Tag: art

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Art Art Feature

Great Outdoors

Currently on view are two exhibitions inspired by Horn Island, the tiny Mississippi Gulf atoll made famous by Walter Anderson’s visionary watercolors and woodprints.

In “Horn Island 23” at the Memphis College of Art, a storm rages on the wall in the form of Trice Patterson’s mixed-media work Some Early Morn. A long piece of frayed canvas fastened with twine to weathered wood looks like a battered tent onto which the artist has scumbled and scrawled charcoal dust, ink, and black Conté crayon. At bottom right of the storm, we can just make out two delicately drawn pines — Patterson’s haunting tribute to Horn Island’s trees, many of which were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Don DuMont, the MCA adjunct instructor who led 30-plus colleagues, students, and alumni during the eight-day stay on Horn Island in June, contributes a well-crafted piece of whimsy to the show. A large raven, mouth open and cawing, strides across the top of DuMont’s Box of Squalling Riches. Crows carved into the sides appear to fly around the box in all directions. Instead of a golden ark, these squawking, intelligent keepers of the covenant guard a freshly hewn cedar/cypress container that could be a coffin for a small animal or a Pandora’s box full of Horn Island mosquitoes, blistering temperatures, high winds, freedom, and excitement.

Much of the artwork in “Horn Island 23” is a microcosm of the island. The sleek, steel seabird torpedoing in for the kill in Bill Price’s Cooling Wind is backdropped by Lance Turner’s large acrylic abstraction of ebb tide in Map of Horn Island Sand. Close by, Richard Prillaman’s copper Toad simulates the glossy slime covering the creature and the iron-rich mud in which it wallows. Matt Wening’s stark digital prints line the gallery’s right wall with dead trees that stand like sentinels on deserted beaches.

Untouched paper becomes a large sand dune in Jason William Cole’s accomplished watercolor Palms. At the crest of the dune, Cole gestures tufts of dead grass and a knee-high cluster of scrub and dwarf trees. Above deep-green palm blades, blue and purple washes create the impression of windswept sky.

Black lines of acrylic, twisting furiously in all directions, record the fight for life, the futile attempts to fly, and the death throes of Lisa Tribo’s Broken Wing Crow. A Spiral in the Sand, Lance Turner’s large acrylic on canvas covered with hundreds of hand-painted, near-white concentric whorls, creates the sensation of being sucked into and spit out of swirling sand and water.

Several of Tessera Phipps’ giclée prints look like pure geometry. Look closer. Puckers in the material of her white triangles and pointed arches, her brown “Xs,” and her titles (Inner Sanctum, Temple Door) suggest the artist was flat on her back looking up at securely fastened tent flaps when she conceived these images.

To photograph his unsettlingly existential Night Sky Over Main Camp, James Carey stood close to shoreline. With a wide-angle lens and a 30-second exposure time, Carey captured a band of artists under thousands of tiny points of light at the edge of civilization and infinity.

“Horn Island 23” at Memphis College of Art through September 21st

In “Eight Days in Exile” at Studio 1688, Willie Bearden, using infrared filters, lens flares, and Photoshop manipulations, transforms Horn Island’s already exotic landscape into post-apocalyptic visions of Eden. A horizon lined with leafless black trees stands in stark contrast to the luminous white scrub bushes, sand, and clouds in Bearden’s giclée print, Horn Island Reflection.

Robin Salant’s archival prints of shell and bone floating in black space bring to mind Edward Weston’s images of nautilus shells. But, instead of pure form, polished surface, and the graceful curve of Weston’s shells, Salant’s shells and bones, all broken and scarred on Horn Island, are more idiosyncratic and provocative.

The back of a catfish skull, picked clean by predators and bleached by the sun in Bone Study #1, looks like a pig snout, a satanic icon, the face of a wolf, and/or webbed wings wrapped around the body of an albino bat. Salant’s image of the orange-red incisors and pitted skull of a rodent, Bone Study #3: Nutria, brings to mind talismans that tribal people believe can channel the forces of the universe.

