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Beside Still Waters: The Life and Art of Jeanne Seagle

Jeanne Seagle’s favorite Bible verse begins, “He leadeth me beside still waters and he restoreth my soul.”

“I’m not religious; don’t get me wrong,” Seagle says. “But I had to learn my Bible verses as a kid. And I remember them. I really like that one.”

Her own still waters are found at Dacus Lake, the subject of “Beside Still Waters,” Seagle’s first one-person art show at L Ross Gallery.

Fletcher Golden

‘Jeanne In Fog’

“My subject matter is the land inside the levee right across the Mississippi River from Downtown. Dacus Lake,” she says. “I have a great affinity for that land. I’ve always loved to go across the river, from the time when I first moved to Memphis. It was so much fun to go ride around in the fields and go down to the sandbars. I go over there a lot. It’s just a great getaway from Midtown Memphis. I can drive over the bridge and be over in the wilderness in 20 minutes.”

Seagle’s show includes 11 large black-and-white drawings and 11 watercolors of the Dacus Lake area. She takes photographs, which she uses for her drawings. “They’re very precise. Very photo-realistic drawings. It takes me about a month to do each one.”

Jeanne Seagle

of Humor,’ News of the Weird illustration for the ‘Memphis Flyer’

During her art career, Seagle, 72, has worked as an illustrator for ad agencies and publications, including the Memphis Flyer, where her cartoons illustrated News of the Weird for many years. Her public art can be seen at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, and Methodist University Hospital. Books that feature her illustrations include Mickey and the Golem by Steve Stern and Mommy Without Hair by Selene Benitone.

But Dacus Lake has flowed through her artwork for decades.

In the mid-1990s, before they were married, Seagle and Fletcher Golden spent a lot of time at Dacus Lake, where Golden lived for a while in a mobile home. “I’d just go over every Friday night and ride through the bean fields. I really got to know the land over there. I house-sat for him, and I would just go down to the river and paint and draw.”

The area was a new world for Seagle, who was born in Pueblo, Colorado. “All of my art was about going out to Colorado to visit my family,” she says. “I just did brightly colored paintings of mountains and canyons and mesas and that kind of thing. I’d go out there every year and ride around and paint.”

When her elderly relatives died and she stopped making the trip to Colorado, Seagle was at a loss for subject matter. “I was not all that crazy about the flat Delta land. But little by little I started seeing all the subtle beauty and the surprises you find when you get up close in the swampland and the waterways. And I started making pictures of this Delta land.”

It never stays the same, she says. “It floods every year. It’s inside the levee, and that makes the landscape change. The waters rise and recede. It’s a great place for all kinds of water birds and animals to live. And because it floods every year, it’s not developed. It keeps the humans away. Because of that, there are animals that just roam up and down the Mississippi for hundreds and hundreds of miles. 

“If you go early in the morning, you see these animals. I saw a panther one time when I got up early and was sitting quietly doing some watercolor painting.”

And then there are the trees. “Because it floods, the roads are elevated so that trees grow up around them, but the trees take on very strange shapes, too, because of the Delta tornadoes that come through and tear off the limbs of the trees. They’re all raggedy-looking trees that are so unusual.”

Jeanne Seagle

charcoal pencil on paper

The area does attract some eccentric people, Seagle says. “When Fletcher lived there and I was visiting on a regular basis, there was a bait shop on stilts. It was kind of a community gathering place.”

And, she says, “There were other people living over there at the fish camp — people who don’t like living in civilization. They were people who are close to the land, people who hunt for beaver tails. Just very earthy, country people who have known all about the country, and the last thing they want to do is live in civilization. We got to know them, and that was really interesting.”

Seagle’s love of nature began when she was a child. Her family moved from Colorado to Mississippi when she was very young, then they moved to the woods of Arkansas when she was five. “My father worked for the department of forestry, and he got a job as a forest ranger in Western Arkansas in the Ouachita Mountains. As a little child, I was living in this forest. An only child.”

Seagle spent time drawing and walking through the woods by herself. “Being all alone with no brothers and sisters out in the country was probably a big influence,” she says. “If I’d been living in town and had lots of people to play with, I might not have become an artist.”

She was known for her art ability in school. “I remember in the first grade I would draw tattoos on little boys and I’d draw paper dolls for the little girls. I charged a dime. I kept on doing that all through school. I was the class artist.”

