Tag: art

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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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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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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.

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Art Art Feature

Eyes Wide Open

In “Sleepless,” the current exhibition at Clough-Hanson, Jan Hankins, an accomplished painter known for his astute and sardonic mural-sized observations regarding politics, plumbs the dark waters of the subconscious. Hankins’ methodology is ingenious. With plastic replicas of characters from science fiction, classic tales of horror, and adventure films, he creates scenes of apocalypse that represent the conflicted impulses of the human psyche — the desire for relationship, for power, for pleasure, for immortality.

The psychic battles that rage in Hankins’ paintings are often complex free-for-alls between morality, instinct, and reason. In Lamb O’ God, the sacrificial lamb becomes a 22-karat, testosterone-filled ram that looks down from a high precipice as an F16 bombs an already devastated landscape. The head of a scientist becomes a gun turret from a battleship in Madness, and in The Blind Beating the Blind, God (with white hair and beard and a halo as heavy as an anvil) whispers prohibitions in the ear of a hunchback who is jacking off.

A Day in the Life looks like a ribald simulation of the evolution of the id/ego/superego in which the Creature from the Black Lagoon emerges from primordial waters with gun and money in his webbed hands, a policeman with angel wings points a gun in our face, and a mummy dressed in the American flag leaps out of a pile of manure, roll of toilet paper in hand.

No humor seems too dark, no exaggeration possible in a world where nuclear weapons and self-righteousness proliferate, genocide is alive and well in Darfur, and cloning humans is a distinct possibility. The surreal is tomorrow’s reality, and many of Hankins’ works have this at-the-edge quality, including Dominion Over, in which nightlights on the tanks of a chemical plant shine like Christmas lights in an otherwise blacked-out world. A giant ant straddles a flask and towers above Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory table. Bambi crouches below on a tiny island surrounded by black water.

Dark waters (an appropriate symbol for pollution, global warming, and clouded psyches) inundate much of the landscape in this body of work. A few survivors stand on top of rocks, stone pedestals, and piers. Fifi the pampered poodle (Yak with Fifi, acrylic on canvas) sits on top of an ice floe all dolled up with ribbons and flowers in her hair. She’s bright-eyed and slap-happy and oblivious to the snarling wolves that approach her.

Black water almost covers the stone pedestal on which the muscle-man in Blauburgunder stands. This Schwarzenegger look-alike has one foot on a treasure chest and is wrapped in the colors and stars and stripes of the flag. His tattered trousers are red-and-white-striped. His arms have become wildly gesturing, brawny legs that wear blue boots covered with gold stars. Blauburgunder — an Austrian word for the red Pinot Noir grape — refers, perhaps, to a politician drunk with power, money, and patriotism. In spite of the black water lapping at his ankles, he’s still grinning, still swaggering, as clueless and excited as Fifi.

Mirrors placed beneath three untitled toy models (including the one on which Blauburgunder is based) reflect gallery lights and cast shadows of figures onto the wall, creating dramatic plays of light and dark that intensify our sense of the struggles that go on within the heart and soul. Light streaming from beneath the plastic replicas and climbing up the gallery wall, rather than shining from above, brings all kinds of truisms and metaphors to mind, such as removing the sty from our own eyes and looking for truth inside.

In a series of oils on canvas (Sleepless 1, 2, and 3) and in two untitled plastic models, hope regarding the human condition can be gleaned from Hankins’ retelling of a classic tale of horror and romance. In Sleepless 2, water roars across the landscape and around Frankenstein’s monster, a stitched-together creature whose head is sewn on backward. The creature’s arms and torso reach toward the gravesite on which he stands. His head and lower body strain toward his bride, who is bandaged from neck to foot and strapped to an operating table. Beneath the table, a panther devours a human heart. In this scene of raging emotions and thwarted desires, another bandaged creature (or another aspect of the feminine) rises from the bride’s chest. Its swollen right hand reaches for a rose engulfed in light.

Wide-eyed and wide-awake in “Sleepless,” Hankins goes into the dark and shines light on wounded, misguided, deluded creatures who can still reach for beauty. His cast of characters — by turns funny, frightening, and poignant symbols of the human psyche — provide a blueprint for us all.

At Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, through December 6th

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Classy Broad

Every once in a while you stumble into a neighborhood or self-contained fold of urban landscape that you didn’t know existed. If you’ve never been on the 2500 block of Broad Avenue, when you first see it, you’ll be immediately struck by the distinct identity of the strip of buildings there. You can tell this neighborhood has lived an interesting life. But any melancholy felt for the loss of those times is more than matched by excitement over the potential that it still has.

Some good people see that potential too and have been working to turn Broad’s frown upside down. This Friday, October 13th, will be a lucky day for the street and for visitors as the Historic Broad Business Association presents the first Broad Avenue Gallery Walk. Anyone who remembers what South Main was like years ago — and how exciting and amazing it is when gallery tours are held there today — will have a sense of what this night means for Broad.

Jerry Coulliard will show off his metal furniture and architectural pieces at his studio MetalWorks. At Material, work by Nashville artist Ben Vitualla can be seen in “Target” (part of the Target series shown above) and artist Larry Patton will open his own studio a few doors down. Adam Shaw, known for his comics — Dead in Memphis and Bloodstream, among them — and his paintings — which are kind of a Gen-X Edward Hopper — will open his studio and show “Luck of the Draw,” featuring work by cartoonists such as Greg Cravens, Mike Norton, and Lin Workman.

Broad Avenue Gallery Walk, Friday, October 13, 6-8 p.m.; MetalWorks, 2537 Broad; Adam Shaw Studio, 2547 Broad;

Material, 2553 Broad; Larry Patton Studio, 2571 Broad