Author: Eileen Townsend

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Art Art Feature

“Born to Hula” at Glitch.

CREDIT: MELLOW MOUNTAIN COALITION 2014/2015

Over the course of the past five months, artists Tad Lauritzen Wright and Hamlett Dobbins have painted about 50 heads. The heads, which currently animate the walls of Lauritzen Wright’s Midtown garage/studio, are made from neon-colored paper and googly eyes. They are not accompanied by bodies. They are heads in the same way that Muppets are animals, which is to say that they are more head-like than they are like anything else, but you couldn’t exactly call them naturalistic.

These recent works from Lauritzen Wright and Dobbins are only the latest effort in the artists’ longtime collaborations. This Friday, Glitch will host the fifth show of the friends’ work together — an exhibition they titled “Born to Hula” after a beloved Queens of the Stone Age anthem. The paintings in “Born to Hula” are a departure from the artists’ earlier collaborations because, where past works have been compiled over long periods via mail, Lauritzen Wright and Dobbins made these pieces working together in the same room, one morning per week.

“I drop my kids off and he drops his kid off and we work,” Lauritzen Wright told me when I visited his studio to see Dobbins’ and his preparations for the show. “One of the titles we were thinking about for the show was ‘Daddy Daycare.'”

What transpires at Daddy Daycare, according to Dobbins, is a kind of “nonverbal conversation.” Paintings are passed back and forth, metal albums are played, pieces are added to or reduced to parts for other paintings. “We come in,” says Dobbins, “and we make these marks and we make these moves and maybe at the end of the day, we will talk about it. It is this nice kind of way of thinking about things.”

The garage studio where Lauritzen Wright and Dobbins work is crowded with liquid acrylics and dirty brushes, torn or otherwise dissembled sheets of paper, half-formed drawings, and glittery material tests. There are also several works attributable to Lauritzen-Wright’s 6-year-old daughter, who the artist cites as one of his major current influences.

“I have a 6 year old and I put a lot of stuff up of hers and she plays out here a lot … but that is kind of where my aesthetic falls at the same time,” says Lauritzen Wright. “I knew my aesthetic was child-like,” he laughs, “but I didn’t know what exact age it was like until my daughter got to be 5 or 6.”

The aesthetic in “Born to Hula” is child-like: monstrous and colorful and plasticky like recycled toys. The “dopey and fun” paintings (as Dobbins calls them) champion a kind of infinitely bright 1970s boyhood held in infinite backyards. But there is also a twist of jaded junkiness in the yet-untitled works, such as the one they describe as “the mush painting with a see-through rainbow on it.” In the paintings’ dark moments, we are reminded that even pristine pre-fab swingsets must one day rust.

The artists often work at a large scale and quickly, without preciousness about past creations. “I make these big oval-shaped paintings and drawings,” Dobbins says. “Sometimes those don’t work, though, and when those don’t work, I just sort of grab four of them and stitch them together. We realized that it would be better if we cut it out and there was this kind of X shape … I have been piling colors on.”

Lauritzen Wright says, “I kind of dig the heads out of abstractions, and then [Hamlett] is digging them out through cutting. Most recently, on some of the larger ones, Hamlett had some really simple linework, and then I went in and kind of accentuated his line. We were really happy with those. It pushes and pulls in both places.”

It will be interesting to see Dobbins’ and Lauritzen Wright’s work at Glitch, Adam Farmer’s house gallery that has, over the course of the past year, hosted Memphis’ most dynamic collaborative shows. Farmer’s space is also casually nostalgic, though for a caffeinated ’90s (Air Bud! Tim Allen!) rather than Dobbins and Lauritzen Wright’s open-hearted ’70s.

Even without the liberal use of googly eyes, Lauritzen Wright and Dobbins collaboration would feel not-too-serious and warm. “Hamlett is the best painter I have ever known,” says Lauritzen Wright, “and the way he goes about using paints has been really interesting. There has been a lot of attention paid to how things look on the surface.”

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Art Art Feature

“Voice of the Turtle” at TOPS.

