Tag: Harrington Brown Gallery

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Art Art Feature

Stir It Up

Anima/Animus,” Kurt Meer’s current exhibition at L Ross, references Carl Jung’s designation for the feminine/masculine qualities that exist in us all. A thoroughbred horse — a creature that is both graceful and strong, majestic and grounded — stands at the center of Still. Ears pricked, alert and calm, the thoroughbred gazes out over the landscape. The wide range of siennas and umbers that color the animal’s coat look as fertile as the freshly plowed earth on which this mare (or stallion) stands. The moist soil and silken fur reflect the lavender sky. Though no searing suns, no billowing clouds roil our point of view across the surface of his paintings, Meer’s skies feel all-encompassing and alive. Soft blue seamlessly gradates into silver into lavender into the radiant pink that borders the white-gold mist near the center of Clouds I. Peering into this painting — so accurately observed that every particle of moisture seems to vibrate with light — it feels certain the sun will soon break through.

Opening reception May 6th, through May 28th

In Memphis College of Art’s group show “The Greece & Crete Studio Elective Workshop,” architect and environmentalist Clark Buchner explores the fragile boundaries between line and form and illusion. The thick eroded walls and ramparts in the digital image Tree in Courtyard, Palace of Knossos, Crete, Greece suggest that some important monument or religious edifice lies just beyond our point of view.

Buchner, however, isn’t drawn to the grand or merely picturesque but to scenes that etch more indelibly into memory. He shoots low to the ground, accentuating the rubble in the courtyard and the decay at the base of the walls. The shadow beneath the trunk of a tree feels as tangible as the object that cast it. By placing the tree in the foreground of the image, Buchner suggests this leafless sentinel is as important as the ruined walls it guards.

Through May 9th

Larry Edwards, Pinocchio’s Dream 2, at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens

For decades, accomplished colorist, social satirist, and hell-and-brimstone preacher Larry Edwards has explored “the three F’s — the foolishness, foibles, and frailties of human behavior.” The Dixon Gallery and Gardens’ current exhibition, “3 Themes,” contains some of Edwards’ most unnerving artworks yet. In his saturate/surreal gouache, pastel, and watercolor painting Pinocchio’s Dream (2), multiple Pinocchios tumble and fall as scissors cut through their strings. Unseen forces set other Pinocchios on fire. Far right, a pair of scissors are about to cut the legs of yet another Pinocchio.

In another chapter of Edwards’ retelling of the children’s classic, Armored Noses Admiring Pinocchio, a blood-and-flesh Pinocchio — now a real boy — balances on three disembodied and helmeted heads stacked on one another. Pinocchio sports a nose that looks phallic. Noses and/or tongues (another body part adept at bearing false witness) protrude from the helmets.

In Pinocchio Falls into the Inferno, Edwards has his subject paying for his transgressions. But in The Phoenix, it’s another story, one which the artist describes as “a happy ending … the mythical bird and Pinocchio rise, reborn from the flames.” In Edwards’ oeuvre, however, entries into heaven and exits from hell are never easy rides. With a smile that looks more maniacal than transcendent and a nose that is, alas, as long as ever, Pinocchio is spewed into a pitch-black world where clouds are dense and brown.

Manipulated by unseen forces, easy prey to flattery, driven by desire, and possessing multiple personas, how can Pinocchio, or any of us, speak to truth? One thing, however, feels certain: Edwards — a tireless painter and retired professor emeritus now in his 80s — is edgier and more ironic than ever.

Opening reception May 19th, through July 24th

In Harrington Brown’s current exhibition, “Two Rivers,” the swatches of color on the surfaces of David Hinske’s paintings look as shot through with light as the Taos home in which he works. The rhythms of Hinske’s brushstrokes — by turns staccato and fluid, impastoed and full-throated — mirror improvisations of the jazz music playing in the background.

In works like In the Kitchen, Digging in the Pantry, and Basil (In a Can by the Window), what looks abstract is most real for this painter/chef/musician who multi-tasks. Hands on the meal prep as well as on his brushes — slathering oils onto canvases as high-key as the notes of a sax, pulling sprigs of fresh herbs from orange-lipped canisters, and peeling/slicing/dicing tomatoes and yellow peppers for the soup simmering in a kitchen that also serves as one of Hinske’s studio spaces: Everything is in motion.

