Nothing Ever Goes Unseen, oil on panel, 2022 (Photo: Courtesy John Roberts/David Lusk Gallery)
“I’m sitting here in the yard right now, and I feel like someone’s watching me from the window upstairs,” John Roberts tells me over the phone. He’s at his family farm in Weakley County, Tennessee, where his distant grandmother purchased the land in 1838 and where in 1921 his great-grandfather built the house he now lives in. “There’s just so much history here,” Roberts says.
This history and the legends that linger in the fabric of his environment have, in turn, laid the backdrop for Roberts’ first solo show: “Nothing Ever Goes Unseen.” In this series of paintings, various figures from the generations before him stare directly at the viewer without shame or menace, surrounded by a “warm and inviting” color palette. “It’s not supposed to be creepy,” he says. “I like to think about what comes next after this life. I like to think we’ll be reunited. I guess, my faith has a lot to do with it, too; I’m Catholic. And I think these people are just waiting around for me. … I’ll be out mowing the yard and I’ll think about things like ‘Is there somebody in the window?’ or I think I see somebody peering around the corner of the house. … It’s a comfort for me to see these people, to paint them. And it’s kind of like an act of prayer for me because Catholics pray for the dead.”
“Thinking about them gets me a little choked up,” he adds. “My great-great-grandma looking out for me — those things are outside of time now, and I’ll be there, too, some time.”
Indeed, the artist spends a lot of time contemplating mortality, having been a tombstone etcher for more than 20 years, a job he got right out of grad school and still works to this day. Soon after starting this job, though, Roberts, a father of eight, became consumed by his responsibilities in work and in his family and couldn’t make time to paint until a year and a half ago. Though he admits that his work as an etcher has helped improve his skills as an artist, Roberts says, “It’s been frustrating because I felt like I haven’t been able to express myself. … The whole time I really longed to be making art, but I had so many things going on.”
Yet, he adds, those “things going on” have empowered him with the lived experiences to express the generational memories and warmth that his paintings aim to convey. As such, to Roberts, those 20 or so years of not painting were not a loss but a time of artistic enrichment. And now at 48, having the time to paint has been “revolutionary,” he says. “I can’t imagine not having that outlet now. I’ve taken a few days off since my show, and I don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t wait to get back in the studio.”
“Nothing Ever Goes Unseen,” David Lusk Gallery, on view through July 31.
“Bipolar Stain” by Leslie Holt (Credit: Leslie Holt)
“Art viewing and art making are incredibly important for my mental health,” says Leslie Holt, whose show “Don’t Let the Sun” closes this weekend at David Lusk Gallery. “It sort of reminds me why I live sometimes. Art’s a life force for me.”
Holt, who is based in the Northeast, says that she’s been into art ever since she was a kid, despite coming from “a family of scientists.”
“My sister is a neuroscientist,” she says. “My mom was a physicist.” But even in the pursuit of painting, this hereditary thirst for scientific inquiry didn’t skip over Holt — that much is evident in her “Brain Stains,” which takes inspiration from PET scans of brains from those with different mental health illnesses.
Though they cannot diagnose mental illnesses, as clinical imaging tools, PET scans reveal, through a mapping of an array of colors and patterns, underlying different physiological activities. A PET scan of a depressed brain, for instance, lights up almost entirely in different shades of blue, while a non-depressed brain will light up in hues of red, yellow, and green, with blue present in a much smaller area.
“Depression Stain” by Leslie Holt (Credit: Leslie Holt)
“I’m a very visual person, and I just think they’re beautiful — the scans themselves,” she says, adding that with her family of scientists, “I’m kind of aware of this imagery, not that I have in-depth knowledge of meaning or interpretation behind them.”
Though she has researched extensively for her art, has worked in social work, and volunteers for National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Holt stops herself from getting caught up in the specifics of the scans and the facts. “There’s a couple in the show that are more literal interpretations, where I’ve translated the color pretty faithfully and the shapes pretty faithfully,” she says, but as the series progressed, “they really became much more abstract.
