection’s sole portrait ( of two women riding the NYC subway) seems less about the women and more about how pink a scarf looks against platinum blonde hair.

Foote got his start as a commercial photography assistant in Paris, and continued commercial work in New York City. While on an extended trip home to Memphis, he began to make creative work “to fill the time and keep in practice.” Foote’s monograph, “My Friend From Memphis,” features much of this early work.

Though “Sixteen” is a clear outgrowth from Foote’s start in Memphis, the content of the work is more broadly sourced. It seems, also, less constrained: paragraphs, where there were sentences. The artist’s chief concern remains, however, syntactical.

He acknowledges as much: “There are surprises in the work sometimes — sometimes purely on the level of composition.”

At the University of Memphis Fogelman Gallery, Cole has an impressive solo exhibition, “Duality.” She was invited to show as a part of the Fogelman’s BFA Selects series, which features outstanding recent university alumni. The show, which opened earlier this month, ends October 25th.

Cole’s show features brightly hued sculpture and painting, and some pieces that are arguably both or neither. (What can you call a three dimensional piece mounted on a wall?) For her 3-D work, she uses prepared wood to create abstract, geometrical forms. The pieces are painted chemical shades of pink or blue or orange, and directly lit, so that shadows form a dense underlay for each work.

In some pieces, the Cole employs color gels to filter lighting on her pieces, so that different shadows are cast in different colors. Cole, who plays in the band The Memphis Dawls, says that she got the idea from stage lighting.

The show’s most notable 2-dimensional work is a multimedia drawing that Cole executed on a faded projection screen. In the piece, black lines are cut out of the screen into a shape that echoes the geometries of the rest of the Cole’s work. The wall behind the screen is painted hot pink and under-lit, so that the drawing has an eerie dimensionality.

Cole’s work is almost too well-executed. For a show that depends heavily on changeable elements like light and shadow, and that deals in shapes that are organically wrought out of odd angles and joints, the overall effect is too contained. She could really get weird with it.

Both Cole and Foote are skilled makers whose work takes different approaches to important questions about how simplicity and form operate visually.

Foote images courtesy of David Lusk Gallery; Cole images: Lester Merriweather

If you’ve never been to Repair Days or, heaven help you, never been to the Metal Museum, this weekend is the time to go. The museum itself (currently exhibiting works by Master Metalsmith Thomas Latané) is hands-down one of the best spots in Memphis, and Repair Days is the museum’s largest event of the year.

I spent a minute trying to come up with an analogy for what Repair Days is in comparison to the city’s other annual events. I was pretty unsuccessful. Repair Days is not “like BBQ Fest for blacksmiths.”

The weekend is, as museum director Carissa Hussong puts it, “…its own organism.” It is an informal reunion for craftspeople, a teaching event for young metalworkers and hobbyists, an auction, a dinner party, a family day, and a many-tiered repair market. This is the event’s 34th year.

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The museum hosts an estimated 150 volunteer metalsmiths over the course of the weekend. Members of the public are encouraged to bring their broken metalwork to the museums grounds, where the metalsmiths are set up under white tents. For those not in need of repairs, there will be ongoing metalsmithing demonstrations, work for sale, and, on Saturday evening, an auction and dinner.

Tom Latané, this year’s honored Master Metalsmith, is a blacksmith.

About this year’s selection, Hussong says, “It’s fun to go back to the roots of blacksmithing, which is very central to the Metal Museum.” Past years have showcased jewelers and “whitesmiths” (craftspeople who work with white metals such as tin and pewter).

Latané, who is largely self-taught, started working with metal as a teenager, after observing blacksmiths in Colonial Williamsburg.

“I set up a little blacksmith shop in my parents’ backyard while I was in high school, in suburban Baltimore, in 1970,” he says. “When I graduated, I started making things out of wood and metal for art and craft fairs and a couple consignment shops.”

Many of the works on display in the museum are tools he built for personal use or are presents for his wife, Kittie.

“It’s an honor to be presented to the public by the museum,” Lantané says. “A big honor.”

