Perambulating the Bounds

Sound Crawl Nashville edition 3

2011-09-30T12:03:00.000-07:00

The downtown Art Crawl generates a swarming, buzzing mass of people, squeezing themselves in and out of galleries, diving for miniature cups of wine, and talking about art, artists, and everything else. For all the intensely social quality of the event, people do have their eyes open. And once a year two musical entrepreneurs ask them to have their ears open when they add the buzzes, clicks, swooshes, and blips of electronic music to the buzz of people in the Arcade.

For three years now, Kyle Baker and Aaron Doenges have curated Sound Crawl a festival of electronic music presented in conjunction with the Art Crawl. Each time they’ve tried something a bit different, but the basic idea is to invite composers from around the country to submit works that will be played in the Arcade and environs during the Crawl. From the first, Sound Crawl has had an enthusiastic response from composers looking for audiences for their music, and the sounds in the Arcade heighten the 40-ring circus feel of the evening.

Baker and Doenges use the term Sound Art rather than electronic music for what they present, a signal to the audience that what they will hear won’t have many of qualities people (unless they are familiar with contemporary classical music) will associate with “music.” As Doenges puts it, these works have “no notes. Usually no instruments. There isn't a performer. And rhythms (even arhythmic rhythms) are often obscured by the newness of the listener to the medium. "Sound Art" leaves people without a preconceived notion of what they will be hearing so we feel that they come with more openness to the experience.”

However, most of the pieces follow the basic rules of music—they have a beginning, middle and end and are composed with a logic in their sequence of sonic events. And therein lies a problem. While the Art Crawl provides a great opportunity to introduce a lot of people to these unfamiliar sounds, it isn’t the best environment to really hear the works. In the Arcade, you’re more likely to catch a snippet here and there, not the full shape of the composition.

The problem is no different than most video art, also a time-based medium. With video, you usually walk into the room somewhere in the middle of the piece and decide whether to stick around for the end or not. Plenty of people sample a few random seconds of the video and move on. You have to evaluate the length of the piece and decide if you want to take the time with it. Sound Crawl limits its submissions to 7 minutes or less, so listeners don’t have to wait forever to come around to the beginning, but they don’t have video’s title sequences and copyright notice at the beginning and/or end to provide orientation.

While the Arcade is lively on Crawl night, there’s no way to make it a place where you can concentrate on music with an abstract structure. So last year Baker and Doenges also presented pieces in more of a concert setting in the sanctuary of Downtown Presbyterian Church. It’s a great room for music, but off the beaten path and it required taking a break from the flow of Art Crawl.

This year Doenges and Baker have new variations in the Sound Crawl events. They will still present pieces in the middle of the Arcade in the middle of the Crawl—it keeps the festival connected to the crowds in the galleries, and Doenges adds “I just think it’s fun to do.” To this they’ve added two events, one later on Saturday and the other on Sunday evening that will expand Sound Crawl into settings where their material becomes the destination—people won’t stumble across the performances while visiting galleries, but will make a decision to attend these separate events. Part of the purpose of the project has been to expose this music to people who will just bump into it at the Crawl. Now they are taking a little more risk and seeing if they can also get some people to search it out.

After the Art Crawl on Saturday, Sound Crawl will sponsor a kind of after-party at the Bank Gallery on 3^rd Avenue. Calling this event the “Listening Room,” they will present some of the selections from the Sound Crawl in less hectic environment. According to Doenges, “we wanted to provide a space where people who were more interested in the works could really listen but without the strange formality of being in a concert hall with nobody on stage.”

The next night, on Sunday, they are inviting people to come back downtown to Downtown Presbyterian Church for “Art of the Future,” which looks like the core of the Sound Crawl this year. Using several rooms in the church, they will present a series of performances sequentially (not simultaneously), along with listening stations for purely recorded work. In addition to the basic ticket price ($10, $5 for students), there’s a VIP ticket for $20 that includes dinner.

The Sunday offering at Downtown Presbyterian Church represents an evolution of Sound Crawl from recordings of electronic compositions into electro-acoustic material with live performance, improvisation, and work that extends beyond pure music composition into a realm that more justifies preference for the name Sound Art over electronic music.

Some pieces have elements of theater, like Elizabeth Roberts’ “Title,” which is her response to an artistic depiction of an antique chair. The performance incorporates the chair into a stage setting with an electronic track and piano improvisation. Michael Kalstrom’s “Life is Dreaming” is a sort of short opera where video accompanies a vocalist, an instrumental soloist and electronics. Visual elements obviously will figure prominently in a piece of video art by Quinn Collins and Tyler Kinney where the sound and images are integral to each other. Paul Schuette goes further into the middle ground between sound and visual art with an instrument he built called Mobile2 that combines several oscillators that mimic the properties of an Alexander Calder mobile.