“Eight Days in Exile” at Studio 1688 through September 20th

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News The Fly-By

Q&A: Tom Foster

For the last 40-odd years, artist Tom Foster has sketched courtroom trials, painted artwork for movie and theater sets, and designed flyers and album art for bands ranging from Big Star to the North Mississippi Allstars. Today, he’s the author of more than a dozen self-published monographs and comic books, including The Waltzing Senator, aka Strawberry Funnies Special No. 2. (For more, turn to page 35.) This Thursday, September 13th, at 5 p.m., Foster will be signing copies of the runaway bestseller, a detailed recap of local politics, at Burke’s Book Store in Cooper-Young. — by Andria Lisle

Flyer: As a courtroom artist, what’s the most interesting case you’ve covered?

Foster: I drew the Dr. Nichopoulos trial, where he was busted [for over-prescribing medication for] Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. Jerry Lee’s pharmacist had accepted a ‘script for 10 Dilaudid, where Jerry Lee had taken a pen and written a comma and a couple of zeros after it.

What inspired you to cover the Ford trial?

Politicians with developers’ hands in their pockets aren’t helping people at the neighborhood level. The closest thing I’ve done to this is the “Save Overton Park” campaign from the underground newspaper days, when it took the hippies and the neighborhood people to get involved, which actually worked. This book is the first of a trilogy — I still don’t know what the outcome is going to be. Everywhere I go people are talking about this trial, Libertyland, or their MLGW bill.

Does the media attention you’ve gotten for The Waltzing Senator surprise you?

When I went to school at the Art Academy [now Memphis College of Art] in the late ’70s, people made fun of me when I told them I wanted to draw comic books. Today, Burke’s told me I’m their best-selling author! Tamara [Mitchell] Ford called and ordered several copies right before she got arrested for her latest DUI. I was worried the police were gonna find the book in her car [laughs], like maybe that’s what drove her to drink!

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We Recommend We Recommend

Coming to America

The lives, struggles, and humanity of people from every part of the world have come to the University of Memphis.

Their stories arrived with “Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America,” a multi-media art exhibit originating from immigrants living in the New York City borough of Queens. The result of years of work by Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan, “Crossing the BLVD” captures the energy and personality of these new Americans.

“I find the show incredibly compelling,” said Leslie Luebbers, director of the Art Museum at the U of M. “The show vividly presents portraits of people as thoughtful, funny, hopeful, durable beings who live in two cultures: the past and the rapidly changing present.”

Brief stories and scenes of everyday life accompany portraits of the immigrants who now call New York City home. Headsets hang among the pictures, giving visitors a chance to hear these stories first-hand, and a mobile story booth allows them to contribute their own stories (or those of their families) to the collection. There is a touch screen database for deeper investigation.

On Saturday, September 8th, Lehrer and Sloan will bring “Crossing the BLVD” to life. Lehrer will serve as tour guide, while Sloan will take on the roles of immigrants and refugees.

“Crossing the BLVD” not only illustrates the trials of immigrants but also the cultures they bring with them.

“Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America” at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis through November 10th. Performance by Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan on the Main Stage in the Theatre & Communication Building, Saturday, September 8th, at 8 p.m. free.

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News News Feature

In the Paint

More than a decade ago, Elliot Perry — then a point guard for the Phoenix Suns — was sharing a flight to Japan with fellow NBA’ers Charles Barkley and Darrel Walker when the conversation turned to art.

“I had no interest in it at the time,” Perry, a University of Memphis alum who earned a record-breaking 2,200-plus points for the Tigers before graduating in 1991, quickly confesses, “but Darrel showed me books and catalogs and some things from his collection.”

He was immediately hooked.

Talk to Perry for five minutes, and he’ll discuss the merits of Mississippi-born painter William Tolliver and dissect the life and work of the 20th-century African-American master Jacob Lawrence before making predictions about his beloved Tigers’ upcoming season.

Today, his zeal is reflected in his collection, which includes hundreds of pieces in mediums that range from photography and painting to drawing, sculpture, and video.