Latané will host a gallery talk and demonstration on Saturday, October 5th at 5 p.m., followed by an auction and live music.

Repairs are available 10 a.m.-5 p.m., through Sunday, October 6th.

Images of Repair Days by Tod Swiecichowski; images of Tom Latané’s work courtesy of the artist

Matthew Hasty, a landscape painter and featured artist in this year’s Art of Science exhibition (opening Friday at Hyde Gallery), has no idea what cell mitosis looks like up close. His painting, The Echoes of Pneuma, would flop in any science fair, due to its imaginative take on cell walls (Hasty: “I used beef tripe for reference”) and inclusion of some antediluvian forms that seem, at best, misplaced in the cell world (Hasty: “…those parts kind of looks like Grover?”)

It’s a good painting, even if (actually, because) it makes a human cell look like a Dantean underworld. For the hard science side of things, there’s Dr. Sharon Frase, an electron microscopist whose research was Hasty’s inspiration.

Frase and Hasty will both be on hand at this Friday’s opening to answer questions and talk about their work.

This is the third year that St. Jude has put on the Art of Science, a project that partners local artists with St. Jude’s scientists. This year’s pull includes video installation, dance, clothing design, painting, sculpture, and graphic art.

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Melissa Harris, the exhibit’s curator, explains, “We invited artists to St. Jude to see a slideshow of images from scientists, and they were able to select images based on what they were interested in. The artists and scientists interact at various levels. Sometimes the artist will go into the laboratory; sometimes the scientist will come to the artist’s studio.”

Heather Smallwood, the co-founder and president of the project, says, ““We’re hoping that it will be thought-provoking in many ways. We want people to come away interested by both the art and the science.”

Also this Friday, Lester Merriweather will be exhibiting the first installment of his show “Black House/White Market,” at TOPS Gallery.

Merriweather, the curator of the University of Memphis’ Fogelman Gallery, has developed a series of large-scale collages. The collages pose magazine clippings of eyeless pop goddesses, jewels, gold watches, chains, and other celebrity ephemera against bleak grey canvases or spotless plexiglass.

In some of Merriweather’s works, the magazine clippings are arrayed into patterns reminiscent of French wallpaper. In others, they are placed far apart and the balance of the pieces hangs in the vast empty space of the canvas.

Considering its scale and pop subject matter, this first installment of Merriweather’s work, “Black House,” is strikingly restrained. Merriweather manages to make all the glitter and the glare look ambient. This is a result of what the artist calls his “largely intuitive process” (a clean hand and a keen eye for pattern.) It also may be a reflection of this decade’s underwhelmed sense of fame, the artifacts of which are a kind of twerking-centric white noise.

Additionally: Craft enthusiasts should note the opening of Studio Nysha, the school/exhibition space/studio of Nysha Nelson, a Bartlett-based quilter. Studio Nysha opens this Friday with works by international quilters.

Nelson, who used to live and teach out of Somerville, TN, is an enthusiast of “free motion quilting”, in which the quilter is in control of a free-form quilting line.

It’s a week of oppositions in Memphis galleries: high-brow meets low-brow, the natural meets the plastic, and the old meets the new. At David Lusk Gallery, the paintings of Leslie Holt and sculptures of Wayne Edge are (respectively) cynical and stoic; hot pink and earthtoned. At Memphis College of Art, the main Rust Hall Gallery is devoted calming depictions of the Gulf Coast, while the neighboring Alumni gallery is full of Chloe York’s bright, cartoonish paintings. At Five in One Social Club, artists have revisited oldtime woodcut printmaking with new(ish) heavy machinery.

Memphis College of Art is displaying “Horn Island 29.” The Rust Hall Gallery is packed out with student, faculty, and alumni work— all inspired by a May 2013 trip to Horn Island, off the Gulf of Mexico. This is the 29th year that MCA has sent a group to the island. The resulting works run the gamut from traditional painting, to cartoons, to metalwork and conceptual sculpture.

