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Doctor My Eyes

CREDIT: Jonathan Postal

Matt Singer rummages fitfully through a desk drawer, pushing aside disembodied ears and other bits of pink, porous tissue. “I know what it feels like to be obsolete,” he grumbles, recalling the days before computer-generated film images, when an artist with his peculiar skills had a future in the motion picture industry. He finds the computer disc he was searching for, slips it into his laptop, and settles back into a chair beneath a poster of Blackstone the Magician. His brightly lit office suite is part clinic, part art studio, and part sci-fi lab for a mad inventor.

“This is what I do now,” he says, and a gallery of ravaged human faces materializes on the screen. He clicks through pictures of burn patients and cancer survivors, a shudder-inducing parade of disfigurement and calamity. He points to an unsmiling picture of a dark-haired young woman. “This woman was swimming underwater,” he says. “Some kids were throwing rocks and when she came up for air — bang. She lost an eye.”

In the next room, Singer’s assistants, Nick Pena, a former art professor at the University of Missouri, and Charles Etinger, a Memphis-bred cartoonist, are layering bands of molten color into soft silicone eyes.

Jonathan Postal

Matt Singer

By the time the Venetians invented the glass eye in the 15th century, ocular prostheses had been in use for nearly 2,000 years. The earliest known examples were created by ancient Egyptians, who painted clay discs that were attached by strips of linen. In the mid-19th century, German artisans perfected a technique for producing a prosthetic-grade art-glass eye. The technique was kept secret and handed down from one generation to the next. The German eye-making monopoly became a problem during WWII, when wounded American soldiers returned home needing ocular prosthetics that were increasingly unavailable. American ocularists and Army dentists worked with plastics and oil-based pigments to create the first acrylic prosthetic eyes, which are now — excepting Germany and parts of Europe where glass is still preferred — a global standard.

Which is where Singer comes in. He thinks his silicone “flexiglass” prosthetic is the logical evolutionary step in artificial eyes. Singer’s eye has been FDA-approved, and clinical trials began in June 2005. His prosthetic eyes have received rave reviews from users and have caught the attention of a few established ocularists.

But some very important people remain unconvinced.

“I did, in fact, find it crude,” said Heather Banfield, the education chair for the American Society of Ocularists (ASO). “If a student ocularist were to submit to us a finished acrylic prosthesis equivalent to this finished silicone prosthesis, this student would not pass the practical exam.”

Singer sent Banfield a sample eye hoping that he might be invited to teach a class at the ASO’s next conference. He wasn’t surprised when his petition to teach was denied, but he was annoyed when Banfield forwarded his creation to ASO president Bud Turntine instead of returning it to Memphis. He was staggered by her criticism.

“I can guarantee you, I’m 10 times the artist she is,” Singer rages like a wounded maestro. He dismisses Banfield’s comments as reactionary. “It’s an awful feeling, being obsolete,” he says.

Jonathan Postal

Before moving to Memphis, Singer was a special-effects makeup artist in Hollywood. He made monsters, robots, and aliens for films such as Bicentennial Man, Species II, and Star Trek: Nemesis. He sculpted lifelike body parts that could wiggle, squirm, explode, and gush blood. The high-strung artist felt right at home in the hectic environment of a film set. But as they say in the movie trailers, something happened to Matt Singer in 1992 that would change his life forever.

“I saw Jurassic Park,” he says. “That’s when I knew I had to figure out something else to do. Who needs monster makeup when you can make dinosaurs that real on a computer?” After 14 years in L.A., Singer moved to Memphis with a wife, some pets, a few spare body parts, and a plan. Actually several plans, all involving mold-making and cast silicone. He sold his special-effects makeup process to Saturday Night Live, taught at Memphis College of Art, opened his own short-lived school for prosthetic makeup artists, and pitched his services to crime-scene investigators, doctors, and Memphis-area theaters. He even had plans for a silicone-based wrinkle cream to sell on QVC that he half-jokingly called his “retirement plan.” Now, instead of making monsters, he unmakes them. He’s an illusionist who makes fake body parts for people who have lost real ones.

“You can’t actually replace the things that are gone,” he says of the work he did through UT-Memphis before opening his own office. “You can make something that gives the person a sense of being whole.”

Singer does noses, cheeks, chins, and foreheads. But an FDA-approved process for making soft ocular prosthetics is potentially a very valuable commodity. Singer sees the future in eyes, and he thinks the ASO’s resistance is the ultimate proof that his eyes have legs.

Eye-making is an arcane profession. There is no school for ocularists; no prescribed course of academic study. To become an ASO eye-maker you have to find one of the 80 or so ocularists who are active and certified to teach and hope that he or she is willing to take on an apprentice for five years. There are only 300 ocularists in the world, and only about half that number are active. The trade is often a multigenerational family business and is famously proprietary.

Jonathan Postal

In 2006, Raymond Peters, one of the original dental techs appointed by the military to research and develop the acrylic eye, told The Daily News of Naples, Florida, that he was something of a rebel among ocularists because he’d trained five people. “This is a very hard culture to break into,” he said. “Many ocularists forcefully try to keep the knowledge in the family.”

“It’s like the Mafia,” Singer complains. “They aren’t trained artists; they aren’t doctors; they don’t even have to have a degree.”

“It’s a little like the old European guild system,” says Fred Harwin, a laid-back veteran of the eye-making trade. Harwin is an Oregon-based artist and medical illustrator whose work has been written up in the New England Journal of Medicine. He’s also the subject of the multi-award-winning documentary short The Ocularist.

