Tag: Tad Lauritzen Wright

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Gotta Catch ’Em All

A trading card by Alex Paulus (Photo: Artist Trading Cards Memphis)

Some collect baseball cards; others collect Pokemon cards. For Alex Paulus, a kid in the ’90s, it was Marvel trading cards. “That was my favorite thing when I was a kid,” he says. “They were like these fully rendered oil paintings of Marvel characters.” Little did he know that his childhood hobby would inspire him to start a new kind of trading card in Memphis, almost three decades later.

In 2020, when lockdown rolled around and boredom took over, the artist explains, he had an itch to return to those Marvel cards that had once excited him, so he purchased a box of them. “I found out that in one of the packs in the box, you could get an original hand-drawn piece of art on a trading card,” Paulus says. “And I got one of those cards. I was like, ‘Oh man, this is really cool.’ … So that kind of gave me the idea of what if I could buy a pack and it was just filled with all of these handmade cards and how cool that would be.”

Paulus, as it turns out, wasn’t the first to think of creating trading cards with original art. That honor belongs to a Swiss artist, M. Vänçi Stirnemann, who in 1996 initiated an ongoing and now worldwide performance whereby artists of all backgrounds create, collect, sell, and trade self-made unique works, 2.5-by-3.5 inches in size. 

Inspired by this, Paulus became determined to bring the phenomenon to Memphis and started the Artist Trading Cards Memphis group, with local artists creating their own tiny art to sell and trade. In March, the group hosted their first event and are now gearing up for their second, this time at Crosstown Art Bar. The goal, Paulus explains, is to “inspire others to make their own artist trading cards and become part of the performance, too.”

For the event, a few artists will sell their limited-edition 2.5-by-3.5-inch works at affordable prices, some as low as $10. Some will sell them individually, and others will sell them in packs. Some cards you’ll be able to see before purchasing, and others will be a surprise. Some packs will even have golden tickets for full-sized artwork if you’re lucky. Of course, you’ll be able to trade cards with other collectors at the event, and you can even bring in your own 2.5-by-3.5-inch works to trade for the last hour from 8 to 9 p.m.

Participating artists, along with Paulus, include Mary Jo Karimnia, Sara Moseley, Nick Peña, Tad Lauritzen Wright, and Michelle Fair. “These are legit gallery-showing artists who are making these,” Paulus says of the artists. “It’s not just getting our friends who like to doodle on stuff.”

Keep up with the group on Instagram (@artisttradingcardsmemphis).

Artist Trading Card Event, Crosstown Art Bar, Sunday, July 16, 6-9 p.m.

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Tad Lauritzen Wright’s “Poetics of Gesture” on View at David Lusk Gallery

Repeating It Perfectly (Undone) Again 4, acrylic on canvas (Photo: Tad Lauritzen Wright

At the onset of lockdown, Memphis artist Tad Lauritzen Wright began a series of single-line drawings about the political and social unrest that followed. “They were very narrative,” Wright says. “They were almost like documentary drawings.” But after this collection of drawings, which was featured at the Brooks, Wright, like many, became exhausted with the inundation of bad news and problems to solve.

“The work I made, while I was making it, felt pretty poignant,” he says, “but then it started to feel like a scene in Groundhog Day, you know, where it just kept repeating itself over and over in so many ways. I went into the studio and I had no idea what I was going to do. And that was a good thing.”

And so he took a 6-foot-by-9-foot drop cloth and tacked it to the wall. “So I’m sitting in a chair staring at this big blank drop cloth and this [tangled 100-foot] extension cord is on the floor. I haven’t picked it up yet. And I started thinking about the possibilities of this thing and what it actually represented. And it was much more than the extension cord. It was this idea of problems that I could easily solve when I couldn’t solve any of the ones going on around me. It was going to take a little bit of time to figure it out and untangle this thing, and so I decided I would make a painting about that and I did.”

The subsequent paintings are now a part of his “Poetics of Gesture” show at David Lusk Gallery, where they will be on display through February 5th. The gallery is hosting an open house January 30th, where guests will be able to speak with the artist.

