Tag: Medicine Factory

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Art Art Feature

Jeanne Seagle in “Of This Moment”

Photo: Abigail Morici

If you’re even the most casual reader of the Memphis Flyer, you’ve seen Jeanne Seagle’s work. Just turn to the weekly “News of the Weird” column every now and then, and you’ll see one of her quirky illustrations. But this week, if you head to the Medicine Factory, you’ll find the work she’s proudest of — her drawings and her watercolors of Dacus Lake, across the Mississippi River in Arkansas.

Seagle has been fascinated by this area for years now. After all, it’s where she started to get to know her husband Fletcher Golden, who lived at a fishing camp in the area at the time. “We would just wander all over that land while we were dating,” she says. “It was so much fun.”

Often, she returns there — to hike, to paint with watercolors, and to let her surroundings wash over her as she takes photographs to reference later in her drawings. She thrives in nature, she knows.

“I just love going over there. I love these scenes. I love these landscapes. That’s my spot,” Seagle said in an interview with Memphis Magazine last year.

Jeanne Seagle (Photo: Courtesy Jeanne Seagle)

Today when we speak about the Medicine Factory show, “Of This Moment,” which features new works, she notes how she hasn’t tired of the subject, especially with its ever-changing qualities. “In this show, I have a picture called Fallen Tree, and I have drawn that tree several times in other pictures when it was still standing,” she says. “That’s the thing about drawing landscapes, you can just focus on one spot and nature takes over and changes things constantly. … I find it endlessly fascinating.”

For three or four hours a day, she draws scenes of nature from photographs she’s taken at Dacus Lake, just a drive across the river from her Midtown studio. Sometimes, she’ll play blues CDs to fill the space with the rhythms of the Delta as she stills her focus on rendering the smallest of details — grooves in tree bark and wisps of grass — with careful marks in charcoal and pencil.

These black-and-white drawings take weeks to complete, sometimes up to two months. She’ll fold over the Xerox copies of photos she’s taken in some places, making entirely new compositions, adjusting the wilderness to her aesthetic liking. From these gritty images printed on copy paper, Seagle gleans details that an untrained eye would not recognize. She knows this art, inside and out, just like she knows these woods, harvesting their most innate qualities from her memories.

Unlike her illustrations that favor stylization, Seagle renders these images realistically, leaving no detail spared. The scenes are still, out of time. A sense of wonder remains in her drawings, inviting the viewer to slip into nature’s serenity, only a few miles from the grit and grind of Memphis.

After decades of working as an artist, Seagle has slipped into a serenity of her own, as if all her prior artistic endeavors have led to this moment. She’s experimented with styles and challenged herself many times over, she says, and now she’s found a subject that is uniquely hers — one that she’s emotionally attached to, that she’s excited to render in a style and medium that feels right, not like one she’s trying on.

“I have always liked to draw more than paint, and I just feel so much more comfortable doing that,” she says. “When I was a little girl, I was not exposed to paint media. When I was a little kid, I just colored with crayons, and I kind of just kept on doing that.”

Even as she continues in this phase of her life and art with these landscapes, Seagle can’t help but think of her childhood. “Just thinking how ironic it is that my parents were all about trees, too. My father worked with trees at his job as a forest ranger and my mother loved to take photographs of trees. It’s just kind of natural that I’ve just kind of slipped unintentionally into this little niche here.”

But it’s a niche Seagle plans to stay in, perhaps one that’s been in her genes all along. “I have spent most of my career doing color pictures for illustrations magazine and book illustrations,” she adds. “And now I’m doing what I want to do.”

“Of This Moment” is on display at the Medicine Factory. It features drawings and watercolors by Jeanne Seagle and paintings by Annabelle Meacham, plus works by Matthew Hasty, Jimpsie Ayres, Alisa Free, Claudia Tullos-Leonard, Anton Weiss, and others. Hours are Thursday, June 6th, noon to 6 p.m.; Friday, June 7th, noon to 6 p.m.; Saturday, June 8th, noon to 4 p.m.; and Sunday, June 9th, by appointment only. To schedule an appointment, email art@sylvanfinearts.com. Seagle will give an artist talk on Saturday, June 8th, at 1 p.m.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Tennessee Ballet Theater’s 901 Stories

Dancer Dasha Andriienko (Photo: DC the Snapper)

Over the past few years, Tennessee Ballet Theater (TBT) has brought to life the histories of Earnestine & Hazel’s, the Annesdale Mansion, and the Jack Robinson Gallery through dance. This May, as part of the site-specific series of performances, the company will tackle its next location: the Medicine Factory, once a pharmaceutical company and now home to artists’ studios.