For the next month, 15 choice works are on display at Rhodes College’s Clough-Hanson Gallery. The selection includes pivotal pieces such as Glenn Ligon’s neon sculpture Untitled (Negro Sunshine), Renee Cox’ portrait American Beaute, and Wardell Milan’s Cibachrome collage of lush greenery, dinosaurs, and African figures.

“Most African-American people don’t grow up appreciating art,” Perry says. “They’ll like a cotton-picking scene or a portrait of a mother and child — something figural we can all relate to. For me, it’s been a growing process. In the beginning, I couldn’t appreciate abstraction or anything conceptual.

“Over the last four years, I’ve made a 360 on the work I collect and began moving toward young contemporary artists, artists of my time. I read about when [noted African-American art collector Dr. Walter Evans] started collecting in the ’70s and how he built friendships and working relationships with artists. I thought, Hey, I can do the same thing. So I started getting in touch with young contemporary artists.”

Clough-Hanson’s director, Hamlett Dobbins, says, “It’s one thing to buy something, and another thing to build that relationship. And in that way, Elliot is like a patron, someone who is aware of how important his support can be to a young artist.”

After crossing paths at a Brooks Museum exhibit that featured work on loan from Perry’s collection, Dobbins began laying the groundwork for “Taking Aim: Selections from the Elliot L. Perry Collection,” which will be on display at Clough-Hanson through October 11th.

Dobbins and Perry handpicked the pieces from 15 different artists, including hoop-dreams-themed works like photographer Hank Willis Thomas’ luminously deceiving Basketball and Chain, Michael Ray Charles’ Untitled (an arresting, nearly 5-foot tall painting which features a cartoonish figure stuffed into a fishbowl, while a carrot, a basketball, and words like “prosperity” and “influence” dangle above him), and Robert Pruitt’s ominous Sandinista, a drawing that depicts a figure dressed in half-bushman, half-NBA attire, a fatigue-styled cap on his head and a pistol at his feet.

The oldest pieces in the show, mixed-media work such as Kerry James Marshall’s The Face of Nat Turner Appeared in a Water Stain and Radcliff Bailey’s Untitled, date back to the ’90s; everything else is 21st century and as breathtakingly contemporary from a socio-political standpoint as they are on a purely artistic level.

“People paint what they know,” Perry says. “This collection tackles so many different issues. It shows the rich heritage of African-American people in so many diverse ways.

“Since I began collecting, I’ve always wanted to share art with other people,” he continues. “For me, it’s an inspiration. People think of it as a rich person’s game, but I know guys who have built significant collections by paying out a little bit at a time, doing their homework, and going out there and being a part of the scene.”

Now, Perry, a part owner in the Memphis Grizzlies, sees his collection as much more than a monetary investment.

“Being a collector has broadened my horizons,” he says. “I’ve gained an appreciation not just for visual art but for music, from opera to classical. Dance and performance art too — the whole nine yards. Wherever I go, whether it’s basketball season or not, I’m always talking to people and always collecting.”

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Art Art Feature

From Darkness and Light

For his exhibition of recent work at Perry Nicole Fine Art, John McIntire transforms smooth, cool stone into sexual icons, fertility fetishes, and sacrificial gods. Many of McIntire’s marble sculptures are complex syntheses of primal power and grace.

Voodoo Something to Me turns Belgian black marble into a two-foot-tall Venus of Willendorf with fertile bellies carved on her truncated body. Aztec Dreamer is a haunting composite of desert mystic, abstract masterwork, and sacrificial god. This large, supine figure with curved spine could be a yoga devotee practicing an advanced pose, a Buddha kicking back for a good belly laugh, or one of Henry Moore’s reclining figures. The title and posture of the piece also evoke Chac Mull, the Toltec god on whose belly humans were sacrificed.

In one of the most poignant and powerful works of his career, McIntire embodies Marilyn Monroe in white Georgia marble. Beneath a luminous floor-length sheath, we can just make out the sleek contrapposto figure with arched right foot on the verge of spinning across the gallery floor. Marilyn wraps her arms around her upper torso and forehead — an attempt, perhaps, to comfort herself or to better integrate mind/body/heart. With five feet of curvaceous white marble, McIntire brings to life the complex blond bombshell who counted playwrights and presidents as confidants, the comedienne who starred in some of the classics of American cinema, the aging ingénue who overdosed on drugs, and the Hollywood sex symbol who needed more.