In high school, Seagle took an art class trip to Memphis Academy of Art, which later became Memphis College of Art. “I saw these kids in there that were beatniks. I loved that. I really wanted to be a beatnik. So when I got old enough to go to college, I came up here.”

She moved to Memphis in 1967. “By this time, the Art Academy had all the great people: Ted Rust, Bill Womack, John Mcintire, Burton Callicott, Ted Faiers, Veda Reed, Bill Roberson. Murray Riss started teaching when I was there. It was just wonderful to be around these people, and I got to take classes from all of them.”

Seagle majored in illustration. “When I was a little girl, I loved looking at my mother’s magazines. I really was not exposed to art galleries. We lived in the forest ranger station in Western Arkansas, so the art that I saw was in my mother’s magazines. And I wanted to be a magazine illustrator, a children’s book illustrator.”

Her schooling was interrupted after she married her first husband, a medical student. “My first marriage was very brief — to somebody that I met here in Memphis, and we moved to Los Angeles.” That was “a different lifetime,” Seagle says. “He was gone most of the time, being an intern at the hospital.”

Jeanne Seagle

Jeanne Seagle and Pomegrante Studio

After her divorce, Seagle returned to Memphis, where she completed her degree at the Art Academy.

She took a job as assistant executive designer with Dobbs Houses. “I dressed like the young executives. I wanted to be a young executive. I worked at Dobbs Houses in the interior design department and went to work in a high-rise building and dressed up with hose and skirts.”

Then, she says, “The director of my department was found to be embezzling from the company and the whole department was fired. That’s when I changed. I was fired from the executive track and so I just kind of totally changed then and relaxed and became more of a Bohemian, I guess.”

In 1973, Seagle got a job working with a couple of her classmates, Ellis Chappell and Jim Williams, at The Grafe, the in-house graphics agency for Stax Records. They created and produced Stax album covers.

When The Grafe downsized, Seagle became a founder of Chappell, Williams and Seagle, an illustration studio in the Timpani Building, an old cotton warehouse. The Malmo & Associates ad agency was their biggest client. After five years, they sold the building.

“We made a bunch of money,” Seagle says. “So I just went to Europe, traveled around, went to all the art museums. I came back and I started doing fine art.”

When her money ran out, she went to work for Malmo & Associates.

In 1993, Seagle became a freelancer. A major client was Contemporary Media, Inc., where she became a regular illustrator for the Memphis Flyer. She illustrated the Flyer‘s News of the Weird column for 20 years. “That was great training for what I’m doing now,” she says, “which is obsessive black-and-white drawings.”

Her Flyer illustrations were composed of “little tiny dots,” she says. “You had to be obsessive-compulsive to do it. And that’s exactly what I’m doing now in my landscape drawings. I’m just doing these tiny little marks that take forever to do. Everybody looks at them and says, ‘Oh, my God. You just have such patience to do that.'”

Seagle also began doing public art, landing UrbanArt Commission grants to create mosaic murals on two trolley stops on Madison.

In 2012, she created the 16-foot sculpture, I Can Fly, at Le Bonheur: “It’s a giant obelisk with mosaics on all four sides depicting the seasons with children playing, climbing trees. On top is a giant bluebird about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle with a little kid riding on top of it.”

The next year, she created the 16-foot-tall Genome Kids sculpture at St. Jude. She describes it as “a giant DNA helix with whimsical-looking little children climbing it.”

She then did a series of 6-foot square paintings, including “giant painted quilts,” at Methodist.

“I made a lot of money,” she says, “and I was able to, pretty much, retire from commercial art work and turn to fine art.”

She began booking shows, beginning with a one-person show at the Delta Cultural Center in Helena. Then, she says, “Linda Ross called me up and asked me to be in one of her shows. That was really a great turning point in my fine art career, to be able to be in a well-respected gallery. I’ve been in shows with her for five or six years.”

Ross, now retired from the gallery, says, “What has always attracted me to an artist is the movement, the feeling, of the line work in their art. So it’s no wonder that I found Jeanne’s body of work so compelling. She has such a deft hand, whether it’s the broader brush strokes in her quietly moving watercolors or the delicate-layered markings in her stunning penciled landscapes. Simply masterful.”

