Tag: Lester Merriweather

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2015: A great year for art in Memphis

“I Thought I Might Find You Here” by Brian Pera at Rhodes Clough-Hanson Gallery

Early in the year, filmmaker and author Brian Pera showed a series of sculptures made in the wake of a friend’s suicide. Pera used colorful yarn, wood, and other oddments to create a show that managed both warmth and solemnity. Pera included video, a slideshow, and a small booklet of photographs to further explore loss. What resulted was moving and brave work. — Eileen Townsend

“Lance Turner: Crosstown Studio Residency Exhibition” at Crosstown Arts

To explore the concept of endlessness, Lance Turner created a series of symmetrical, dizzying abstractions in a back room at Crosstown Arts. He repeated his strange murals until they covered the walls of the space and then built a series of models that echoed those murals, ad infinitum. Turner also showed excellent work this year at GLITCH, a Midtown house gallery and venue. He is perhaps best known for his downtown mural of late punk rocker Jay Reatard, whose image he painted in grey pixels on the side of a South Main business. — ET

Lester Merriweather’s “WHITE(S) ONLY”

“WHITE(S) ONLY” by Lester Merriweather at University of Memphis’ Fogelman Galleries

Merriweather’s exhibition, which consisted of all white objects, was hosted in a gallery with glass doors, white walls, white columns, and overhead spot lighting. The main focus was on a series of oversized paint swatches in degrees of white, with their corresponding names printed on them. Real product names like “Colonial White” and “Fresh Cotton,” provided a pointed commentary on the country’s past. Accompanying the swatches were objects covered in white, such as an old church with a steeple, an old washboard, a miniature ship with masts, and an American flag. The starkness of the room and the blankness of the items in it allowed viewers to focus on the textures and iterations of overwhelming whiteness, in many senses of the word, and what it feels like to exist in that space. — Elle Perry

“Mi Sur/My South,” group exhibition at Crosstown Arts

This exhibition represented Caritas Village-based Centro Cultural’s latest annual survey of Latino/a artists in Memphis. The exhibition featured more established, as well as emerging artists. Many of the pieces dealt with identity and the dualism that can come with being Latino/a in the United States, and, more specifically, Memphis. The show included work by artists who immigrated to the United States as well as those who grew up here. A broad range of both sculptural and two-dimensional work was included. — EP

“A Kind of Confession,” group exhibition at the Metal Museum

In another exhibition focusing on group and individual identity, the Metal Museum’s “A Kind of Confession” featured metalwork from 11 black artists at a range of career points from around the U.S. It explored culture and race in America through the lens of history, socioeconomic status, gender, and current events. Some pieces offered a nostalgic, often humorous slice of black life, while others offered social critiques of both contemporary black and American culture. — EP

“Meet Me Where I’m At” by Johnathan Robert Payne at Crosstown Arts

Payne paired his meticulous, methodical drawings with an hour-long performance, which was equally methodical: He spent an hour doing a Tae-Bo workout video and then, in a vulnerable gesture, bathed in front of a small audience. Payne’s show approached themes of loneliness and desire. It made us uncomfortable and made us think. — ET

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Art Art Feature

Rock the Boat

CREDIT: Courtesy of LJM Studios

I’m a fan of Lester Merriweather’s art. His intricate collages, built out of carefully arrayed clippings from luxury magazines, are both bleak and sumptuous. They looked great in 2013 at TOPS Gallery, as a part of his exhibition “Black House | White Market” and again in 2014 in his Crosstown Arts solo exhibition “Colossus.” Merriweather is also an active curator who currently heads the University of Memphis’ Fogelman Galleries.

“Nothing Is For Ever Last,” Merriweather’s latest solo exhibition at the Dixon, is not his best. The work is similar, in both subject matter and approach, to that shown in previous exhibitions. Many of the works depict colonial-era ships on crested seas beneath mythologically bright blue skies. Others are gilded assemblages of luxury magazine ads, flowers, and jewels arranged ornamentally on matte canvases. The best work in the show, hydra, is a seascape composed of glossy female hair. A monster built from the nude arms of white models emerges from the hair-sea only to be flattened against a glitchy sky. In hydra, Merriweather recasts taken-for-granted images of (white) female beauty into something disorienting and unexpected.

Merriweather’s works are best when they awe with scale and shininess. The work in “Nothing Is For Ever Last” feels undercooked compared to past exhibitions. Collages are mixed in with a variety of model ships. Merriweather replaces the ships’ sails with red and blue bandanas (crip ship and blood vessel) or else he dips them in plaster to ghostly effect (dipped ship). These pieces succeed more in the description than the execution; Many look shabby where they should gleam.

Elsewhere, Merriweather replaces the hulls of ships with Louis Vuitton and Chanel Bags. untitled (commercial vessel) doesn’t need a title; it is all designer monograms, afloat in dark waters, its crew overboard and grasping from the depths. Hip-hop-influenced high fashion intersects Euro-colonialist imagery for an overarching comment on the violent legacy of global luxury trade.