John Fahey’s 1968 guitar ballad “Voice of the Turtle” is a classic piece of Vietnam-era musical Americana. The song’s train-like rhythms draw out a melody that is as mournful as an empty boxcar but as defiantly optimistic as the all-American promise of something greater down the line. “Voice of the Turtle” is a kind of frontier hymn colored by the psychedelic urge to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

This past Saturday night, TOPS Gallery opened an exhibition called “Voice of the Turtle” in honor of the late Fahey. The show features a small, abstract tempera work by the guitarist who took up painting in the years before his death in 2001. Fahey’s painting is shown at TOPS alongside work by eight Memphis artists, many with a similar interdisciplinary bent. The show includes sculpture and drawing by Fahey’s friend and 1960s Memphis scene-maker John McIntire, alongside drawings by William Eggleston, Guy Church, and Jonathan Payne, sculpture by Terri Phillips and Jim Buchman, collage by Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin, and painting by Peter Bowman.

Fahey’s small painting at TOPS is nothing to write home about, at least in light of his talent as a musician. Painting was a secondary art form for Fahey, but that isn’t a bad thing. Plenty of artists, including Bob Dylan, David Lynch, and Eggleston, have exploratory painting practices that often meet with undue critical disdain. TOPS’ “Voice of the Turtle” is an exhibition that celebrates these practices, and references a time when the interdisciplinary (art as a multi-hued journey of personal discovery, rather than as a specialized niche practice) was more celebrated than it is today.

A marble “game” sculpture by McIntire occupies the center of the gallery. To clarify: It is a sculpture made from white marble, but it is also a game of marbles. Viewers are invited to drop a marble into one of the sculpture’s many holes connected to a network of tunnels, and assumably, see where the marble emerges. At Saturday’s opening, no one had any marbles (perhaps having misplaced them in the ’60s? ba dum ching…), but not much was lost. McIntire’s sculpture is still beautiful and playful — the sort of thing you’d expect a favorite uncle to have stashed in his attic.

John McIntire’s portrait of John Fahey

McIntire also contributed a small drawing on yellow legal paper of Fahey, sitting in profile, wearing sunglasses. A cigarette hangs out of Fahey’s mouth. The drawing feels like a dashed note, a quick record of a lost conversation. Between this drawing, McIntire’s sculpture, and Fahey’s painting, there is a kind of friendly history — a warm context that makes room for the other featured artists’ work.

Eggleston’s squiggly, colorful drawings are each about five inches tall. There is not much to say about them except that they are really fun, and that every artist should probably make a squiggly drawing once in their lives. Beaudoin’s cut-and-paste collages are assembled from old magazines. They are at once personal and alienated by the material’s faded gloss. Buchman contributed two roughly hewn abstract ceramic works with an understated drama.

The works that pack the most punch are four expertly stippled drawings by self-taught artist Church, whose genre scenes seem drawn from an otherworldly forest. The characters that inhabit this realm are likewise magical; their exaggerated proportions seeming all too natural in Church’s constructions. “Voice of the Turtle” is worth going to see if only for Church’s work.

Another high point in the exhibition is a small drawing by Payne. His elaborate, obsessive mark-making, navigated through hundreds of undulating lines, is quietly done without seeming restrained or restricted. Payne is also the youngest artist in the exhibition, and his presence in “Voice of the Turtle” shows a kind of artistic heritage — a generational relationship between artists that is as open-ended and bravely optimistic as Fahey’s eponymous song.

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Art Art Feature

Video Artist Madsen Minax Addresses Violence, Power

Madsen Minax, a video artist who makes work about violence and intimacy and power, is currently an adjunct professor of art at the University of Memphis and a recent transplant from a small and close-knit queer Chicago art scene. In the spring, Minax will begin production on a feature film set in Memphis that uses themes of power and power play. This will be the artist’s most ambitious project to date, following recent works such as My Most Handsome Monster, a 13-minute ambient video portrait of two BDSM sexual encounters that Minax developed collaboratively with the subjects of the work, and The Year I Broke My Voice, an hour of disjointed reenactments of ’80s coming-of-age films by a cast of gender-indeterminate millennials. Both My Most Handsome Monster and The Year I Broke My Voice screened over Thanksgiving weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Minax is also a musician whose folk pop duo, Actor Slash Model, toured through Memphis years before Minax moved to town. The artist uses music as a key element in hiz work, both in longer pieces and in shorter works such as The Separation of Earth (By Fire), a three-part choral arrangement and video collage assembled from the language scraps of artist David Wojnarowicz’s One Day This Kid Will Get Larger.

