Tag: David Lusk Gallery

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Art Art Feature

Taking Aim

Several years ago, while waiting in a dentist’s office, artist Tad Lauritzen Wright picked up the magazine Garden & Gun. Without opening it, he knew immediately that the title would serve as the impetus for future artwork, the result of which, “Garden & Gun,” is currently on view at the David Lusk Gallery through October 27th.

After that first, brief encounter with Garden & Gun, Lauritzen Wright sought out more copies and read articles online. He became fascinated with the magazine and its tagline, “Soul of the South.” Initially, his work was directly about the articles featured in the magazine. He abandoned this fairly quickly, however, not wanting the work to simply be illustrations of the imagery and subject matter of the articles.

“It would have been an easy way going about making the work,” Lauritzen Wright says. “But it wasn’t a valid way for me to do it. It didn’t say anything about what I wanted to say.”

So his approach to the work became more abstract and personal, the articles used only as a starting point — a process evident in the piece titled A Tear for Mark.

That work began with an article about the Kentucky Derby, which in turn led Lauritzen Wright to think about his relationship with horses. He thought about the Shetland pony named Blacky he had as a child. The pony died when Lauritzen Wright was 9, something he did not learn until he was 17, as his parents had told him “Blacky was sent to live with the cows on a farm.” Lauritzen Wright is also a big fan of the indie rock band Sparklehorse and its lead singer Mark Linkous, who committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. The artist also started to think about the last time he watched the Kentucky Derby, recalling the tragic events that led to the immediate euthanasia of filly Eight Belles while still on the racetrack at Churchill Downs in 2008. These three disparate and grievous events were combined into A Tear for Mark, a “shiny, happy horse painting,” Lauritzen Wright says.

“If the people do not read the titles, then the show is about flowers and animals. The titles mess everything up,” he says. (One can only hope to know the stories behind the work with titles such as Crazy Aunt Teena, Rainbow Cult, Before the Visions, and Goodnight Sweetheart, a 48″ x 60″ silver and gold painting of a hand cannon.)

Lauritzen Wright is primarily known for his collages, one-line drawings, and word puzzles. For years, he was exclusively interested in very flat paint applications. With this latest body of work, he says, “I am interested in texture — an experimentation with paint, paint manipulation, to see what I can make happen.”

He’s also using spray paint for the first time. These experiments result in work that is about the physicality of painting and pushing his painting into a different direction. This methodology is evident in Forgetting Where I’m From and Left Undone, where the paint is built up on the surface (envision the icing of a cupcake) and is akin to the work of artists like Jonathan Lasker and Pia Fries.

As someone who has closely followed the work of Lauritzen Wright for years, I contend this is the type of exhibition he always wanted to make. There is no evidence of second-guessing any aspect of the process, from the application of the paint to subject matter.

When asked about this, Lauritzen Wright recalls an article he read about André 3000, part of the hip-hop duo OutKast.

“In the article, André 3000 says when he is writing his best music, he is in a zone. He isn’t trying to be smart, he isn’t thinking” he says. “For this exhibition, the whole show, I was in the zone. There was nothing I forced, nothing I didn’t want to make.”

At David Lusk Gallery through October 27th

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Art Art Feature

Mavericks

True to its title, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s current exhibition “Monet to Cézanne/Cassatt to Sargent: The Impressionist Revolution,” is about courage and upheaval.

Eighty-five masterworks from the Brooks, the Dixon, and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art tell a story of a group of 19th-century and early 20th-century artists who broke so sharply with aesthetic, cultural, and religious tradition that their blasphemous and dangerous works were described by contemporary critics as “chambers of horror.”

The Brooks exhibition includes some of the Impressionists’ most accomplished paintings, such as Claude Monet’s stunningly observed Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil.

The exhibition also records what happened after the revolution. As these artists realized they were their own arbiters of beauty and could channel a more personal spirituality, they became more daring.

With compelling after compelling example, the show tracks the Impressionists’ and Post-Impressionists’ march toward work that was increasingly mystical, expressive, and abstract. Don’t miss the shimmering interiors by Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.