One of Merriweather’s smaller, untitled collages is built from the spread of a historical magazine. Page left is a description of the British Navy’s defense strategies. Page right is a romantic painting of a ship — The Resolution — capsizing in a storm. Merriweather collages a model’s arm into the waves, sea-monster-style. This work is simple, but it stands out because it is so directly related to what’s across the hall in the Dixon; an exhibit called “Hail Britannia!” that features a lot of paintings of ships and the aristocrats who owned them.

I imagine the point of putting exhibitions like “Hail Britannia!” and “Nothing Is For Ever Last” next to each other is to create what curators like to call “a conversation” between two different kinds of work. Merriweather’s work says: British colonialism spawned centuries of waste and human casualty and wrought havoc on the globe. “Hail Britannia!” says: The British Empire employed lots of painters who were not half bad at painting seascapes.

Maybe this implied “conversation” would have more going for it if there weren’t about 10 times more paintings in “Hail Britannia!” than are in “Nothing Is For Ever Last” or if Merriweather’s work pulled off the grandiosity it has in past exhibitions. Or maybe if the exhibition literature, which alludes to “statements” that Merriweather’s work makes about “urban” life in America (must we tiptoe so lightly?), had been braver.

“Nothing Is For Ever Last” suggests a void in the conversation on race and wealth in America that it doesn’t attempt to fill. It left me wanting more.

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Art Art Feature

Memphis Artists Describe Their Ideal Art Space

The French writer Gaston Bachelard once wrote about building a dream house: “Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, much later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it … It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.”

It is with Bachelard’s much-later and maybe-impossible dream house in mind that we ask Memphis artists to describe their dream art space, the one they would create if they had infinite time and resources.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of artist profiles inspired by Meghan Vaziri’s portraits. See more of Vaziri’s work at meghanvaziri.com.

Lester Merriweather

An ideal gallery would consist of tall walls and polished concrete floors so that nothing would be obtrusive to the work.

It would have absolute logistical freedom as far as budgets, travel, shipping, insurance, etc., so ideally it would have a “golden parachute” attached to it.

The administration would be a consistent mix of artists, grant writers, dealers/gallerists, and writers in an attempt to cover all the important touch points for the art itself.

There would be a balanced approach to exhibiting work locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. Also, there would be a wide array of themes covered in types of work exhibited, very often covering controversial bodies of work.

Lester Merriweather is curator of the University of Memphis’ Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art. A new exhibition of his work, “Colossus,” opens Friday, July 11th, at Crosstown Arts.

Mary Jo Karimnia

My physical dream space is always raw — a repurposed, crumbly brick building, interior architecture that respects its origins but also provides lots of white wall space, with multiple galleries suited to everything from traditionally hung artwork to installation and video viewing space with seating. Plenty of classroom and office space. Good lighting would be a must in all areas. Natural lighting like the de Menil museums in Houston would be a great bonus. Areas of lush greenery maybe in courtyard form. And I like big, tall, wall-sized doors. A building with an interesting history always inspires me in some way.

The main purpose of this art entity would be producing shows with a strong emphasis on a diverse contemporary scene. Programming would consist of both short-term and long-term exhibitions from a wide variety of perspectives: women, men, gay, straight, foreign, local, black, white, old, young, emerging, established, non-traditional materials and techniques, traditional materials and techniques. The facility would showcase local, national, and international artists and nurture relationships between artists and between artists and community through residencies, classes, lectures, and such. There would be programs to bring artists in and to take artists out. I imagine sending a group of artists from Memphis to a place like the Salar de Uyuni, the biggest salt flats in the world, in Bolivia. It is a very surreal place. Throw in an eclipse and you have an amazing experience for a group of artists to build work upon and to build a show around.

Mary Jo Karimnia is a painter whose recent shows include “Unchained II” at Rozelle Warehouse and “This Art Has Cooties” at Marshall Arts.

Joel Parsons

A clean, well-lighted place. A place that is the physical deep web (not sure what it is but I heard about it on House of Cards and I want to go there but I’m scared). A place that eats the runway and does car commercials in Japan. A place that knows the line between self-care and self-harm. A place that is DOM/MASC/BUTCH because it will not be topped (except when it wants to be hard femme/power bttm). A place that has read Sonja Morgan’s toaster oven cookbook. A place to day drink with. A place that, well – let’s face it, we’re undone by each other. A place to have a one-night-stand with but then it’s totally cool and no one regrets anything and we’re still, like, really good friends. A place that is a new and mouthwatering way to cook an egg. A place that knows what it did. A place that gives good text. A place that cries. A silken web stretched across your morning transom. The second studio album by American R&B group TLC. A vessel for exxxcesses of desire. A pig in a wig. A flavor of ice cream. The dancing twins emoji. Tyra Mail. Magnetic field. Feels. Verb. A place that’s on that Tilda Swinton tip. That got dat booty do. Tough. Fizzy. Qute.*

*no carpet

Joel Parsons is a sculptor and curator of Rhodes Clough-Hanson Gallery. He is also the founder of Beige, a queer art thinking space and house gallery.