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A Sketchy Past

While most of Irene Miller Rodkin’s art is unsigned, chances are, if you lived in Memphis in the 1970s and much of the ’80s, you know her work well. That’s when Rodkin was the main staff fashion artist for the Goldsmith’s in-house advertising department. Back then, Goldsmith’s used illustrations, rather than photographs, to show off their goods in advertisements, and Rodkin would, on average, create an illustration a day for that purpose. A collection of her illustrations, along with portraits and other work, will be on display in the exhibit “When Ads Were Art” at the Memphis Botanic Garden.

“Buyers within the store would be responsible for choosing the things they wanted featured in the ad,” Rodkin says. “They would bring [the clothes] up to my office, and I would first sketch them on hangers, and then I would put them on figures.” The figures were copied from tearsheets from other newspapers collected by the layout department and chosen to best highlight the clothes. “I liked high fashion the best,” Rodkin says. “A large volume of ads were sale ads, where they’d feature a really good sale price, and the illustrations would be of dresses or house garments or lingerie. They would be kind of generic. But once in a while, I would get really nice fashion ads.”

The illustrations featured in the exhibit are originals given to Rodkin over the years by the production department. “The production person would return some of the originals to me because they would store them, and they wouldn’t always have room,” she says. “Some things they thought were too nice to pitch.”

“When Ads Were Art” at the Memphis Botanic Garden from January 5th-31st. The opening reception is Sunday, January 6th,
from 2 to 4 p.m.

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In the Galleries in Memphis This Week …

In her exhibition at Clough-Hanson Gallery, “The Solid Matter of a Celestial Body,” Jillian Conrad leaps from high to low art and from the utilitarian to the metaphysical as she messes with the meaning of art and asks, “What is real?”

In the first moments of viewing Conrad’s Flat Earth Projections, we see every nuance of color, every chasm, every mineral vein of what could be a stone, a mountain face, or a meteor hurling through space before it burns itself out in the atmosphere. As we adjust to the darkness in the small room in which Flat Earth Projections are placed, we realize the crispest, most detailed artworks in the show have no substance. Conrad has magnified pieces of road rubble and projected their images on the wall …

Read the rest of Flyer art critic Carol Knowles art review here.

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Remembering Otis

An exhibit displaying rare photos and personal belongings of soul singer Otis Redding opened Monday, December 10th, and runs through April at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. The opening of the exhibit commemorated the 40th anniversary of Redding’s death at age 26 in a plane crash near Madison, Wisconsin.

Redding recorded several classic songs, including “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” in the studio that stood at the present site of the Stax Museum.

The exhibit features mementos from Redding’s family, many on display for the first time. They range from pictures taken at Redding’s “Big O” Ranch near his hometown of Macon, Georgia, to a poster advertising the show he never made it to.

In addition to the artifacts on loan from Redding’s widow Zelma Redding and daughter Karla Redding-Andrews, the exhibit contains several items from private collector Bob Grady and never-before-shown objects from the Stax Museum archives.

“Stax Records was like a second home for Otis,” Zelma Redding said. “We are pleased to be able to share some of our personal family moments in this exhibit.”

“Otis Redding: From Macon to Memphis,” Stax Museum of American Soul Music. Through April 30th, 2008. $10

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Otis Redding Exhibit to Open at Stax

An exhibit of Otis Redding’s personal effects goes on display Monday, December 10 at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. Monday marks the 40th anniversary of Redding’s death in a plane crash in Lake Monona near Madison, Wisconsin.

You can read Ben Cauley’s account of that crash in the December issue of Memphis magazine, on newsstands now. He was the lone survivor.

The Stax exhibit features photographs and mementoes from Redding’s family and personal collection that are on display publicly for the first time.

In addition to the artifacts on loan from Otis’ widow Zelma Redding and daughter Karla Redding-Andrews, the exhibit contains several items on loan from private collector Bob Grady and never-before-shown artifacts from the Stax Museum archives.

“Stax Records was like a second home for Otis,” Zelma Redding said. “We are pleased to be able to share some of our personal family moments in this exhibit.”

The exhibit runs through April 30, 2008.

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Art Art Feature

One for All

It’s all uphill for the peasant who carries a large load of sticks on his back and walks up a plowed field in the early-morning light. We can almost hear the crunch of the man’s feet crossing the frozen furrows and feel the biting cold penetrating his simple cotton jacket and britches in Camille Pissarro’s painting Hoarfrost at Ennery, which now hangs with 39 other groundbreaking works in Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s exhibition, “Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape.”