“I’m controversial,” he whispers sarcastically, nibbling on pastries at the Madison Hotel in downtown Memphis.

“So maybe not every artist has formal art training in areas like color theory,” Harwin says carefully, weighing both sides of the argument. But these are extremely creative people, and more than anything else they are inventors. They have to be, you know, because there’s no place you can go to buy the equipment. You modify the things you get from a dental supply, or you make your own. But the system isn’t always open to outsiders, and that can be a deficit, I think. Without an influx of other creative minds the field probably doesn’t progress as rapidly as it could.” Jonathan Postal

Harwin, who received a Lion’s Club grant to research soft ocular prosthetics, doesn’t think Singer’s eyes are crude at all. He’s impressed by the artistry and sees the need for just such a product for people whose eyelids have been damaged and require rehabilitation. He’s by no means prepared to endorse Singer’s silicone eyes, and the two men often disagree, but Harwin is interested in seeing the results of further testing and in cultivating an advisory, symbiotic relationship.

“I enjoy Matt’s enthusiasm,” Harwin says. “But I can see where others might be a little …” He stops and searches for a quotable way to describe his friend’s force-of-nature personality. “Right now, Matt sees [Flexiglass] as a material that can and should be used by everybody,” he finally explains. “But it’s still very new. And I can’t say how much it will change things, or if it will. Acrylic, when it’s done right, works very well for some people.”

Acrylic doesn’t work for everyone. It doesn’t work for people like Betty Maxwell, a retired teacher and school counselor from Arkansas who lost her eye when she was 2 years old.

“It was the 4th of July, and we had a family reunion over in Ravenden Springs,” Maxwell says, recounting events that happened over 60 years ago. “Daddy was chopping ice to put into this big ice cream freezer. All the kids were screaming because they wanted ice cream, and when he heard the screaming, he thought someone had been hurt. So he turned around, and I ran onto the ice pick.”

Jonathan Postal

The toddler was rushed to the hospital in Memphis where an ophthalmologist’s conference was under way. Although her eye couldn’t be saved, one of the visiting doctors introduced the family to a new kind of implant: a small glass marble that would allow the artificial eye to move. The glass eye worked well enough, but 2-year-olds grow quickly. When it was time to get a larger prosthetic, the German glass was no longer available.

“There’s no way to accurately describe the pain,” Maxwell says of the near-lifetime she spent wearing an acrylic eye. “You know how bad it can be if you get one grain of sand or an eyelash in your eye? Imagine a handful of sand.”

Maxwell says she can’t remember a time when she didn’t carry a Kleenex to daub away the tears and mucus. Because she worked with children, she was especially sensitive about her appearance. “There’s nothing more honest than a child,” she laments. “At my age now, I’m not vain. But still, I don’t want people to fear me either.”

Skin tags began to form in Maxwell’s empty socket, and when they became irritated, she drove to Memphis to have them burned off.

“When my [artificial] eye was looked at under one of the big microscopes, they saw all these little craters,” she says. “And it seemed that polishing just made them bigger and bigger.” Eventually, Dr. James Fleming, an ophthalmologist and professor at UT-Memphis, told Maxwell about Singer’s eye.

Maxwell no longer has drainage problems. In the two years since receiving her silicone eye, there have been no more skin tags and no infections.

“I’ve always had good ocularists,” she insists. “But for the first time since I can’t remember when, I’m not in torture.”

Dr. Fleming was pleased with Maxwell’s results but, like Harwin, is cautious and eager to see more testing.

Memphis-based eye-maker Bob Thomas has a prankster’s nature and the comic timing of a vaudevillian. “I wanted to be a car designer, and I guess you could say I do make headlights,” he says. In his 50 years as an ocularist, he’s made eyes for A-list clients like Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Falk.

“So many of the people we work with send pictures,” Thomas says. He stands near an antique display case full of glistening hand-painted eyes, each vein a carefully applied strand of red cotton thread. He flips through a photo album filled with happy, normal-looking people. “This girl was at a rock concert,” he says, pointing at a pretty teenager. “The band started throwing CDs into the audience, and bam — right in the eye.”

Thomas rummages through his workspace, looking past silver appliances, dusty grinding wheels, and old wooden boxes overflowing with tools of the trade. “Here,” he says, holding up a clear glass marble like the one Maxwell wore as a child. “Since I’ve been doing this, I think the most important innovations have been the implants.” He produces oddly shaped marbles, marbles covered in mesh, and two rough-looking marbles of man-made coral. “Once these are attached to the muscle, they develop their own blood flow,” he says. “Next thing you know, people will want to see out of them,” he chuckles and shows off a novelty pinky ring he’s made from a spare eye. “Looks good, doesn’t it?”

Thomas doesn’t feel the least bit threatened by Singer. The two even work together with patients who need more extensive prosthetic work. Like Harwin, he thinks there’s probably a niche for soft eyes. He wants to see more clinical trials, and he wants to help Singer understand how ocularists work.

Thomas and Harwin paint similar portraits of their friend and colleague’s predicament. Even if ocularists are overly proprietary, they say, there’s nothing to gain from telling people who’ve done successful and rewarding work for decades that they’re backwards and wrong. “If they don’t want to let me in, I’m going to put them all out of business,” Singer says. “If I can’t get ocularists interested, I’m going to teach my process to optometrists. Why wouldn’t optometrists want to learn how to do this?”

Memphis optometrist Michael Weinberg agrees. “I think a lot of optometrists will be very interested in this,” he says. “After all, we are a patient’s primary care provider.”