At Perry Nicole Fine Art through August 15th

Anthony Lee’s American Out-Caste

Another visionary artist, Kurt Meer, immerses himself in alchemical and esoteric texts. Instead of turning dross into gold, in the exhibition “Voyage” at L Ross Gallery, Meer accomplishes something more personal and profound. He takes us downriver toward sunset in a body of work that attunes us to the subtlest of stimuli, baptizes us with light, and at the end the journey, eases us into night.

In Voyage I, river mist acts as a prism turning sunset into rainbow. Melon bleeds into teal into indigo into violet. White-hot yellow radiates from the center of the painting, creating a bowl of light that washes over and through the viewer.

In Voyage II, we move closer to the winding river, whose surface mirrors the sunset. No neons, no street lights, no strobes — above and below we are immersed in soft halos of light. The painting Solace brings us to the final bend in the river where Meer’s shadows are as nuanced as his colors. Earth’s edges dissolve into mist and darkening sky, palest peach streaks across the middle of the painting, and our own edges begin to blur. Still moving downriver, the last trace of color fades, as Meer enfolds us into the soft blanket of night.

At L Ross Gallery through August 31st

Anthony Lee’s vibrant colors, splashes of paint, and glossy surfaces bring to mind carnivals and the sunny beaches of Hawaii and St. Croix, islands where the artist has lived. In his exhibition “Under the Sun” at the Memphis Brooks Museum, Lee’s strongest paintings don’t depict tropical playgrounds but are, instead, scenes of hard labor, broiling suns, and the endless cycles of poverty.

In American Out-Caste, three large men lumber toward a livery stable that stood on Main Street in Memphis in the early 1900s. A fiery glow illuminates horses, wagons, and the stable, which are back-dropped by splatters of red paint and a silhouette of Memphis’ current skyline. A white-hot sun shines above the stooped right shoulder of one of the men. We can’t see his face. He could be looking for work, any kind of work, or this could be a showdown at high noon by men armed only with rakes and hoes.

Another punishing sun hovers above the heads of sharecroppers, circa 1930s, toiling with crude tools beneath skyscrapers in Work Ethic. The only thing unrestricted in Unrestricted are broiling temperatures. In this Dante-esque painting, faces floating in saturate red look stupefied by the heat.

In Mary and Son, 19th-century cotton pickers are also backdropped by heat and 21st-century architecture. Acrid greens glow around the heads of a mother and her son, who is strapped down with a large sack of cotton. The fetid halos suggest both polluted environment and tainted sacrifice. As more Americans fall below the poverty line, as generation after generation of the urban poor, undocumented migrant workers, and subsistence farmers are consigned to lives of quiet desperation, Lee’s 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century field hands become powerful portraits of poverty repeating itself.

At Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through August 12th

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Book Features Books

In Focus

In 1976, William Eggleston was the first artist granted a one-man show of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But earlier in the ’70s and back in Memphis, where Eggleston lived, he was redefining black-and-white portrait photography in a series that is only now being published — a series of lightning-quick shots made using a large-format, 5 x 7 camera.

The subjects were friends and acquaintances. The setting was the T.G.I. Friday’s that once anchored Overton Square. And the book based on these portraits is 5 x 7 (Twin Palms Publishers; www.twinpalms.com). There’s some signature color shots here too, but it’s Eggleston’s razor-sharp images in black and white that, thanks to Twin Palms, are the new focus of attention.