Jeanne Seagle

‘Flooded Shoreline,’ charcoal pencil on paper

Seagle’s current show at L Ross Gallery was supposed to open in the spring but was pushed back because of the pandemic. Originally, Seagle thought the “the fog, the water, and these stark winter trees” would be “too depressing” for a spring show. “Then, as it turned out, with the pandemic, I don’t think pretty pastel-colored pictures of things would be very appropriate for our world right now. These mysterious, dark pictures are very appropriate.”

“The level of detail and technical skill in these pieces speak for themselves,” says L Ross Gallery owner Laurie Brown. “But, to my mind, what really sets Jeanne’s work apart is her ability to capture the quiet, ephemeral moments of life so exquisitely. You can almost hear the breeze whispering through the branches or feel the cool dampness of the fog.”

As for future plans, Seagle says, “I want to make bigger pictures, and I really want to start being in museums.”

Seagle and Golden, who have been married almost 20 years, live on an acre of land in Cooper-Young. “It’s made the pandemic much more bearable to have all this land, all these trees in our backyard. It really looks like we are living out in the country.”

Seagle still makes the trip to Dacus Lake. “I’m still totally fascinated with this landscape. It’s always changing. The water conditions are always changing. The floods and the water rising, morning and night, and the light — it’s just full of ever-changing subject matter that thrills me.”

“Beside Still Waters” is on view through September 5th at L Ross Gallery.

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Art Art Feature

In the Paint: Robert Fairchild’s Art

Robert Fairchild’s artwork has evolved from the drawings he made at 5 years old.

“I did crayon drawings,” says Fairchild, 21. “Star Wars characters with lightsabers.”

He continued to draw as he got a little older, but, he says, “I was a big nerd, so I drew a lot of dragons and Halo aliens. Like just really the nerdiest subjects I could draw in my sketchbook.”

Michael Donahue

Robert Fairchild

Now his work is “more about the scene and what the figures are doing in that space and occupying that space.”

Fairchild’s work, which is in private collections, has been shown at Crosstown Concourse and other spaces.

His work began changing when he got to high school. “I guess when I started realizing being a nerd wasn’t too cool,” he elaborates. “So, my subjects definitely changed. As I grew up, I started to value things differently. I valued people around me rather than fantasies. I valued reality more than my imagination.”

Fairchild took steps to become a technical artist. “Just by observation and learning skills such as perspective drawing and how to render a subject,” he says. “I wanted to push my limits to that. I’m still trying to do that. It’s an ongoing process.”

He credits his Houston High School art teachers Amanda Schulter and Bobby Spillman with helping him take his art to another level. “They showed me art could be a career and you could turn it into something pretty incredible.”

He made pencil and gouache drawings of family and friends. “I didn’t have a really sophisticated idea,” he says. “I just loved these people, and I wanted to do a drawing of them.”

But making art wasn’t easy, Fairchild says. “It was very difficult. It’s been a long, hard process to get where I am now. This kind of work took a long time. And art never came easy for me. I always had to work at it pretty diligently.”

He knew he was going to major in art when he entered college. “I was fortunate enough to get a full ride to the University of Memphis with their scholastic scholarship. That was an absolute miracle. That’s why I went to college. They have a great program, and I’ve been studying under Beth Edwards and Jed Jackson. And it’s just been great.”

His teachers helped him create art that makes a statement. “There’s nothing wrong with doing a dog portrait, but figuring out why I’m doing a dog portrait. Having some reason and concept behind it.

“I love Edward Hopper. His work is about telling a story with figures and having a meaningful subject. I kind of take from his aesthetic choices and try to put them into my work. Right now, my pieces are about public interaction and private interaction between people. So, it’s about comfort in a social setting.”

Describing his painting Millennial Moment, Fairchild says, “I worked from a photograph from a New Year’s party two years ago. It took me about three months to make, but that was when I started to see how many figures I could have in a scene and how much movement I could get, as well as show this isolation within a very packed environment.”

It wasn’t a strict depiction of the party, he says. “I’ll alter the scene. I’ll change the color palette and paint certain people abstractedly rather than try to render them. The main figure is a girl on her phone. And there are two larger female figures in the forefront of the painting. And you have some wild movement in the background.

“Every figure in the painting is in black or dark, [except] the main girl in front wearing a big pink puffy coat. And she’s on the phone ignoring everyone.