Though TBT’s previous site-specific performances have explored that particular site’s history, this production will diverge from the format by exploring stories throughout Memphis, hence the title 901 Stories. “The pieces in the show are all stories plucked from or inspired by nuggets of Memphis history,” says TBT’s artistic director Erin Walter, “things that we know in Memphis, things that maybe are related to Memphis that we haven’t explored in depth.”

As such, the ultimate product is a range of stories told through dance, from the romance of novelist William Faulkner and Joan Williams, his muse and a novelist in her own right, to the legend of Pink Lizzie, Memphis’ most famous ghost. Walter even choreographed one piece to tell the story of Mrs. W.C. Stewart, who ran her husband’s potato chip and mayonnaise business in the Medicine Factory after he died. “Every article I read [about her] just referred to her as Mrs. W.C. Stewart,” Walter says. “I couldn’t actually find her first name or given name anywhere. … And so I was really interested in that idea of, back in the ’40s, the rarity of a woman running a $1 million business, and yet we don’t even know what her first name is.”

These stories, among others being told in 901 Stories, are worth remembering, Walter says. “We’re calling it a love letter to Memphis,” she adds. “And it’s really exciting to me — the idea of making history come to life through dance, through a sort of unexpected medium. You’re going to remember it.”

In the past, audience members have compared TBT’s site-specific productions to “therapy,” Walter says. “One person said, ‘I literally feel better about my city. I feel inspired by [these stories]. I feel proud that this happened in Memphis,’ and she said, ‘We really need that.’” And that’s what Walter hopes to convey in this show, too. “It’s about mending, healing, coming together to celebrate something that is positive, not negative, in our city,” she says.

The event itself promises to feel like an intimate “party,” with guests enjoying performances throughout the building. “The audience will have opportunities to get a drink, socialize, see art, and see aerial work or see a tap dance in an elevator [and so on],” Walter says. “You’ll be moving and you’ll be seated as well.” Plus, visual artists will showcase their work in a “living gallery,” where dancers will respond to the pieces on sale with improvisational movements. Jordan Occasionally will emcee, and Morgan McKinney will mix cocktails. Tickets can be purchased at tbt.ticketleap.com.

901 Stories, Medicine Factory, Friday-Saturday, May 12-May 13, performances at 7 p.m. & 8:30 p.m., $30.

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Art Art Feature

When Arrows Meet

Nick Canterucci, Satan Goatbeard, 2022

When asked why he became an artist, Nick Canterucci laughs. “Well, about that,” he says, “I wanted to meet girls. When I was a young guy, up in [Detroit,] Michigan, there was this beatnik artist who lived next door to us and he always seemed to have some kind of bitching babe on his arm. He smoked unfiltered Camels, wore a beret, and had a cool little sports car. I thought, man, this is right up my alley.”

Despite his ambitions, Canterucci never had any formal art training, going to school for mathematics and later moving from Detroit to Memphis to work at Channel 5 and with FedEx. Yet, throughout his career, he stuck with his art, finding that his passion for creating drove him more than wooing the ladies ever did. “My wife would say, ‘You’re a good boy now,’” he says, before quipping, “But I’m wilder and busier than I’ve ever been. I just haven’t gotten the email that I’m old. My brain is 25 and my body’s 70.” And the amount of work he has produced over the past few years since retirement would agree. In fact, even though his 18th show is currently on display at the Medicine Factory, he is already halfway through creating his next show, slated for 2024. 

Sunday in Detroit

For now, Canterucci speaks of his current exhibition “When Arrows Meet,” which consists of paintings done in his “outsider art” style. With bold colors and collage elements, the 20 abstract pieces demand the viewer examine every inch of the canvas, with the eye drawn to each individual element — from a set of numbers floating in the background to a tiny British flag pasted on a breast. The compositions are purposely chaotic, with one piece even titled Cacophony, leaving observers to decipher patterns for themselves, as if Canterucci has left behind a code without a key — and that’s not far from Canterucci’s method. 

He says, “There’s a lot of secret information in my paintings. If you know how to translate my visual parameters, I’m telling you exactly everything that’s going on in my life or my friend’s life or my wife’s life.” For some of his pieces, Canterucci cites the exact moment of inspiration — a friend expressing feelings of isolation, a friend’s break-up, or the opening credits of a movie he fell asleep while watching. Painting, he explains, allows him to process his experiences, mundane and extraordinary alike.