An essay in 5 x 7 by writer/filmmaker Michael Almereyda sets the scene: In 1973, in the wee small hours, and with Eggleston’s friend Randall Lyon using a “bounce flash” to light the subjects, the photographer took a spontaneous approach and turned it to his advantage: night owls caught in the act — sometimes looking straight-face into the camera; sometimes off in their own thoughts — but captured, as Almereyda writes, with “laconic clarity.” Then Almereyda summarizes the results — results that are trademark Eggleston: “The knowing simplicity, the deadpan irreverence, the imaginative treatment of mundane detail, the uncanny mix of slyness and sweetness, intimacy and detachment — it’s all there in black and white” — images Elmereyda goes on to describe as still “joltingly fresh.” And they are.

The images also serve as a corrective, if, back in 1976, you took John Szarkowski’s word for it. He was the influential MoMA curator who wrote in William Eggleston’s Guide that Eggleston was “perhaps never fully committed to black and white.” Stranded in Canton, Eggleston’s 30-hour, black-and-white video shot during the early ’70s, contradicts that claim. 5 x 7 does too.

But leave it to Eggleston to recognize the full import of his work. Recalling a meeting with Szarkowski over these very nightclub photographs, Eggleston asked the curator, “Have you ever seen anything like these before?” Szarkowski: “No.” Then Almereyda to Eggleston: “That’s all he said?” Eggleston, with laconic clarity, to Almereyda: “I thought that was a lot.”

The Writer Within

A chime sounds. Everybody’s quiet. Then your assignment is: to write … right off the top of your head, for the next two minutes, anything goes. And at the end of those two minutes, you can read aloud what you wrote. Talk about it. Hear from others. Rid yourself perhaps of your own worst enemy: your inner critic.

That was the case at a recent one-night writing workshop conducted by Valentine Leonard, Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Memphis and author in the spring of 2008 of Bergson-Deleuze Encounters: Transcendental Experience and the Thought of the Virtual (State University of New York Press).

But if that title sounds forbidding, Leonard is not. Last year, she left academia to focus on the creative life and entered into … well, you name it.

In addition to conducting writing workshops, Leonard has taken to the stage as a member of the Our Own Voice theater troupe. She teaches guided meditation. She leads exercises in “past-life regression” and dream interpretation. Her goal, according to her Web site: “to create and communicate new, healing and empowering ways of seeing, feeling and thinking.” And that includes drumming.

On Sundays in Overton Park, you can catch her playing in an Afro-Cuban drum circle, this after she studied Haitian voodoo drumming in Paris, the city where her family moved (from Lyon) when Leonard was 17 and where she began her college career in, of all things, pre-law. No surprise, she says, she “hated it,” and no surprise, after teaching for three years in the philosophy department at the U of M, she saw that her opportunities in Memphis, a city she loves, were limited. Instead, as she puts it, “I wanted to explore creativity rather than talk about creativity.”

You can do your own exploring too when Leonard, along with Diane Brandon, conducts a two-day workshop, “Exploring Your Creativity and Inner Voice,” in Leonard’s Midtown home on August 25th and 26th. To register or for more information, contact Valentine Leonard at valentineleonard@mac.com or by phone at 239-9919.

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Art Art Feature

Wild Abandon

You’ll find no provincialism, colloquial kitsch, or partisan bickering in the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s current exhibition, “Perspectives.” From its explosive beginning to its magnetic end, this regional art show, put together by globe-trotting juror/curator Michael Rooks, brainstorms possibilities.

Memphian Bo Rodda plops us right into the heart of -46m, 248m, -572, a computer-generated universe where thousands of viewpoints simultaneously explode toward and away from the viewer. There is no horizon line, no ground, no bumper-to-bumper traffic in this parallel world. Instead, swerving lines, printed on metallic paper in endless shades of gray, read like stainless-steel intergalactic freeways that have swallowed up every square inch of space.

Nashville artist Kit Reuther’s oils on canvas are as open-ended. In two of her strongest works, Blueline and Porcelancia, weeds scattered across crystalline cold landscapes become tours de force of painting and imagination. Dried pods morph into small urns, faded blue china, and hieroglyphs that wash into streams of ink excreted by squids and seaweeds floating in deep waters.

