Nashville Visual Arts Events July 2010

I haven’t gotten much of anything for the last half of the month, but there’s probably something coming up and more than likely something I’ve gotten notices on but I’m missing. Several good things opening on Art Crawl night. Tinney’s show should be good—Longobardi and Prusa have both shown engaging work on previous occasions. Laura Chenicek (at Blend) is always thoughtful, and the work at MIR sounds like it should be good.

Local galleries are continuing their events in support of Rusty Wolfe and Kim Brooks’ Finer Things Gallery, devastated by the flood. The participating galleries will show work from Finer Things and pass on the proceeds to Rusty and Kim. This month it’s LeQuire, Local Color/Midtown, and Zeitgeist:

July 1 (5-8pm) LeQuire Gallery

July 8 (5-8pm) Local Color/Midtown Gallery

July 9 (5-8pm) Zeitgeist Gallery

See Facebook for more info.

Belcourt’s got really good films coming up. I Am Love, opening on July 9 and probably only up for a week, and Winter’s Bone opening July 16 are getting amazing reviews. And the Kurosawa series continues.

Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery opened two new exhibits in June that I didn’t get into the listings: American art from the collection, and a survey of drawings also from their collection.

As always, if you have an email list of your own, feel free to forward this.

If someone wants to get added directly to my list for the email, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

July 1

Cumberland, Bob Durham talk. Bob’s a great painter, and always a lot of fun to talk to. He’s got a reputation as a kind of satirist, and he enjoys cracking jokes in his paintings, but there are times when he stops you dead in your tracks with an effortless integration of classical images and forms into his work.

Zeitgeist, Kristi Hargrove, Todd McDaniel, Andrew Smaldone, Ruth Zelanski, and Derek Cote The second installment of Zeitgeist’s summer group show. Kristi’s work keeps evolving, starting from a foundation of high level draftsmanship but that keeps messing with what you can see and increasingly questions the surface she’s working on. I realized I haven’t seen Todd’s work in a while. It looks like he’s working with more schematic elements that the abstractions of his that first caught my attention.

Oosimaginary, Ovvio Arte. Oosimaginary is a 3-person performance group that does improvisation that incorporates music, dance, and theatre. They are also performing Friday night (July 2). Performance at 8:00.

Gallery One, Chad Awalt. A sculptor of figurative work in wood.

July 2

Center for the Arts (Murfreesboro), Ezzy Harrold and Charlie Rauh. Guitarist Rauh and dancer Harrold have done a series of experimental dance/composition collaborations in the last year or so at various venues in town. This is their latest and apparently their last local performance as they head off to New York. Nikki McFadden and 84001 are also performing. Center for the Arts, Murfreesboro, 110 West College Street, 7:30-9:00

Pandit Ajoy Chakraborty, Music City Sheraton Hotel. A concert of classical Hindustani vocal music presented as part of a Bengali cultural festival this weekend. According to the email I receive, this concert is free but I would double check and make sure that conference registration is not required (www.bangamela.org). The concert starts at 11:30 p.m., and it’s at the Sheraton Music City Hotel, not the temple.

July 3

Tinney, Pam Longobardi, Patricia Bellan-Gillen, Margery Amdur, Carol Prusa, and Peggy Cyphers Longobardi has shown previously at Tinney, with works like wall-mounted collections of monochrome objects that bring to mind the accretion of human debris in the ocean and the transformation of objects from function to form and converging in ways where individuality gets absorbed into the mass. I saw strong emotions in her work, as she responded to devastating chaos in the world with smaller acts of order-making. Her new works are paintings bursting with color. The other artists are billed as new to Tinney. Prusa was in a very nice exhibit at the Frist, Shades of Gray—this show will include finely detailed drawings on domed pieces of acrylic accented with points of light from fiber optics.

MIR, Bernard and Danesha Stallings. This couple have endured the hardships of Bernard’s multiple deployment to Iraq and put their conversations and experiences over those years into works on paper.

Blend, Laura Chenicek For her Blend project, Laura takes on the subject of sexual violence—marital rape, sexual abuse, and incest—in work designed in ways that force viewers to decide how much they want to see. She has done work with similar devices of exposure and multiple surface, but not, in what I’ve seen, dealing with such charged material.

Davis, Urban Project 2. For a second year, Davis is doing a show of graffiti artists and “urban” designers and jewelers. It’s a great change of pace for the Arcade and the Art Crawl.

Twist, Mitch O’Connell. A Chicago artist who whips up wild compositions with tattoo, circus signs, cartoons, and advertising iconography. Not just borrowing from tattoo imagery, O’Connell has done actual tattoo design.