“I knew I wanted to do a party painting and I wanted a lot of figures and [to demonstrate] the fact that [the party] was in my home,” Fairchild says. “And I wanted to show how nasty it was. It was kind of smoky and gritty and dirty. But it was also a really fun time. It was a memorable party.”

His work now is “less about the figure and more about the environment. Now I’m trying to challenge myself with different materials.”

Fairchild still wants to show isolation in his paintings, but his focus has become less about realistically depicting subjects and has shifted to show a subject with “a gestural depiction of a figure. And that they’re alone.”

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News News Blog

Local Artists Get Free Critiques From Peers

Crosstown Arts

A recent Open Crit night.

Once a month, Memphis artists can present their work and get constructive criticism from peers.

At Crosstown Arts’ monthly Open Cric events, artists are given the chance to show off their artwork and receive “critical feedback.”

Each month, participants get to see artwork from up to four different artists, discussing each for about 25 minutes. The discussion will be guided by a facilitator with experience in critique settings.

Crosstown Arts

A recent Open Crit night.

Visual artists of any experience level are welcomed to participate with up to eight new or in progress pieces of any medium. The critiquers don’t have to have any professional art experience. Critiques will “always be done in a supportive, constructive and casual environment, could at the same time be challenging,” Crosstown Arts said.

The next Open Cric is Tuesday, June 11th from 6-8 p.m. at 430 N Cleveland — Crosstown Arts’ gallery and performance space. Participation is free and open to the public.

Crosstown Arts

A recent Open Crit night.

Artists presenting that night are Cassi Rebman, Eric Painter, Sophia Mason, and Mia Richardson. The discussion will be facilitated by Kimberly Jacobs.

Open Crit night is held every second Tuesday of the month. Interested artists can sign up here.

The events are organized in partnership with ArtsMemphis, an organization that supports visual artists in Shelby County through mentoring, advocacy, and funding.

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

RATS! Public Art that Doesn’t Give a Rodent’s Rump

A new art installation called “Barrier Free” now stands in the Hall of Mayors at Memphis City Hall. 

It’s beautiful. It’s big…real big. The main piece has larger-than-life photos of families from across the city.

That part of the piece represents “our beautiful diverse tapestry,” reads the artist’s statement from Yancy Villa-Calvo, hired to create the installation by Latino Memphis.

Graphic shirts at the end caught my eye. What did they say? 

The delightful little girl’s shirt reads “Follow Your Heart” and I hope she follows hers.

The man standing behind her followed his heart when it came to choose his wardrobe. His shirt reads “I don’t give a….” Below the words, a cartoon rat leads a cartoon donkey.

Reading between those twisty lines of high comedy, you know this shirt implies: “I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

Then, you look up at the man wearing the shirt and you realize he really doesn’t. At. All.

Good for you Rat’s Ass Shirt in a Big Public Art Display Guy. Much respect for you playing by your own rules.

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Is the RedBall a Veiled Comment on Mass Surveillance? (Probably Not)

Kurt Pershke, RedBall Project in Paris

The RedBall in Paris

The Brooks Museum of Art announced this week that as a part of its centennial celebration, it is bringing artist Kurt Perschke’s “RedBall Project” to Memphis. The “RedBall Project” is a temporary and site-specific installation piece that involves the placement of a giant, inflatable red ball at various significant points around town. The locations where the Ball will be placed are determined by Perschke, who spends time biking, walking and otherwise exploring the city in the months before the Ball is placed.

The Ball’s placement in other cities has looked loosely to be the work of some toddler-like deity: balanced at the edge of bridges, inflated in doorways, shoved beneath underpasses. It’s funny and unsettling without being too unsettling. It says, “Hello, this is an international city where inexplicable art stuff happens.” It’s the kind of thing Memphians will remember years out: “Ah yes,” we’ll murmur to our cyborg grandchildren, “2016… the year that we were visited by the Ball.” Here are some pictures of the “RedBall” in other cities, so you can get the idea.

In short: the Ball will be fun. The Ball will be different. The Ball should (but will probably not be) placed directly on top of the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, like a bloated clown nose. The Ball will introduce temporary and site-specific art to Memphis, and it will do it with cosmopolitan style. We are good with the Ball. But will the Ball be a veiled comment on mass surveillance? Let’s discuss.