Memphian Jon Lee’s mixed-media paintings appear to reach a boiling point. Exotic animals materialize out of scraped and scumbled backgrounds, and venom drips from the mouth of a cobra. Acrylics and aerosols crash across his surfaces and drip over the edges of these 21st-century abstractions mixed with the raw energy and materials of graffiti.

Many of the works in “Perspectives” lie at the edge of art and consciousness. Memphian Terri Jones’ Stone’s Line is quirky, nostalgic, and so minimal you could miss it altogether. It’s worth finding for the associations it evokes, including the root-beer float you shared on your first date decades ago. Fifty-year-old paper straws thread together and disappear into the ceiling. As you move around Jones’ free-hanging strand of straws and memory, notice how it sways, creating shadows that ooze like colas onto gray carpet.

Patrick DeGuira’s Cannibal’s Makeover (detail)

Local artist Phillip Lewis’ installation, “Atmosphere,” both grounds us and arcs our point of view straight up. Droning sounds come from a speaker on the ceiling above a translucent blue rectangle that pulsates like an idle video monitor. Look up into Lewis’ ingenious mandala and acclimate to its sound. Your heart rate will slow to the beat of the visual pulse, and you’ll find yourself drawn some 300 yards above the museum where Lewis recorded winds with a parabolic mike.

Passionate, open-ended dialogue reaches a high point with Memphian Cedar Nordbye’s wall-filling installation that builds, explores, and destroys civilization. Two-by-fours inscribed with mind-bending mottoes climb up and over the top of a 10-foot partition. A cast of characters, including Billie Holiday, Abbie Hoffman, Franz Kafka, and Noam Chomsky, is exquisitely rendered in ink and acrylic on the surfaces of wooden beams that build both architecture and ideas. On the far right, 2×4’s tumble past cartoons of jet planes, replicas of the Empire State Building, and an image of a monk setting himself on fire.

A wry, informed mind is indispensable for deciphering Nashville artist Patrick DeGuira’s Cannibal’s Makeover, a small sooty room where shards of glass and human femurs are piled on the floor, hatchets are embedded in walls, human skulls are candleholders, a well-dressed man levitates just beyond reach, and almost everything (chairs, mirrors, bones, walls) is painted a dark gray. Humans feeding off humans will always be with us, DeGuira’s dark, deadpan installation seems to say. But ritual sacrifice is so passé. Imagine, instead, dark forces as heads of countries and corporations chew us up and spit us out, millions of us. Instead of devouring humans, one by one, in this high-tech world think global warfare, corporate takeover, and environmental devastation.

Memphis artist Niles Wallace works another kind of magic. He transforms hundreds of layers of shag carpet into two of the most moving works in the show. His cone-shaped Temple suggests many kinds of worship, including stupas, sweat lodges, and pyramids. Suspended a foot or so from the ground, his circular Portal suggests the hoops through which we must jump to reach subtler realms. You’ll find no ascetic, static perfection in Wallace’s heavenly visions. Instead, we get a comforting spirituality inflected with the frayed, shaggy, well-worn textures of life.

Murfreesboro artist Jacqueline Meeks explores our darker impulses with a series of ink drawings of a bejeweled, plumed aristocrat. Meeks’ metaphor for self-indulgence spinning out of control is political/social/psychological satire at its best. With her head covered by intricate petticoats and her elephantine bottom bared, an 18th-century French courtesan somersaults across the left wall of the gallery.

Above the entrance to “Perspectives,” William Rowe’s neon sign shouts “forget me” in ironic, electric-blue writing. Forget you? Forget this show which so beautifully reflects this mesmerizingly complex world? Not likely.

“Perspectives” at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through September 9th

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We Recommend We Recommend

Branch Office

CREDIT: Silberschuh9875 | dreamstime.com

For a lot of people, art is a mysterious, half-smiling woman without eyebrows. For Catherine Blackwell, art also includes a tea party at a compost pile.

On Saturday, July 14th, Blackwell, a Memphis College of Art graduate student, will unveil her latest work at the Memphis Botanic Garden. But “Fallen From View” does not incorporate traditional pieces of art. Instead, Blackwell will lead a series of environmental tours on Saturday mornings and Tuesday evenings. As she explains, “The tour itself will be the artwork.”

