Melissa Farris – Memphis Flyer

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

At first glance, the precariously tilted table tops on spindly legs in Dwayne Butcher’s ArtLab installation, “Beauty Terrorist in 3D,” look like dinette sets morphing into hordes of insects in some macabre comedy. Butcher is a poet, blogger, activist, and established artist as well as a Memphis College of Art graduate student. Like his wobbly tabletops, this gutsy, self-described “Arkansas redneck with fine art aspirations” sometimes falls on his face. And sometimes he succeeds brilliantly, as he does here, with the simplest of materials suggesting simultaneously 3D recreations of his signature line drawings, alien insects, and AT AT’s, those Star Wars animal/artillery hybrids as rapid-fire as Butcher’s imagination.

At ArtLab, University of Memphis, through May 21st

With Styrofoam and bits of colored paper, Tim Kinard sculpts life-size clowns, jugglers, lion tamers, tightrope walkers, and acrobats for “Final Acts,” his master’s thesis exhibition at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis.

One of Kinard’s most powerful acts takes place in a small side show (aka the New Media Room) where the World’s Strongest Man flexes his muscles, hoists a can of beer in the air, and towers over the World’s Smallest Man, a laid-back senior citizen dressed in a ’50s-style Mexican wedding shirt and who smokes a pipe, walks with a cane, and sports a bald head and a Buddha belly. Kinard’s dramatic contrasts between body types and mindsets suggest, in part, what we become when overdeveloped biceps and braggadocio diminish the gentle, measured wisdom of the elders.

All of Kinard’s circus performers are carefully observed and psychologically complex. From the high-dive artist on the platform just below AMUM’s 25-foot ceiling and the tight-rope walkers balancing above our heads to the trapeze artist who soars over the partition separating AMUM from the museum offices, Kinard satisfyingly fills one of the most cavernous art spaces in Memphis.

On the museum walls surrounding Kinard’s circus performers, you’ll find another unique exploration of self in Melissa Rackham’s digital images of a stuffed rabbit. Left out in the snow, under a bed, in the middle of a highway, and at a yard sale, Rackham’s emblem of childhood serves as poignant comment regarding the parts of ourselves we anesthetize, forget, put at risk, and sell for too low a price.

At AMUM through May 10th

In “Solitary Tracks Stretched Out Upon the World,” Memphis College of Art’s MFA thesis exhibition at On the Street Gallery, John Gutierrez uses Bic ink and the lightest possible flicks of his wrist to create drawings that range from almost indiscernible wisps of energy to impenetrable black holes that glow with the purple iridescence of the inexpensive ink.

For her Memphis College of Art MFA thesis, Catherine Blackwell-Pena’s digital images of new subdivisions remind us that urban landscaping often razes the earth. In the digital image Viewers of Views, a man standing on a slab of concrete, his back to the viewer, looks out at beautiful uninterrupted expanses of sky, mountains, and forests.

Drawing by John Gutierrez, from ‘Solitary Tracks Stretched Out Upon the World’

Blackwell-Pena places this same hand-poured concrete slab on the floor of the gallery in front of the photograph. Step onto the concrete, but be forewarned: At this point, ecological agenda becomes epiphany that may entice you to trade denuded earth and concrete highways for mossy paths and fine old trees not yet sacrificed to urban sprawl.

On the Street Gallery through May 10th

Other Works Worth Noting

At the University of Memphis Jones Hall Gallery, there’s not a trace of macho posing or narcissism in Melissa Farris’ nearly nude paintings, Brad’s Ass and Brad’s Crotch. With a warm palette and flowing lines, Farris’ BFA thesis records the glow of youth in a svelte young man undressing with the grace of a dancer.

Line and form become even more fluid in Danielle Zuckerman’s Rhodes College senior thesis, Harry, Frodo, and Self. Zuckerman’s face dissolves and re-forms as Harry Potter and Frodo the Hobbit in a digital video that suggests how deeply stories seep into consciousness and shape who we are.

Life-size tightrope walkers by Tim Kinard at AMUM

For her Rhodes College senior thesis, Elizabeth Mann portrays a world where nothing is sacrosanct. In her most poignant painting, Grip, deep burgundy shadows play across the gaunt face of a man whose expression is a mix of anguish and angst. Neither fantasy nor psychedelic color nor cartoon flowers have prepared him for the world he sees when he removes the still smiling and wide-eyed Teletubbie helmet from his head.

MCA senior, Judith Stevens sums up this year’s student art with the wildly imaginative mixed-media altar Hermetic Nomad, in which defecating babies, roaring lions, hand-stitched fabrics, fine-art paintings, and Eastern sages pay homage to the whole of creation.