Much of Minax’s visual work is musical in that its beauty is inextricable from its tempo. In My Most Handsome Monster, clips of a fireworks show are interspersed with footage of a rural landscape and an archival film of meat butchering. The sky clouds and a thunderstorm rolls in while a narrator speaks: “Waiting is an enchantment.” The text used in the video, which Minax drew partially from a 1973 novel by Monique Wittig called The Lesbian Body, is a sometimes poetic, sometimes graphic meditation on violence and intimacy and catharsis. The subjects of the film are “endlessly lacerated, tainted, crushed, fresh, whole, rested, reborn as if nothing had occurred.”

Minax’s work is concerned with how we, as individuals and as people in communities, “reenact” violence. This conversation perhaps begins with intimate scenarios (how sex is about power) but ends on a much broader note. In Minax’s words, “How do BDSM practices stage, reinscribe, and/or open out historical narratives around race, bodies, power, and subjugation? … How, where, and when does the transformation of self happen?”

It has been a week in which these questions of race, bodies, power, and subjugation have made headlines. People have taken to the streets protesting the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri, and the country has watched from our desktops and televisions. We watched an empty courtroom and waited for the decision; we watched protesters stand head-to-head with riot police; we watched Michael Brown’s mother cry while standing above a crowd; we watched cop cars burning. At a distance, the decision and the protests had an almost cinematic feel — tension, explosion, the particular catharsis of watching a city in flames while countless people yelled “shut it down.”

Minax’s videos are not exactly concerned with violence, if real violence is found in swift and meaningless and all-too-quiet acts. Rather, the artist is concerned with how we, as humans, attempt to give that violence meaning and weight in our lives. Whether we engage in power play in our intimate relationships or whether we protest in the streets to seek something so elusive as justice in the wake of despair, Minax’s point is that these reenactments are a kind of will-to-power. They are how we become ourselves.

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Art Art Feature

Dusty Rose Cremations offers innovative way of being memorialized.

Dusty Rose Cremations & Memorial Services, a local company run by Mike Hanson, offers “full-service cremations.” A full service cremation includes a viewing and casket funeral before the actual cremation and is considerably less expensive than a traditional burial. The market for full-service cremations is crowded, so companies like Dusty Rose often offer small complimentary services to draw customers.

“What the other places are doing now is throwing in catering services as their bonus, with little cheese and cracker trays and all that,” says Hanson. His company’s innovation has been to offer something less generic — one of Dusty Jonakin’s hand-painted portraits with paint made from the deceased’s ashes.

Jonakin, Hanson’s son-in-law, is a Memphis-based artist whose portraits of famous musicians (painted in the usual way) can be seen on the walls of B.B. King’s Blues Club, and who happened into the cremation industry after he painted an ash-based portrait of a friend.

The friend who Jonakin painted passed away young in an automobile accident. Several years before his death, he and Jonakin had come up with the idea of ash portraits together. Says Jonakin, “We were sitting around talking about different things people were doing with cremations. I had recently learned how to make paint to make your own pigments. I said, ‘Hey, you could probably make paint out of ashes.'”

The Dusty Rose Cremation & Memorial Services offices are located on the 27th floor of Clark Tower. Their mortuary is located farther east, so their office is quiet and economical: a shelf with examples of urns, pamphlets, and catalogs advertising other, more elaborate urns. (I flipped through a magazine from a competing company advertising a “Small Blooming Bio-Urn” and the blown glass “Eternal Flame” along with “The Classic Book Urn,” which will encase your remains in the false shell of a Jane Austin novel.) When I visited, Jonakin’s portraits were propped up on a chair, waiting to be shipped to the families that commissioned them.

Donnie Roberts

If the portraits seem out there, consider LifeGems.com, a Chicago-based company that uses human ashes to create multi-colored diamonds, available for around $3,000 each. LifeGems, made with a G.E.-engineered super-compression method that speeds up the diamond-making process by thousands of years, are but one option in the ever-expanding field of human ash products. If diamonds aren’t your thing, you can have your ashes made into fireworks, bullet casings, tattoo ink, pencils, a 3-D printed face-shaped urn (!), or have them shot into space in a personalized capsule.

Jonakin’s ash paintings are simple, based on photographs. They are painted from ash blended with linseed oil, a process that creates a grayish pigment. Jonakin says that, since he has started creating more portraits, he and Hanson have been especially interested to see how the process of the cremation affects the tone of the painting.