Consisting of several stops, each tour will last approximately 45 minutes. Blackwell will talk about the environment, touching on topics such as invasive plant species and tree diseases caused by global warming.

The tour ends with a tea party near a compost pile, something Blackwell calls “totally ironic.”

Blackwell realizes that her idea of art might raise a few eyebrows.

“It’s very nontraditional, and I welcome debate on whether it’s art at all,” she says. “I’m all for discourse. I’m trying to offer lots of vantage points to let people make up their own minds on environmental issues.”

Blackwell will lead day and night tours, with the latter showing something people rarely see: the Botanic Garden after hours.

Blackwell says, “I hope my tour will allow people to understand the environment a little more. Information is half the battle.”

“Fallen from View,” Memphis Botanic Garden, Saturday tours at 10 a.m. Tuesday tours at 9 p.m. July 14th-August 28th (no tour on August 18th). $2. For more information, call 576-4100.

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Art Art Feature

Cosmonauts

Located somewhere between mortals and the gods, George Hunt’s portraits of Southern soul at D’Edge Art include misguided devils, fieldhands who play the music of the spheres, and bruised Madonnas.

In Hunt’s complex cosmology, Satan is a creature more heart-broken and impish than evil. In Red Devil Blues, Satan wears his heart on his sleeve. His right eye is dilated and huge. Primal energy coils like a snake from his lower torso and sways to the tunes this horned, baby-faced devil plays on his purple ukulele.

Many of Hunt’s vivid, textured canvases combine wry humor with knowing nods to the masters. El-Roitan, The Man shows a grimacing, barefooted fieldhand whose neck and torso are an antique cigarette label seamlessly collaged onto the canvas. El-Roitan plays the music of his soul on a Greek lute surrounded by a Miro-like universe of dancing planets, insects, flowers, and stars.

The women of Hunt’s work are as full of mojo, art history, and blues as the men. In Sister Madam Walker, an almond-shaped face combines the features of an African mask with those of a medieval Madonna. A sliver of pale moonlight cups her cheek. White cotton fabric collaged into a Sunday-best dress frames a face on which Hunt maps out life’s passions and dark passages with a stunning mosaic of purples, mahoganies, and midnight blues.

At D’Edge Art through July 31th

In her installation, “Jewels,” at Medicine Factory, Erinn Cox elicits intense visceral reactions and develops surprisingly rich metaphors with nine piles of dirt topped with small pieces of plaster painted with high-gloss enamel. Some of the plaster pieces are shaped like calcified kidneys or hearts. On other piles, the opalescent material clusters like pearls, suggesting that

from ‘Jewels’ by Erinn Cox

life’s irritants bring experience (“pearls of wisdom”) as well as disease.

There are no hierarchies, no special powers or privileges here. Thick strands of human hair twist like earthworms aerating the soil. Hanging from the ceiling above each mound of dirt is a naked light bulb like one sees in a room used for interrogations or as a growth light. Both images fit. On June 7, 2004, Erinn Cox almost died. Since that time, she has explored her feelings regarding death and disease through memento mori that ask tough questions. Cox looks into nine piles of death/decay (a number connoting the end of a cycle) and finds optimal conditions for another round of life.

At Medicine Factory through June 29th

In Lauren Kalman’s exhibition, “Dress Up Dress Down,” also showing at Medicine Factory, a svelte figure floats in pure white light on a tiny LCD screen that dangles outside its casing, its circuitry exposed. At first glance, we wonder if Kalman has jerry-rigged us into some celestial realm. Up close, we realize the angel is the artist dressed in a white suit and swinging on a rope in an overexposed video titled Drop. We never see Kalman let go, but judging from the strain in her arms and the grimace on her face, her fall is imminent. Hanging by the Teeth finds the artist, dressed in the same silken suit, hanging by her teeth from another rope.

Rows of medicine bottles, frog skeletons, jaw bones, and jars used to hold biological specimens line up against Medicine Factory’s walls. Far back in the gallery, Kalman imagines her own demise on a corroded mortuary table she welded to the dimensions of her body.