“There’s no focus; the subject’s inconsequential; and the painting’s dingy and vile,” railed the critics when Hoarfrost at Ennery appeared in the “First Impressionist Exhibition” in Paris in 1874, but novelist and social reformer Emile Zola found Pissarro’s art powerful because of its “extreme concern for the truth.”

It is a fitting footnote to history that 70-plus years after the French Revolution, a self-taught outsider and social anarchist like Pissarro jumpstarted a revolution in art that successfully challenged the social, cultural, and aesthetic attitudes of the day. Curator Katherine Rothkopf’s beautifully nuanced show thoroughly acquaints us with this lesser-known painter whose innovative brushwork, iconoclastic subject matter, and mastery of atmosphere and light rival those of the more famous impressionists: Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Cezanne.

Disenchanted with social and religious as well as artistic hierarchies, Pissarro painted peasants as large as gentry and smokestacks as large as church steeples and found all people, all employment, all weather, all terrain worthy of his art.

Effect of Snow at L’Hermitage, Pontoise

In the evocative, ephemeral Banks of the Oise, Saint-Ouen-L’Aumône, a river flowing past smokestacks in the Paris suburbs reflects the fumes billowing up, blending with clouds in the sky. Homes and landscape are obscured by heavy snowfall in Effect of Snow at L’Hermitage, Pontoise. At the center of View of the Village of Louveciennes, the viewer’s attention is captured and held by thousands of dabs of color that look like brown summer grasses quivering with light.

While all the show’s paintings were created from 1864 to 1874 — the decade leading up to the Impressionists’ first exhibition — the video accompanying the artwork explores Pissarro’s childhood on the Caribbean Island of St. Thomas, Pissarro’s search for the new and unorthodox until his death in 1903 at the age of 73, the impact the Impressionists had on each other’s work, and how these upstart painters dramatically changed the way we look at art and life.

One stunning example of Pissarro’s command of the picture plane is his masterwork Côte des Jalais, Pontoise, with its descending/ascending perspectives. Point of view is plunged into a Paris suburb lining the floor of a valley far below. With a dramatic play of billowing gray clouds backlit by bright white light, the artist draws attention back up to the top of the canvas. An umber, then ochre, then deep-green field of crops covers the slopes of the valley. At the bend in an unpaved road, two strollers come into view. The road’s loose patchwork of dirt and grass fans out at the bottom of the painting, encompassing viewers and reminding us that we, too, are part of these ever-changing patterns of earth, atmosphere, color, and light.

“Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape” at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through January 6th

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Music Music Features

R.I.P. Punk

For the last several years, Los Angeles-based photographer Theresa Kereakes has focused her lens on Memphis garage-rock icons such as Monsieur Jeffrey Evans, Jack Yarber, and Harlan T. Bobo, adding their images to her already vast musical pantheon.

Late last month, as part of a continental “tour” that includes stops in Atlanta, Toronto, Houston, and Oxford, Mississippi, Kereakes returned to Memphis — not to shoot more photos, but to begin installing an exhibit of her work, which goes on display at Goner Records Thursday, November 1st.

Titled “Punk Rock Day of the Dead,” there’s not a Memphis musician in the bunch. Instead, Kereakes — who showed past work here as part of 2005’s Gonerfest 2 — turns a critical eye on “live fast, die young” L.A. musicians such as Germs frontman Darby Crash, who died of a drug overdose in 1980; AIDS casualties such as Black Randy (who founded West Coast art-punk group Metrosquad) and Lance Loud; Jeffrey Lee Pierce, who died of a brain hemorrhage at 37; and former Cramps guitarist Bryan Gregory, who dropped dead of a heart attack four years before his 50th birthday.

“Out of all the people I have pictures of, the ones who really resonate are the dead guys,” admits Kereakes, who, during punk’s heyday, also captured legends like Johnny Thunders, who died under mysterious circumstances in New Orleans when he was just 38, and Stiv Bators, the cocksure Dead Boys vocalist who died in his sleep after being struck down by a Paris taxi.

“One time, Stiv painted ‘R.I.P. Sid Vicious’ on a billboard for the movie Heaven Can Wait,” she recalls. “He called me up and said, ‘You know, Sid’s died. You’ve got to come see this billboard on Sunset [Boulevard].’ I shot a picture of it, which was used as the lead picture for Creem magazine’s obituary of Sid.