The Arts Company, Chris Beck, Tony Breuer, Judy Nebhut, and Deborah Wait Typical variety from the Arts Company—paintings by Breuer, photos by Nebhut, sculpture by Beck, and Mosaics by Wait.

Rymer, Thomas Petillo, Christopher Rodrigues, Caleb Charland, and Matt Mikulla and Chris Ellis. Petillo, Rodriguez, Charland, and Mikulla are all photographers associated with the Society of Nashville Artistic Photographers (although Matt’s even better known as one of the pioneering gallery/studio owners in the Arcade who used to put out a new body of work every month). Ellis is a sculptor.

Estel, Dana Costello and Moco Sasamoto. Cartoon-like paintings of ambiguous scenes by Costello, biomorphic, vaguely sexual wood sculptures by Sasamoto.

Open Lot, Diet Blood. Another multi-media event at Open Lot, with paintings by Donny Smutz and performances by Dave Cloud, Deluxin’, Square People, Marj, and the Panty Raid burlesque group.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, works related to Magdalene House This exhibit includes Kaaren Engel, Paul Harmon, and others, including women who’ve been through the program, which serves women who have a history of prostitution and drug abuse. The group has had great success with the Thistle Farms line of bath and body products that they design, manufacture, and market.

Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan, Music City Sheraton Another concert at te Bengali cultural festival at the Music City Sheraton, this one featuring Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan on sitar. This one does have an admissions price--$50 or $25 according to the email I received, but again I’d check with the conference on it: www.bangamela.com. It’s scheduled to start at 3:00 in the afternoon.

Nashville Visual Arts Events June 2010

Rusty Wolfe and Kim Brooks’ Finer Things Gallery is one of the great hidden spaces in Nashville—pass through the gates on Nolensville Road and down a short driveway, and you’re in a realm that seems far away from the city, surrounded by a sculpture garden and cut off from the city by trees, with maybe the biggest commerical gallery space in town. All of it perched on the edge of a creek. Bucolic. Except when it rains over a foot in a day. Then it’s a mess. Apparently they had devastating damage from the flood—10 feet of water in the building, sculptures swept away, and in addition to the gallery, the facility includes Rusty’s studio and their living space. Several Nashville galleries are helping out by donating their sales on one day to help out Rusty and Kim. This round robin fundraiser starts on June 3 during the Art After Hours when Cumberland will pitch in with 100% of their sales for the evening. The entire list of dates and galleries is as follows:

June 3 (6-9 pm) Cumberland Gallery

June 11 (5-8pm) The Arts Company

June 24 (5-8pm) Gallery One

July 1 (5-8pm) LeQuire Gallery

July 8 (5-8pm) Local Color/Midtown Gallery

July 9 (5-8pm) Zeitgeist Gallery

See Facebook for more info

A couple of shows I’m particularly looking forward to this month: Sisavanh Phouthhavong and Jarrod Houghton at Tinney and David Hellams at Downtown Presbyterian Church. And in addition to the shows opening I’m listing here, Rymer and Davis have shows continuing from May.

William Pope L. is going to be back in town June 13-19 for more shooting on the “Versioning Nashville” video project that he is doing with TSU. Contact TSU if you want to be involved: gallery@tnstate.edu

And the Belcourt has the new Harmony Korine movie, Trash Humpers, for a few more days, then a documentary kind of about Banksy coming up (Exit Through the Gift Shop) and a big series of Kurosawa films that starts with Ran on June 11.

As always, if you have an email list of your own, feel free to forward this.

If someone wants to get added directly to my list for the email, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

June 3

NCAP Neuhoff Building, Kevin McGarry talk. NCAP is starting a new lecture series with a talk by New York-based critic Kevin McGarry. The event will be a conversation for RSVPs by June 1, but you might check with them and see if you can still send in an RSVP. McGarry’s in town to review Alicia Beach’s show at Seed Space on Chestnut Street. I haven’t seen anything about an opening, but it is listed at being up for all of June and July.

Cumberland, Dane Carder talk. A gallery talk by a young artist showing at Cumberland, whose paintings are drawn from old photographic images.

Zeitgeist, Nicole Baumann, Mark Bynon, Shannon Clark, Joe Saunders, and Patrick Schlafer Zeitgeist continues its tradition of summer group shows with at least longish term gallery artist (Bynon) and some newcomers (at least to me), like Baumann who has recently finished an MFA at the very highly regarded program at VCU and Schlafer who just got his bachelor’s degree from the surprising and challenging program at Lipscomb.