Look, really look, this artist seems to be saying, at the ideologies that drive you to excel, to climb some corporate or spiritual ladder. Death is inevitable. When you strive for perfection in a body subject to aging and disease and push yourself to the limits of endurance, you hasten your decline.

In another video, Kalman dramatically underscores her ideas by wrapping a skull around her genitalia with a long swatch of fabric. Rather than an affront, her measured movements, repeated again and again in a video loop projected onto one of Medicine Factory’s scarred walls, become a meditation on Eros/Thanatos.

At Medicine Factory through June 29th

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Art Art Feature

Roll With It

As pivot for the Memphis roller-derby team Legion of Zoom, Elizabeth Alley sets the pace for her pack and is the last line of defense against the other team’s jammer. She’s very good at this fast, furious sport full of spills, sharp turns, and colorful language. Alley is also very good at art. In works currently on view, she records the art and architecture of Europe with her signature style of vivid colors, evocative shapes, and skewed perspectives.

Mostly shown from the thigh-down, roller-derby skaters, decked out in thick black kneepads, striped socks, and short shorts, are the subject of several of Alley’s untitled paintings in her exhibition “Don’t Leave Anything Behind,” at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts. With night lights illuminating the sweat on her angled right leg, one of these figures swivels left, darts past another player, and races counterclockwise around a rink painted a pastiche of oranges to accentuate the energy of this high-speed chase.

Many of the other quickly executed, mixed-media paintings in the Marshall Arts show are fragments of French life reduced almost to abstraction. In a beautifully atmospheric cityscape, blurred gray rectangles jut into a cobalt sky next to an orange awning. The crisp-edged, saturate rectangles on the right are a nod to Alley’s love for ethnic restaurants. Block lettering on a bright-red and creamy-white sign announces Tibetan food in the heart of Paris.

In a bird’s-eye view of Paris, we look through the hands of a huge clock face inside a train station converted into one of France’s premier museums. Just to the left of 7 o’clock, Alley lays down washes of ochre and umber to suggest the mottled facades and irregular windows of 16th-century architecture on the other side of the Seine.

Alley’s wry humor is as skewed as her perspective. An amorphous pattern of umbers and grays is backdropped by a clear turquoise sky. Adjust your eyes to this painting’s shadows, and you’ll make out a muscular body folded in on itself. A gray forearm falls between the legs. An elbow rests on a knee. The figure’s head is missing, cut off by the top of the picture plane. It’s a painting of Rodin’s The Thinker, but in Alley’s version, this forever deep-in-thought man has his head in the clouds.

“Don’t Leave Anything Behind” at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts through June 9th

This year’s Memphis In May poster saluting Spain reproduces six of Alley’s thickly impastoed oils on canvas arranged in three vertical rows. Two of these slices of Spanish life require footwork as agile as the leaps and sidestepping of roller-derby skating.

In the top right panel of the poster, a flamenco dancer’s red and black skirts and underskirts (in colors so thick they look squeezed straight from the paint tube) swirl in several directions around her legs and patent leather shoes. We see her from mid-thigh down. Her feet are flat on the floor, locked into place for an instant. Crisp strokes of raw sienna brushed in every direction add to the energy of the image and suggest the scuffmarks created as the dancer spins across an earthen floor.

We see a matador’s legs and silhouette in another panel. His feet are stationary but his shadow is full of arcs and angles. Like a dancer spinning left and right, like a skater negotiating a sharp turn around a rink, Alley captures another pivot as a bullfighter swoops his cape and abruptly pulls it back and behind him.

Rows of stucco-colored, hexagonal columns recede far into space as Alley takes us deep inside the Alhambra in the poster’s bottom right panel. At dead center in the composition, a tiny portal of light on a shadowed wall brings to mind the pinhole of a camera obscura and the eye of an artist exploring every nook and cranny, every scintilla of motion and light.

Elizabeth Alley’s poster saluting Spain is available at the Memphis In May offices, 88 Union Avenue, and at local frame shops.