Most significantly in this evolution for Sound Crawl, they have installed a system built around a software called Weiv which uses Wii controllers to allow several users to interact with video scenes projected on a clear projection surface that floats in air like a hologram. This system will be used with for a performance of a movement from Derek Webb’s recording “Feedback.”

The selections in the Sound Crawl may not always live up to the level of medium transcendence suggested by the phrase Sound Art, but looking at them as musical compositions points to an even more audacious quality of this event. Baker and Doenges have created a festival of contemporary classical composition in plain sight in Nashville. Our town does not have a prominent contemporary music ensemble like the Contemporary Music Forum in DC or Boston Musica Viva. The Symphony and Alias program contemporary pieces regularly but not in great concentration. No one in Nashville presents as much work by living composers to such a large audience in a focused format as the Sound Crawl does each year.

A shorter version of this piece appears on the Art Now Nashville website.

WRVU goes to WPLN

2011-06-08T23:38:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago when WPLN switched over to a mostly talk format, I went through perfunctory motions of complaining about the death of classical music. Truth was I listened to the talk shows then on the AM station and not the classical programming. The switch accommodated my listening patterns. Well, classical music is back with WPLN’s purchase of WRVU, which gives me something else to complain about.

WPLN and Vanderbilt followed the same playbook as KUHF and Rice in Houston. Rice had (or has depending on what you think about internet broadcasting) a superb station, better than Vanderbilt’s. They put it on the block, and the NPR station associated with the University of Houston bought it and created separate sister stations for talk and classical music. Public radio seems to work that way—one station works out something, others pick it up. Several years ago I read some articles about a consultant who worked with the public radio stations on programming that always seemed to end up with less music more talk. Over time, I think most people feel reasonably good about NPR and local public radio as primarily news outlets. The decline of newspapers and the transformation of TV news makes the radio stations very important.

College stations like KTRU at Rice at WRVU at their best became interesting venues with room for a wide range of sound and inspired, idiosyncratic programming. They were places where a fringe improviser could do a live spot on radio for a few minutes. Some DJs emerged with very distinctive ideas—the Sunday afternoon jazz shows on KTRU, or their weeknight world music and experimental/electronic shows, Brian and Elizabeth’s Brazilian and local show on WRVU, Pete’s R&B show, the jazz shows John Rogers did. Chris Davis had a show at various times that was often remarkable, informed and broad-minded, and subversive.

Whenever these stations came under threat, I always wanted the Universities to see these stations and the programming mix that evolved as cultural assets major contributions to the life of the community like a series of art exhibits or classical music concerts. But there’s no getting around the fact that the universities saw these stations as student activities, possibly a training ground. And as student activities radio stations had probably outlived their relevance. I haven’t done a poll, but I can believe that fewer students listen to their college radio station today than way back in my day. Too many options.

According to the press release WPLN bought the frequent for $3.3M and Vanderbilt is going to set aside the money as an endowment for student communications. That means they didn’t sell the frequency to cash in on it. They will save some money on operating costs, and it might free up space, although maybe not if they continue to operate as an internet station. The $3.3M will go into an investment that would generate $165K a year at a 5% payout, $132K at 4%. In other words, not enough that these funds will make a difference for Vanderbilt’s bottom line.

Of the options, what happened at Rice and Vanderbilt is not as bad as I feared. The frequencies could have gone to the religious outfits that dominate the left side of the dial in some times, or ended up broadcasting C-SPAN or whatever it is that took over the public bands in DC (radio has been terrible in DC for over 10 years). I can’t say I’ve been listening to WRVU in recent years. While I never got turned on by much of WPLN’s classical programming, some of their stuff is well done. I don’t listen to Live in Studio C as much as I should, but it seems like they plug in well to concert programming in town. As the Nashville Symphony gets more interesting, they’ll ride with them. There is every reason to think that they will come up with new things.

A few suggestions

Drop the convention of avoiding music with words. Most classical music radio sticks to instrumental music, I believe in recognition of how people use classical radio, often as background music. Words and the human voice draw attention to themselves.

Grab programming from other stations, even if it is not actively syndicated. WQXR in New York recorded and archived the performances from the festival of North American symphony orchestrasat Carnegie Hall.

Do locally-produced programs of electronic and contemporary music. Find someone who can say put together a program on French spectralists or recordings by Ursula Oppens. If you must, put it on the air at some God-awful time, but archive it.

Buy recordings, don’t just rely on what record labels are pushing.

One of the best shows on WRVU was a program of contemporary classical and renaissance music hosted by Angela Lin, a professor in the German department. She died at the early age of 40. WPLN, in the form of WFCL, could honor her memory by trying to match the insight and range of her show.