“Some bodies,” Hanson says, “are cremated in what is called an ‘alternative container,’ which is really nothing more than a cardboard box. Others are cremated in cremation caskets, which are created in dark wood. [The subject of the most recent portrait] was cremated in a casket, which is why there is this particular color … brown, sepia tone. Depending on the ashes we get, depending on where they were cremated, it creates a different tone.”

Hanson says the portraits have been very well received by the families that commission them. “I think we are on to something,” he says. “We are trying to go worldwide.”

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Art Exhibit M

Art This Weekend: Tad Lauritzen Wright and more

tlw.anna.nicole.jpg

Tonight, from 6-8, there will be an opening for Tad Lauritzen Wright‘s “The Bacchus Sessions” at David Lusk Gallery. Lauritzen Wright’s paintings— murky portraits of Anna Nicole Smith, scrawled classical scenes and messages such as “civilization begins with distillation”—have the feel of Art Brut paintings with the attitude of R. Crumb cartoons and the morals of a Richard Linklater movie.
On view through November 15th

MX1_2070.jpg

The second annual Five-in-One steamroller printmaking event will happen on Broad Avenue Saturday, October 18th, noon-10 p.m. Artists and friends of Five-in-One carved larger-than-life woodcuts, soon to be inked up and printed onto large sheets with the help of a rented steamroller. Last year’s event drew a big crowd and was a lot of fun to watch, and, weather permitting, this one should be the same. The event info online tells us that “printmaking is a social artform!” and, in light of that, there will be an afternoon party in front of the Five-in-One store.

Also on Saturday, Emily Ozier will lead an art class from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at Church Health Center Wellness, (1115 Union Ave.) Ozier, who has exhibited work at the Church Health Center in the past, is a painter and educator who will coach participants to create self-portraits and write accompanying haiku. To sign up for the class, contact Kimberly Baker at bakerk@churchhealthcenter.org or call 901-701-2238.

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Art Art Feature

Ben Butler’s “Cloud Morphology” at Crosstown Arts

f you’ve never heard Kate Bush’s 1980s pop hit, “Cloudbusting,” you should. The song tells the story of Wilhelm Reich, a brilliant Austrian psychoanalyst whose work was widely discredited after he began to theorize that the universe operated around “orgone” power — a psychosexual, orgasm-based cosmic energy capable of controlling human affairs. In 1951, Reich built a machine called a “cloudbuster” out of 15 aluminum tubes that he believed could destroy “orgone radiation” in the atmosphere and create rain.

Reich’s story is tragic and familiar, a true-believers swan dive through a hostile, scientific century. In Bush’s song, Reich is called “special” and therefore a “dangerous” man run awry of science into the realm of blind faith. His story is like many others borne of a fact-obsessed age, stories we love and cling to and write songs and make art about because they speak to something essential — about the seen and unseen, the true and untrue, what is fact and what is belief and where we draw the line.

Ben Butler’s recent sculptures, his “Cloud Morphologies,” on view now at Crosstown Arts, work with the same metaphor of captured and busted clouds symbolizing the immaterial being made concrete. Butler captures his clouds by forming them out of hard, immobile ingredients like cement and graphite. Their forms are rounded and intestinal-looking, like contorted versions of cartoon cumuli. There is something very bodily and earth-bound about Butler’s Cloud Morphology I, Cloud Morphology II, and Cloud Morphology III; they aspire to the heavens but exist squarely on earth.

This show marks a new direction for Butler, a professor of sculpture at Rhodes College, whose earlier works consist of finely wrought wooden forms that Butler built systemically. Butler started those pieces with a control (a piece of wood so-and-so-inches wide) and then threw in an X-factor (for example, expanding each wooden piece by .5 inches and rotating it 2 degrees

clockwise …). He followed his own algorithms until they tapered off, became too large, or otherwise completed themselves. These earlier works are beautiful but restrained, sometimes to a fault. They are about a kind of clean information, made physical and trapped by its own growth.

The piece in “Cloud Morphology” that most follows the earlier strain in Butler’s work — and the only wooden work in the show — is Scholars’ Rock, a sculpture carved out of quarter-inch-thick slabs of wood and separated by small, lateral beams. The work grows upwards and outwards with a kind of hesitant logic, and the result does look academic, the shape emerging hesitantly like a mountain seen through fog.