“This is what the ocularists have been afraid of from the beginning,” Singer says. “That I would take my process to optometrists and cut them out of the picture completely. I wasn’t going to do that, but then it hit me: If they don’t want to let me in, if they don’t want me to teach my process, why shouldn’t I?”

Like any fevered inventor or visionary businessman wrapped in his own obsessions, Singer is given to overstatement, and he knows it. “Okay, I’m not going to offer this exclusively to optometrists,” he admits. “I mean, I’ve got an ocularist coming to train with me next week.” Singer’s still frustrated, but he’s also encouraged by the news that Dr. Fleming will be delivering a lecture at the ASO’s Chicago conference that includes data and information on the Flexiglass eye. To celebrate, he is planning a party.

“I’m calling it the ‘eye opening.’ I’m inviting my friends to get together so I can take close-up pictures of their eyes.” Then Singer’s thoughts turn again. “I want to use all of these eye pictures to make a paint-chip system,” he says, expounding on plans to take the Flexiglass eye worldwide. “We’re taking this oveseas. It’s something that can be used in situations where you can’t get an exact match. “That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?” he says, laughing. “Well, isn’t it?”

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Art Art Feature

Best in Show

The black rods and white ovals that make up David Comstock’s large enamel paintings in the exhibition “Flow” are some of the most expressive and sexually charged artworks currently on view.

The stakes are high in the thickly impastoed board game of life and death that Comstock plays out on the walls of L Ross Gallery. Large ovals look like inner sanctums and the lens through which we look at life. Everything feels slowed down, and every sensation is recorded on Comstock’s collages of frayed canvases that resemble torn membranes and scarred skin.

A thick black rod surrounds the ovum at the center of Untitled Green 003. Other lines slash across the canvas. One of these lines arcs down, pierces the egg-shaped core, and infuses the canvas with spring greens.

Negative Positive 002, the smallest canvas in the show, is the rawest. In this X-ray (and x-rated) version of the game, a white rod explodes inside the painting’s pitch-black core. In Passing, we don’t see the rod pierce the “egg,” but the yolk is broken and flows across the surface of the painting in washes of ochre and lemon.

An ovum gets pierced in David Comstock’s Untitled 003

In Comstock’s board game, every rectangle and square looks like a moment of psychological, emotional, or physical checkmate. In painting after painting, the thick black lines that surround, slash across, and penetrate egg-shaped centers simultaneously suggest not only injury/death but also birth/nurturing/sexuality, making “Flow” one of the boldest games in town.

At L Ross Gallery through March 31st

Glennray Tutor’s meticulously rendered oils of brand-new toys tightly packed into heart-shaped boxes make me long for the gunk and disarray of burnt-out fireworks and broken action figures. The three extraordinary pieces in his current exhibition, “Recent Works,” at Jay Etkin Gallery, plumb the depths of human experience with marbles and comic books.

Three iridescent marbles, painted equidistant from the center of Trio, orbit like tiny planets on top of a romance comic book published in the ’50s. The shadow of a purple-pink cat’s eye falls across the faces of two lovers about to kiss. Another marble, a swirl of yellow-orange, tops the final frame where much of the image and many of the words are cut off by the edge of the painting. What’s left are bits and pieces that read, “Lovely sweethearts … Moon … down on us … so softly, so wisely … came true all over again.”

The course of love in Glennray Tutor’s Trio

Since the publication of this romance comic some 50 years ago, many moonstruck sweethearts have discovered that the course of love is not as predictable as that of the planets and their moons. Tutor’s experiments with marbles and true romance establish that this artist, in addition to being a skilled hyper-realist, is also a campy metaphysician whose insights are bittersweet and wise.

At Jay Etkin Gallery through March 24th

At first glance, Kit Reuther’s six large oils on canvas look like depictions of weeds blown across barren landscapes. A closer look at her exhibition “Organikos” at Perry Nicole reveals a seemingly inexhaustible variety of colors and forms scattered across expanses of canvas.

One idea leads to another in works such as Blueline, in which blue washes and expressive shadows create giant squids that shoot out streams of ink, dried grasses poking through crevices of snow, and the tendrils of seaweeds floating in a deep-blue sea.

Shapes in Marabisque morph from doodles to pearls in oyster shells to peas in pods into an oval mirror. Scumbled gray lines lie near the center, with the artist topping off her fertile free-associations by floating a child’s bright red whirligig above the briar patch of lines, while at the bottom, she sprouts daisies from an impasto of primordial green ooze.

Reuther’s method of generating a form then building on that idea to invent new forms reminds us that consciousness of the ever-evolving environment is not always best expressed by hyper-realism, vague impressionistic play of light, or the reductive geometry of minimalism. Reuther, with rich imagination, captures dynamic interaction in life between sensory stimuli and response.

At Perry Nicole Fine Art through March 31st

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News News Feature

River Rat

It sounds like a punk-rock version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — a group of twentysomething hippies build homemade boats using parts from the trash and set out from Minneapolis for a summer-long trip down the Mississippi River.

Every year, a mix of artists, poets, activists, anarchists, and adventure-seekers craft boats using salvaged materials, like old wood and Styrofoam. Most live up north and spend July through the fall exploring various river towns along the Mississippi.

“They show up in towns like migratory birds on their way down south for the winter,” says local artist Andrea Buggey.

Back in 2005, Buggey decided to join the ramshackle crew. She headed to Minneapolis, got some help building a boat she affectionately dubbed the Ida B, and set sail on July 4th. Photographs, drawings, and poetry from her trip are on display in “Traveling Down the River” at Java Cabana through March 31st.