Lost World

2011-06-05T21:07:00.000-07:00

Visiting the Zoo is a depressing experience. This still comes as a surprise to me. I took such delight in zoos when I was a kid. I knew my way around the National Zoo well, got to the point where I could identify nearly every bird there.

I went back this weekend, to something irreversibly diminished and damaged. In part it comes from getting older. The Zoo seemed so big back then, endless in the new things to see. As an older, larger person, everything is easier to comprehend. I also think the zoo has reduced the number of exhibits. Back in my childhood days, zoos were just beginning to create naturalistic environments for animals, and the National Zoo still had many locked up in row after row of cages. You can fit in more animals that way. Now that they need to give the animals more room to stretch out, there's room for fewer of them. Also, in the intervening years there has been more awareness of the stress on cold climate animals living in such a warm places. A lot of places have gotten rid of their polar bears. I think the National Zoo did that.

Zoos are suspect now. If you’ve paid any attention you know that no zoo provides a great environment for most of the animals. All animals have their habitats and natural patterns of roaming and movement. No way you can catch that in an enclosure.

Habitat brings us to the worst part. Every exhibit, in the interests of education and honesty, describes what has happened to the natural range of the animal on display. And nearly every one is in danger of disappearing in the wild. Indian Elephants, tigers, Central American amphibians. There are so few wild places left, government preserves hold on tenuously and suffer incursions, mysterious diseases sweep from one end of a continent to another, and introduced species drive out the old ones. The exhibits at zoos always talked about conservation in my memory, but somehow back then, back in my childhood, it seemed to be a matter of identifying cases that need attention and getting people to work on those. And there were heroic people who would eventually prevail, in spite of any setbacks. Now seems like we've got a massive series of last ditch efforts across species, geography and ecosystems. I’m not sure anyone believes in restoring balance, only in arks like the seed vault on Spitsbergen in Norway. Gather a breeding stock of each thing that exists and try to keep it safe, map its genome, hold on for who knows what, and hope and pray that events—climatic, political, social—don’t overtake the effort.

A Zoo visit today tolls mourning, for what was lost and what seems impossible to avoid losing.

When I visited as a child, in the 60s and 70s, I saw the zoo as a storehouse of wonders and a gateway to a much larger world where these animals lived in many places I hoped to visit.

At the time I made those visits, the forces were in motion that robbed the world of these places. Modernization, economic integration, the creation of a universal capitalist market and its unrelenting demands to realize economic potential in everything that contained it. Technology and human population too great for anything delicate—like an ecosystem, or a social system—to resist. And chaos generated by all of that.

That pleasure of discovery proved to be innocent and ignorant. And age dispels some ignorance. At the end of the day knowing is stronger. But maybe the breaking of illusions which inevitably accompanies age makes up the bigger part of the mournfulness.

Meek's Cutoff

2011-05-24T06:06:00.000-07:00

Currently showing at the Belcourt, Meek's Cutoff is Kelly Reichardt's story of 3 families making their way to Oregon in 1845, among the first Americans settlers moving into the territory in large numbers. Their party is led by Stephen Meek, a mountain man type who dresses the part with buckskin jacket and long matted beard. You get the sense that even at this point in the West, he was self-conscious about image, marketing himself to these families by looking precisely what they would expect of a frontier guide. And he's gotten them lost taking a short cut to the Wilamette Valley from the main Oregon Trail. So they wander apparently aimlessly in the Eastern Oregon desert and before long have to turn their trek into a search for water.

Along the way they encounter and take captive a Native American man--unarmed, speaking a language none of them understand, which leaves them free to speculate about his motives--will he take them to water, lead them back to a larger band from his tribe, lead them on a suicide march. Or maybe he's as lost as they are. The encounter between settlers and the indigenous people starts with nearly complete incomprehension on both sides. Understanding derives from rudimentary gestures of interpersonal power--Michelle Williams' character helps their captive so he'll owe her something, and it forms the basis for a sliver of a connection between them that in the end dominates the group in which people otherwise fail to gain credibility with each other.

In the sermon in church last weekend my minister talked about moral and spiritual space. Space looms large in Meek's Cutoff. The spaces are open, dry, with the most minimal ground-hugging vegetation in a dormant state. The characters wander through it. The space itself threatens to overwhelm them and destroy them, putting too much distance between them and water, giving them no guideposts to lead their way. This space becomes a moral crucible, breaking them down but on the other side they don't build a new sense of direction in a moral universe, but just seem defeated. After a process of trying to sort out reality and truth from misperception and illusion, the characters resign themselves to not reaching truth or insight, just a political accommodation and a need to plow ahead in some direction. The movie ends without resolving what appears to be the main drama, whether they find water. In the end it doesn't matter, because of the moral space they've been through. The people who will or will not reach the Willamette Valley have been damaged by thsi time in the desert. They've shed so much, such as the expectation of comfort and connection as well as the fundamental idea that what matters is to arrive at a right decision.