A hypothetical situation: It’s a sunny midsummer day in Memphis. You’re walking down the street, drinking an iced latte, when you notice that your favorite intersection has been visited by a massive red ball. You stop drinking your latte, mid-sip. You feel suddenly more aware of yourself, of your puny human size, of how zoned-out and unquestioning you were moments before. The RedBall has seized your attention, changed your relationship to the corner and how your body feels as you approach the corner.
You move closer. The RedBall stays in its position. Maybe you put a hand out and feel its rubbery redness. But you can’t move it. It’s really heavy. So you circumnavigate. Your latte-infused commute has been effectively changed, forever. Meanwhile, the Ball is mute, unchanging, super-bright in its super-occupation of public space.

This is a weird experience, huh? Or maybe it is not so weird, because it triggers something in your brain. It triggers the memory of the other thing that was recently installed on your favorite corner: that blinking, blue camera box that provides the Memphis Police Department with 360-degree surveillance of your block. Operation Blue CRUSH, as the camera boxes are called, also made you check yourself in public space. The camera established a ball-shaped zone of spherical surveillance that, while invisible, is very much palpable.

Before you come at me with accusations like, “Oh, what, are chemtrails real too?”, ask yourself: What is the point in a big, red, ball? Our public art could conceivably be anything. It need not be static or silent. It need not be immobile or durable. It could ask things of us. It could tell a story. But a red ball does none of those things. A red ball is just a silent presence — an elephant in the proverbial “room” of the commons.

Is the “RedBall” a comment on the normalization of mass surveillance? Probably not. But will the way we meet it be more normal because Memphians are used to large and inexplicable presences in our neighborhoods?? It’s possible. Whether or not it is intended (and, let’s be real, it’s not), the fact is that in its red and spherical reticence, the Ball is like surveillance: whether or not it watches us is beside the point. The point is that it makes us watch ourselves more closely. Now excuse me while I go get a latte.

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Art Exhibit M

Vid-O-belisk, I Never Knew You

When news broke this week that Nam Jun Paik’s massive “Vid-O-belisk” is in the process of coming down, no longer to hold its traditional place in the center of the Brooks Museum of Art’s rotunda, I felt a mix of emotions. The first of these was relief, because I have long held a grudge against the “Vid-O-belisk” for being, IMHO, not a very good work of art from an otherwise great artist. The second emotion I felt was nostalgia for my stint working as a caterer at the Museum, because “Vid-O-belisk,” with its squiggly neon and antique video art, was a functional compass for us servers. “Go to the table nearest the red owl thinger,” we would instruct each other. 

With that in mind, I Facebook chatted local painter and my old catering co-worker, Dimitri Stevens, and we remembered the “Vid-O-belisk” in all its clunky glory. Here is what we recalled:

Brooks Museum of Art

Nam Jun Paik’s ‘Vid-O-belisk’ (2002)

Eileen: Hi, Dimitri! How are you on this day? A day when the “Vid-O-belisk” is no longer the first thing you see in Memphis’ biggest art Museum?

Dimitri: 
I’m doing fine Eileen. It’s a little hollow inside the Brooks now-a-days.

Eileen: Well, we’ll always have our memories of working catering events at the Brooks, trying to dodge the massive tower of antique TVs in the middle of the rotunda.

Dimitri: The neon will be remembered as well.

Eileen: You’re right. The best thing about the ol’ “Vid-O-belisk” were those little neon squigglies attached to the side of the TVS like a case of viral worms, which the catering staff affectionately named things like “Pineapple Parrot.” Can you remember any of the names?

Dimitri: 
No, I’m not too savvy on the names, but the squiggles seemed to range from stick figures to simplified architecture.

Eileen: There were definitely some music notes on there. And a weird eye. I’m partial to the Pi symbol and the lil neon buddha. What message do you think Nam Jun Paik was trying to send with this tower of junk TVs and random symbols?

Dimitri: I was thinking it’s about accumulated cultures through technology.

Eileen: That’s probably it. We used to cater a lot of weddings that happened around this monument to accumulated cultures through technology. In your honest opinion, would you invite the “Vid-O-belisk” to your wedding?

Dimitri: Definitely. I don’t have any big wedding plans yet, but it was an overall beautiful piece.

Eileen: 
It wasn’t my cup of tea, but I know it brought joy to many. Thank you for taking this moment to remember the “Vid-O-belisk” with me. And cheers to whatever comes next.