“Later on, when Stiv was touring with Lords of the New Church for the last time, he’d become such a monster. He was doing every kind of speed imaginable, which turned him into the biggest jackass. I’d still drive him around and take him places, but I was angry at him. Then someone called me from Paris and said Stiv was dead. I said, ‘Put him on the phone — now,’ because he was someone who’d fake death two or three times a week. But they said that he was really dead.”

Today, Kereakes considers herself a survivor of a scene where “even the ones who weren’t drug addicts, alcoholics, or complete fuck-ups” are lucky to be alive.

“We’d drive all night to concerts. I remember doing a five-hour drive in the rain to San Francisco to see the Sex Pistols. I’ve lived fast and hard, and somebody’s been watching over me. It puts a lot of things in perspective,” she says.

“Back in the day, during the first punk rock gestalt, I think we had the right degree of narcissism. We knew we were special. We were gonna take over the world,” says Kereakes, whose ’70s-era portraits of the Cramps, Avengers vocalist Penelope Houston, and the Velvet Underground‘s John Cale appear in Punk 365, Holly George-Warren‘s coffee-table tome on the musical genre, published by Abrams this month as part of the 30th anniversary of a revolution that began with the October ’77 release of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.

“I couldn’t do this show in my hometown,” Kereakes declares of “Punk Rock Day of the Dead.” “In L.A., there’d be so many expectations. They knew all of these people already, and there’s so much information people would bring to the party — too much ‘I don’t like that guy.’

“Memphis is different,” she says. “It’s more fun, because people really like the music, and there’s no judgment about the musicians. I find this town so warm and welcoming. I’m a huge Oblivians fan and to be able to walk into a place and find people like Jack, Eric [Friedl, founder of the Goner Records label], and Jeff Evans, and document what they do seems so important.”

Surveying her work, which includes a portrait of an uncharacteristically fragile-looking Darby Crash holding an acoustic guitar and an action shot of Stiv Bators sharing the spotlight with Dee Dee Ramone, Kereakes says of her numerous friends who have crossed over from notoriety to immortality, “Unfortunately, dead, they’re worth a whole lot more.”

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The Literary Nightlife

Any month is a good month to support your neighborhood branch of the Memphis Public Library. But this November, the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, at 3030 Poplar, is a great place to be.

There’s a performance by Alaskan storyteller and fiddler Ken Waldman on November 13th, a showing of the Scandinavian film Mother of Mine (this month’s offering in the library’s “Wider Angle” film series) on November 14th, and free classes on computer basics for adults throughout the month.

But to start the month, the Central Library is not only the place to be, it’s the place to give. “After Hours,” the Foundation for the Library’s annual fund-raising gala, is Saturday, November 3rd. For $100 per person ($700 for a table of eight), guests will be treated to cocktails and dinner (catered by Another Roadside Attraction), live music (including a performance by the Memphis Men’s Chorale), and a silent auction — so keep your voice down, this here’s a library. Not so silent during “After Hours”: the night’s keynote speaker — political satirist and author Christopher Buckley (pictured).

If you don’t know Buckley’s titles (No Way To Treat a First Lady, Washington Schlepped Here, and, most recently, Boomsday), surely you know the movie Thank You for Smoking starring Aaron Eckhart and Robert Duvall. It was based on Buckley’s book of the same title. And maybe you know another Buckley book: The White House Mess, which was a work of fiction. The current White House mess isn’t fiction, it’s a fact. And surely Christopher Buckley has some words to say on the subject. That’ll be fine. It’s “After Hours.”

“After Hours,” the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, Saturday, November 3rd, 7-11 p.m. For reservations or more information, call 415-2834.

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Art Art Feature

Just Desserts

To fully experience Delta Axis @ Marshall Art’s current exhibition “Activation,” you had to be there opening night eating cake and looking at brutal images of war.

Creatures flayed beyond recognition were strewn across a butcher block in Rob Canfield’s savage, beautiful oil Slaughterhouse, and the figure that screamed in Canfield’s Thin Red Line looked like the old woman undone by treachery in Bronzino’s 16th-century masterwork Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time.

Jonathan Yablonski’s sleek, 21st-century image of war hung on the opposite wall. Slender lines soared skyward and narrowed at the top of a black skyscraper backdropped by a blood red sky. A human skeleton as large as the high-rise brought to mind the hordes of humanity whose toil and blood build economic and military empires.

In her mixed-media collage, Native, Leila Hamdan painted what it feels like to be hidden away, shamed, and treated like disposable property. A woman totally covered by a black burka, except for eyes that smoldered with rage and regret, shapeshifted into the thick neck, squat torso and stubby legs of a work-horse.