Originally, Buggey hopped aboard a boat for only a day, packing her bike so she could ride home when she got back on dry land. She had such a great time, however, she decided to spend the following summer traveling with the crew.

Two of the river regulars helped Buggey construct her boat, an open-air pontoon-style craft made from cypress wood, Styrofoam, and plastic bottles for buoyancy.

“Using salvaged materials is a lifestyle thing — saving what other people have wasted,” says Buggey. “It’s like recycling.”

For example, white PVC piping curved into arches over the top of the Ida B resemble an elephant ribcage. When it rained, Buggey would drape a blue tarp over the piping to keep dry.

“All the boats had motors, but the Ida B also had a paddle wheel. It was made of cypress planks and was hooked up to two exercise bikes, which propelled it pretty quickly. You just had to ride the bike,” says Buggey.

Altogether, there were 12 crew members occupying five homemade boats: the Ida B, Shadow Builder, Gator Bait II, Bobby Bobula, and the Leona Joyce. Throughout the months-long journey, the crew would hop from boat to boat to visit, dine, and help captain. Occasionally, adventurous folks from towns along the way would join them and ride for days or even weeks before getting off.

“Four of the boats had dinghies that we’d trail behind us,” says Buggey. “We’d keep our bicycles on the dinghies so when we got to towns, we could travel to get more supplies like food and gas.”

Meals, cooked on camp stoves on boats or campfires on beaches, were generally communal. Boats were hooked together for eating and sleeping, so only one person had to captain rather than five. Most meals involved fish or food from cans, seasoned with fresh herbs grown on Buggey’s boat garden.

At night, a couple of people usually stayed awake to steer and serve as lookout for barges or other river traffic. But occasionally, even the lookouts would fall asleep on the watch.

“One night when we were floating together, we woke up and discovered we’d landed in a stump field,” says Buggey. “It was very shallow and we all had to get out and push. The propellers on the motors were tangled with weeds.”

Sometimes the crew would retire their sails for several days, opting to hang out in towns.

“There was this small town in Illinois where all the people were very frightened of us. They were whispering to each other and following us around in stores. We created this panic,” says Buggey.

The crew brushed the experience off until they befriended some teenagers a few towns down the river. The teens claimed the previous town was under the “Curse of the River Gypsy King.”

“They told us that during the Depression, there was this group of gypsies that lived on houseboats,” says Buggey. “They stopped in the town and their leader, the gypsy king, had a heart attack. They took him to the local hospital, but he was refused service. He died in the waiting room, so the gypsies cursed the town. The tale has apparently carried on.”

By the time the boats reached Missouri in October, Buggey was running low on money for gas. Prices were high after Hurricane Katrina, so she decided to abandon ship and call her parents to pick her up. She left her boat in a creek while the rest of the crew headed on to New Orleans.

Buggey says the travelers generally give the boats away or sell them for a couple bucks since they often can’t afford to trailer them back north. New boats are constructed for the next year’s trip. Buggey doubts she’ll be building another boat though:

“I might go visit when they pass through, but I wouldn’t want to do a whole season of traveling again. I did gain a deep respect for the river and nature. There’s so much beauty and wilderness out there. And we pretended like we were pirates.”

“Traveling Down the River,” photos, drawings, and poetry byAndrea Buggey, are on display at Java Cabana (2170 Young) through March 31st.

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Art Art Feature

Breathe In

“Inhale … From the Corners,” Terri Jones’ exhibition at David Lusk Gallery, consists of three corroded sheets of metal, three sheets of vellum, two bottles, a black string, a piece of paraffin, a glass marble, and two long strips of gray felt. The show is so spare some viewers may wonder if the work has already come down. Those who stay long enough to explore Jones’ delicate lines, remarkable economy of gesture, and translucent materials will find themselves immersed in a nearly seamless symphony of light and space.

This symphony’s allegro movement occurs early in the morning when sunlight pours through plate-glass windows and bathes two large sheets of vellum titled Inhale. Hanging from the gallery’s 20-foot-ceiling and swaying with the slightest breeze, Inhale‘s large expanses of glowing, undulating vellum (a material used for sacred texts and ancient manuscripts) produce a quality of light bordering on the sublime.

Jones attunes our senses to the subtlest of stimuli. Tiny, nearly invisible ovals fount up and flow down Inhale‘s surfaces two at a time, then single file, farther and farther apart, until they disappear like drops of water in a translucent, silky-smooth vellum sea.

A black string draped over steel rods protruding from the far back wall teems with metaphor and perceptual play. Two identical golden bottles are hidden behind the reception desk close to the floor. They hang from the ends of the string, pulling it taut and creating the outline of a three-sided square. The title of the work, Fair, and the hidden gold (the only touch of color in the show) suggest layered meaning and special significance.

While many of Jones’ titles, such as Reach, Trace, Inhale, and Pause, are verbs that indicate subtle, incremental movement, Fair is a descriptor loaded with aesthetic and ethical evaluation regarding beauty, equity, and common decency. What holds the string structure in place, Jones seems to be saying, is the same delicate balance and careful handling that hold together any artistic composition, psyche, relationship, or community.

Part of Terri Jones’ exhibit ‘Inhale…From the Corners’ at David Lusk Gallery

From its starting point at the center of the gallery, Course, a long, narrow carpet of gray felt, crosses the floor diagonally and dead-ends beneath three sheets of metal titled Gift. Instead of forming the sides of one of Robert Morris’ inert gray cubes or standing alone, powerful and iconic, like one of Richard Serra’s steel slabs, three small, corroded metal squares are hinged like the panels of an altarpiece whose images and written doctrines vanished long ago. Corrosion has dissolved colors, words, shapes, even the gouges and scratches, transforming Gift into something veiled and haunting.