I haven't seen Kelly Reichardt's earlier films, which were set in the more contemporary Northwest. I wish I had seen them, because it looks like she is making a more sustained argument about the moral character of the society that emerged from the frontier experience. Rather than ennoble the people who went through it and form the basis for an almost utopian society, the Frontier Experience damaged Americans, created trauma that had physical, epistemological, and moral dimensions. The frontier on some level defeated people, who today wander through a different kind of desolate landscape, where the economy threatens more than beckons and social connections break down.

Obscure abstract

2011-05-19T22:43:00.000-07:00

One roughly breaks the universe of art into people you’ve heard of and those you haven’t. You trust that this sorting represents a measure of relative importance. The names of the major painters of each era are easily accessible. When you run across an unfamiliar name, my first reaction is not “how did I miss this” but some assurance that the figure occupies a more esoteric place in art history. I don’t think I was familiar with Georges Lacombe before I ran across a distinctly Gauguin-esque painting at the Norton Simon Museum, African-mask like figures gathering chestnuts in a strange forest dominated by bright reds. I’m sure Lacombe’s name rolls readily off the tongue of a connoisseur of the Nabis, but I’m complacent enough to assume my ignorance doesn’t represent a serious gap—in fact, these little gaps allow me the pleasure of discovery even at my advanced age.

This certainty breaks down as you move closer to the present in history. For contemporary artists, the prominence of artists in my consciousness, if you did one of those word maps that weight the frequency of terms in a document or other source, is to some extent and within certain bounds, a random process. While it may be impossible to avoid John Currin, I track on Jiha Moon, who is quite interesting, but there are undoubtedly a hundred others of comparable importance of whom I’m utterly ignorant.

On one hand the sorting process of historical significance has not started. 40 years from now maybe people will discuss Bob Durham rather than Currin. I can imagine a case where a “provincial” painter (not residing in New York, LA, Europe, or China) like Bob gets rediscovered, like someone from a small Dutch town in the 17^th century.

We also will have to see if the end of a unifying art historical narrative means that artists from our day will always remain part of an undifferentiated blob of 1,000s of names.

I thought I had a reasonably good grasp on the post-war years, so I would know what to expect from Surface Truths: Abstract Painting in the Sixties. a show at the Norton Simon Museum. Instead, it made me feel quite stupid. The first room was dominated by names I did not recognize at all: Frank Lobdell, Harvey Quaytman, Takeshi Kawashima, Ray Parker, Thomas Downing, Ralph Humphrey, and Stephen Greene. These guys were all in the first of the two rooms. There were also names more familiar to me: Agnes Martin, Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Stella, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin. But I only reached them after a series of unfamiliar names that made me wonder if this was completely an alternative history of art in the 60s.

My parents are great about recognizing names like these. They know more about art than I do by leaps and bounds. But I’m sure I’ll occasionally be able to pull the same trick 40 years from now. “Oh yes, Tara Donovan, she piled up mounds of uniform, mass-produced common objects—plastic cups, pencils—to create not so miniature worlds.”

Thomas Downing was DC-based, so I’ve probably heard his name. A grid of large circles in various shades of reds. They look machine made, but they were hand painted free-hand. The variety and sequence of colors has a pleasing rhythm, with a distinct but not over-bearing pulse. The painting goes well with Ralph Humphrey’s painting, which also deals with gradations of tonality, in this case a surface covered with green, mostly olive, but loose variations in hue and paint thickness that give this painting a complex texture.

One of the points of this exhibit is that even after Abstract Expressionism, as Pop was taking center stage, some people kept on in abstraction. It’s not a very interesting idea. Yes, people kept painting. Rackstraw Downs’ little book of remembrances describes his experience of art in New York consisting of a very different set of painters.

The paintings in this show are very fine. The Downing and Humphreys paintings are satisfying. The work by Ray Parker consists of two large patches of dark green hovering in an abstract ground. Again, they are painted loosely, the shapes not precisely the same or neatly trimmed off. The color of the two differs subtly, and some sections have been built up and worked over more. Frank Lobdell’s work is a sea of vivid orange-red with chains of marks crossing it on diagonals, like some sort of track or a distorted rendering of some sort of figure. The primary chain has thick dark outlines filled with yellows and oranges. The crossing chain consists mostly of faint outlines that look overpainted, partially eradicated. The colors, between the background and the yellows and others in the chain remind me of a stone I had as part of small rock collection I had as a kid, which had the most vivid oranges and yellows occurring together. I don’t remember what the mineral was. I don’t think it was anything precious, just pretty.

