Nashville Visual Arts Events August 2009

Twist Gallery is celebrating its 3^rd anniversary this month with what should be a good show by Angela Burks, a figurative painter on the faculty at MTSU. Francis Bacon comes to mind—in aspects of the compositions, not the painter’s personal behavior, which I can’t vouch for either way. Twist has also been asking people to send in postcards as a campaign to save the Arcade Post Office.

And we’ve also got a new space opening, Open Lot, in East Nashville. They are starting out with a solid group show and have great plans for shows in the coming months—next month it’s exhibit of video related to string theory.

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July 31

Open Lot Project Space, Art.Edu. Open Lot is a new space opening up this month at 1307 Jewell Street. The inaugural show, curated with Lain York, is a group show by a lot of the really good young artists in town right now: Kelly Bonadies, Alex Crawford, Courtney Anne Greenlee, Natalie Harrison, Erin Plew, Randy Purcell, Nick Stolle, Mandy Stoller, Kendra Schirmer, Myrna Talbot. Open Lot has space in St. Louis as well and is promising interesting shows in the future. The location, in East Nashville, is near Ellington Parkway, in the neighborhood between Cleveland Street and Trinity Lane—you may want to check Google maps on this one.

August 1

Twist, Angela Burks and Love Letters to the Post Office. I’ll probably have more to say about this show later. Burks is an MTSU grad, she went away for an MFA, and she back teaching there. She is doing portraits where the faces are obscured by a mess of blood-red colors, making them something like forensic pictures. The gallery is also selling commemorative posters that are quite nice, and Eastern Block is playing downstairs.

Sera Davis, Admir Jahics and Comenius Röthlisbergers. Two Swiss artists known as The Invisible Heros have done drawings taken from freeze frames on YouTube. At this point, YouTube is one of the most pervasive and influential sources of visual content in our society, but at best it indiscriminately gathers in trivia and profound material, and at worst may impoverish our visual world. These artists give over an old art form drawing, to this new world.

Blend, Wasted Thread. Tiffany Denton is leading a collaborative project in which the gallery has asked people to send in used clothing and textiles which will be sewn together into a big installation piece. After the installation, the cloth will be reworked into items to be sold in shops around town to support Kiva, a micro-lending program.

Rymer, Drew Galloway and Gordon Chandler. These two artists both work with and on metal. Galloway paints on tin sheets that he has burned and otherwise manipulated. Chandler is a sculptor who sounds like he works with reused materials like oil drums.

The Arts Company, Avant-Garage Sale. In addition to their annual sale of gallery work, this year the Arts Company is holding an Art Exchange that will feature pieces from collections and estates.

Tinney Contemporary. The My Magic Cape show, featuring Don Evans’ drawings, continues. I’ve got a review of this in the Scene that comes out tomorrow.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, SNAP. The Society of Nashville's Artistic Photographers steps out again, this time at DPC. Participating photographers include Laura Carpenter, Denny Adcock, Kay Ramming, Eric Denton, Martha Smith, and Nicholas Dantona.

Plowhaus at the Arcade.

Studio 83.

MIR Gallery.

Open Lot, Tiny Tornadoes, Gracious Calamity and Buffalo Clover. Part of their opening weekend events, Open Lot is having 3 bands playing on the night of the gallery crawl—3 bands, starts at 9, $10 cover.

August 6

Art After Hours. The Nashville Association of Art Dealers has started a program in which members stay open from 5 until 8 on the first Thursday of the month. For a list of participating galleries go to the NAAD website. Food seem to be an important part of this—LeQuire is going to have Las Paletas popsicles.

Zeitgeist, Oblique Strategies: Dr. Roy Elam. Dr. Elam is director of the Center for Integrative Health at Vanderbilt and will talk about wellness as a part of Zeitgeist’s series of speakers from fields other than art leading talks in the gallery.

Cumberland, Parks and Greenways Foundation benefit. Cumberland has several artists who have made works that about the environment as a fundraiser—participants include Andrew Saftel, Ann Wells, Billy Renkl, Carrie McGee, Don Gilbert, Jeff Danley, Jeff Green, Johan Hagaman, Xin Lu, Ron Porter, Kit Reuther, Max Shuster and Dane Carder.

August 22

Gallery One, David Douglas and Tracey Lane. Douglas is a photographer who starts with black and white images taken with all sorts of equipment, including Polaroids and pinhole cameras. He antiques and roughs up the images in sometimes extreme ways. Lane is a painter who does things similar to Douglas in her medium, scarping and scratching the surface