A slender eraser placed between two panels brings to mind the crayon drawing that Willem de Kooning allowed Robert Rauschenberg to obliterate: Forty erasers and one month’s labor later, Rauschenberg reduced the drawing to a nearly blank sheet of paper.

Instead of erasing a work of art, Jones reduces David Lusk Gallery to a nearly blank canvas, a tabula rasa full of residual energy that begs to be shaped and reshaped. Two graphite lines titled Reach and Pause drawn directly on the left and back gallery walls are punctuated, respectively, with a fresh slab of paraffin and a cast glass ball. The marble-sized ball looks poised for action, ready to complete its roll down the wall and across the floor.

The 19-foot-long portal titled Trace, delicately drawn on vellum and nailed to the right wall just above the floor, allows us, like Alice, to go through the looking glass down the rabbit hole into an open, luminous vision of reality where we not only think about but experience Milan Kundera’s “unbearable lightness of being,” Buddhism’s Sky Mind, and T.S. Eliot’s transpersonal vision described in the final segment of Four Quartets:

“When the last of earth left to discover/Is that which was the beginning;/ … Not known, because not looked for/But heard, half-heard, in the stillness/Between two waves of the sea./Quick now, here, now, always –/A condition of complete simplicity/(Costing not less than everything).” Through March 31st

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We Recommend We Recommend

Dressed Up

Memphis’ Africa in April is a mere flip of the calendar in the future, but for those needing it, a fix can be had at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art this Saturday. The museum is celebrating the opening of the exhibit “Power Dressing: Men’s Fashion and Prestige in Africa” with a free family day. In addition to no-charge admission to the exhibit, visitors can create their own African-inspired art and clothes and will be treated to the song-and-dance rhythms of Watoto de Afrika (a Memphis group composed of African Americans age 8 to 17). Visitors can also enjoy a screening of short films inspired by African folk tales (unless Anansi gums up the projector).

“Power Dressing” runs Saturday through May 10th, and it proves that the emperor does, indeed, have clothes. The exhibit shows off a wide variety of dress, from the threads of itinerant workers and warriors to the duds of kings (no, ’68 Comeback leather isn’t on the sched), from Morocco to South Africa, from the 19th century to the present. All told, 49 outfits will grace the Brooks, and their colorful array will prove that the Dark Continent is anything but. In particular, the exhibit explores the relationship between fashion and social, political, and spiritual status. If you’re going to be the alpha male, you better look the part — your duds better not be a dud. There’s nary a one in the Brooks’ bunch.

“Power Dressing: Men’s Fashion and Prestige in Africa” Family Day at the Memphis Brooks Museum of art, 1934 Poplar (544-6200). Saturday, March 10th, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Free.

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Art Art Feature

Up Close and Personal

In contrast to photorealist painters, plein-air painters use no hard edges. Light is constantly in flux, and trees vibrate with wind. “Path into the Wilderness,” John Torina’s exhibition of 14 large, consummately executed oils on canvas at David Lusk Gallery, captures nature’s endless play of color and light with slashes of pure pigment and passages of blazing impasto that punctuate and energize subtle tonalities and monochromatic color fields.

The Eternal Circle by Lisa Jennings

In the spirit of Monet’s studies, Torina follows the light of the Mississippi River Delta from season to season, from dawn to dusk. In Old River Channel, a band of pale peach is bookended by two stands of leafless trees. The channel’s slow-moving water, the silver-blue sky, the skeletal trees, and the pale, nearly translucent sunset capture the look and feel of a crystalline, cold winter day. In Scarlet Summer and Sunset Over the Delta, Torina captures the fiery temperatures, humidity, and haze of summers. Deep reds (cadmiums, crimsons, and siennas) fill the sky, tint the vapors above the river, and reflect off large swaths of the wet Delta lowlands.

At David Lusk Gallery through February 24th

George Shaw’s Study for Poet’s Day

For 26 days during the summer of 2006, Lisa Jennings hiked the west coast of Ireland near Galway. And she painted — producing a body of work that constitutes “Threshold,” the exhibition at L Ross Gallery.

In her previous shows, ghostly figures, black ravens, and white doves were often superimposed on ethereal dreamscapes. Painting the Irish landscape on site has taken Jennings to a whole new level of art-making. Her mixed-media paintings are rich with the colors and textures of Ireland: the deep-purple heather, the red jasmine, and the infinite greens of the rolling hills. They are rich with ancient iconography as well, recording sites of ritual, stargazing, and burial, where prehistoric peoples erected large stone megaliths and circles of standing stones.

Jennings’ new work is also filled with personal symbolism. In Crossing the Unknown Sea, one of the standing stones morphs into the silhouette of a woman standing in a shallow sea, her feet planted on the ocean floor, her head turned to the right and gazing out to sea. Next to the figure is a curragh, an open boat covered with hide, which transported the ancients and their megaliths between coastal islands. This curragh, whose golden oars nearly touch the luminous figure, stands ready to carry a visionary artist deeper into the Irish landscape, deeper into the mind-set of millennia of humans burying their dead, studying the movement of the stars, attempting to understand the universe.

At L Ross Gallery through February 24th

Since childhood, George Shaw has sketched and painted his birthplace, Coventry, England, and is internationally noted for his meticulously rendered paintings. For his exhibition “A Day for a Small Poet,” however, Shaw quickly executed 19 enamel paintings on small pieces of cardboard, which are tacked to the walls of Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College. This format is poignantly apropos for a body of work in which the remains of an ancient forest and 15th-century graveyards stand alongside strip-mall shops, prefabricated housing, and abandoned garages.