As I would expect, California and Western artists are well-represented—Lobdell was in California most of his career, as were Robert Irwin and Larry Bell, and I associate Martin with New Mexico. Of course, it seems true more often than not that shows about this period make an effort to acknowledge the West Coast scene. Several of them have the same story—grew up in the Midwest, served in the war moved to California. The exhibit includes a black and white photo from the period of each artist. These are pictures from that time before the 60s counter-culture started, the men with clean white shirts and short hair, serious and optimistic.

Many of the paintings in this show do connect in my mind with minimalism. There is the most subtle Agnes Martin I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something. A grid of rectangles in an overlapping brick-wall pattern done in pencil. The lines are all light, but their thickness varies distinctly. The piece by Robert Irwin is mostly a monochrome field of a subdued red. The only features are two horizontal lines that run nearly but not quite border to border. One is in a contrasting slate blue color. The other echoes this line above, in the same color as the ground but distinguished by extra layers of paint, making it present through texture.

The paintings in this show are uniformly pretty large, which gives them the heft to stand alone and makes a show of about 20 or so objects sufficient. Each is sort of big gulp. The assessment might be unfair, but I left feeling these were as I said very fine paintings, paintings you can enjoy, but I don’t know if they are important. The fact of these paintings and painters, and of Rackstraw Downes’ account of his New York, can lead you to question whether there really is a narrative for art history, or whether the confusion we experience today is all there really is.

Maybe that narrative isn’t really about art at all, but about cultural impact, and that’s something else. What we end up writing about is not what’s good, but what makes and impression and has an impact, even a transitory impact. So what artists today have an impact? And on whom? Other artists? Or a broader society, though maybe limited to those engaged with elite culture. So who? Matthew Barney or Jeff Koons? Some subset of the Chinese. Ai Weiwei if things keep going the way they are.

Amendment 10-A

2011-05-11T01:00:00.000-07:00

The Presbyterian Church in its inimitable way has found a way to wrap a passionate, critical and potentially divisive issue in the driest possible of coverings, a vote on a small change in wording to our Book of Order, a document organized in sections and subsections that lays out how to run the denomination and the churches within in. We are organized in a kind of federal structure, with local bodies (presbyteries) that are parts of regions (synods) that come together in the national General Assembly. When we change the rules, we have to get a majority of the presbyteries to agree.

Tonight the Twin Cities presbytery voted to change the standards for ordination, giving the amendment the majority vote it needed so it now reads

Standards for ordained service reflect the church’s desire to submit joyfully to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all aspects of life (G-1.0000). The governing body responsible for ordination and/or installation (G.14.0240; G-14.0450) shall examine each candidate’s calling, gifts, preparation, and suitability for the responsibilities of office. The examination shall include, but not be limited to, a determination of the candidate’s ability and commitment to fulfill all requirements as expressed in the constitutional questions for ordination and installation (W-4.4003). Governing bodies shall be guided by Scripture and the confessions in applying standards to individual candidates

That seems pretty straight-forward. The thing is that it replaces language that stated that anyone ordained (ministers, elders and deacons) needed to live in "fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness." In other words you couldn't be gay. But now that's gone. By taking out those words, we have decided to let gay men and women become ministers!

The denomination has been arguing about this for years, decades really. As a mainline denomination, we are pretty liberal but have conservative members and churches as well. We've been trying to avoid the collision of these two points of view for many reasons, but a practical one is that we've been losing members and one assumes that some people and congregations will bolt with this decision. We've already had some of the more conservative churches spin off in separate denominations. But every year that went by with this unresolved was more untenable to people like me. When I without question believe that gay people should be full members of my church, my society, my friendships, everything, how could I continue on in a church that wouldn't acknowledge that? Now we have. Some people had gotten frustrated waiting and had joined the Congregationalists, who are theologically similar to us. Now I feel good about sticking around.

One thing that's particularly heartening is that my Presbytery, Middle Tennessee, was expected to vote no but voted yes. It was kind of close, but it was a yes. Overall, the amendment has passed relatively easily. We seem really ready for this. It doesn't feel like an ambivalent endorsement.