Vanderbilt Space 204, Jennifer Stoneking-Stewart. Exhibit by a printmaker who was teaching at Belmont but is moving to a school in South Carolina next year. Reception from 4-6. The gallery is open 10-4 on weekdays.

June 5

Tinney, Sisavanh Phouthavong and Jarrod Houghton. Independently Phouthavong and Houghton are two of Nashville’s best artists—she’s a painter and he’s a sculptor of life-like scenes. They are also married, and they’ve collaborated on the work in this show. I don’t know if I’ve seen the results of their collaborations—they had a great show together at Ruby Green, which presented separate bodies of work from them (and Erin Anfinson). Even there, some of Houghton’s work was intimately connected to their shared experience, and it is easy to imagine that the work they make together will be coherent and compelling.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, David Hellams. Hellams is known for his brilliant comic figurative drawings, executed in a meticulous hand, but he’s trying something different for the paintings in this show. He’s looking at rooms rather than people, and using very different methods that include layers of canvas. It sounds (and from one image, looks) much rougher than earlier work, but also more tactile and less tightly coded.

Estel, Anna Jaap, Steve Knudson, and Ian Kessler-Gowell. Paintings by Jaap and Knudson, glass by Kessler-Gowell. Jaap’s work has a very specific and uncommon tone, that entwines beauty, even prettiness, with wildness and darkness. It embraces decoration and familiar tropes like botanical forms, but much else lurks within it. It is romantic in the historical sense of the word, with a capital R.

Blend, Ali Bellos Ali’s project is called re:seed, and revolves around creating and disseminating seedballs around town. There are all sorts of seeds, but there’s an emphasis on “phytoremediating plants that can help to repair soils contaminated with heavy metals and organic pollutants, green cover crops that will help to restore nutrients to the soil, and native plants that heal, either through medicinal properties or aesthetic beauty.” In the exhibit and a website (www.alesandra.net), participants can see where the reseeding will occur and suggest other sites. In June there will be a bike tour of the sites and at the end of the growing season the plants will be sampled to analyze them for the presence of metals and the impact of the remediation. The project probably had its origins before the floods but takes on new significance in its aftermath.

MIR, Marc Pewitt. An exhibit of photograms, images made by placing objects directly on light-sensitive paper. It’s an old experimental technique, probably most famously used by Man Ray.

Twist, Margaret Pesek. A body of work that riffs on the imagery of Catholicism, its shrines and icons. Pesek sounds like she approaches this material with a particularly intense engagement with the mystery which these images and objects hold.

The Arts Company, Brother Mel Brother Mel’s annual exhibit at the Arts Company is accompanied this year by a monograph on him written by The Arts Company’s Anne Brown. Brother Mel will be doing a book-signing for that at Davis-Kidd Friday evening. The exhibit at The Arts Company covers the many media this wildly prolific artists works in.

Rymer, Erin Anfinson, Jonathan Ferrara, Michael Brown. Closing reception.

June 8

Zeitgeist, Jonathan Neufeld. Zeitgeist launches another series of cross-disciplinary gallery talks with Neufeld, a philosopher at Vanderbilt whose interests include performance and interpretation, and the philosophies of music, aesthetics, politics, and law.

June 11

Belmont Mansion, Beth Gilmore. Part II of Beth’s senior show opens at Belmont Mansion, where she has worked for many years and which has been a huge source of images for her work. The elements shown in May at Downtown Presbyterian Church included all sorts of twisted Victoriana, like gilt frames burgeoning with computer circuit boards and constructions under bell jars. Reception from 6-8:30 on the 11^th.

June 17

Tennessee State Museum, Bernard de Clavière and Romance of the Horse. Two related shows, one of which features a renowned painter of equestrian subjects who has lived in Nashville since 2002. The State Museum has assembled a selection of equestrian art and artifacts from its own and other local collections to go along with Clavière’s work.

June 18

Frist Center,The Golden Age of Couture and Tokihiro Sato. The couture show was organized by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and looks at fashion houses in London and Paris right after World War II (1947-57). The period covered starts with the establishment of Christian Dior’s house and ends with his death. The V&A is one of the world’s leading collections of design and decorative arts, and it sounds like they’ve got examples of some of the major works by the designers active during these years. In the CAP Gallery, Sato is a photographer who started out as a sculptor and uses the photo medium as a way of capturing light and space. He uses large-format cameras and long exposures to capture light that he moves across a scene. It’s a kind of painting, and also performance.

June 26

Cheekwood, Aaron Rotham. Rothman is a photographer who has put together a site-specific exhibition for Cheekwood’s Temporary Contemporary space.