“I think the PET scan sort of design and diagram started to feel a little limiting to me,” she continues, “and a little bit like privileging the scientific part of what I’m trying to do, how I’m trying to speak about mental health.” To Holt, having suffered depression herself and having witnessed bipolar disorder’s effect on her mother, how mental health operates on a human, personal level takes priority above a clinical definition. Each case varies by person, and each person’s case can vary by moment and situation.
As such, Holt also turned to embroidering onto the canvas phrases and verses of poetry, selected “to speak about the human condition and sometimes the mental health condition in ways that scientific language doesn’t really get to.” Sometimes she will also embroider text from clinical notes and texts like the DSM, suggesting the tension between the interiorization of the clinical and personal language that often coexist after a diagnosis — inseparable yet opposing forces of logic.
But, on the surface of the paintings, a viewer will not recognize all these words because Holt has embroidered them onto the back of the canvas, leaving the front indecipherable, with threads left hanging and tangled, as if undone and lost in translation — “like how communication gets garbled for anybody trying to explain something, but particularly for folks who are in the midst of mental health symptoms.” Five of the paintings, however, are suspended in the gallery space, allowing the viewer to witness both sides of the canvas, a vulnerability offered by few artists.
“Depression Stain” by Leslie Holt (Credit: Leslie Holt)
Also, on view are paintings in Holt’s “Unspeakable” series. The initial inspiration for this series was Picasso’s Guernica, one of the artists’ favorite pieces of art of all time. “I think it captures raw emotions in ways that words can’t,” she says. From there, she branched out to other artists “like Käthe Kollwitz, Frida Kahlo” and their depictions of intense emotion before turning to “hysterical women who were documented by clinicians in the 19th century.”
“The clinicians would draw them and photograph them and make sculptures of them in the midst of a ‘hysterical fits’ to try and understand, to try and categorize the different stages of hysteria,” she says. “And it’s a disturbing history because they would sometimes provoke symptoms or they would clearly put the women on display in front of an auditorium and induce symptoms as a performance themselves.”
The pain, trauma, and exploitation in these moments are unspeakable, marked with shame, obtrusive like the staining on Holt’s canvases that spread behind the suffering figures embroidered onto the surface, mere outlines held together by thread.
When considering the two series in conversation with each other, Holt says, “I think of the PET scans as being sort of modern day interpretations of mental health conditions and then these hysterical women being the historical approach, and questioning which is more accurate and how far have we really gotten.
“What I love is that this work promotes conversations about this topic and is often very affirming, and people will really respond to the fact that I’ve made this topic more public than it usually is. … I think there’s part of me — because I come from a scientific family — that’s like, ‘What right do I have to speak on this topic?’ I am not an expert. And I think [my art is] asserting that it’s okay. It’s sort of empowering.”
“Don’t Let the Sun Go Down” is on view at David Lusk Gallery through Saturday, May 28th. For more information on the artist, visit leslieholt.net or neuroblooms.com, where you can purchase pins inspired by her “Brain Stains.” Ten percent of the proceeds of Neuro Blooms goes to mental health organizations like NAMI.
Leslie Holt’s work is on view at David Lusk Gallery (Courtesy David Lusk Gallery)
Repeating It Perfectly (Undone) Again 4, acrylic on canvas (Photo: Tad Lauritzen Wright
At the onset of lockdown, Memphis artist Tad Lauritzen Wright began a series of single-line drawings about the political and social unrest that followed. “They were very narrative,” Wright says. “They were almost like documentary drawings.” But after this collection of drawings, which was featured at the Brooks, Wright, like many, became exhausted with the inundation of bad news and problems to solve.
“The work I made, while I was making it, felt pretty poignant,” he says, “but then it started to feel like a scene in Groundhog Day, you know, where it just kept repeating itself over and over in so many ways. I went into the studio and I had no idea what I was going to do. And that was a good thing.”
