Ross Gallery – Memphis Flyer

At 87 years old, Samuel Nichols is still maintaining a successful artistic career. “Ode to Lonerock,” on display at the Beverly & Sam Ross Gallery at Christian Brothers University, marks his second exhibition at the gallery, and he has also exhibited work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon. Nichols, who studied at the Memphis Academy of Art (now Memphis College of Art) and the Art Center of Los Angeles, says he began painting seriously around 1970.

Nichols began showing his paintings while he worked as a creative and art director for Jantzen Inc., the sportswear company based in Portland. With time and experience, Nichols has come to compose brilliantly understated works with a great feel for color and simplicity.

He first came upon the town of Lonerock — a cozy hamlet in Oregon founded in 1881 as a service center for the surrounding ranch land — while searching for a location to photograph a spring line for Jantzen.

Nichols later moved his life and family to Lonerock and remained there for 12 years, inspired by the lives of hard-working people as well as the quiet beauty of the rural landscape. His “ode” is altogether joyous, with bright white skies and a pastel palette that combines almost impressionistic scenery with skillfully detailed subjects.

The pleasure in creating each painting is palpable — gently overlapping mountains fading into blues and pinks, charming schoolhouses in the midst of open fields, and big, rusty machines.

Nichols has also included a few small, clay sculptures in the exhibit as an extension of his work — what he sees as a jocular way to further express and realize forms.

Through April 13th

The National Ornamental Metal Museum opened a new “Tributaries” exhibition for Chris Irick’s most recent venture, “Flight.” Many of the concepts for “Flight” were inspired by a visit to the Science Museum in London, which includes an extensive gallery reflecting British and international achievements (and failures) in aviation. Drawing largely from the oval shapes and dark colors of Victorian mourning jewelry, Irick has created an elegant series of jewelry that is expertly designed and exquisitely crafted.

The piece Whittle’s Daisy Chain was named after Frank Whittle, who developed the jet engine for Britain. And as an avid bird watcher, Irick has delved even deeper into the roots of flight.

“I knew when I started working with the idea of different planes that I eventually wanted to work with birds,” she says.

The first piece she completed for the series, Feathered Turbine, seamlessly unifies natural and man-made aspects of flight. A semblance of the rotary engine is constructed of actual finch feathers from Irick’s pet finches. She then pierced the finches’ flight pattern on the back, which led to her series of brooches made up of common flight patterns.

Through April 29th

The Metal Museum also recently opened a show of a different variety with the Enamelist Society Exhibition, “Alchemy: Transformation in Contemporary Enamels.” Alchemy is an antiquated, magical principle based on the transformation of matter, particularly attempts to convert base metals into gold. The term illustrates the fascinating process of enameling, as it encompasses the complex and delicate application of glass to metal to create an altogether new material.

“Enamel is powdered glass, and some way or other they magically adhere it to mainly copper or fine silver. Then they fire it, and it melts and fuses into a skin,” says Richard Prillaman, a silversmith and former professor at the Memphis College of Art.

The show, made up of the 13th Biennial International Juried Enamel Exhibition and 9th International Juried Student Enamel Exhibition, highlights works that demonstrate remarkable aesthetic and technical expertise in the medium. Categorized by miscellaneous objects, jewelry, and wall works, the exhibition of more than 100 pieces illustrates most of the numerous methods of enameling, often using multiple techniques within a single piece.

“The most common technique is sifting, where they take the powder and a little cup with a screen in it and sift the enamel on top of their frame. For many techniques, that’s the starting point. Then they’ll do things like sgraffito, where you sift on enamel and then take a scribe and actually draw in it to give yourself a design,” says Kevin Burge, a repairs specialist at the Metal Museum.

“Champlevé is a commonly used method that’s like enamel inlay, where they etch into the metal to create a recessed area and lay the enamel in there, while cloisonné is an alternate method using small wires as a border to separate the colors,” Burge says.

