Material – Memphis Flyer

Rather than ponder Platonic perfection, Peter Williams’ exhibition of “Recent Works” at Clough-Hanson confronts the world in all its complex, ribald, multicultural, paradoxical glory. You’ll find no vague shadows playing across stone walls in Williams’ 48-by-60-inch painting Plato’s Cave. Instead, stones shape-shift into montages of racial/sexual/cultural prejudice and dysfunction, including pornographic Aunt Jemimas and good-ole-boy sadism. Disembodied heads register awe, surprise, dismay, and horror.

In Williams’ oil-on-panel portrait Plato, the Greek philosopher looks like a spunky, neurologically damaged street-fighter whose face has been beaten to a pulp on more than one occasion. Instead of meditating on ideals, Williams asks us to embrace the world as it is, to fight the good fight, to struggle to our last breath.

Williams’ bald head and brawny torso are the same color and texture as boulders closing in on him from all sides in his relentlessly honest self-portrait of courage and mortality Dr. NO. His crosshatched, red-brown loins look like the soil beneath the stones. The lavender sky that backdrops his expressive mahogany face acknowledges life’s profound beauty and pain.

At Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College through March 27th

In Laura Painter Stafford’s exhibition “Presents in Creation” at Perry Nicole Fine Art, dollops of paint become a field of ruby-red flowers in Job 9:10-11. A church’s bright-orange roof, thick stucco facade, and swaying architecture seem to move with the spirit of God in Psalm 68:35.

Instead of feeling stylized or too full of the trappings of religiosity, Stafford’s love of the poetry of thanksgiving in Psalms, her thick paint, and childlike exuberance are powerfully disarming. We feel Stafford’s excitement as she shapes her worlds, her joy as she beholds what she has wrought.

Also on view at Perry Nicole are Rod Moorhead’s provocative pit-fired clay figures. These winged creatures are part fallen angel, part Greek deity, part muse, part temptress. Even as they tumble head-over-heels down the wall in Regret, even as they lose themselves in bittersweet passion in Last Dance with Mary Jane, their soft, searching faces suggest that, whatever their missteps, these creatures will learn from their experiences and move on.

At Perry Nicole Fine Art through March 31st

In the L Ross show “Ice Hockey Is For Abstract Painters Who Are Tired of Defending Formalism,” Ryan VanderLey explores art history with humor and panache.

VanderLey frees himself from the demands of formalism in Greenberg Was Cut II, creates an abstraction that is both two- and three-dimensional in Neo-plastic Ice, and in Stone Field Was Alright takes one of minimalist Carl Andre’s stones, plants it in a spring-green field, and breaks it wide open with slashes of turquoise and coral that look exotic and floral.

In the space- and mind-bending work I Saw That Stuff Over There, a wooden beam jutting out from the bottom allows us to “virtually” climb into the painting onto a warm brown ledge.

Steady yourself: This artwork becomes increasingly gestural and transparent as VanderLey splinters hockey sticks into expressive de Kooning-esque slashes and turns the ice into thin sheets that hover and glow like Mark Rothko’s fields of color.

Instead of defending particular aesthetic positions, VanderLey incorporates line, form, color, content, and context into playful, philosophical wholes that are some of the freshest, most satisfying works seen this year.

At L Ross Gallery through March 30th

The hypnotic paintings of Susan Maakestad’s exhibition “Traffic Land” at Material were inspired by traffic-camera images retrieved from the Internet. Maakestad’s worlds are composed not of crisp-edged details but boundless space, ceaseless motion, and palettes that look like mixes of oil slicks, soot, night lights, sunrises, and sunsets.

In Mile Marker 3, we drive a long graceful arc of highway, swerve around a bend, and disappear into a purple-blue twilight. In Mile Marker 4, a broad, teal-green interstate narrows to a needle point beneath a soft-pink sky. And in Maakestad’s particularly haunting Untitled — Night, we drive past a crumbling cement causeway in need of repair toward a gritty halo surrounding a polluted metropolis far in the distance.

At Material through April 10th

It’s 8 a.m. Saturday morning. Too early for gallery-hopping? Not if you love to mix java with artwork. We’re at Republic Coffee, and the walls are lined with some of the best paintings and photographs of Eric Swartz’ career.