In one of the untitled works, a huge tree trunk, decayed on the forest floor for centuries, is surrounded by litter from a nearby housing complex. Study for Lychgate depicts eroding medieval gravestones and the gate where the dead were laid beneath shrouds (only the well-to-do could afford coffins) until the priest performed last rites. The exhibition’s most provocative work, Study for Poet’s Day, is a weathered, blood-spattered garage in Tile Hill, the public housing complex in Coventry that has gained the reputation of being one of the roughest places in the U.K.

“A Day for a Small Poet” is a fitting title for a show in which a respected painter returns to sketching and to his roots. This body of work pays homage not to the rich or famous but to small poets — like the talented youngster who lived with his working-class parents in Tile Hill housing and honed his artistic skills sketching the buildings and trees of Coventry.

At Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, through February 21st

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News News Feature

I Do

CREDIT: Photo courtesy of Norman Gilbert Photography

There’s a new exhibit at the Shainberg Gallery at the Memphis Jewish Community Center called “Ketubah Renaissance: The View From Memphis,” and I know what your first question is likely going to be because it was mine too: What’s a ketubah?

To put it simply, a ketubah (pronounced “k’-too-bah”) is a marriage document, common in Jewish weddings for centuries, that explicitly states how a wife is to be taken care of financially in the event of divorce or the husband’s death. It’s an insurance policy for the married woman — a legally binding wedding codicil established to compensate for what was once the man’s power over his wife. Or, as ketubah artist and curator of the exhibit Donald Emerson says, “I think of it almost as the world’s first prenuptial.”

In many cases, ketubot (plural, pronounced “k’-too-boat”) are works of art in addition to being legal certificates. The decoration of ketubot can be traced back to Italy in the early 17th century. As the art form grew in popularity, it spread to other Jewish communities across Europe and the Middle East.

It flourished for centuries, but as printing became more common, fewer couples had their ketubah handmade. Additionally, as civil law progressed and began to address women’s issues, ketubot became less necessary. For many Jewish couples, however, ketubot never disappeared as a central part of a wedding and in a household, though their role in artistic expression became more scarce.

Since the late 1960s, there’s been renewed interest in decorating the ketubah document. Today, artistically, ketubot come in just about any style. Artists featured in “Ketubah Renaissance” work in and borrow techniques from Cubism, Impressionism, Pointillism, micrography, medieval illuminated manuscripts, and much more. In addition to Emerson, Memphis ketubah artists in the show include Diane Harkavy, Sally Markell, and Stephen Wachtel.

There’s also been a loosening of the definition of what a ketubah is. Many modern ketubot are, in addition to being legally sound, egalitarian statements of commitment. A ketubah can be more symbolic than strictly practical. In some instances, they include texts that resemble vows exchanged in a Christian marriage ceremony. A few of the exhibit’s ketubot are commemorative, commissioned for couples’ 50th wedding anniversaries.

But don’t get the idea that ketubot are no longer viable, powerful documents. Traditional laws state that a couple cannot live together even one hour without a ketubah under the roof. Before loaning his ketubah for the exhibit, one husband asked his rabbi what the ramifications would be if his ketubah wasn’t physically present in his house. It was determined that so long as the couple knew the exact location of the ketubah outside of the home, it would be okay for them to still live together.

Many of the ketubot in the exhibit are wonders to behold. One ketubah, a lithograph by Debra Band, is a labyrinth of geometric puzzle pieces interspersed with 36 starbursts. A trail of wavy, delicate black lines frames the image and advances through the space between the shapes. Upon closer inspection, the lines are revealed to be micrography: tiny handwritten words. In this case, the whole of Song of Songs has been committed to the page by Band.

Many ketubot utilize the symbols of Jewish art, mythology, and history. Common motifs include the menorah, the chuppah, pomegranates, the Star of David, signs of the zodiac, lions, crowns, and images of Jerusalem. Often visual puns or multiple meanings are built into the ketubah. In addition to the Aramaic legalese standard to ketubot, the text, often written out by the artist or a calligrapher, might contain quotes from the Bible. Selections often are personalized, including, in some serendipitous instances, biblical passages that contain the names of the betrothed within one sentence.

The relatively unknown nature of ketubot was one of the main reasons Emerson put the exhibit together. “The public doesn’t see ketubot a lot, so I thought [the exhibit] was a way to turn things inside out, taking something that’s private and making it public.” The show also displays the diversity of expression. “In a sense, it’s a reflection of the diversity in the Jewish community,” Emerson says. “It’s a small community, and people from the outside tend to look at it as monolithic and homogeneous. But actually there’s a lot of variety.”

Resonant within that variety in “Ketubah Renaissance” is a consistent, clarion, ancient agape, a declaration of fidelity that rings sweet visually and textually — a holy devotion, a kedushah, made individual for a couple that honors the whole institution of love.

At the Memphis Jewish Community Center’s Shainberg Gallery through February 25th

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Art Art Feature

The Look

“Artspace,” a 5-by-6-foot wallboard at the P&H Café, is one of the world’s smallest galleries. It flanks a small stage where bands play bluegrass and rock music. Beyond the stage, artists and writers gather for late-night probings into the human condition. Emily Walls’ exhibition “Are You Still Holding?” is a perfect fit for such a place.