You’ll find a pivotal moment in the history of art in Paul Cézanne’s Trees and Rocks, Near the Chateau Noir. As Cézanne moved beyond Impressionism to search for the building blocks of reality, he created an increasingly geometric body of work that culminated in Cubism.

Even Renoir provides intimations of things to come in a show that includes not only that artist’s signature full-figured women but also The Wave, which brings to mind the passionate brushwork of the Abstract Expressionists.

Through October 9th

Fast forward 100 years. The spirit of the maverick lives on in the work of Memphian Greely Myatt, who is noted for unorthodox and highly original works of art that often pay homage to modern and postmodern masters. Without losing any of his iconoclastic edge, Myatt’s David Lusk exhibition “Just Sayin’,” also contains some of the most graceful and philosophical works of his career.

Standing at over seven feet, Volume II is an interactive steel sculpture with a hinged binding that allows viewers to open the pages of a book. Empty thought bubbles and speech balloons welded into each page create a graceful steel filigree that allows us to see all the storylines simultaneously. In one of his slyest and most strikingly beautiful works, Myatt encourages us to experience the world from new perspectives. We can fill in our own text and become an omnipotent observer (in thought bubbles Myatt welded at the top of a page) or the poet speaking from his/her gut (in speech balloons welded into the bottom of the work).

Myatt pays tribute to a couple of his favorite artists in List, a tall, weathered slab of steel on a Styrofoam base back-dropped by a large sheet of aluminum. Traces of color in a small slit that divides the polished aluminum from top to bottom conjures up one of Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings recast in metal.

As viewers approach the installation and stop to assure themselves that Styrofoam can, indeed, support a slab of steel, List also becomes a wry nod to sculptor Richard Serra.

The largest work in the show and one of Myatt’s most apropos alter-egos yet is I Like the Way You Dance, a 10-by-10-by-10-foot sculpture of speech balloons made out of mop handles, plastic, and steel.

The size of the work and the empty balloons allow us to join in the dialogue and step into a dance that blurs the distinction between high and low art and the boundaries between genres. This gracefully arcing work of interlacing speech balloons could be a couple moving in perfect sync and who remind us that what we say is less important than our attitude, body language, and the give-and-take of our conversations.

Or this could be the multifaceted mind of a sculptor whose seamless syntheses of pop/folk/conceptual/abstract art in a show titled “Just Sayin'” speak to universal truths, in a Southern vernacular, and to the history of art.

Through October 1st

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Art Art Feature

Imagine That

CREDIT: Holly Fisher, Louie

In David Perry Smith’s “Fresh Horses,” one of this year’s most flawlessly integrated three-person shows, Holly Fisher wields steel like sticks of charcoal and forges strips of metal so fluid, digital images of her work look like contour drawings. We feel muscles rippling throughout the torso of a horse labeled Louie. We see into the cartilage and bones of a skeletal structure that is delicate but strong enough to lock the animal’s slender legs in place as he throws back his head whipping up his mane and tail.

An award-winning equestrian as well as accomplished encaustic painter, Mary Cour Burrows, floats near the top of her Chagall-like self-portrait The Horse Whisperer. Mouth to nostril, Burrows breathes life into a creature whose prominent snout, gentle eyes, and thick fur look like a not quite solidified version of the red mare at the bottom of the painting. In Dancing with the Red Horses, Burrows and four sorrels circle faster and faster until their fully extended bodies move in an unbroken circle — hand to tail to hoof to mane — that brings to mind the primal joy of the nude figures in Matisse’s masterwork La Danse.

In Mary Reed’s haunting collage painting Pause Prance, a woman both rides on and merges with a translucent steed created out of layers of handmade paper and white-gold glazes. The sleek woman is as golden-red as the atmosphere through which she rides. Like many of Reed’s heroines, she looks away from the viewer. Lost in her own dreams, this Guinevere turned gallant knight, this Woman of La Mancha sets out on a vision quest that mixes the legendary and surreal with the deeply personal.