And so he took a 6-foot-by-9-foot drop cloth and tacked it to the wall. “So I’m sitting in a chair staring at this big blank drop cloth and this [tangled 100-foot] extension cord is on the floor. I haven’t picked it up yet. And I started thinking about the possibilities of this thing and what it actually represented. And it was much more than the extension cord. It was this idea of problems that I could easily solve when I couldn’t solve any of the ones going on around me. It was going to take a little bit of time to figure it out and untangle this thing, and so I decided I would make a painting about that and I did.”
The subsequent paintings are now a part of his “Poetics of Gesture” show at David Lusk Gallery, where they will be on display through February 5th. The gallery is hosting an open house January 30th, where guests will be able to speak with the artist.
“Poetics of Gesture” Open House, David Lusk Gallery, 97 Tillman, Saturday, January 30th, noon-3 p.m.
Four artists grapple with a particular issue facing humanity and our planet. In their careers — through study and persistence — they have developed pertinent and compelling art. The public is invited to experience how the artists think, work, and create.
Maysey Craddock’s work was highlighted the first week in August. Her work focuses on the diminishing wildernesses of Southern wetlands that change and shift with the tides. Selected works on paper reference the natural environment of the Gulf Coast of Alabama. Abstract drawings are rendered and transferred onto sewn-together fragments of found paper bags, mirroring the natural and geological processes. Twenty-five percent of all proceeds sold from this exhibition will go to the Southern Environmental Law Center (southernenvironment.org).
Courtesy of David Lusk Gallery
Work by Ashley Doggett
Ashley Doggett, highlighted in week two, considers her work as not only imagery but also history and education. Her pieces within “Heed” pay homage and speak to current events as the world confronts systemic racism and injustice. “Brutality against our bodies and its social politics can no longer stand in the same court in which they once had,” says Doggett. “We are fighting together and with allies to take a stance against social inequality.” Twenty-five percent of all proceeds sold from this exhibition will go to the NAACP (naacp.org).
Leslie Holt’s current work for week three of the exhibition explores the often-private states of extreme emotion caused by war, loss, or mental illness. In 2013, Holt shifted from paint to mixed-media work after discovering a deep connection to the meditative process of stitching. Her process includes staining raw canvas and stitching imagery on top with embroidery thread. This project has personal roots in her own experience with major depression as well as her mother’s battle with bipolar disorder. Twenty-five percent of proceeds sold from this exhibition will go to NAMI (namimd.org).
Rob Matthews will close the exhibition in week four with his hopeful, dreamlike Madonna paintings formally rooted in abstracting a single Byzantine Madonna icon panel. His work for “Heed” is connected to a lot of work previously made in relation to political events of the Middle East over the past 10 years. Twenty-five percent of proceeds sold from this exhibition will go to Water Is Basic (waterisbasic.org).
davidluskgallery.com, visit the gallery website, Instagram, or Facebook page to view work and artist interviews through August, free.
Artist Greely Myatt doesn’t let his past life events go to waste.
Take the pine tree he planted decades ago in his mother’s yard.
“When I was in the third grade, my teacher — Mrs. Davis — gave all the kids in the class a little pine sapling, and we were supposed to take it home and plant it,” says Myatt, who is 65 and a professor of art at the University of Memphis. “Well, I was a reasonably good student, and I did. Fifty-five years later, my sister called me up and said, ‘Hey, I cut your tree. Do you want any of it?'”
Their mother had the pine tree cut down because she was afraid it would fall on her house. Myatt said he wanted all 60 feet of it.
Part of that tree is included in some of Myatt’s works in “Making Marks,” his new show at David Lusk Gallery. Indicating his giant Saul Steinberg-looking steel piece depicting a man contemplating a question mark, Myatt said the man’s cuff links, the block he’s sitting on, and the question mark as well as the ball on his exclamation mark sculpture and the shelf holding building blocks are “all wood I grew.”
The aluminum quilts in Tablecloths are another story. “I guess some of that’s kind of trying to purge a guilt. When I went to college, my grandmother gave me this beautiful quilt. And I was a kid. I didn’t have respect for anything. Not that I didn’t like the quilt. I was appreciative.”