With small, untitled ink drawings, smaller scraps of Naugahyde, and even smaller pieces of unfired polymer clay, Walls creates poignant, passionate, ever-hopeful bits of life. Walls packs a lot into a small installation in which each stroke of pen and twist of clay feels sentient.

A thumbnail-sized sculpture with a Cornish hen body and a head that looks like a bright-red sexual organ sits on top of a piece of wood proclaiming, “Good times are coming.” In an untitled drawing, a little black-and-white mutt inside a tiny wire pen invites us to play. A discarded Christmas tree drawn on a piece of plywood (so delicately rendered we can almost feel its soft needles) hangs above a Naugahyde snake that coils out of the wall and sniffs us with its felt-tipped nose. And bits of clay scattered across a dollhouse-size mantel look like sections of an earthworm, that rudimentary but remarkable creature capable of regenerating itself after it has been cut in two.

At the P&H Café through February 2nd

The sculpture in “Nancy White: New Ceramic Images” at the University of Memphis’ Jones Hall Gallery reveals another ceramic artist working at the top of her form. What comes across strongest is White’s deep love for the earth and its creatures. With smoked clay, chloride, glazes, and a finesse that comes only with years of experience, White creates an exquisite series of impressionist scenes of a sunny afternoon on Audubon Lake. Umber and off-white bodies of a flock of Canadian geese blur into sunspots, into light dancing on water, into a complex mosaic of blue-green-ochre that colors the grassy waters where the geese feed.

Rabbit Proof Fence? explores our complex relationship with a creature we adore, abuse, and consume. In this sculpted wall hanging, White’s smoked clay becomes the soft fur of three rabbits pressed against a barbed-wire fence. An actual strand of barbed-wire stretches across the rabbits’ bodies and attaches to the ceramic frame that surrounds the scene like a burnished altar to the beauty/danger that characterizes much of the natural world.

At Jones Hall Gallery through

February 16th

Nancy White’s Rabbit Proof Fence?

Another accomplished Memphis sculptor, Andrea Holmes Lugar, has mounted “Mixed Media,” an impressive exhibition of clay and bronze sculpture at the Levy Gallery in the Buckman Performing and Fine Arts Center. Some of the show’s strongest works are large bronzes. These are not polished monuments to the powerful and famous — Lugar is after something more personal and poignant.

Vissi d’Arte — Vissi d’Amore (“I lived for art, I lived for love”) looks like a ripe brown melon that has been peeled in one seamless motion, its golden pulp scooped out. This large bronze pulls us into its nearly empty shell, unwinds our point of view, and thrusts us back into the gallery. Art and love, Lugar suggests in this ingenious metaphor, are a ripening of feelings that sometimes comforts and shelters, sometimes reams us out, and almost always spins us off in new directions.

Lyre with Woven Landscape begs to be played. You may experience a strong desire to cradle the sounding board that looks like a scarred torso, to pull your fingers through the silken strings, and to imagine you have struck some soft, low notes that, like the artworks in Walls’ and White’s exhibitions, tell us about the world’s fragile and resilient beauty.

At the Levy Gallery through February 9th

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Art Art Feature

Back and Forth

In a recent phone interview, Jerry and Terry Lynn, identical-twin artists who paint together as the singularized “Twin,” spoke of their Southern roots, religious faith, and some 21st-century challenges, including the havoc caused by Hurricane Katrina and the violence in Darfur. Their new exhibition, “Twin: Paintings & the Story” at the David Lusk Gallery, bears witness to the ongoing struggles of humankind.

At first glance, the acrylic on canvas At the Sea looks like a group of Creole women dressed in white gowns and turbans standing at water’s edge performing the rite of baptism. But the acidic yellow sky looks rancid, a dark red sea is filled with rust, earth, and/or blood, and dead tree limbs reach across the top of the painting. In Twin’s apocalyptic landscape, the baptizers stand at the edge of a dying world.

Paint jabbed, impastoed, and flung across the top of The Journey: Refugees explodes above seven men and women, all in profile, who appear to move slowly, resolutely across the bottom of the painting. A patchwork of color becomes the hats, shawls, skirts, and shirts of this line of refugees whose will to go on in spite of chaos makes this poignant image a reminder of the more than 20 million people displaced in the world today.

The artists build complex metaphors and rich narratives in this body of work. For instance, in their retelling of the Genesis creation story, In the Beginning: Early Morning, a small white building that represents the church the artists attended as children (a recurring motif in Twin’s paintings) also looks like a medieval castle. Clouds surrounding the fortress-like church look heavy, pregnant with moisture. The aerial perspective, somber colors, fortress, and stormy sky depict a cosmos full of cataclysmic energy and mystery reminiscent of El Greco’s View of Toledo. As a final touch — one that feels free of satire or kitsch and full of respect for the unadorned power of the rustic — a large black rooster in the foreground stands guard over the primeval scene.

There are masterful passages of understatement in Twin’s paintings as well as images that roil. In The Temptation, another work based on a story from Genesis, tiny flecks of white and touches of umber on a scumbled brown background successfully suggest the stubble of a cotton field, the face/turban/bodice/skirt of a woman, and the shirt and trousers of her companion. Ousted from Eden, these two minuscule figures walk across a stark, barren world.

Women dressed in long white dresses have served as archetypes in Twin’s paintings throughout the artists’ career. In Strength: Manna, five iconic figures stand in a field as impressionist as Monet’s haystack series. Gallery lights reflecting off collage elements (frayed bits of burlap and dried grasses) suggest a harvested field and the loose weave of the women’s muslin dresses. The dark featureless faces of the figures contrast sharply with a landscape bleached out by noonday sun. The central figure’s large frame, stooped shoulders, and muscular forearms draped across her broad, skirted thighs speak of hard work, endurance, patience.