“Poetics of Gesture” Open House, David Lusk Gallery, 97 Tillman, Saturday, January 30th, noon-3 p.m.

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“Born to Hula” at Glitch.

CREDIT: MELLOW MOUNTAIN COALITION 2014/2015

Over the course of the past five months, artists Tad Lauritzen Wright and Hamlett Dobbins have painted about 50 heads. The heads, which currently animate the walls of Lauritzen Wright’s Midtown garage/studio, are made from neon-colored paper and googly eyes. They are not accompanied by bodies. They are heads in the same way that Muppets are animals, which is to say that they are more head-like than they are like anything else, but you couldn’t exactly call them naturalistic.

These recent works from Lauritzen Wright and Dobbins are only the latest effort in the artists’ longtime collaborations. This Friday, Glitch will host the fifth show of the friends’ work together — an exhibition they titled “Born to Hula” after a beloved Queens of the Stone Age anthem. The paintings in “Born to Hula” are a departure from the artists’ earlier collaborations because, where past works have been compiled over long periods via mail, Lauritzen Wright and Dobbins made these pieces working together in the same room, one morning per week.

“I drop my kids off and he drops his kid off and we work,” Lauritzen Wright told me when I visited his studio to see Dobbins’ and his preparations for the show. “One of the titles we were thinking about for the show was ‘Daddy Daycare.'”

What transpires at Daddy Daycare, according to Dobbins, is a kind of “nonverbal conversation.” Paintings are passed back and forth, metal albums are played, pieces are added to or reduced to parts for other paintings. “We come in,” says Dobbins, “and we make these marks and we make these moves and maybe at the end of the day, we will talk about it. It is this nice kind of way of thinking about things.”

The garage studio where Lauritzen Wright and Dobbins work is crowded with liquid acrylics and dirty brushes, torn or otherwise dissembled sheets of paper, half-formed drawings, and glittery material tests. There are also several works attributable to Lauritzen-Wright’s 6-year-old daughter, who the artist cites as one of his major current influences.

“I have a 6 year old and I put a lot of stuff up of hers and she plays out here a lot … but that is kind of where my aesthetic falls at the same time,” says Lauritzen Wright. “I knew my aesthetic was child-like,” he laughs, “but I didn’t know what exact age it was like until my daughter got to be 5 or 6.”

The aesthetic in “Born to Hula” is child-like: monstrous and colorful and plasticky like recycled toys. The “dopey and fun” paintings (as Dobbins calls them) champion a kind of infinitely bright 1970s boyhood held in infinite backyards. But there is also a twist of jaded junkiness in the yet-untitled works, such as the one they describe as “the mush painting with a see-through rainbow on it.” In the paintings’ dark moments, we are reminded that even pristine pre-fab swingsets must one day rust.

The artists often work at a large scale and quickly, without preciousness about past creations. “I make these big oval-shaped paintings and drawings,” Dobbins says. “Sometimes those don’t work, though, and when those don’t work, I just sort of grab four of them and stitch them together. We realized that it would be better if we cut it out and there was this kind of X shape … I have been piling colors on.”

Lauritzen Wright says, “I kind of dig the heads out of abstractions, and then [Hamlett] is digging them out through cutting. Most recently, on some of the larger ones, Hamlett had some really simple linework, and then I went in and kind of accentuated his line. We were really happy with those. It pushes and pulls in both places.”

It will be interesting to see Dobbins’ and Lauritzen Wright’s work at Glitch, Adam Farmer’s house gallery that has, over the course of the past year, hosted Memphis’ most dynamic collaborative shows. Farmer’s space is also casually nostalgic, though for a caffeinated ’90s (Air Bud! Tim Allen!) rather than Dobbins and Lauritzen Wright’s open-hearted ’70s.

Even without the liberal use of googly eyes, Lauritzen Wright and Dobbins collaboration would feel not-too-serious and warm. “Hamlett is the best painter I have ever known,” says Lauritzen Wright, “and the way he goes about using paints has been really interesting. There has been a lot of attention paid to how things look on the surface.”

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Desirables

In “Philosophy of Beauty,” the current exhibition at David Lusk Gallery, Tad Lauritzen Wright reveals strong, if not completely serious, feelings about art, life, and beauty.