Through June 30th

Included in Pinkney Herbert’s David Lusk exhibition “Broken Time — Progressions” is Fanfare 1, a pulsing pastel on paper. The work’s lime-green and deep-blue asymmetrical rectangles — framed in red and surrounded by jagged strokes of black — powerfully parallel the show’s title, which is the jazz term for irregular, improvised syncopation. The overlapping ovals at the heart of drawing looks like the lips of the trumpeter opening and closing around the mouthpiece of his/her instrument reaching for the high notes and crescendos. 

In a decided departure from Herbert’s driving sometimes explosive style, Tower 3 is a tall but fragile structure in which lines climb, change direction, intersect, and go back up and out as Herbert reaches for that open-ended framework that facilitates fresh vision and the creation of highly original pieces of music as well as works of art.

Through June 30th

Everything glows with life in WKNO 1091 Gallery’s “Artist Spotlight Exhibit: NJ Woods and Marie Babb.” In Woods’ high-key acrylic painting When You’re on a Hill, You’re Closer 2 da Moon, the lightning bugs are huge and children climb a hill as steep as a mountain. An enormous moon shimmers in the sky. Small shacks take on a life of their own as wooden slats turn gold in the moonlight and steep red roofs blow in the wind like the sheets on the clothesline at the bottom of the hill. The painting’s ebullient child-like joy doesn’t register as kitsch, as Grandma Moses-quaint, or even as exaggerated. Instead, Woods reminds us, this is the way children experience the world, the way they remember the magic.

Through June 30th

Some of the most sensual and iconic works of Niles Wallace’s career are currently on view in his Gallery Fifty Six exhibition “Sticks and Stones.” Dozens of deliberately misshapen stark-white ceramic bowls fill the top shelves of Wallace’s 8-foot-tall Collection Cabinet. Fired with a single glaze, Wallace’s colors are sometimes as crisp as the white and black halves of a yin-yang symbol, sometimes as nuanced as tea stains against hairline cracks in a porcelain cup, sometimes as sleek as the petal of a rose.

On the bottom shelves, Wallace places one plastic container inside another and warps both bowls with a heat gun. These surprisingly beautiful bowls writhe, reach out, and fold back upon themselves — sometimes tortuously, sometimes with delicate grace. These asymmetrical, shape-shifting works of art speak to every aspect of the creative process — ideas gestating, art and life evolving, and imagination as malleable as molten plastic.

Through June 25th

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Art Art Feature

Charged Objects

Part Pop artist, part shaman, Willie Cole takes household objects and so charges them with danger and talismanic power, they become ego-shattering icons as well as riveting works of art. The artist’s best-known work, Stowage, was showcased at Cole’s 1998 solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. It also serves as the centerpiece for his Brooks exhibition, “Deep Impressions.” A long, slim projectile covered with tiny white dots lies near the center of this nearly black woodcut. Surrounding the projectile are a series of circles, each imprinted with a single iron-scorch. As we step in closer to this wall-filling work, we realize we’re looking at the layout of an overcrowded British slave ship ingeniously re-created with a blackened image of an ironing board and iron scorches. We’re staring through the ship’s portals into the stark lean faces of African tribesmen about to be sold into slavery.

At the edge of abstraction, Cole’s iron-scorched paperwork Raid looks like rusted hulls of ships ramming into one another. Or these could be blood-stained spears flashing in combat. Its emotional energy feels as sudden, unexpected, up close and personal as the melees that occur when slave traders “raid” African villages.  

The right panel of the triptych Man Spirit Mask contains another evocative image. For this work, a photo etching of the artist’s face has been elongated, cropped, turned upside down, and jammed into the sole plate of a Proctor Silex steam iron. Like Stowage and Raid, this strikingly original and unsettling work is filled with seemingly endless asides about the callousness and cruelty that occur when humans are treated like chattel, jammed into cargo ships, and consigned to the drudgery of planting/harvesting/hauling cotton and cooking/cleaning/ironing.

Through May 8th

You’ll find powerful portraits of architectural facades as well as faces in David Lusk’s current show, “Jared Small: Small World.” Over a Cup explores the boundary between the everyday and the sublime and finds transcendence in unexpected places. Dressed in his Sunday-best white shirt and suspenders, an older man sits in a small, clean, well-worn kitchen. The Hopperesque square of light shining through the window and framing his face suggests this is a holy place where a senior sips coffee and reflects on a hard but honest life. 