Conceptual artist Sanjit Sethi baked three large cakes for viewers, including one titled “Axis of Evil,” which was decorated with silhouettes of North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. We ate the cake from paper plates that were imprinted with the American flag.

Colored pencils and John Morris’ sardonic color-it-yourself print Coloring Colonialism lay on a table against the far back wall. Some viewers added a line or a touch of color to bear witness to the horror depicted. Some viewers turned away. Others, intoxicated by this show’s heady mix of celebration, patriotism, and brutality, colored the scene in ways that further debased the men and women being burned alive by Spanish Conquistadors.

The cakes have been eaten, but the provocative, brutally honest paintings and prints are still on view.

At Delta Axis @ Marhall Arts through November 3rd

Rob Canfield’s Thin Red Line at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts

Emotional battles are fought in Memphis College of Arts’ exhibition, “Threads 11×1, Eleven Artists A Single Vision.”

We see the inner turmoil in Gwyneth Scally’s sienna-red painting Raven, in which a woman howls, tears at her flesh, and tries to crawl out of her skin as her left foot morphs into a bird of prey. We see foreboding in the stern, sad face of a little girl whose left arm is tied to a billowing black cloud in Emily Kalwaitis’ pencil and acrylic wash titled Held. Kristin Martincic’s ceramic sculptures are filled with unresolved longing. Two white legs in Waiting materialize out of an equally white wall, bend at the knees, and strain to touch the plot of real grass just beyond reach on the floor below.

Conceptual artist and writer Buzz Spector tops off these hauntingly noir works with Black Waterfall, a mixed-media sculpture in which tattered threads unravel and cascade down seven feet of black denim, bringing to mind torn curtains and pierced veils. Instead of white light, Spector and the other artists in this exhibition explore the shadows, the unresolved angers and fears, the dark clouds that gather inside and above us all.

At MCA through November 8th

Running in conjunction with this weekend’s RiverArtsFest in South Main is the “RiverArtsFest Invitational Exhibition” at Jay Etkin Gallery. Roger Cleaves’ robotic, cartoon-like characters skulk, stalk, strangle, and stab each other across every square inch of his paintings. In sharp contrast to Cleaves’ sly satire, Cynthia Thompson sculpts delicate understated paper works that tell us about the quiet, gentle wisdom of the body, and Ian Lemmonds’ images of plastic toys combined with evocative light create a tableau of possibility and joy. At Jay Etkin Gallery, October 26th-October 28th

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Columbus’ Ship to Dock in Memphis

Okay, okay, so we know Columbus is, like, dead or whatever. And his ship Nina is probably long gone. But a replica of the famed vessel is set to visit Memphis from November 2nd through the 12th.

The faux Nina, which was used in the film 1492 starring Gerard Depardieu, was built completely by hand without the use of power tools in 1988. Archaeology Magazine called it the “most historically correct Columbus replica ever built.”

The ship’s been touring the country since 1992 as a sailing museum. While in Memphis, the Nina will be open to the general public for self-guided tour every day of the week.

For more information, go here.

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Cowboy Jack Clement at Brooks Museum Tonight

Tonight, the Brooks Museum of Art is screening a phenomenal documentary about one of Memphis music’s most influential figures. And, unless you’re a true music geek, you probably don’t know very much about the man.

Sam Phillips may have all of the name recognition, but he wasn’t the only eccentric genius working behind the scenes at Sun Studio at the dawn of the rock-and-roll era. Robert Gordon’s entertaining documentary, Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan gives long overdue props to Phillips’ lesser-known Sun Studio partner, “Cowboy” Jack Clement, whose reputation looms somewhat larger in Nashville than it does in the Bluff City.

Clement, a zany English Literature major given to florid flights of verbal fancy, is responsible for launching the careers of certifiable icons such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Charley Pride. He contributed mightily to the artistic development of industry giants George Jones, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson.

Throughout his long, productive career, Cowboy Jack obsessively filmed everything going on around him. Gordon, who authored It Came From Memphis, as well as an exhaustive biography of Muddy Waters, has described Clement’s disorderly film archive as a “goldmine.”

Anyone interested in meeting Cowboy Jack, taking in Gordon’s film, and watching some truly astonishing footage of a wild-eyed Johnny Cash having a cigarette on A.P. Carter’s grave is advised to attend.

The Schedule: 6 pm – Cash Bar;
7 pm – Film;
8:30 pm – Music by Cowboy Jack.

$5 for members, $8 for nonmembers. For more information, call 544-6208