As far as I'm concerned, this decision allows the Presbyterian Church (USA) to be who it truly is, and to realize the best things it has to offer the world. To manifest and live God's Kingdom more.

bin Laden is dead

2011-05-01T23:15:00.000-07:00

The TV's on with the coverage of bin Laden's death. Crowds have gathered outside the White House gates, at ground zero in New York and Times Square, maybe other places. After talk in church about peace, peace, peace, the celebrations seem unseemly. But inevitable. It's like the crowds on VE and VJ day. Spontaneous. The proportions seem off, crowds celebrating the death of one man (and in DC singing Na-Na Na Na, Hey Hey Good Bye like a playoff game), and it's not clear to what extent we are done. In WWII, there was the relief at knowing that the mass mobilizations of opposing sides had come to its cruel end. I do hope that this signals the end of something virulent in the world, and that rebellion becomes the new thing that pushes holy war off the stage. And that we now rapidly accelerate our disengagement as enforcers, and get out of Afghanistan.

Images of Lambert

2011-05-01T21:55:00.000-07:00

As a younger man, but not quite young, I entered a new kind of life I never expected, part of the traditional, mainstream business world. A place where I could easily find myself eating lunch at a colleague's club listening while the others talk about golf. At that time, some time ago now, I became one of those men, mostly men, whose daily life involves familiarity with the airports across the country we pass through every day.

If you speak of the past, even past not so long past like when I stepped into this life, you speak of a time when there was more. In those spaces of the air transit system, more airlines, more flights, more seats. Antediluvian, before the World Trade Center attacks, the years of war, the mismanaged economy and the subsequent collapse.

I remember Lambert Airport in St. Louis when TWA existed and TWA had its central hub there. TWA used a strongly centralized hub and spoke system and every flight might have flown there, especially if you lived in the Central time zone. Arriving at Lambert you found chaos, everyone had connections and had to cover a lot of distance quickly because of the spread out layout.

The main terminal at Lambert was one of those temples of modernity airports like the TWA terminal at Kennedy and Dulles, all of them express a sense of air travel as exciting, all sweep and flow, not the bogged down tortuous experience we know today. Kennedy and Duller were designed by Saarinen. Lambert was designed by Minoru Yamasaki. Same guy who designed the World Trade Center.

Even the name Trans-World Airlines carried the strong scent of nostalgia for the recent past, like PanAm, If you picture an airplane in 1962, you probably picture the logo of one of those now defunct lines.

By the time I started my new life, before the Fall, terminals were becoming irrelevant to the flying experience, a place to run through quickly. I don't see why any airport authority would invest heavily in what travelers encounter before security.

In 2001 American swallowed TWA. This was good news for me, consolidated frequent flyer program into one I used all the time, more flight options in one place. Of course American didnt' need a hub in St. Louis since it had hubs in Dallas and Chicago, sandwiching St. Louis. Lambert withered. American cut back flights, shut down wings of the airport. Very little improvement occurred in those wings. It now feels rundown. Like lots of facilities, not just airports, in the mid-section of the country.

It was a nice surprise to see many scenes from Lambert in the film Up in the Air. There was George Clooney, in the Admiral's Club I know. People with mundane lives like mine feel a frisson when they see a glamorous star in our shoes. I can pretend he is me, I am him. Even if the film was off pitch about the details of the lives we lead, those men, mostly men, who pack the early morning weekday airport parking shuttles.

Lambert was an apt location for this movie about economic destruction, about the man who delivers the news of human obsolescence and feels left with nothing while he tries to remain the last one standing. Clooney's Ryan Bingham is completely without power and authority. As a man who sticks with the program he gets to have a level of comfort and security, but much else is stripped from him. The economy damages in more ways than one. Clooney's been here before with Michael Clayton.

Lambert today carries the physical scars of the economic processes that have broken down the promise of modernity. The great achievements, and the promise of happiness have been miniaturized, folded down into a small device screen.

I am convinced that in time we will see that the unraveling in more and more physical processes as we overuse, wear out and heat up the planet.

Last week Lambert appeared on screen, this time in the grainy, voyeuristic security camera that showed tornadoes hitting the facility and tearing up American's gates. Passengers and TSAs run through the councourse, then lights go out, the sealed spaces get punctured, and wind and air pressure effects suck signs and trashcans along the floor.

This summer promises to be one of steady destruction, brutal storms every week touching down here and there. You know we won't always be able to afford to rebuild. Eventially, we'll scrape the bottom of the barrel and will have to let some stuff go, like the houses on my block that are burned out and abandoned but no one--not the owners, not the city--have the money to tear them down.

What comes after modernity, with its slick, sweeping temples, is not post-modernism but ruins.

Nashville Visual Arts Events September 2010

2010-09-01T15:57:00.000-07:00

It’s like 2005 revisited. Is it too soon for nostalgia? With Kristina Arnold, Amanda Dillingham, and Jason Driskill all showing in the Arcade, it’s a return to a happier time, long ago, when… OK, I’ll snap out of it. Kristina’s last show at Twist was really good, and I wish I’d had time to take my notes on that and turn them into a longer piece of writing. And representing the good new days, TSU and Watkins have faculty art shows. I have not kept track with comings and goings at TSU, but it looks like there are several names new to me—given what’s been coming out of that department, it will worth finding out more.