Small’s portrait Lena stands on its own as a moving character study as well as serving as part of a large mural depicting another biblical parable the Good Samaritan. As Lena turns on her fine black leather heels to walk away, she looks back at an injured person who lies just outside the picture plane. She doesn’t see the storm clouds racing across the sky, a building fraying/dripping/dissolving, or the pitch-black shadow hovering close to this beautiful, oh-so-busy young professional who serves as poignant reminder that everyone’s place in the world, sooner or later, comes undone; that all of us eventually will need a helping hand.

In a Row takes us from radiance to decay to total dissolution. Though the wooden frames of three shotgun houses are worn, the middle home’s lemon-yellow paint job is breathtakingly beautiful in sunlight. The cement walkways at the bottom of the painting liquefy and spill into what looks like a chasm. In light of recent earthquakes, tsunamis, and threats of nuclear meltdown, Small’s beautiful, ephemeral worlds feel more visionary than surreal.

Through April 30th

Sculptor and painter Anton Weiss witnessed World War II, spent his childhood in a concentration camp, and, after the war, relocated to the United States, where he studied Abstract Expressionism with Hans Hofmann. In his L Ross exhibition “Remnants,” Weiss’ life comes full circle as he captures the chaos and the potential for change that occurs when citizens of the world rise up against tyranny.

Weiss takes the long view — planets float in deep space, and loosely knit, irregular rectangles look like city-states coalescing and decaying, like civilization rising and falling. Weiss weds the inventive shapes of Abstract Expressionism with Surrealism’s cosmic mystery with Dada’s absurdist humor and anti-war sentiment. At the top of Remnants 003, a half-moon cradles a dwarf sun. Near the center of the work, several hammered, weathered metal strips resemble a military jacket — torn in two, brown with age, and stripped of all indices of rank.

After the war, Weiss vowed to stay away from the dark side. And so throughout his career he refused to paint black or nearly black works of art. In what Weiss describes as a “personal as well as aesthetic breakthrough,” the artist has created works that while very dark are also some of the most insightful and life-affirming pieces in the show. Measuring 48-by-24 inches, Remnants 007 feels figurative, personal. The work’s deep charcoal grays conjure up soot generated by industry or artillery fire, or, perhaps, this is the dark night of the soul.

In Weiss’ layered and scumbled acrylic surfaces and in his hammered and weathered metal fragments, you’ll glimpse shadows of the psyche, foibles of the human heart, and nearly indecipherable scripts that read like hieroglyphs in an ancient tomb or fingernail scratches on a prison wall.

Through April 30th

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Art Art Feature

Edgy

Curator Cynthia Thompson has gathered together artworks by 10 internationally noted artists for “Anguish,” MCA Graduate School Gallery’s inaugural exhibition that runs the gamut of grief.

Polly Apfelbaum’s huge, floor-covering Funkytown is made out of hundreds of hand-dyed and hand-cut pieces of synthetic velvet that range from soft-edged pastels to more tightly stitched pieces of fabric to large swatches of deep-blue and deep-burgundy velvets that appear to puddle and flow across the gallery floor toward a wall where two beautiful young women are sobbing.

Words written in black ink across vibrant pink flesh in Jenny Holzer’s 17 Cibachrome prints titled Lustmord (sex murder) cut deep into the psyches of women ravaged by war and into the collective consciousness of wartime Bosnia as Holzer records the actual words of victims, family members who witnessed the atrocities, and perpetrators who seem concerned only with whether or not their sexual appetites have been satisfied by the women they raped and murdered.  

“Anguish” covers grief but never wallows in pathos and speaks to truth so powerfully that this show may change forever the way you look at life and art.

Through November 7th

Under the direction of its new curator, Lester Merriweather, Jones Hall Gallery at the University of Memphis is also mounting some daring, strikingly original shows such as “Objectify Me, Woman!” in which Tam Tran explores “gender blur” and “the gray areas of sexuality” by applying makeup and women’s clothing to young men posed in traditionally feminine postures.