In the other works in the show, we see more of Butler’s hand, though haltingly. Directly next to Scholars’ Rock is Cloud Morphology III, a small piece made of graphite and “ultracal gypsum cement.” The black contours of the sculpture look like a blackened, knotted digestive tract. This is one of the best and most decisive works in the show. Here, instead of depending on the beauty, safety, and anonymity of algorithmically determined forms, Butler imagines the evolution.

Butler makes his clouds by building up blocks of foam until he has a roughly human-height, large block. He then carves into the foam with a hot knife, creating repetitive, rounded shapes until he has a bulbous (blob-ous?) form. He then deconstructs the layered foam and uses each individual layer as a mold in which to cast concrete. His concrete casts create an inverse record of his progress.

The show is sparse, and some of the cloud morphs are stronger than others. (Cloud Morphology II is not as lithe as I or III.) But Butler doesn’t need a lot of work to communicate his message, which exists within his haphazard archaeology of the information age — particles of information, possible strains of the heavens that Butler makes material in concrete and wood.

Through November 8th

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Art Exhibit M

Erin Harmon’s Latest Project

River Project model

  • River Project model

Erin Harmon makes her work in a green garden-shed-turned-studio, a location that seems fitting for an artist whose dioramic painting/collages often depict botanical cabinets of sea-anenome-shaped neon plantlife. Harmon’s botanicals are, for lack of a better word, “oogly”— full of acidic dots and undulating yellow lines; seductive and poisonous-looking.

In the past, Harmon’s work has been mostly small-scale and confined to the page. She breaks this habit with her latest project, a collaboration alongside choreographer and dancer Steven McMahon, of Ballet Memphis. McMahon’s original ballet, (working title) BIRDS, premiers in mid-October as a part of Ballet Memphis’ River Project. Harmon designed the set, per McMahon’s request, with “not a feather in sight.”

[jump]

When I saw the in-progress model for the set, Harmon was in the process of developing two 18-ft tall, movable, Mississippi-Delta-inspired “arbor shapes” (“like a pair of abstract bird wings…[they] create this channel through the middle, so it is kind of an open flyway”)

Here is Harmon talking about her set with a slideshow of sketches from her studio:

“I knew I wanted floating shapes so that it kind of related to my work and collage work… I wanted it to be real and unreal. This piece is influenced by, or inspired by the Mississippi flyway; the route of migration that birds take along the Mississippi. It is a very luxurious route for birds to take; it it kind of like a vacation in that there are no mountains; there’s not a lot of resistance, it is fertile it is fruitful, there’s water.

“I am constantly trying to move the landscape away from the real. So things like: I started with an X shape that is kind of like a cactus, but that just continues in the work to evolve. I like how graphic it is, and how awkward. [Steven] is really interested in the kind of weirdness of birds, how kind of awkward and sometimes disturbing these things can be.”

River Project, October 18-26 at Playhouse on the Square

[slideshow-1]

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Art Art Feature

Work by Faith Wilding at Clough-Hanson

Faith Wilding wants us to remember that we have bodies and that those bodies can feel joy and pain and terror. And so she makes drawings. “We search for signs of the body,” she wrote in a recent essay. “We need constant affirmation …”  

Wilding’s most recent drawings, a watercolor series of deeply hued leaves and ovary-shaped tears, are lightly sketched and loosely colored. They are unframed and feel informal, like vivid excerpts from a four-decade-long diary. Their small scale is personal and, as a result, the works are powerful in the way that things made privately often are. As a part of Wilding’s current retrospective “Fearful Symmetries” at Rhodes’ Clough-Hanson Gallery, these works on paper offer a radical solution to the problems of the world: Make things with your hands. Share them with other people.

Red Tongue

Wilding is a founder of the feminist art movement, a multimedia and performance artist. Her long career includes activist work with cyber-feminists, a series of graphic and elegant “cyborg bodies” paintings (she calls them her “recombinants”), and a sustained focus on the female anatomy as a potential image for both beauty and terror. Her early work is currently experiencing renewed interest in museums and galleries — a 1972 crocheted installation work, “womb room” (originally built in a dilapidated Hollywood mansion as a part of the well-known Womanhouse installation) is soon to be reinstalled in the ICA Boston. “Fearful Symmetries,” which debuted at the Threewalls art space in Chicago, is a retrospective of her lesser-seen work, with a few better-known early pieces to provide context.