But he used the quilt to wrap up some sharp plaster pieces he had made. “These worthless things. To protect them. And tore the quilt up.”
Cartoon or speaking balloons, which show up in his piece, Remarks, made of colorful steel gas cylinder caps, often reappear in his work. “The balloons started when I was making this piece for the old Memphis Center for Contemporary Art years and years ago.”
Greely Myatt’s “Making Marks” is on display at David Lusk Gallery.
Gathering wood in a dump, Myatt found “this title page of a little novel. And it was called The Lady. On the other side was a handwritten note that said, ‘Grandpa’s sick. I’ll see you at the hospital.’ I thought, ‘Wow. This is really powerful. What do you do with it?'”
He made a steel speaking balloon and stuck the page sideways into it, so the viewer could read both sides of the page.
Later, he placed wooden quilt-pattern speaking balloons next to some old box spring mattresses. “It was kind of like trying to give inanimate objects a voice, in a way.”
Myatt currently is using speaking balloons in his UrbanArts project, “Everybody’s Talking,” a series of five steel sculptures that “increasingly get larger” in Audubon Park.
The first segment is an empty speaking balloon and a platform, the second is two balloons and two chairs, and so on. The final segment has a small 15-foot stage with five balloons. “It was an opportunity to give the viewer the chance to say something.”
A native of Aberdeen, Mississippi, Myatt read Beetle Bailey and other comic strips. “I tried to draw a few cartoons for our little school paper, and I wasn’t very good at it.”‘
He grew up “in the South away from art, but in a big visual culture. We put stuff in our yards, and we’ll call it art because if you don’t, you get beat up or something.”
He remembered the tree stump made to look like a bear in a yard down the street from him when he was a kid. “It’s got two branches coming up that are his arms. And he’s holding two mailboxes. That’s the kind of thing I grew up around. Not only was it art, I knew what it was. It did something.”
So, later when he was shown a box made out of steel in art class at Delta State and told, “This is art,” he was confused. But not for long.
Myatt, who wants viewers to come up with their own take on his art work, considers his pieces to be “about talking, which is not communication necessarily. It’s more about confusion and misleading and double reads and all those things than it is about clarity. My job is to confuse.”
“Making Marks” is on view through September 30th at David Lusk Gallery.
“I just turned 33 July 3rd,” he says. “I found a gray hair in my beard. It’s the first one. You know what? I’m feeling old.”
“Retirement Party” is the name of his new show of mixed-media (house paint and found objects) works at David Lusk Gallery. “I’m retiring a lot of things. I think this is it for me as a working artist.”
Hildebrand, a former Memphian now living in his hometown of Cincinnati, began drawing as a child. “My grandma was an art teacher. I was never that close to her. I was close with my other grandma, who was just kind of a rough lady. She would cuss, and she would take off her shoe and hit somebody. That happened.”
Hildebrand joined his high school football team and then his football career suddenly came to an end. “I got in trouble and went to rehab in Mexico, so I didn’t get to play my senior year. It was mostly stupid stuff. You’d get arrested for weed. Or you’d steal some liquor from Kroger. And that kind of stuff adds up. So, at a certain point, they’re like, ‘Well, you’re going to have to do some time in juvie.’ It was wild. It was an experience. It was cool.”
And he said, “I wanted to be a tough guy. But, looking back, I wasn’t as tough as I thought.”
Hildebrand majored in illustration when he was at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. After graduation, Hildebrand, who married his high school sweetheart, Emily, opened Hilde’s Gallery and sold his own work.
Hildebrand and his wife moved to Memphis after he got a scholarship to Memphis College of Art. Memphis, he says, “is one of my favorite places. It has a weird feel here. It’s just authentic. And sort of dark. It’s got some kind of an aura about it. Some history. Some ghosts. Something’s going on here.”
Hildebrand developed his style, which he calls “a little edgy.”
He created his “Mohawk Blvd.” series, which were based on a tough Cincinnati neighborhood, where he used to get in trouble when he was younger. He created fictional characters that populated the area.