In Hello Monroe, a man with white-gold hair, porcelain skin, dreamy expression, and chin cupped in hand strikes a pose recalling Marilyn Monroe and the Hollywood glamour shots of the ’50s. The same man, wearing an unbuttoned translucent blouse in Me Again, thwarts our soft porn expectations with his Adam’s apple, flat muscular chest, and the thick black hair surrounding his navel.

A touch of color added to the lips of a svelte young man with long brown hair who holds his arms above his head and grasps the metal bars behind him in Pretty Jesus blurs boundaries by exploring the thin line between gentleness and passivity, sexual and spiritual passion, and sainthood and sadomasochism. 

In Close Call, a man looks down the barrel of a rifle. His expression is brooding instead of dreamy, and his wrinkled cutoffs augment the shape of his penis positioned directly beneath the barrel of the rifle. Red lipstick makes the portrait even more unsettling. This could be a story about cross-dressing or testosterone in overdrive or sexual identity so conflicted that passion turns to rage.

Tran’s explorations of sexual identity come at an especially poignant moment. The teenagers who committed suicide recently after being taunted for their sexual orientation tragically remind us that shaming can also lead to self-loathing and violence directed against self.

Through October 22nd

Bring your children, your Peter Pan sense of play, and your Jane Goodall empathy for life when you visit David Lusk Gallery’s current show, “The Liberated Landscape,” which features some of Tad Laurtizen Wright’s wryest, most original, and poignant artwork to date.

Feel the vibes emanating from the radiantly radioactive tree titled A Cautionary Note. Pay homage to a fallen giant as light bends and blurs through a liquor flask raking across sawdust in Urn for a Dead Tree. Do a two-step with Buzz Saw Retirement, the large jagged-edged circular painting hanging from the ceiling.

Even Lauritzen Wright’s smallest works pack a physical and metaphysical wallop. A white median strip propels the viewer’s perspective straight up a black-topped highway in Heavy Metal Rainbow. Instead of racing toward a pot of gold, we soar toward a skull tinted pink and red, suggesting fresh road kill. Or perhaps this is a fierce Hindu god or a memento mori whose still intact, perfectly white, perfectly straight teeth provide no secret potent for immortality no matter how often we brush our pearly whites.

Through October 30th

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Art Art Feature

Possibilities

Harrington Brown Gallery’s current exhibition, “Dancing into Fall with Contemporary Art,” includes work by technically skilled, strikingly original artists all new to the Memphis art scene.

For his still-life study Pink Fiction, Philip Jackson convincingly re-creates the slimy, uncooked white of an egg inside a water glass. The hint of red in the yolk heightens our sense that life has been cracked wide open. A bright-pink plastic egg — floating just above the glass and lightly touching its lip — captures the crass commercialism and higher ideas of Easter. What is most real, most incorruptible?

In Joyce Petrina’s bronze figure titled P, full breasts rest on top of a large, elegant womb that has been opened up to reveal the fully formed fetus inside — kicking up its feet, ready to jump into life. The mother’s huge trunk-like ankles and feet, firmly planted on the ground, help the woman balance her precious load. Her well-worn face, sunken cheeks, and Giacometti-like skull capture the grandeur and everyday pathos of motherhood.

At Harrington Brown through October 7th

The most memorable paintings in Hamlett Dobbins’ exhibition, “The River Beneath Us” at David Lusk, consist of shapes floating in fields of color so radiant they appear lit from within. Especially expressive line work and complex palettes feel endlessly evocative in pieces such as Untitled (I.V./G.L.M./T.L.W.), a 7-foot-tall painting referencing much of art history as a storybook figure morphs into a frenzied Looney Tunes character into a Cubist portrait that breaks down into pure abstraction.

Even Dobbins’ smallest works look monumental. The 20-by-22-inch work Untitled (for J.W./R.) pans out for an aerial view that suggests how this artist sees the world as well as the process of painting. An opalescent-lemon planet floats in space the color of flesh tones and sand. Dobbins saves his deep-blue and iron-rich earth tones for a silhouetted shape that looks like a butterfly made from the madras cloth that changes color and shape with each washing. In a body of work consisting of 18 paintings — each remarkably different from the next — Dobbins reminds us of the infinite possibilities of matter, mind, and paint.