In one of the earlier pieces on display, Wilding’s 1978 Imago Femina, the artist invents a gilded herbological guide — an illuminated manuscript — around one or several fantastical plants. In these drawings, half-grown stalks and shoots wind upward, negotiated through dark purples, crimson reds, and gold leaf. The images are framed with black rectangles and seem as if they could have been pulled from old text.  

With Imago Femina, Wilding wants to make sacred — to make canon — the shapes of women’s bodies. To do this, she (in the company of many feminist artists) invokes flowers, not only for their signature similarity to women’s vulvas, but because their center-tending forms — their “fearful symmetries” — make them feel like corporeal descriptions of incorporeal things. The Imago Femina drawings are excerpted pages from a book of symbols that was never written, or has been erased.

Wilding’s 1974 Moth Triptych: Emergence of the Moth, Debut of the Moth, and Dissolution of the Moth: for Virginia (a reference to Virginia Woolf’s essay “Death of a Moth”) goes along similar lines, but the penciled forms are not as easily identified as plants. The drawings’ half-ovals and long lines recall warped light along the horizon at dawn, distance bent by perspective.

Virginia Woolf is one of Wilding’s idols, perhaps because Woolf’s characters so often understand their lives as bound to soil and water: “My roots are threaded,” says Louis in Woolf’s Waves, “like fibers in a flower-pot, round and round about the world.” Across the gallery from Imago Femina, Wilding’s drawing, Wait-with Virginia depicts Wilding with Woolf crouched behind the artist’s shoulder, whispering in her ear.

Wait-with Virginia is a companion piece to Wilding’s most famous performance work, a 1974 poem called Waiting, and to her 2007 revision of that work, Wait-With (both on view as a part of the exhibition). Wilding’s original performance of Waiting is a well-known recorded example of the early feminist performance. In the film, Wilding wears a long skirt and rocks slightly back and forth in her chair, her eyes bolted to an indeterminate point in the distance. Her audience sits on the floor, surrounding her, sharing silently in her indignation as Wilding pronounces the passive phases of a woman’s life: “Waiting for him to make the first move … Waiting for my baby to come … Waiting for my friends to die.” The poem and its recording are effective, in part, because Wilding seems not to just recite her poem, but to divine it in sympathy with her community of listeners.

In Wait-With, Wilding reimagines the act of waiting as a space of meditative, unfilled, non-capitalized time/space. “Waiting,” says Wilding, ” … open space between action.” Forty years after the original performance, Wait-With comprehends something Waiting did not anticipate — that American women’s ascension in the workplace has not inspired the sort of structural change early feminists envisioned. Waiting in Wait-With is held up as the opposite of constant capital production, as a sacred time in which we make art and create community, not one to be taken for granted.

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Art Art Feature

Artists on their Dream Space, Part 2

In July, we asked local artists Lester Merriweather, Joel Parsons, and Mary Jo Karimnia what their dream art space might look like. By “dream art space” we meant either a space where art is created or a space where it is shown, or both. Merriweather, Parsons, and Karimnia came up with answers that were practical (it would have funding but no carpet) and fanciful (it could be “a place to day drink”; it could involve trips to Iceland). 

This week, we posed the same question — What is your ideal art space, for your own work or for Memphis? — to photographer and teacher Haley Morris-Cafiero and painter Melissa Dunn. 

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of artist profiles inspired by Meghan Vaziri’s portraits. See more of Vaziri’s work at meghanvaziri.com.

MCA’s Haley Morris-Cafiero

Haley Morris-Cafiero: 

A dream space for making work would need to be large enough to hold my stuff but not large enough to allow me to be one of the stars on a hoarding TV show. I would also need a space that blocks out all of the sun as I make daguerreotypes and wet plate collodion pieces that require controlled light. Also, I would never get anything done if I could look out the window and find shapes in the clouds.

I am drawn to exhibition spaces that allow for traditional exhibitions and more experimental installations in the same building. The most memorable galleries that I have visited were successful at both, and it was phenomenal. Excellent lighting and lighting control is essential to any exhibition space.

