Tag: Perry Nicole Fine Art

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In the Abstract

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

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Full Throttle

From Elizabeth Alley’s saturate, crisp-edged depictions of the 1950s in Perry Nicole’s 10th Anniversary Exhibition to Mary Stubbs’ black-and-white infrared photography at the Buckman to Daisy Craddock’s brooding Southern landscapes at David Lusk, Memphis galleries are bringing in the new year with shows that run the gamut of sensibility and style.

Rod Moorhead, one of Perry Nicole’s newest artists, counterpoints Elizabeth Alley’s paintings of starched white blouses and Danish modern divans with Furies #6, a pit-fired clay sculpture of a young woman who appears to take shape or to decompose in front of our eyes. Pieces of cloth (or perhaps Eden’s proverbial serpents) wrap around the loins and barely pubescent breasts of a creature who looks like a hybrid of a fallen angel and teenage Eve. We can see the sculptor’s thumbprints in the figure’s ruffled, sooty brown wings and the armless, half-formed body that still looks malleable. The half-closed eyes and relaxed mouth (in limbo? a little dazed?) complete Moorhead’s haunting evocation of what it feels like to be human, to be able to glimpse the divine while still trapped in a mortal coil.

Perry Nicole’s anniversary exhibition also provides viewers with an opportunity to see, side by side, works by a wide range of accomplished landscape artists, including Martha Kelly’s signature vision of summer, Top of the Island, in which a canopy of trees casts cool, dark shadows across a grassy field that looks lime-green in full sunlight.

Instead of the expressive female forms for which she is best known, Mary Reed contributes textured, sinuous landscapes to the show. In Boundaries, for example, the bare branches of a misshapen tree reach out toward a winding river and layers of handmade paper, fabric, and paint suggest the heft and roughhewn surface of large boulders as well as the rise and fall of waters rushing toward us.

Arline Jernigan fearlessly works and reworks the surface of her mixed-media, nearly monochromatic painting Flight. We soar through overcast skies past crumbling limestone rock faces, where plant life just begins to take hold in the crevices, where ideas just begin to take shape on an almost blank tabula rasa that is one of the subtlest and most assured works in the show.

Through February 26th 

TU, a touring company noted for its inventive syntheses of dance forms (including ballet, contemporary, and African), performs Friday, January 29th, at the Buckman Performing & Fine Arts Center. TU’s choreography has been described as “beautiful, intelligent and singularly wrought.” The same can be said of the watercolors, ceramics, and black-and-white photography mounted just outside the Buckman auditorium in the Levy Gallery’s January exhibition, “Seen, Shaped, Considered: Works Inspired by the Natural World.”

In one of the most mature works of her career, Mary Stubbs — a photographer noted for images of crosses and church steeples — evokes transcendence with infrared light and a trinity of trees. The trees at bottom left and bottom right of Beyond the Moment are barren. Across the top of the work, branches of a third tree are covered with buds backdropped by luminous jet contrails and a preternaturally dark sky.

Anne Froning Wike creates a sense of wonder with ceramics. A prime example is Lotus Gazing Bowl — Amethyst, a clay vessel shaped out of ever-widening circles of translucent mauve petals flecked with dark green. At the center of this inventive, exquisitely beautiful mandala is a tiny pale-pink rose.

Clouds roll across the top edge of Tom Pellet’s satisfyingly complex, delicately observed watercolor All That Glitters. Near the bottom, a geometric abstraction of greens and corals repeats the colors in the leaves and petals of a large camellia that fills the rest of the work.

Through February 12th

Massive oaks, magnolias, and crepe myrtles weighed down with dusty mauve blossoms nearly fill the canvases in “Points South,” Daisy Craddock’s show at David Lusk. There are no breezes, no rippled waters, no rustling of olive-green foliage in Craddock’s oil-on-linen Magnolia, Midday. Instead, the placid gray surface of a lake reflects an overcast sky. In hands less skilled than Craddock’s, colors muted and images blurred by thick atmosphere could feel suffocating.