After he and his wife moved to Nashville, Hildebrand created another series called “Lumberjack Road,” which was based on their lower-middle-class Nashville neighborhood that was filled with food chains. “There was this sculpture where this lumberjack cut this lady’s head open at this table, and it was just White Castles coming out of her head. That was it. Waffle House and White Castles were everywhere.”
He and his wife moved to Baltimore, where Hildebrand got a job teaching drawing at the University of Maryland. “That’s when I really kind of started painting whatever I wanted to paint. And I started feeling older.”
One painting in the Lusk show includes several colorful Snoopy rugs. “You like Snoopy when you’re a kid.”
The painting also includes the face of Johnny Cash, one of his heroes along with Waylon Jennings. Jennings “was a rebel before punk rock or anything. He and Johnny Cash were the outlaws.”
And the painting includes a depiction of a man defecating on a wall. “It’s like young to old. And this is the reality. This is real life now. I’m not in this adolescent fairytale anymore. This is real. I’ve got to do stuff. Make money.”
His Lusk show includes about a year-and-a-half of work. “I feel like this is my last hurrah. There’s a lot of work. I’ve got a 9-to-5 job now I really like. It’s a desk job. I work at a college. I do sort of administrative stuff. But I’m liking the routine. I like it better than being alone in a studio kind of weirding myself out.”
Instead of spending time painting, Hildebrand is “worrying about getting the gutters fixed and stuff like that. Just normal stuff. My wife and I are trying to start a family. I kind of like the normal stuff a little bit.”
But then, he said, “I might start painting flowers.”
It is currently Armory Week in New York City. The 11 art fairs, consisting of hundreds of galleries and thousands of artists, are spread across Manhattan. Memphis’ own David Lusk Gallery is participating in Art on Paper. Full disclosure, I am represented by DLG and have eight pieces in this fair. Other artists from the gallery that are participating are Maysey Craddock, Anne Siems, William Christenberry, Kathleen Holder,Tyler Hildebrand, and Tim Crowder.
Crowder
Crowder
Can we talk about how badass Tim Crowder’s work is at this fair?? Because it is.
I was unable to go to NYC this year for the fairs, but when I have gone, it is always AMAZING. So. Much. Art. A welcome visual overdose. It is always wonderful to be introduced to artists and galleries you never heard of before and finally get to meet those that you have. You can see some absolutely horrendous art work where you feel that you may have a chance to make it after all and see current trends. This year, there seems to be an overwhelming theme of protest. Including mine.
Pulse is not around this year, but NADA joins in on the action. Spring/Break is always a favorite to check out. They have moved to a Times Square office tower from the worn down Farley Post Office. The post office made for such a wonderful exhibition space for this fair. Hopefully, with the move, it does not lose any of its buzz.
The other fairs are ADAA Art Show, The Armory Show, Clio Art Fair (which is really an anti-art-fair fair), Independent, Moving-Image, the mini art fair Salon Zurcher, Scope, and Volta. For an artist, something that is amazing is to click through all of the participating galleries at each of these fairs. Make note of which ones that you would like to visit, or ones where you think your work would fit in their catalogue. I have met some incredible artists and made some great friends by stalking them first online. Most of these galleries and artists have social media accounts. Follow them all. Reach out to the artist with a simple “I like your work.” I have been included in many shows just by doing these simple things.
6PM – Go to the Metal Museumfor the opening ofA Kind of Confession, work by 11 African American metalsmiths. This show is great. Four of the exhibiting artists will be on hand tonight to speak about their work. If you stick around, you can have a glass of wine and watch the sun set on the Mississippi River. Opening thru 8PM.
David Clemons, ‘Senescopia’ (2007)
7PM – Go the opening of David Lusk Gallery’sPrice is Right. There will be reasonably priced work by Tyler Hildebrand, Greely Myatt, Jared Small and Veda Reed, among others. For midtown folk, you don’t have to go out east anymore— Lusk has new digs on Flicker Street. Opening thru 8PM.