Through June 3rd

For “A Delicate Balance,” the mixed-media installation in the ArtLab at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, Colin Kidder and John Morgan turn toy balloons into fine art. They bend, twist, wrap, and blow rubber balloons into amalgams of vegetable and animal life as they explore what happens when nature’s delicate balance is poisoned, globally warmed, and irradiated almost to extinction.

The only recognizable creatures in their post-apocalyptic jungle are the hummingbirds Kidder and Morgan have sculpted from Polymer clay. While the birds’ tufted bodies and wing feathers are still intact, their beaks are now pointed metal darts sharp enough to pierce the rubbery hides.

And it looks like they’ll be needing them as they hover and dart just beyond the reach of the hundreds of deep-purple, opalescent-orange, and electric-blue tentacles that reach out from the walls or scurry across ArtLab’s floor dragging what look like smooth pink intestines — turned inside out — behind them. Their bellies are stretched to the point of bursting as these phosphorescent, toxic creatures allure and then poison unsuspecting prey.

As edgy as they are instructive, Kidder and Morgan’s original, beautiful, and topical mutants make “A Delicate Affair” a must-see exhibition.

Through February 27th

In Pinkney Herbert’s four large pastel drawings at Playhouse on the Square, energy builds, coalesces into increasingly complex shapes, and culminates in a 100-by-125-inch pastel titled Alpha, one of the most inventive works of Herbert’s career.

A softly glowing, sable shadow, hovering in the background, sucks us in as we are swept across the surface by a spinning serpent. Something more profound is suggested by the serpent’s huge, hinged mouth, its deeply furrowed green forehead crowned with tufts of feathers or leaves, and the threadlike umbilical chord that loosely ties the free-floating shadow (womb? black hole?) to the creature’s belly where large black spermatozoa gestate. Herbert has assembled characters from several creation stories including Mesoamerica’s Quetzalcoatl, the British Isles’ Green Man, and the male and female principles of Shiva, the Hindu god dancing the world into existence.

Mounted in Playhouse on the Square’s impressive new performance and gallery space, Alpha can be read as metaphor for all artists (playwrights, actors, musicians) attempting to shape new ideas and new art forms out of the primordial stew.

Through February 22nd

Christian Brothers University’s current exhibition “Raw Silk” provides viewers with the opportunity to see the collages and silk paintings of two accomplished fabric artists working at the top of their form.

It’s late autumn in Japanese Torii, Contance Grayson’s most evocative collage, in which hundreds of pieces of kimono and Japanese money, stamps, advertising flyers, and vintage postcards are layered and stitched into a deeply textured tapestry of the gardens, sea coast, mountains, and Shinto shrines of Japan. Grayson take us through the gate of a shrine into the courtyard beyond where a tiny figure (the only human presence in the piece) meditates in the garden.

Phyllis Boger’s dyes and resist on silk include crisp, colorful, child-like geometries of Italian hill towns and translucent mosaics. But Boger’s most moving and strikingly beautiful work is Procession.

A weathered copper roof tops a sagging, deep-red facade. Three hooded figures, completely in shadow, stand on mottled royal-blue and teal tiles. One of the figures raises his cloaked arms and gives thanks for the tiny windows of light, umber woods, and rolling fields that border his town. Deep-green and raw-sienna shadows swirling inside the penitent suggest that, instead of merely going through the motions, he deeply feels the ritual he performs.

Through March 11th

Elisha Gold is best known for his metal sculpture, such as the nine-foot sunflower planted at Memphis Botanic Garden whose face is covered with 700 rounds of ammunition instead of seeds.

For Gallery Fifty Six’s current show “Forgive Your Enemies,” Gold has mounted a series of paintings that are as sardonic, socially conscious, and politically astute as his sculpture.

Replete with Ben-Day dots and comic-book-inspired scenes of military battle and beautiful women, Gold’s slick and crisp-edged enamel paintings are, in part, homage to Roy Lichtenstein. In Gold’s particularly chilling portrait of cynicism and presumed superiority, a socialite raises her glass of champagne and toasts the viewer with the work’s title, It’s True. The Bigger the Lie, the More Believe.