At David Lusk through September 25th

For L Ross’ September exhibition “Duality,” Pam Hassler, painter, enamelist, and metalsmith, has created a one-of-a-kind body of work in which a copper disc painted with gold leaf and fine-art enamels are mounted on an acrylic painting. Strips of raw, hammered copper fused onto the face of the metal orbs look like coiled serpents glistening in the sun. The serpents never touch their tails, never spin into Ouroboros-like circles symbolizing unity and perfection. Instead, these are worlds in the making in which coiled copper unfurls koru-like across desert sands, seas, and solar systems.

Sometimes Hassler’s expressive black brushstrokes look calligraphic. At times, they look architectural, like the gate posts of a Shinto shrine. In her mixed-media painting Return to Sender II, Hassler’s bold black writing becomes more energized, rolls like thunder across the top of the planet, and ricochets into the void. Gold leaf falls into red-hot lava, capturing the sheer beauty and raw power of creation.

 Helen Phillips’ raku-fired bowls, birdhouses, and ducks, also on view at L Ross, are some of the most evocative works of her career. Into the Shining Sea suggests the world and everything in it. Crackled and glazed thalo blue on the outside, sooty on top, and a lustrous umber inside, this exquisitely formed ceramic vessel is the clear-blue bowl of heaven, is the parched earth, is the chasm that cradles the deep-green sea.

There is poignant humor here as well. In Wisdom of Silence, a singed duck wearing a metal collar and long monk-like robe glides along, cloaked and shackled for an outrageous mix of majesty, misery, slapstick, and spirituality.

At L Ross through

September 28th

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Art Exhibit M

The Price is Right

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One of the biggest art events of the year kicks off with an opening reception this Friday, August 6, from 6 to 9 p.m. at David Lusk Gallery. The Price is Right exhibition and art sale runs until August 28 and features only artwork under $1,000.

“People like to come and see something new, and we always include two or three artists that we’ve never shown before,” says Sandy Wade of David Lusk. “Or maybe you see a piece by your favorite artist and it’s in a price range that’s easier for you to afford. And if people see something that they like they can just buy it and take it home.”

Work from all 50 David Lusk artists and a few other local artists will be on sale, prices ranging from $200 to $999. Many of the artists will be present for the opening reception. Here’s a preview of some of the art for sale:

Anne Siems, Hare

  • Anne Siems, Hare

Greely Myatt, A Wall of Burp

  • Greely Myatt, A Wall of Burp

Peggy Root, Flood Plain

  • Peggy Root, Flood Plain
Categories
Art Exhibit M

Human Traces

CREDIT: Tim Crowder, oil, enamel & embroidery on paper, 22x30

Now open at the David Lusk Gallery, Tim Crowder’s “Building a Proper Wall” is a surreal—at times bleak, at times playfully ironic— look at a psychological landscape.

Playful Nature

  • Tim Crowder, oil, enamel & embroidery on paper, 22×30
  • Playful Nature

Crowder does not use human figures in these paintings, though there are traces of their existence: in the walls and fences and houses they’ve crafted. Instead of a human face for his personal experiences and feelings of alienation, Crowder opts for animals and animal shapes.

“Animals, I like them because they aren’t so specific,” says Crowder. “You paint a person and it means something different. You’ve painted a portrait or you’ve painted a type of person — either young or old, or something you may not intend to. But with animals they’re a little bit more open to interpretation.”

Free to Go

  • Tim Crowder, oil, enamel & embroidery on paper, 22×30
  • Free to Go

The exhibit runs from July 6th to July 31st at David Lusk Gallery.