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Art Exhibit M

Peculiar Forms: Taiwanese Metalwork in Memphis

Visual Cues, Ms. Chen, Ting-Chun

This Sunday, December 13, from 2-5PM, the Metal Museum will host an opening ceremony for a new traveling exhibition, the 2015 Taiwan International Metal Crafts Competition. The exhibition, which will remain on view through March 13, 2016, features the best of Taiwanese metalwork as judged by the The Gold Museum of Taipei City. 

Soliloquy, Ms. Ou, Li-Ting

The artworks featured in the exhibition draw from both modern and more traditional tropes of metalwork, combining eastern and western craft sensibilities to create a selection both broad and masterful. Work by Li-Ting Ou and Ting-Chun Chen (both featured above) stands out. 

Flavour, Ms. Chen, Siou-Yi

The Metal Museum is one of few museums in the world devoted exclusively to fine metalwork. This will be the first exhibition from Taiwan that the Metal Museum has hosted. 

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Art Exhibit M

Here is Your Weekend Art Itinerary, August 21 – 23

Lawrence Matthews, ‘Vote III’


FRIDAY

Lawrence Matthews, i.e. Don Lifted, “In a Violent Way” at Crosstown Arts (6PM — 9PM):
You may have seen Matthews perform as his alter-ego, Don Lifted, without knowing that the emerging artist is also a prolific painter. For this exhibition, Matthews reimagines famous images of the civil rights struggle.

Nick Pena’s “Crosscut” at Christian Brothers University (5:30PM—7:30PM): 
Pena’s paintings are meditations on the fissure of The American Dream. If you haven’t seen Pena’s work before, this is a great chance to check it out. 

CEREAL at GLITCH (6PM—10PM):
A group show featuring work by Lance Turner, Derrick Dent, Ariel Claiborn and others. There will also be music from C – Stilla, Dick Solomon, Purplecat Jane and Sleepy Barksdale. 

SATURDAY

Animated Film: The Secret of Kells at the Brooks (2PM)
This seems promising: “Young Brendan lives in a remote medieval outpost under siege from barbarian raids. But a new life of adventure beckons when a celebrated master illuminator arrives from foreign lands carrying an ancient but unfinished book, brimming with secret wisdom and powers. To help complete the magical book, Brendan has to overcome his deepest fears on a dangerous quest that takes him into the enchanted forest where mythical creatures hide. “

Still from ‘The Secret of Kells’

SATURDAY AND SUNDAY

Second Terrain Biennial, all day, around the city: 
Artists Terri Jones, Lindsay Julian, Melissa Dunn, Between Worlds Collaborative, Greely Myatt, Johnathan Payne, Terri Phillips, and Lester Julian Merriweather created work to be shown in yards around Memphis. A map is available at the Rhodes College website. Rhodes is hosting the event to kick off This Must Be the Place, a year-long exploration of art’s relationship to place, presented by Clough-Hanson Gallery.

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Art Exhibit M

Your Dreams Interpreted: Gene Hackman, Turtles, A Little Old Lady

Gene Hackman in ‘The French Connection’


Welcome to the first installment of our ongoing attempts at dream interpretation. Today we take on infinite regress, gritty lawyers and road rage: 

Gene Hackman was in a movie in the ’70s, and then decades later he was in the same exact movie remade with the same title, almost shot for shot. The opening scene was a bit different. Instead of getting out of his car in an irritated fashion, he parked at the end of a long line of cars. His irritation was more about where he had to park. I remember a long wall, and someone walking away down the top of it, arguing to someone below. The movie had lawyers, and gritty conversations about the law.

Dear Mundane Dreamer,

Sometimes, in moments of existential frustration, I will reference the opening lines of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Hawking opens his book with an anecdote about an eminent scientist who, while giving a lecture about the nature of the universe, is interrupted by a little old lady who maintains that the world is merely a flat plate resting on the back of a giant turtle. “But,” retorts the scientist, “What is the turtle standing on?” and the lady says something to the effect of “You stupid asshole. It is turtles all the way down!”

Dr. Seuss, from ‘Yertle the Turtle’

It is turtles all the way down! I think this is what your dream is about: Hawking’s stacked tortoises might as well be your long line of cars, or a movie that is the same shot for shot, or the bottomless gauntlet of boring B flicks from the seventies. You look for something deeper in your subconscious offerings and find only minor permutations of what you have seen before.

