At the onset of lockdown, Memphis artist Tad Lauritzen Wright began a series of single-line drawings about the political and social unrest that followed. “They were very narrative,” Wright says. “They were almost like documentary drawings.” But after this collection of drawings, which was featured at the Brooks, Wright, like many, became exhausted with the inundation of bad news and problems to solve.
“The work I made, while I was making it, felt pretty poignant,” he says, “but then it started to feel like a scene in Groundhog Day, you know, where it just kept repeating itself over and over in so many ways. I went into the studio and I had no idea what I was going to do. And that was a good thing.”
And so he took a 6-foot-by-9-foot drop cloth and tacked it to the wall. “So I’m sitting in a chair staring at this big blank drop cloth and this [tangled 100-foot] extension cord is on the floor. I haven’t picked it up yet. And I started thinking about the possibilities of this thing and what it actually represented. And it was much more than the extension cord. It was this idea of problems that I could easily solve when I couldn’t solve any of the ones going on around me. It was going to take a little bit of time to figure it out and untangle this thing, and so I decided I would make a painting about that and I did.”
The subsequent paintings are now a part of his “Poetics of Gesture” show at David Lusk Gallery, where they will be on display through February 5th. The gallery is hosting an open house January 30th, where guests will be able to speak with the artist.
“Poetics of Gesture” Open House, David Lusk Gallery, 97 Tillman, Saturday, January 30th, noon-3 p.m.