David Lusk Gallery, 4540 Poplar Avenue, 767-3800, davidluskgallery.com

Categories
Art Art Feature

Almost Eden

Accomplished painter and university professor Beth Edwards is best known for portraits of vintage rubber dolls that provide wry insight into human nature and the American dream. For her current show, “Along the Way” at David Lusk, Edwards takes her toy dolls, ducks, and dogs out of their showcase homes and places them on the open range in Horse and Rider and into idyllic farmsteads in Happy Cow and Peaceable Kingdom. In the series of paintings titled “Meadow I-V,” there are breathtakingly blue skies, striking red poppies, and healthy, happy honeybees.

Lest we think she has lost her ironic edge, Edwards slips the work At Peace into the show. In this remarkable painting, Edvard Munch’s 1895 masterwork Death in a Sickroom hangs on the wall of one of Edwards’ dream homes. Numbed by grief, the Munch family looks anything but peaceful. This is pre-penicillin Norway, the number of childhood deaths is staggering, and Munch’s beloved sister Sophie is dying.

A baby duck with a strawberry doily on top of her head stands next to Munch’s portrait of despair. Her orange beak is slightly parted, eyes shut in reverie, fat cheeks turned white-gold by sunshine streaming through the window, her tiny wings raised in what looks like a spasm of joy. An ecstatic rubber duck next to the death scene initially feels jarring — what an outrageous juxtaposition, what an aesthetic affront. And yet, the longer I looked at this portrait of pure joy in the face of the world’s relentless sorrow — rather than wincing or guffawing — the more I wanted to weep and let go.

Through July 2nd

David Hinske is also after something rarified, almost ineffable in “Transcendental Vocabulary” at Art Under a Hot Tin Roof. In this exhibition of nonsensically titled luminous abstractions, Hinske asks us to let go of visual and verbal associations, to play in fields of free-flowing color shot through with light. 

Barely visible, thumb-sized smudges in several of the paintings conjure up the first bits of matter coalescing and the first artist making his/her signature mark with a chunk of charcoal in a Paleolithic cave. The rest of Hinske’s boundless and effervescent surfaces bring to mind cotton candy and Technicolor amoebas. Like Edwards’ surprisingly powerful rubber duck portrait of bliss, Hinske’s melted-popsicle pools of radiance are also a joy to behold.

Through June 26th

At first glance, the American flags, vintage photos, handmade prayer cabinets, and antique Bibles in “One Room Schoolhouse,” J.C. Graham’s Gallery Fifty Six exhibition, looks like a show full of feel-good patriotism and down-home religion. Take a good long look. Graham’s flags are torn, his vintage photos are the frightened mirthless faces of children too soon grown up, too quickly indoctrinated. The small pools of blood-red acrylic that seep through the bull’s-eye of a target and through a little boy’s jacket at heart level suggest emotional wounds at the center of us all. This is soul-rending, icon-shattering Americana. 

In the satisfyingly ironic, mixed-media work Confession, two boys with mischievous faces have written and rewritten “I will not confess” on a blackboard. On blackboards, school tablets, prayer cabinets, and soiled stripes of the American flag, Graham writes in urgent child-like scrawl: “Run, run run,” “Mary, Mary, Mary,” “Don’t you see,” “What’s the point?” Like these youngsters, Graham is not afraid to ask questions, to challenge authority.

Through June 30th

Lisa Jennings’ increasing mastery of collage is particularly powerful in “Presence,” the L Ross exhibition that honors ancient wisdom and the web of life. In her haunting self-portrait Body of Clay, Hair of Flowers, the artist’s face flows, nearly seamlessly, into her clothing, hair, and the vegetation surrounding her. This near-abstraction is not the facelessness of anonymity or the fractured psyche of cubism but a powerful reminder that psyche and substance are intimately connected.

A skilled sculptor as well as painter, Jennings carves found pieces of wood into figures like the roughhewn work titled Wisdom. The top of the head is gnawed away. Its skull is bleached white, its eyes are huge and hollow, and a branch is attached to the sternum of this fierce creature who still reaches out to embrace the world.

Jennings tints the the figure titled First Love with acrylics, balances a tree limb on top of her head, and places a stone tablet in her long supple arms. As beautiful as she is wise, First Love isn’t a lawgiver but a young woman who wears her heart on her sleeve (as well as a limb on her head), who learns to balance body/mind/spirit, who bears witness to a world that is equal parts whimsy, pain, and grace.