The best work this year comes from Slade Bishop, whose linocut prints of various forms of crustaceous life seem an appropriate reflection of the Island’s creative environs: meditative, simply executed, serious without being somber. Bill Nelson’s careful paintings and Adam Hawk’s fabricated steel-framed sculpture/painting also stand out.

Luke McDowell showed three enigmatic photographs that he shot at night from the actual inside of a dead jellyfish, using a waterproof camera. McDowell, a recent grad in illustration, said that he never expected to take photographs from the innards of sea life but, when he found the jellyfish on the beach, he thought, “Why not?” The results are as painterly as they are photographic, echoing a cross-media note that is repeated throughout the exhibition.

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Down the hall, in the Rust Hall Alumni Gallery, there is a painting show by Chloe York, “Decorators.” York uses cough-medicine pink, green and baby blue palette coupled with ocean-referent shapes to create her works. The paintings are flat, full of delicately patterned anemone-looking forms, and are about 50 shades past the sort of thing you’d want on a shower curtain or a throw pillow.

This weekend saw an opening at David Lusk Gallery that also had some coastal themes. Wayne Edge’s “River of Stars” is a collection of driftwood and kindling, shells and sea glass bundled and bent together into wall-mounted sculptures.

In the back galleries, lowbrow artist Leslie Holt’s “Help Yourself” features oil paintings of cupcakes and embroidered covers of self-help books. The best painting in the show is Holt’s Cakescape II (mound), an impressionistic take on a disgorged-looking pastry. Not for the faint of heart.

Though the project won’t be on view until September 19th, Broad Avenue’s Five in One Social Club completed a massive printmaking project this past week.

Over the course of the summer, the Social Club invited local artists to make a series of 8-ft tall woodcuts. The club rented a steamroller, attained some appropriately sized white sheets, inked up the woodcuts and spent four days driving the steamroller over the prints. The results are fantastic.

Artist Mary Jo Karimnia and her 15-year-old daughter, Rosie, collaborated on a woodcut. Said Mary Jo, “I hope they do this again next year. It’s a great thing for Memphis. It’s a great time to be involved with Memphis art right now.”

This Friday at 6 p.m., Memphis-based sculptor and installation artist Jessica Lund will be giving a talk about her most recent show, “WREFORD,” in the gallery at Crosstown Arts.

Attendees of the talk might hear stories about Lund’s former landlord (Wreford himself), or the resident apartment complex cat (Elvis), or about what it is like to live in an apartment that, according to Lund, “looked like a scene from Hoarders.”

Lund, who recently received her MFA from the University of Memphis, says that her interest is in how people relate to the spaces they inhabit; how architecture shapes people and their habits. Lund’s concern is with mundanities of property: a neighbor who threaded his failing fence together with an old garden hose, or a weekly $2 fine levied on apartment residents who failed to correctly dispose of their trash.

“WREFORD” is a paean to life in a low-budget apartment complex. (Plexiglass sliding doors, whitewashed metal fences, hair-grain carpeting over cement floor. Rooms that have been vetted by flea bombs and laden with roach motels. For those with an architectural bent: last-ditch Corbusian modernism, rentable for $600ish bucks a month.)

The back wall of the show is composed of insulation, layered concentrically, a zen mounting of that sublime pink stuff usually only seen in half-lit attics. The wall works as a humorous backsplash for other elements of Lund’s show, including an axial sculpture of plywood and intricately cut carpet samples, located center-gallery and looking something like an imploded building.

Lund’s show also conveys a sense of constantly being monitored through motion-censored lights, placed above a series of wall-mounted shoe box sculptures. It is a clever play on the practice of lighting individual paintings in a gallery from above. Rather than unobtrusive track lighting, Lund includes intrusive high wattage outdoor lighting; rather than paintings, small boxes coated in camo duct tape and mesh, arranged into pseudo floor plans.

Lund’s show is cleanly executed without losing a sense of the intuitive. It is successful at communicating the indefinable atmosphere of a place without sacrificing humor.

The talk, and following keg party, will be held at Crosstown Gallery from 6-9 p.m., Friday August 30th.

Images: Katie McWeeney