In 2nd Chance Series: The Fate of Beauty, he invites viewers to play shuffleboard with a game whose point-zones include “hot as a two dollar pistol,” “drop dead gorgeous,” and “ugly as sin,” the kinds of slurs and adulations that start barroom brawls and mark intense infatuations.

In a body of work that contains no sacred cows, no designations between high and low art, no hierarchies of any kind, Lauritzen Wright turns beauty inside out and upside down. Doodles and cartoon characters stand alongside advertising slogans, masterworks, and redheads. In the large grid painting Redhead Discount, redheads include jackrabbits with fuchsia ears, bright-red sunburned faces, and Hershey-brown hound dogs.

Lauritzen Wright’s cosmetically imperfect figures are sassy and alert. A Minute of My Time is composed of 1,440 self-portraits, one for every minute in a day. The artist records almost every expression, body posture, and bad-hair day known to humankind. In Beautiful Headrests, 1 and 2, tall, lean, squat, round, and oval bodies tumble and play on pillowcases embroidered with Kama Sutra free-for-alls.

Mona Lisa’s umber hair and robe have been replaced with a mosaic of cartoon figures, word games, and handwritten lists in the multi-media collage 2nd Chance Series: Mona Lisa. In Lauritzen Wright’s version of the masterwork, there’s a lot going on inside Leonardo’s laid-back, enigmatic icon of beauty. There are things to do, places she wants to go, people she cares about, favorite movies, and favorite recipes.

On scraps of paper, on pillowcases, in colorful grid paintings, and in the face of the artist, we piece together Lauritzen Wright’s philosophy of beauty. His sassy, sexy, all-systems-go philosophy is as hot as a two-dollar pistol. It’s as hot as minute-to-minute awareness of one’s being.

At David Lusk Gallery through October 28th

Leandra Urrutia’s wildly imaginative figurative works in the exhibition “Ceramic Sculpture” at St. Mary’s Buckman Performing & Fine Arts Center record pleasure at the edge of pain, life at the edge of death, and beauty that is all the more desired because it is temporal and uncertain.

Bulbous white orbs in axis x simultaneously suggest voluptuousness, cancer, and pregnancy, and in variable b, the shins and feet of babies (some with missing toes) hang like trophies from what could be umbilical cords, intestines, tentacles of an octopus, or nylons stuffed with dried brown grasses. In axis y, on the far back wall, Siamese twins or a fetus with an encephalitic head and four legs attempt to push through the membrane of an ovum.

If you can stand being ping-ponged between desire and repulsion, birth and disease, ecstasy and pain, you’re in for one of the most daring and original shows of the year.

At the Buckman Performing & Fine Arts Center through October 27th

Jenny Balisle celebrates beauty with meticulously layered paintings that feature surfaces that look wet to the touch, the application of oil paints similar to those used by the 17th-century Dutch masters, color fields and drips of the abstract expressionists, complex surfaces of Art Brut, and semi-abstract landscapes that possess the scale and atmosphere of Chinese scroll paintings.

“Process,” Balisle’s current body of work at the L Ross Gallery, suggests this artist can simulate almost anything on the surface of a painting, including the complex colors and textures of erosion. Chemical blues and iridescent siennas look like patinas of weathered metal in one of her untitled mid-sized oils on panel. In a triptych of oils (each panel measuring 21-by-45 inches), lemon yellows next to deeply scratched sienna and umber surfaces evoke bright sunlight pouring through chinks in walls encrusted with eons of corrosion.

One of Balisle’s most successful works combines the techniques of the modernists with an Eastern aesthetic. While this painting’s drips and color fields can be read as pure abstraction, its large size (5-by-7 feet), layers of paint shot through with sienna, yellow, and light green, and smudges that resemble stands of bamboo also evoke the scale, atmosphere, and images of Oriental landscape.

Thick impastos of umber on the left side of the work look like touchstones through which we might access this ethereal landscape. The desire to rub one’s hand across the weathered rutted earth and bark is almost irresistible.

At the L Ross Gallery through October 31st