For viewers who both rue and revere the Deep South’s all-encompassing humidity (including Craddock, who grew up in Memphis in the ’50s when open porches and ceiling fans were the norm, not central air-conditioning), Craddock’s honest and elegiac paintings register as brooding rather than oppressive, contemplative instead of languishing.

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Tough Times

It was one heck of a year for Memphis art. The tougher things got, the more sardonic, surreal, and soul-searching artists became with their works.

Universities, museums, and galleries, also reflective of the times, mounted particularly moving exhibitions. Memphis College of Art’s January exhibition, “Close to Home: African American Folk Art from Memphis Collectors,” featured one of Hawkins Bolden’s untitled scarecrows. Made out of pots drilled full of holes and held together with brooms and frayed fabric, Bolden’s deeply textured testament to life conjured bullet-riddled WWI helmets on top of old wooden crosses and Don Quixote fighting injustice atop a broomstick horse.

For its summer show, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art exhibited 81 of Jacob Lawrence’s prints, including his masterworks, “The Legend of John Brown” series. These spare works were poignantly apropos for challenges we face today. In screenprint No. 1, Christ hangs on the cross back-dropped by what looks like fast-moving storm clouds, the wings of a large raven, or an omen — readings that reminded us that Christ’s crucifixion was a dark drama about government brutality and warring religious factions as well as the hope for redemption. 

“Lichtenstein in Process,” on view through January 17th at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, includes eye-popping, comic-book-inspired collages, etheric landscapes, wry homages to modern masters, and one of the most moving works of Lichtenstein’s career, Collage for the Sower.

Lauren Coulson’s fall show at Jack Robinson Gallery featured photos taken in Europe. By manually winding the black-and-white film in her inexpensive camera, Coulson made multiple exposures of crumbling statues and eroding architecture and clock towers. These blurred and distorted images were powerful portraits not of grand cathedrals or great generals but of time itself.

Jason Miller filled the rest of Jack Robinson’s fall show with kaleidoscopic mixes of digital images that included department-store Santas, Sunday school portraits of Christ, and corporate logos. Initially dizzying, the open-ended symbolism of Miller’s “Energy Fortress Series” and his free-flowing “Digital Mandalas” ultimately celebrated humankind’s ability to cut through corporate spin and childhood fantasy, to embrace what Miller described as “a more open form … where imagination and spirituality outweigh the need to belong to particular religious sects.”

Nine September exhibitions, collectively titled “Greely Myatt: and exactly Twenty Years,” celebrated Myatt’s sly humor and down-home wisdom in venues as varied as the Clough-Hanson Gallery, the National Ornamental Metal Museum, and the P&H Café. In A Brief History of Sculpture at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, soap bubbles spilled down the sides of a worn wooden plinth as Myatt took sculpture off its pedestal and suggested that art, rather than being concise or categorical, is effervescent and ever-changing. For his show at David Lusk Gallery, Myatt carved a wooden beam into a freestanding pair of pants titled Like a Lighthouse, which he mounted on a table. This wry, viscerally compelling sexual icon also served as a poignant symbol for the emptiness and isolation we sometimes feel in spite of the stimuli that flow 24/7 in our wired-up, plugged-in, cyber-spaced world.

John McIntire was at his quirky, cutting-edge best in the nearly seamless syntheses of the cerebral, the spiritual, and the sensual that shaped his female torsos in a November show at Perry Nicole Fine Art.

The most resonant metaphors for 2009 were the brambles and weathered branches that worked their way out of underbrush and crossed a sometimes arid, sometimes golden-ochre earth in Jeri Ledbetter’s November show of paintings, “Mano a Mano II,” at L Ross Gallery. Charcoal washes coalesced into the death throes of some prehistoric beast in Cielo II. Above the creature, in wild scribbles that arced and jabbed across a piercingly blue sky, we could feel both the artist’s and the ancient beast’s rage for life.

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Something Old, Something New

Adolph Gottlieb: Early Prints,” the current exhibition at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, chronicles a pivotal moment in the history of art. The prints’ titles (Pictograph, Hieroglyph, Omen, Voyage, Aura) tell the story. From 1933 to 1948, the time frame during which these works were created, Gottlieb printed and painted his way through other artists’ styles and the motifs of other cultures and, with the help of surrealism, recorded images from his own dreams and personal visions.