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.

September 1

Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Tyler Hicks. Photographs of the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq take over the entire course of the Long War.

September 2

Zeitgeist, James Perrin. A distinctive younger painter, the latest paintings I’ve seen have overlaid new elements on the abstract grammar he’s been working with.

Cumberland, Margaret Ellis. One-night show of jewelry.

Vanderbilt Space 204, Vesna Pavlovic and Amelia Winger- Bearskin.

September 3

Midtown Care, Manuel Zeitlin and Todd McDaniel. A good pairing, Manuel and Todd share an architectural style—an off-growth of Manuel’s work as an architect, and of Todd’s ongoing creation of abstract forms. Opening reception from 4-6

Watkins, Faculty Exhibit. Listed on their website as Friday but the 4^th of September, my guess is the Friday part is right—that’s usually when they have their openings.

Sewanee University Art Gallery, Pradip Malde Two groups of platinum-palladium prints that play off each other—one of the artist’s wife and son, the other of Greek statues. Artist’s talk at 4:30.

September 4

Blend, Amanda Dillingham and Jason Driskill Jason and Amanda were part of a great small collective, which started as the Secret Show series when they were at Watkins and then was known by the space on Chestnut St. Jason has since moved to San Francisco but the members of the group have been staying in touch. Amanda and Jason are calling this show Splintered Self in reference to questions of identity and the body, which has been a shared interest for them for some time. Since this is Blend, there is a community/public aspect of the show—in this case they are inviting the public to “submit jpg images by email of their faces for a collaborative video piece to be featured” in the show. Those submissions should be directed to splinteredselfartshow@gmail.com

Twist, Kristina Arnold and Matthew Carver. Kristina has moved to Kentucky, and extended her long-standing interest in health and the body to environmental health, and has started to reflect on the social and material landscape of the semi-rural, semi-suburban places that fill in the space outside the major cities of our region. These experiences factored into her last installation at Twist and from her artist’s statement I expect another foray into that realm.

The Arts Company, John Welles Bartlett and Julianna Swaney Bartlett is a printmaker, Swaney is an illustrator, from opposite sides of the country. A curator, Brian Downey brought these two artists together and asked them to do a piece in the other’s style.

Rymer, Charles Clary. Clary builds wall-based sculptures out of overlapping loops of material that look like topographic maps in 3D. If I’m remembering previous works right, this round stretches the color palette more.

Estel, Beth Keitt Brubaker

Tinney, Todd Alexander Show continues

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Children’s Art Show. Every summer our church does an art project with the kids in and affiliated with DPC, and the children always surprise us with the unexpected and acute ideas that come through. This may mean more to those of us who know these children, but it seems pretty remarkable. This year it sounds like they’ve taken it to a new level, turning the smaller chapel into one big installation representing the human body and a kind of spiritual journey through it. That’s the short version—there’s more going on then I can quite fill in here. The show’s title will give you some idea: “Consuming Catastrophe: The Comedy of the Heart; A Play in Ate Parts.” At the opening there will be art activities for kids.

September 9

TSU Faculty Biennial. The participants this year include Herman Beasley, Samuel Dunson, Cynthia Gadsden, Xingkui Guo, Jodi Hays, Jennifer Leach, Micheal McBride, Jane Allen McKinney, Scott McRoberts, Kaleena Tucker, and Paul Zeppelin. The reception runs 2-5.

September 16

Open Lot, Session #5. The latest in Open Lot’s combination of music and art events, this one featuring the Black Swans.

September 17

Billups, Untitled Fall show

September 18

LeQuire, Figurative Art show. Figurative art is LeQuire’s raison d’être, which they celebrate every year in a show dedicated to the human figure. The artists featured this year are Joshua Bronaugh, Greg Decker, and Andrew Woolbright.

Nashville Visual Arts Events August 2010

2010-08-06T14:47:00.000-07:00

Comings and goings in the Arcade this month: First, Twist Gallery celebrates its 4^th birthday. At the same time, Davis Art Advisory has closed up its physical exhibit space for now. So Twist, to celebrate its birthday, is expanding into the space Sera was leasing. Twist is inaugurating its new space with an exhibit by Todd Greene. Who was the first artist to show at Twist, and the first to show when Twist had its second space down the hall.

Got this out too late to get the openings on Thursday night. For one, Zeitgeist has the latest round of its Right to Assemble group show—this installment includes Phillip Carpenter, Vesna Pavlović, Brent Stewart, and John Whitten. And LeQuire opened a show in late July called the “Dark Palette” to complement their previous show on the “Influence of White.”