In the Garden speaks of grace in the face of hardship. Two women dressed in wide-brimmed straw hats and long muslin gowns appear to glide across a landscape lathered with green and brown pigment and a splatter of white cotton bolls. A closer look draws the viewer into the strata of this 75-by-129-inch vision of a cotton field as Eden. It depicts the same fertile delta on which we stand.

With white paint in one hand and pink in the other, Twin poured, splattered, and looped multiple layers of pigment across the surface of Isaac’s Everlasting. There is no Isaac, no Abraham in the painting. At the center of this pink and white jubilation, a dark-skinned Sarah, dressed like a bride in the exhibition’s whitest-whites, looks full of hope and confident that life will go on.

The twins are also skilled portraitists who, early in their careers, painted large canvases of sportsmen and musicians. Instead of stylizing the figures in Trio, the artists capture the nuanced body language of three honky-tonk players, dressed in Panama-style hats and brown Sunday suits, bending over their guitars — strumming, listening, keenly aware of the sounds they are making. Shades of electric blues and smoky indigos envelop the musicians. Bits of frayed burlap and dried grasses collaged onto the surface of this huge (approximately 6-by-9-foot) painting bring to mind wooden floors strewn with debris tracked in by laborers who have come to hear music that is both a hallelujah and a wail.

At David Lusk Gallery through January 27th

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Art Art Feature

Mixed Media

Steven Troy Williams’ artwork is displayed all over the South.  

The 39-year-old painter, who recently received his BFA from the University of Memphis, spends most summers in Panama City, Florida, creating custom airbrush work for motorcycle enthusiasts, who pay big bucks for him to spray-paint their fuel tanks with half-naked angels, leering demons, or scenes from the open road.  

And for years, he’s moonlighted as a T-shirt artist, making wearable memorials, family-reunion souvenirs, and the like at mall-based kiosks in Memphis and New Orleans.  

This month, Williams has also had work hanging at the P&H Café, in a show that closed last week, and at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, in a show that runs through January 21st.  

“There is a division,” he says of the art he creates to make a living and the art he makes to fulfill his creative urge. “It’s something I struggle with a lot. Back in school, I didn’t tell anyone what I do for a living, because I didn’t want that to influence what I wanted to do.” 

Now, says Williams, “I’m embracing both sides.” 

According to him, the techniques he employs in each aren’t that dissimilar.  

“I don’t really have a preference. I’ve drawn and painted my entire life, but I’ve used the airbrush for a long time as well. I want to cross them both. I’ve used the airbrush and the paintbrush in some of my paintings that were in the show at the P&H.” 

Williams’ paintings at the Brooks, which hang near sculptures by Christopher Wollard in a collaborative show aptly called “Urban Primitive Works,” incorporate Haitian voudou elements with New Orleans folklore and even a bit of Memphis history.  

The stumpy, bandage-wrapped figures which loom in the center of Inimitable Mojo and Lisa Marie Laveaux could be a combination of the detailed creatures in self-described “lowbrow” painter Robert Williams’ fantasy creations and the tiny, textile-rich Ku Klux Klan dolls that William Christenberry began making in the late 1970s.  

Inimitable Mojo depicts Papa Kingi Ba, a Legba-like deity who is represented by a character that looks part Nightmare Before Christmas, part biker gang. In Lisa Marie Laveaux, an ample-bodied woman with wild Medusa locks and a hollow, alien face ethereally hovers over a rough-sketched above-ground cemetery that seems to float atop a gold wash. A tainted brown smudge — a familiar sight to anyone who’s journeyed to post-Katrina New Orleans — sits waist-high, like a watermark left on buildings by the retreating floods.  

Axe in the Attic depicts a goateed Cyclops who sits in a twig nest, axe at the ready, the phrase “Brownie here is doing one heck of a job” scrawled down the center of the canvas. Plumb Voodoo, on the other hand, resembles an ice-blue ace of spades playing card with a fiery face planted dead center. Below, real rusty pipes jut out of the piece.  

“The voodoo dolls were a series I started several years ago,” explains Williams. “I put ’em aside awhile ago, and then the Brooks approached me.  

“It was interesting to pick [the theme] back up after the storm,” adds the onetime Crescent City resident who returned to Memphis to finish his degree long before Katrina hit.  

“I didn’t set out to say anything about Katrina, but I have a lot of friends and family down there who live with [the hurricane’s aftermath] daily. Things have been creeping into the paintings, like the axes which people on the Gulf Coast are keeping in their attics.” 

While the earthy, primitive nature depicted in his paintings and Wollards’ sculptures perfectly complement each other, Williams says the duo worked separately, collaborating only on the dream rocket that stands in the center of the Brooks’ downstairs gallery. “I did the paint job on that, which was a lot of fun,” he says of the eight-foot sculpture that’s been transformed into an Easter Island-like monument.  

“It was pretty funny, because the museum initially saw [the sculpture] when it was still black,” he recalls, explaining that before the installation, someone from the Brooks called to confirm the details of the piece. “I said, ‘Oh no, it’s not black. I painted it.’ They seemed kinda upset, but I spent four days painting that dude! 

“It’s really flattering,” Williams says of his invitation to show at the Brooks. The fact that he had two shows running simultaneously in Memphis, he maintains, is “pure coincidence.” 

“I’d booked the P&H last winter, and their waiting list is so long that it took until now for my name to come up,” he says.