In the 1945 etching Untitled (E # E), two necks grow from each side of an upside-down face whose features have been rearranged by cubist distortion. Whorls morph into waves into phalluses into snakes into fingers. One of these fingers presses into the body of a large fish-like creature whose mouth opens wide with surprise.

In this and many of the other prints in the show, Gottlieb develops an increasingly original, gestural, nonrepresentational style that foreshadows the work of the abstract expressionists (Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline et al.), artists who changed the face of art in this country and around the world.

At AMUM through October 20th

You’ll find the most unsettling, show-stopping symbolism at L Ross Gallery in Margaret Munz-Losch’s exhibition, “Damnatio Memoriae.” An armadillo sits inside a rotting cypress stump in Munz-Losch’s primordial six-foot-tall painting Lullaby: Madonna of the Moss. Instead of her own litter of pups, the armadillo holds an armless human baby whose left eye is milky white. Fire ants march around the infant’s forehead like a crown of thorns.

Adolph Gottlieb image: Adolph and Estther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by Vaga, NY, NY, AEGF #4682P

The armadillo is either cradling or consuming the infant. Both readings are possible in a world where life, death, and decay are inseparable. Saplings grow out of rotting logs; cypress knees thrive in fetid, microbe-rich waters. This work’s subverted religious symbols, swampy environment, and green vines wrapped around cars and a school bus suggest that the lullaby the Madonna/armadillo croons to the infant goes something like this: Neither textbooks nor creeds nor motorized vehicles can deliver us from nature which, ultimately, reclaims everything. The more we try to insulate ourselves inside our books, inside our minds, inside our cars — the more we miss out on life’s raw beauty and power.

At L Ross Gallery through October 27th

Using skills and sensibilities learned from Chinese landscapists and sculptors of miniature stone mountains, Michael Costantini casts lean weathered bronzes whose irregular surfaces look architectural, organic, and geologic. In Perry Nicole Fine Art’s current exhibition, “Michael Costantini,” these evocative totems look like beams of a skyscraper excavated in some distant future, 200-year-old saguaro cacti whose wounds have been faithfully recorded, and/or vertical rock faces blanketed with moss and lichen.

Costantini’s acrylic paintings are also composed of rough-edged, irregular geometries. Scumbled and overlapping blue, beige, and indigo rectangles in The Outer Banks hover and shift like the seas/sands/storms of the coastal community in North Carolina where Costantini lives.

At Perry Nicole through October 29th

Hamlett Dobbins’ abstract paintings are visual shorthands for patterns as simple as the shape of a friend’s head and for processes as complex as the evolution of friendship. In his David Lusk Gallery exhibition, “Every One, Every Day,” Dobbins digs deep into mind and matter and paints what look like shadows moving across mental and physical landscapes, moisture oozing through cellular membranes, the centrifugal force of orbiting planets, and worm holes in facets of light.

Two of the show’s most understated works clearly demonstrate Dobbins’ mastery of color and light and, like much of Dobbins’ art, evoke a synesthetic response. A 3 o’clock sun blazes at the bottom of Untitled (for L.T./G.M.). Alternating layers of transparent yellows and greens turn the canvas into a meadow shot through with light. What looks like a piece of fabric, stained green and gold, billows at the top of the painting. Stand in front of this work, and you’ll feel sun on your body, breezes in your hair.

Two golden diamonds overlap and fill Untitled (for L.T./J.V.T.). At each of the diamond’s tips are small portholes. Like the view through a keyhole in a Dutch masterwork, you’ll see detailed worlds through these portals. Complex patterns of cumulus clouds float through 10 different shades of blue above forested hillsides, crows on pitted stone walls, and meadows covered with grains and grasses.

These small, surprisingly complex scenes demonstrate Dobbins’ skill at landscape as well as abstraction and prove him to be a magician whose sleights of hand and mastery of materials teach us to look, really look, at each scintilla of shape, color, and light.

At David Lusk through October 27th