Meghan Vaziri – Memphis Flyer

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.

“Unchained II” sounds like a gore/horror film. It would be set on a remote California mountain and be about crazed starlets, who, after escaping a cult kidnapping, go on a chainsaw rampage and exact revenge on those who wronged them. Unchained II would be a ’90s remake of the original Unchained, which would have been made in the ’80s, and have the Van Halen track “Unchained” (David Lee Roth sings: “Unchained! Ya, you hit the ground running!”) as its theme song.

Unfortunately for Black Lodge customers, “Unchained II” is not (at least, probably not) a ’90s gore flick. It is the name of a new group art exhibition at the Rozelle Warehouse, featuring work by eight local female artists. The artist Mary Jo Karimnia organized the exhibition by inviting one artist, who in turn invited another artist, who invited another, until a collaborative chain of participating artists curated the show in grassroots fashion. The exhibition, the second of its kind in Memphis, is “unchained,” then, because it is off the hook (cool) or because it is a collaborative effort in an artist-run space and therefore unchained from usual gallery strictures.

Chandler Pritchett, and Stepahnie Cosby in “Unchained II”

Karimnia says that one of the interesting things about the “Unchained” shows is discovering accidental synchronicities between the artists’ work. Accordingly, this year’s exhibition features a lot of material-heavy, collage-based works. The work in the show varies in quality but all of it is warmly and carefully presented, a hard quality to come by in too many traditional galleries.

Stephanie Crosby’s digital black-and-white photography is drawn from “Empty the Cache,” a series of forest landscapes interrupted by blacked-out shapes. Smoke Break shows an angular vine interrupted by a clean black triangle. In For the Afternoon, two black squares create mini-voids against the backdrop of an eroded hill. Crosby says that she hopes the interruption of these void shapes will allow the viewers to see the image without understanding it as a clichéd landscape — to proverbially empty their mental cache.

Works by Meredith Wilson and Chandler Pritchett

Crosby is partially successful. One way of dealing with clichéd images is to negate them, override them, or deconstruct them with anti-images (a black triangle, a black flag), and she does that. But put beside her earlier work — meticulous color series such as “Cosmos” and “Primitive Plants” — “Empty the Cache” falls flat. Crosby is capable of making landscape photographs that have a painterly depth, that the viewer cannot help but encounter slowly. Her traditional work doesn’t risk cliché, so why try to disrupt it?

Elizabeth Owen’s “Hand of God Series” also plays with worked-over images. Her colored-pencil and laminate paper collages of Mary, Jesus, and Joseph reference a very identifiable Medieval aesthetic and are surrounded with cheap-o glitter and cut paper. Pieces like Holy Family are getting at something interesting but could go further. Owen’s methods could be pushed into a realm of glittery saints and neo-folk altars. (The transcendent shiny collage work of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt comes to mind.)

Mars Science Lab Heatshield/Gale Crator #12 by Kerri Dugan

Two different artists, Meghan Vaziri and Kerri Dugan, use light boxes to high effect. Dugan’s fetchingly named Mars Science Lab Heatshield/Gale Crater #12 is a strange radial, planetary collage that looks like both a crater and a color wheel. It is a mysterious piece, radiant with either cosmic or chemical interior light.

Vaziri’s Susanna & the Elders, a tableau of a woman bathing in a glade while a man looks on, is stitched from wool, silk, cotton, and tulle and backed with a lightbox. Vaziri uses the tulle (a French-originated fabric used to make tutus, wedding veils, and lingerie) expertly. Vaziri is a painter, and Susanna is a painting without paint, in that it captures the artist’s painstaking gesture and holds it. Vaziri perhaps takes cues from artists such as Elizabeth Gower, whose ethereal but heady 1970s works on fabric were taken up by the Women’s Art Movement. Susanna is especially un-photographable and should be seen in person.

Karimnia says it was an accident that “Unchained II” is an all-female exhibition, but much of the work in the “Unchained” exhibit shares an attention to traditional women’s-work materials (beads, fabric, beeswax). This influence may stem from Karimnia’s paintings. Karimnia’s Catrina depicts a contemporary man with his arm around a woman in elaborate historical costume and dressed with “seed beads,” those infinitesimally small plastic beads that are dangerous to children and animals. Karimnia makes her paintings from photographs that she takes at anime and cosplay conventions that she attends with her daughter.

Like many of the works in the exhibition, Karimnia’s works are colorful and likable but laboriously made and unexpectedly heavy, both in material and content.