Morris-Cafiero is the photographer behind the provocative “Wait Watchers” show. The Magenta Foundation will publish a book of Morris-Cafiero’s work in fall 2015. She is the head of the photography department at Memphis College of Art.

Melissa Dunn: 

I look for a shift — the need to stop and be with art. This pause can happen in a nook like TOPS Gallery, a “proper” white cube gallery, a museum, someone’s house, a coffee shop, or on the street. 

On the route to my house I find myself at the light on the corner of Lamar and McLean almost every day. There, on a beige billboard, someone painted a huge smiley face with the phrase “NOBODY KNOWS” underneath. In those moments of waiting I notice how this strange and poignant tag changes with different light at different times of the day. Would it have the same impact in a different space?

For Memphis, the ideal lies in having access to a variety of spaces — commercial galleries, alternative spaces, university and college galleries, and museums. 

The glaring omission in the Memphis art landscape is a contemporary art museum. Granted, contemporary art is thankfully being curated at the University of Memphis, Rhodes, Memphis College of Art, at some galleries, and a bit at the Brooks, but Memphis needs a museum dedicated to art being made right now from around the world.  To fully experience this I have to travel, and that’s not ideal at all.

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Art Art Feature

Dolph Smith’s Parting Shots at the Cotton Museum

There’s an anecdote about two writers, Hal and Al, who sit down to discuss their work. Hal pulls out a 1,500-page novel and hands it to Al, who flips through it and says, “Geez, Hal, this looks good, but it sure is long.” “Well,” responds Hal, “I didn’t have time to write something short!”

Point being, of course, that it is harder to make something good and simple than to make something good and complex. Longtime Memphis artist and educator Dolph Smith’s most recent show at the Cotton Museum is a testament to this idea. The exhibition — called “Parting Shots” because it is also (supposedly) Smith’s final show — features paintings, drawings, and sculptures that Smith pares down into their simplest gestures.

Rosie’s Window, part of Dolph Smith’s “Parting Shots” exhibit

Smith, who spent his teaching career at Memphis College of Art, is best known for his deeply hued watercolor paintings of Southern barns. Smith’s barns are myth-steeped and romantic without being wistful. The artist and craftsman’s work has a dark incisiveness that places his simple landscapes somewhere outside the literal. It is hard to see his barns, pitched under bleeding skies, without also seeing their hollowness. The structures are an empty point of contact with a big, and not necessarily kind, beyond.

“If you look at any one of these paintings,” Smith says, “you’ll see that watercolor is an act of nature. I could never paint these skies, but if you have water and you put a color on it, it will move. As it moves, it takes color with it. It will settle into the interstices of the paper. I collaborate with nature.”

“Parting Shots” contains some works from Smith’s early canon, as well as much more recent sculptural pieces. After his 1970s success as a painter, Smith says he entered a period where he felt as if he were artistically repeating himself. In response to this, he became a paper maker. “When you begin to build up surfaces,” says Smith about this process, “you feel like something is coming out to join you in the real world.”

Layered paper works such as Will We Know What’s Gone Before feel less like they are built to join us in the real world as they are to draw us more effectively into a removed and transcendent space. In the piece, graphite-coated handmade paper is sculpted to form a pile of sunken-looking detritus. A paper ladder grows out of the graphite detritus and morphs into a brightened, wooden version of itself — a version that is, once again, disrupted by the graphite toward the top of the work. Several other wooden ladders also appear, and disappear, near the piece’s center.

Will We Know What’s Gone Before takes place in a dream where, perhaps, the viewer climbs an endless ladder out of a silo, a factory, a well — and mid-climb, is caught in a strange, bright light. This dream-logic is echoed in a similarly constructed work, The Pearl Divers of Tennarkippi, in which a wooden boat sails over the cast-paper remnants of a wooden house. The work recalls sunken ghost towns or a hurricane-flooded gulf. The pearls, if they are there, remain hidden.  

Smith’s works are not about place, though the works bear the signs of a storied South. Rather, pieces such as Parting Shot V: Leaving the Nest and Parting Shot III: Nerissa Knotgrass leaves for new ground center around a sense of displacement — a doubleness or tripleness of place, realized through small frames and images that he places throughout the work.

Smith’s work is not elaborate. It doesn’t need to be. He focuses on simple moments of paradox that, though deeply complex, need little elaboration to be understood.