Through June 30th

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Art Art Feature

Being There

The paintings in “Altiplano,” Keiko Gonzalez’ exhibition at Lisa Kurts, are both abstract and achingly real. Gonzalez, a widely traveled, internationally respected artist, lives and paints in Altiplano, the vast Bolivian plateau flanked on all sides by peaks of the Andes. 

Many of Gonzalez’ paintings — such as Laja, Patacamaya, and Tren a Oruro — are named for small towns scattered across the Altiplano. One-story buildings at the very bottom of these works look minuscule compared to the imposing Andean peaks that rise above them. In his particularly powerful deep-red monochromes, we feel the passion of the artist as well as Altiplano’s rugged terrain as Gonzalez scrapes, scumbles, and gouges palette knives into layer after saturate layer of carmines, burgundies, corals, and brick-reds.

Thick passages of carmine slashed through with burgundy in the 72-by-72-inch pink-ochre painting Calamarca suggest a scarred rock face and the torn flesh of farmers who eke out a living in a beautiful, inhospitable terrain. Dark purples and midnight blues limned in white in Las Animas evoke the sub-zero temperatures and frozen mists of this 14,000-foot-high Andean plateau, where fierce winds make piercing sounds the locals describe as “voices of the ancestors.” 

At Lisa Kurts through April 30th

 

Like Keiko Gonzalez’ “Altiplano” paintings, some of the most powerful pastels in Kathleen Holder’s David Lusk exhibition “Okeanos” are large red monochromes. Rather than conjuring up primal emotion, raw earth, and bruised flesh, Holder’s pastels draw us deep into barely discernible syntheses of water, shadow, and light.

The velvety sheen of Holder’s mixes of powdered pigments and opalescent minerals create the impression that light is about to break through even her darkest passages — like the lavender-gray twilight in Okeanos II and the iridescent Okeanos V, in which a river rounds a bend beneath a pinpoint of light in a night sky. Four pinpoints of light, aligned horizontally across the center of this midnight-blue painting, conjure up otherworldly or quantum physical systems of communication (something akin, perhaps, to Bell’s Theorem) that crosses vast expanses of physical and psychic space.

Holder’s dark-red pastels evoke “Okeanos,” the Greek term for the cosmic river flowing between our universe and a sulfurous underworld. The pyramidal shape near the top of Okeanos I, the darkest and most iconic work in the show, could be Mount Olympus, the prow of a boat emerging from the mist — Holder’s symbol for accessing alternate states of consciousness — or the softly-glowing conical hat of a bishop (or wizard or fool), each radiating its owner’s special prowess.

Burgundy shadows at the center of the painting read as dark passages of the underworld or the psyche. Light breaks again at the bottom of Okeanos I — not as reflected light but as inner radiance — as Holder’s metaphorically complex mixture of mystery and myth draws us, increment by subtle increment, into the deepest pool of all: the human soul.

At David Lusk through April 24th

 

What to make of Peter Bowman’s exhibition, “Time and Space,” also at David Lusk? Bowman’s color schemes are unorthodox, his compositions are off-center, his lines of perspective are seriously askew. The centerpiece of his show is a studio table covered with empty paint tubes, mixing pans, palette knives, and what looks like a decade’s worth of slathered-on oils.

Is Bowman untrained or primitive or, perhaps, a faux folk artist? None of the above. In one of the most exuberant, inventive shows of his career, Bowman envisions God as a graceful frond that arcs up and into the painting on the wall in Untitled (Orchid). The frond’s spring-green tip is about to touch the stem of a brown pear (as rough-hewn as a lump of clay) in an ingenious update of Genesis and the Sistine Ceiling that suggests every act of creation is as powerful as the first.

Why stop there? Like a child, like the Buddha — Bowman sees the world with fresh eyes as he experiments with alternate universes and messes with time and space. In Untitled (Rising Sun), a free-floating pear (Bowman’s illusion is unsettlingly convincing) is backdropped by a red sun. Instead of rising above or dropping below the line of horizon, the bright-red disc embeds itself in a bank of snow.