In Dash, Swartz records the part of a vehicle we see as we slide into the driver’s seat. The rudimentary control panel inside this antique truck or sedan has become a rusted metal hulk. The windshield is clouded with algae and age. At the right edge of the image, a surprisingly intact steering wheel takes us back to mid-century when we were crisscrossing America’s brand-new interstates in the vehicles of our youth. Most of them are junkers now, metaphors for time and memory and a good jumping-off point for our exploration of the accomplished, richly symbolic artwork found in a wide variety of Memphis venues.

Through August 31st at Republic Coffee

Our next stop is Material, the cutting-edge gallery that helped jump-start the now-burgeoning Broad Avenue Arts District. Niki Johnson’s and Melissa Farris’ exhibition “Moral Fiber” fills the small space with artworks charged with irony, intense emotion, and complex meaning. Nothing feels off-limits for these two sassy, savvy young artists who ask us to look into the face of power and sexuality, to question authority, and to challenge sexual taboos and the artificial distinctions between high and low art.

Johnson’s appliquéd portrait of a screaming Donald Trump, titled Old Yeller, asks us to consider whether we value cold corporate power more than the faithful companionship and courage typified by the stray dog in the American movie classic of the same title.

Viewers are encouraged to pull back curtains covering Farris’ shadow boxes. Inside are graceful, peach-and-pink watercolors of same-sex partners making love.

Many of Johnson’s and Farris’ artworks are charged with playful innuendo. Cupcakes, Johnson’s needlepointed studies of women’s breasts framed by fluted cupcake tins, are bite-sized and beautiful. Jonathan’s Quilt, Farris’ appliquéd portrait of a young man on an eight-pointed-star quilt with hand inside his jeans, transforms the “security blanket” into something we can hang onto from cradle to grave.

Through August 29th at Material

Gadsby Creson’s installation at the P&H Caf

Just off Main Street, the walls of Power House Memphis are montaged with iPhone photos that internationally renowned contemporary artist Rob Pruitt took of Memphis. His most evocative work records Graceland’s 1960s décor and fans’ floral tributes to the man who revolutionized music, swiveled his hips, and helped thousands of youngsters come of age in the sexually repressive 1950s.

Pruitt’s images of an empty wheelchair imprinted with the word “Graceland” and a large statute of Christ resurrected on Presley’s gravesite most poignantly tell the story of the love affair between Elvis and his fans.

Through August 9th at Power House Memphis

Several blocks farther north on South Main, we discover Micah Craven’s monotype Simple Food Simple Taste, one of the most powerful artworks currently on view anywhere in Memphis. It’s one of the prints in the group exhibition “Oh Lord, Won’t You Send Me a Sign!” at Memphis College of Art’s On the Street gallery. The show was curated by University of Mississippi chair and associate professor of art, Sheri Fleck Rieth.

Craven’s expressive linework and deep shadows depict a child’s cracked teeth, protruding ribs, emaciated arms, and what could be a belly bloated by starvation or a pregnant girl unable to feed herself or her fetus. An empty fishing pole in the child’s left hand and the work’s title make the figure a powerful poster child. Instead of raping the world for quick profit, Craven suggests that we leave enough natural resources intact to allow humanity to farm, fish, and fend for itself.

Through August 9th at On the Street

This has been a long, rich day, but we’re not done yet. We stop by the P&H Café for one last cup of coffee.

On the wall behind the bandstand, also known as P&H Artspace, is Gadsby Creson’s installation, “The Price Is Even More Right,” one of the smallest, most original shows in town.

Each of Creson’s mixed-media paperworks is mounted on two 4-by-4-inch squares of foam core. Some of the works are glued to the foam core like tiny abstract paintings. In others, the foam-core squares serve as backdrop and stage for minuscule paper sculptures.

Two of Creson’s most dramatic pieces suggest a line of narrative. In the first, a Matisse-like dancer moves with frenzied grace above a dark-red sea. In the second, another ebony figure folds her body onto the floor like a dancer taking her final bow.

Creson’s dancers are a good way to end our day. I’m headed home to begin writing this column. But stay as long as you like. The P&H crowd of music lovers, literati, and art enthusiasts keeps jamming way past midnight.

An opening reception for “The Price Is Even More Right” is Friday, August 8th, from 8 to 10 p.m.

Through September 8th at the P&H Café