But you need not despair, MD, because if the Cosmic Turtles of Infinite Regress have anything to teach us, it is that we contain unseen multitudes. Same-ness doesn’t preclude depth. Maybe your dream is trying to tell you that something you previously saw as unremarkable was actually the point. You simply need to re-envision it, probably with the help of Gene Hackman. (What was this movie called, by the way? Was it Rest Easy, or You Can Sleep When You Are Dead? Jokes, jokes.)

In honor of Hawking’s little old lady, I will also advise you to check out the paintings of American folk artist Grandma Moses. I once heard an interview with Grandma Moses, who started painting at the age of 78, during which she said, “People keep telling me that the snow is blue. But I look and look at it and I can’t see any blue. So I just paint it white.” Was the snow blue? Was it white? Who knows. The point is that she kept looking.

Grandma Moses, ‘Winter’

Yours truly, 

Eileen 

We here at Exhibit M are taking a stab at dream interpretation, with the help of art and anecdote. Do you wonder what your dreams are about? Send them to: eileen@contemporary-media.com.

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Style Sessions We Recommend

Lauren Carlson of Question the Answer Launches New Jewelry Collection

Memphis artist Lauren Carlson began her jewelry line Question the Answer in 2011 exploring materiality and creating artistic adornments with incredible detail. Lauren began hand painting skull pendants she shaped from wood and detailed with ink. A statement piece, she calls the “sugar skull,” can be considered her signature design after catching the attention of many in the local fashion community.

The name Question the Answer is her nod to material exploration as a means to unveil new perspectives. Continuing to question the answer, she has produced various collections of wood and metal – intricate yet simple in form. Now Lauren is launching a new collection using gemstones that is meant to be minimal as well as versatile.

“The gemstone collection is very minimal; simple pastel stones are set without any type of ornamentation or pattern. I really love the versatility of this type of design; it works for so many different women,” she says.

[jump]

“I’m still learning different techniques and finding what works for me. Some of the methods I’m trying for the first time, so staying minimal is key. This collection is my first step towards the inclusion of  gemstones. The next step will be to acquire a couple more tools to quicken the production process, thus allowing me to launch new designs.”

To keep acquiring new techniques, Lauren will be launching a crowd-funding campaign in late August to add these new tools to her studio.

“Within the campaign I will be completing the evolution of my original design, the sugar skull, by casting it in metal. The sugar skulls represent the idea of inanimate desire and frivolity, in which sparked my journey into jewelry making. I am so excited to come full circle and to see how this design has changed over the years.“

Memphis is Lauren’s home. She’s surrounded by most of her family — being here is comforting. “It is my constant,” she says. Her Midtown studio is within her neighborhood and is in a building she shares with other artists.

“My Memphis consists of a tightly knit and incredibly encouraging creative community. I love seeing other artists thrive here and it helps me to know that the life I’m trying to make is possible. It’s really affordable to live here and that’s incredibly beneficial to me, start-ups cost money, and in the beginning it’s really nice to know you can at least have your rent paid.”

Seeing the style of her jewelry, it would be fair to assume that it relates to her own personal style, which she describes as functional and simplistic. Her clothing is almost the stage where jewelry can shine. “When I’m dressing up, I gravitate towards solid colors to show off my jewelry — that way I can layer lots of pieces without looking too loud or overdone.”

“I love the basics; most of my closet is filled with neutral colored tees and high waist jeans. That’s not to say that I do not own extravagant pieces. I’m a New Years Eve baby, so I know the importance of breaking out that sequined mermaid skirt from time to time. Occasionally, a girl just needs to feel a bit luxurious,” she adds.

A place like Memphis has the natural ability to influence one’s personal style. “I’ve always been attracted to highly patterned pieces and bright hues, but I’ve just now found ways to balance those complexities. Memphis radiates a similar liveliness and I think that aspect of my style is deeply rooted to this city.”

You can order from her line on her website or at local shops such as City & State and Menage.

Outfit Details
Dress, Elizabeth Suzann, a Nashville-based designer / Sandals, Madewell Sightseer Slide Sandal / Jewelry, Question the Answer (“of course”) & heirloom pieces from her grandmother
 
Gem collection photos by Annabella Charles Photography and courtesy of Annabella Brandon and Lauren Carlson.
 
Crowd-funding Campaign Details
Find updates on her campaign on her website: www.questiontheanswer.com & follow along on her Instagram page: @questntheanswr