As he created the pieces for this show, Covid was at the forefront of his mind. “I feel sensitive, and there was a lot of weird energy in the air sometimes, and I can’t explain it. I can’t tell you exactly what it is, but sometimes, it kind of makes your hand stand up, and so I’ll work through it by painting.” That sense of urgency to get his thoughts onto the canvas, in turn, reveals itself in enthusiastic, stark brush strokes and self-assured outlines of figures, with little need for perfection. 

If This Is It

Canterucci embraces abstraction, finding solace in the “offbeat” German and Russian artists of the 1920s and 1930s who existed outside the mainstream. He himself has often felt like an outsider, understanding the world differently than those around him. “I see the world in ones and zeros. Kind of like the Matrix,” he says. “I just have a stream of numbers. I see everything in mathematical sequences and stuff.”

Abstraction, the artist continues, “appeals to the mathematical thing in my brain, and it allows me to work through issues. … Art can be very therapeutic at times. It can really help you get over some issues. Same thing with music. I can’t tell you how many cool records got me out of Pity City. So it goes both directions [between the artist and the consumer].”

As such, Canterucci hopes his paintings can stir something within his audience. “Maybe it helps them take stock of where they’re at in their life, or maybe I can bring a smile to their face, or maybe, they can go, ‘Oh God, this is terrible,’ and give them something to talk about.”

No matter the response, Canterucci thrives on feedback and often seeks knowledge and inspiration from other artists to improve his craft. “Each show seems to be a little bit better. You could obviously see an evolution of progress from my early shows up to this one, which is my 18th,” he says. “And then again, for every successful painting I’ve had multiple failures. Sometimes what you see in your head and what ends up in the canvas are two different things. And then you have those rare occurrences where you’re firing on all cylinders. And then boom, bingo, you nailed it.”

Cacophony

In the meantime, between being in his punk band The Underwear Heads and making his fanzine, Canterucci shows no sign of stopping painting. And when he’s painting, nothing can stop him. “ I don’t care if the house is on fire,” he says. “I don’t care if giant bat spiders from Jupiter are coming down the street grabbing people. Don’t bother me.”

The last day to see “When Arrows Meet” at the Medicine Factory is Saturday, February 18th.  

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Art Art Feature

Painfully Pretty: Nikii Richey’s “A Come Apart”

“You look like somebody threw you away,” artist Nikii Richey’s mother said to her in passing when she was young.

“I’ve never forgotten that,” Richey says. “She probably didn’t even know she ever said that and probably would have denied it if I ever brought it up, but the way she reacted to me was always centered around my looks and how I looked.”

Richey’s relationship with her mother was tense, to say the least. “She had a lot of her own struggles,” Richey says. “She was an alcoholic, smoked her whole life, probably undiagnosed bipolar.” So, when Richey had the opportunity to attend college in South Carolina, she left her Mississippi hometown and estranged herself from her mom.

But, in the last five years of her mother’s life, Richey assumed the role of caretaker and brought her mom to Memphis, her home for the past 20 or so years. During that time, Richey says, “we were able to reconcile, and I was able to understand where all of that came from. It was passed down from her mother.”

Buttercup (Penneys) (Photo: Courtesy Nikii Richey)

Richey’s mother — Retta — grew up in the ’50s and ’60s as a bona fide beauty queen. “I was reading some letters that her mother wrote to her in college,” Richey says, “and it was all about the next beauty contest and what dress she was going to wear and what they were going to do with her hair, and it was never how are you, how are your classes.” That focus on beauty never left Retta. She was married to her second husband for a year, Richey says, and he never saw her without makeup on.

Retta passed away a little over two years ago, and a year later, Richey knew that she had to make something, to move her hands. “I just thought to myself, I’m gonna make this big braid,” she says. “I was thinking about my mother and her fixing my hair and pulling it through a cap and frosting it when I was 7 years old. I just quieted my mind and let my emotions take control of my hands. I followed my intuition.”

That intuition led Richey to creating the works in her latest show, “A Come Apart.” “That’s something else my mother would say: ‘I’m just having a come apart,’” she says. “It’s a mental state phrase — when things get to be a little too much, and you have to ‘take to the bed.’”

In this show, Richey plays with the comfort of old linens in her sculptures, but then she pokes and bends wires through them and sprays those wires with vinegar to rust them from the inside out. “If my intuition tells me to take out a blow torch and burn it,” she says, “that’s what I do, and I see what happens after that. Maybe I need to burn it, so I can repair it.” And she might bleach the fabric; she might wax it; she might dye it or add makeup or spray it with hair spray; she might stretch it out and pull it back with ribbon.