Opening reception May 6th, through May 31st

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Art Art Feature

Passion & Pain

Memphis College of Art’s current exhibition, “Drawing Comment: Illustration and Social Commentary,” includes internationally noted artist Luba Lukova’s stunning portrait of love and loss titled Water. Although the work is semi-abstracted, we can just make out a mother’s expression, still see the pride and concern she feels for the fire-engine-red baby that lies on her chest and cries. The mother is armless. Her body is as cracked and gray as parched earth. Instead of statistics regarding rates of mortality, instead of discussions about drought and its impact on the African continent, Lukova’s in-our-face, one-on-one work of art asks us to feel, really feel, what it’s like to love a child then watch it die.

Through March 27th

A New Yorker for years, now living in Nova Scotia and exhibiting across Europe, Canada, and the U.S., Leya Evelyn paints like she lives — experimentally, with daring, and open to new possibilities.

The nuanced, layered, scumbled, and scraped surfaces of Evelyn’s “Recent Paintings” at Harrington Brown Gallery allow us to see her visions unfold as sunlight moves across a weathered facade in Wilder By Far, no. 2, as almost impenetrable darkness falls across the right panel of the triptych Chance Meetings, and as passions are laid bare on the scraped saturate-red surface of I Knew About It Anyway, no. 5. 

The circles and ovals that often appear in Evelyn’s work are not geometrically exact symbols suggesting eternity or cycles of nature or elliptical orbits of planets that change little over millennia. Somewhere between line and form, between object and abstraction, Evelyn has developed a highly personal language of gesture that feels inflected with emotion and new ideas: frayed rope-like lines hang loosely then knot up in I Knew About It Anyway, no. 1, uncoil and reach up in Tell Me the Reason, no. 2.

Along the edges of many of Evelyn’s paintings tiny pieces of fabric are collaged next to equally small swatches of color. You may find yourself moving into and stepping back from these paintings again and again as you explore works so rich and evocative, each centimeter of their borders is a fully realized work of art.

Through April 5th 

For “Lied, Tied & Dyed,” artist and activist Suzanne Broughel has filled Jones Hall Gallery with incredibly soft materials and colors. As we step in close to enjoy her subtle textures and tones, we’re also drawn into an exploration of what the artist describes as “white skin privilege and economic racism” and “serious inequalities that still exist.”

Broughel’s mix of the conceptual and visceral, her nuances of meaning as well of texture and tone, and her inventive, sometimes unnerving, use of everyday materials — including skin bronzers that simulate bullet wounds in ribbed cotton T-shirts, basketball hoops tied into knots used for lynching, and Martha Stewart bedsheets tie-dyed and titled White Confidant of a Black Panther (Self-Portrait of David Horowitz) — make her explorations of privilege and prejudice particularly powerful. 

Hundreds of rows of beige-toned Band-Aids tilted Forty Acres of Bandaids (Every Shade of Bandaid For Sale Within Forty Acres of the African Burial Ground, NYC) not only address the presumption that flesh tones are beige instead of deep-brown or black, they also evoke the stone blocks out of which slaves in Egypt and in 18th-century New York City built huge edifices that housed and entombed the rich and powerful.

Many of Broughel’s works radiate in all directions in sometimes celebratory, sometimes chaotic, sometimes explosive ways. In our overpopulated and high-tech world, millions of people, no longer needed for backbreaking labor, are jobless and destitute. Their basic needs are unmet, their desire for opportunity is profound, and their energy is coiled and also ready to explode.

Through March 25th

James Inscho’s paintings bring us full circle. Memphis attracts noted artists from around the country and world, and our city sends out prize-winning artists like University of Memphis fine arts major, James Inscho, whose works can now be seen at the U of M’s Communication and Fine Arts Building.

Stand close to Inscho’s large oil-on-canvas The Condition IV, and it nearly overwhelms with undulating fields of burgundy, crimson, and opalescent orange. Stand back several feet, and you’ll see a portrait of humanity that is at once existential, sardonic, and seething.

Near the center of the work, a full set of teeth, tinted blood-red, smiles at us with what looks like a warning and a welcome, a grimace and a grin. Inscho’s shape-shifting pool of roiling blood and emotion in this work confronts us not with a portrait of disease but some truths about the human condition that can’t be cured or overridden or high-teched away.

Through April 15th by appointment

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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