8PM – Memphis-native and current Florida resident Nathan Yoakum has work at Jay Etkin Gallery on Cooper. Opening thru 9.
9PM – Go home and read Ben Davis’ 9.5. Theses on Art and Class. I’m an evangelist for this book right now. Or you could go to sleep, you philistine.
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Saturday
12PM – Go to Burke’s Books and browse theirart bookcollection. Then go across the street and adopt a cat at House of Mews. All the better to read your nerdy art book with.
All day – Stop by Crosstown Artsfor Micheal Chewning’s Themeless (430 Cleveland) and, if you haven’t already seen it, Jay Crum and Kong Wee Pang’s Walking Eyes, in the main gallery.
8PM – Go to the Brooks Museum to seeWhen Marnie Was There.The Brooks shows awesome films, new and old. Their team does a good job of filling Memphis’ art house cinema void.
Sunday
…is the Lord’s day. So take an afternoon stroll through the Dixon’s gardens to see meditatively crafted ceramics by Jun Kaneko.
In the last interview he gave before his death in 1993 at age 90, Carroll Cloar shared a childhood memory with WMC’s Joe Birch. The celebrated painter and longtime professor at the Memphis College of Art talked about a pet chicken that ate out of his hand and perched on his shoulder until one terrible night when it accidentally ended up on the dinner table. Cloar says he was devastated and hid under his family’s house for hours crying and swearing he’d never love anything as much as he loved that bird. That wasn’t true, of course, as he later admitted: “I recovered and loved three women and three cats in my lifetime. Two women left and the three cats died, but the third woman has been here 20 years.” The third woman, his wife Pat Cloar, will visit David Lusk Gallery Saturday, December 6th, to sign copies of a new book produced by the Art Museum at the University of Memphis (AMUM) titled Carroll Cloar: In His Studio.
Cloar was a complicated artist from Earle, Arkansas, who employed realism, surrealism, magical realism, expressionism, and something like pointillism, often all at once.
In 2013, to celebrate the artist’s centennial, several regional museums teamed up for a multi-exhibit event called “The Summer of Cloar.” The most personal and surprising of these shows was produced by AMUM, where recordings of the artist’s voice played near the reassembled, newspaper-collaged walls of the artist’s studio. Carroll Cloar: In His Studio juxtaposes the artist’s words with drawings, photographs, and images lifted from the studio, documenting the AMUM show, which also showcased a seldom-seen group of mid-20th-century lithographs.
Editor’s note: the opening reception for “Bawlmer” has been changed to September 20th, 2 p.m.
It’s been a year since Memphis artist and Flyer contributor Dwayne Butcher traded the Bluff City and barbecue for the crab cakes of Baltimore. But Butcher didn’t leave his hometown fully behind when he moved into his new digs.
“I knew before I even left town, before I ever moved to Baltimore, that I was going to have a show at Crosstown Arts during this time period,” says Butcher, who says he used his planned “Bawlmer” show as a way to introduce himself to the art scene in Baltimore and set up a cultural exchange between two cities that he describes as being more alike than different.
“This was a way for me to force myself on people in Baltimore,” Butcher says. “This was a good way for me to meet all of the people I thought I needed to meet.”
A piece by Greely Myatt
“Bawlmer” features pieces by a half-dozen East Coast artists working in a variety of mediums.
“The humor in the work really stood out to me,” says Butcher.
Humor has always been a key component of Memphis artist Greely Myatt’s work, and so it is once again with “and,” his fall sculpture exhibit at David Lusk Gallery. This time around, he’s also playing with light and “visual closure,” the brain’s tendency to fill in the blanks so that we see complete images when only part of an image is shown.
Myatt wondered briefly if the talking balloons and thought bubbles that populated his work had become too ubiquitous, since they were everywhere from mobile phone messaging to the comic books that ate Hollywood. With “and,” he finds new ways to revisit old visual themes. He also begins to consider punctuation marks as abstract design.
Courtesy of David Lusk Gallery 
David Clemons, ‘Senescopia’ (2007) 