“All those treatments represent what women do to their bodies,” she says. “I like to play with the difference between the way that trauma leaves scars behind and how we still try to be pretty through all of life’s trauma instead of just being. … I think about women and their bodies and their stresses a lot, so that definitely plays into my work [outside the studio], too.”

In 2015, Richey co-founded Sister Supply, which supplies pads and tampons to menstruators in need, and currently, she is designing the interiors of Hub Hotel, a new transitional housing space for women, which she says will include a salon to provide “luxury, comfort, and safety for these women.” But, she ponders, “What’re the social implications of needing to have your hair and nails done to feel good about yourself as a woman, even after all they’ve been through?”

“That’s the basis of this show — this forced societal and motherly demand for beauty and display,” she adds. “And every single piece in this show I can relate back to my mother.”

“A Come Apart” is on display at the Medicine Factory through November 28th, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Call 484-6154 for entry.

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Music Music Features

A New Path

CREDIT: John Markham

Memphis musicians are often credited for a fiercely independent creative spirit that has been characterized at times with lofty platitudes such as “maverick” or “renegade.” While those adjectives ring true with several local acts, they are particularly apt when applied to the new local experimental/avant-garde duo known as >mancontrol<.

>mancontrol< is the latest project helmed by two of the Memphis rock scene’s most reliable and well-loved figures: Dave Shouse of the Grifters, Those Bastard Souls, and the Bloodthirsty Lovers, and Robby Grant of Big Ass Truck, Vending Machine, and Mouserocket. But this project is nothing like any of those rock/pop bands, as the “>mancontrol< manifesto” (a document composed by Shouse, who declined to be interviewed) explains:

>mancontrol< ([C14,  from New English, stem of  “manual control”] make music in the moment; experimental, improvisational music built from the most primitive of sounds: monophonic single waveforms. Arbitrary factors come into play with each new venue: the amount of ambient light, bodies in motion or curious light sources like swinging chandeliers and LED hula hoops. There is no stage at a >mancontol< show. We set up in a way that allows audiences the opportunity to affect our music. Anyone that makes light or interrupts it becomes a factor in the evolution of each song.

What this means, basically, is that Shouse and Grant manipulate simple synthesizer tones and encourage the crowd to participate by altering the light in the room, which changes the sound. In truth, the execution is likely as complicated as it seems it would be.

“Overall, the sound originates from a basic sine wave. Then it’s processed and built up using effect pedals and light,” Grant says. “We are both producing melody with our voices. We don’t have set ‘songs,’ but we do have goals for each performance. We know what we want to communicate and roughly how we will do it.”

The original idea for the band was conceived several years ago by Shouse but began to take shape in 2010 when he discussed the idea with longtime acquaintance Grant.

“When Dave invited me over to just play around, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen or if it would turn into anything. Heck, it took a year to solidify even what my instrument would be,” Grant says.

“When I first showed up, I brought a lot of pedals and stuff with me and made a lot of noise. Dave slowly suggested I simplify everything and create more space. Right now, we’re kinda like a two-person orchestra with Dave as the conductor.”

The newly christened >mancontrol< played a couple of low-key shows in town in 2011, aided by former third member (and New Mary Jane/John Paul Keith and the One Four Fives bassist) James Godwin, before paring the band down to two members and taking the show on the road. Earlier this year, they played highly successful shows in New York City (where the duo already has a booking agent) and Cincinnati.

“We were really surprised at the positive response to what we were doing,” Grant says.

With a few encouraging experiences now under their collective belt, Shouse and Grant finally feel ready to launch >mancontrol< as a full-fledged project in town. To that end, the group will be performing this Saturday, December 8th, at 8 p.m. at the Medicine Factory, an art space located at 85 Virginia Ave. West.

“This is our first show where we feel like we have evolved enough to promote it,” Grant says. “We did a video there [the Medicine Factory] a few months back and have stayed in touch. They asked us to play a December show, and we were happy to oblige.”

The show is not only a coming-out party for >mancontrol< but also features the debut of a mural by artist Gabe Martin and the unveiling of a musical innovation called the “eyelophone,” which was created by photographer/artist John Markham.

According to Grant, the gallery environment, among other locales, is more conducive to what >mancontrol< wants to achieve.

“We’re trying to find alternative spaces as much as possible,” he says. “We are totally self-contained, don’t need a soundman, and can play anywhere with power. The only place we don’t want to play is on a traditional rock-club stage — but in the corner or the bathroom is fine.”

facebook.com/mancontrol

medicinefactory.org

>mancontrol<

The Medicine Factory

8 S. Virginia Ave. West

Saturday, December 8th, 8 p.m.