And getting this out late enough that I’m going to settle for several entries that are just the venue and artist. Sorry I wasn’t able to do more.

Next Thursday (the 12^th) Brady Sharp and I are playing in Birmingham as part of The Improvisor Festival, organized by LaDonna Smith. All sorts of great people are playing there all month.

Winter’s Bone is playing a few more times at the Belcourt this weekend. It’s quite amazing. And the last few Kurosawa films, new print of Breathless, and so on.

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.

August 7

Gallery F, The Fisherwoman: An Artistic Response to the Gulf Oil Crisis. Group show with work by Iris Kleinschmidt, Erin Plew, Matt Christy, Adriana Larios, Patricia Earnhardt, Robert Bruce Scott, Channing Bailey, Maya Moore and dance performances by Maya Moore, Megan Harrold, Lily Heine, and Adrienne Bailey with music/sound by Tony Youngblood and Charlie Rauh.

Blend, Ben Vitualla One of Blend’s founders, Ben has put together a project to address crime in East Nashville. He’s led community activities like video and art projects, questionnaires, and information areas, with life-size figures of children were painted at the events by attendees and then displayed outside of their homes as public art in private spaces in East Nashville neighborhoods In addition to the opening at Blend, there will be related events at the Tomato Festival in 5 Points on August 14 and an artist talk at Blend on Saturday the 21^st.

Twist, Mitch O’Connell and Todd Greene. In the original Twist gallery, their show by Chicago artist O’Connell continues. But this time there will be live tattooing by Kustom Thrills. As mentioned in the opening, Todd’s got an exhibit in the new space/Davis Art Advisory’s old space. And there will be music—by Todd’s group Bulb and Eastern Block.

The Arts Company, Annual Avant-Garage Sale and equestrian paintings by Marek Bohemus

Rymer,SCAD MFA graduates. Tony and Margy Rich, Christopher Priore, Nora Mulheren, Jonathan Yoerger and Masumi Nyui.

Estel,.R. Ellis Orrall

Tinney, Todd Alexander

August 10

Open Lot, Audrey Chen and Luca Marini. Audrey is a cellist and vocalist, trained classically at a high level, who in the last several years has burst into the experimental and improvised music world. She’s performed in all sorts contexts with a lot of different collaborators and a surprisingly large number of fairly regular groups. Here she is performing with the percussionist Marini as Kamama.

August 14

5 Points, Tomato Art Show

August 21

Gallery One, Thomas Monaghan

Gallery F, Ripple Effect. Collaborative project led by French artist Corinne Spielewoy involving 26 local artists who have created a set of related pieces, done in a sequential fashion. At the opening the Scarritt-Bennett resident artists will also have a studio open house.

August 22

Harpeth Hall, Lori Putnam At the Marnie Sheridan Gallery, opening from 3-5

August 28

Billups, Diorama-o-rama. As the name suggest, dioramas! Participating artists include Jeff Bertrand, Charles V. Bennett, Dustin Dirt, Brooke E., Dave Fritts, Brandt & Aurora Hardin, Mai Harris, Julian Herrera, Jessica Hill, Jonny Lashley, Kevin Presley, David Pound, Amanda Sekulow, Brittany Danielle Smith and Greg Veach.

Open Lot, Printervention.

September 1

Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Tyler Hicks. Photographs of the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq take over the entire course of the Long War.

Nashville Visual Arts Events July 2010

2010-06-30T21:32:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-02T21:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Art Crawl 1, the Storm, and Art Crawl 2

2010-05-02T20:51:00.000-07:00

I had a pleasant time at Art Crawl last night, but it really was just a half-sized version. The Arcade galleries, Estel, and DPC were open, but the 5th Avenue galleries got together and closed. And I guess one of them sent out an email that Crawl was off. Thanks to that and also to the unquestionably foul weather, the crowds were pretty small, at least as long as I was around. I can't remember which one of the galleries sent out the email message, but they said they would reschedule, and that's the point of this post--this is an appendix to my listing to say keep an eye out for word on a rescheduled Art Crawl. Sometime after you've put the Ark back into dry dock. From the conversations I had, the Arcade galleries will run receptions again whenever May Art Crawl 2 gets scheduled.

Nashville Visual Arts Events May 2010

2010-05-02T20:46:00.000-07:00

Big month it looks to be. Dale Chihuly’s campaign of conquest finally overruns Nashville’s defenses, knocking off both the Frist and Cheekwood in one month. As of now, I really don’t know how many cultural institutions in the United States have withstood the force of Chihuly and refused to stage a big show of his work. I think there’s a train museum in Cozad, Nebraska, the boyhood home of the fourth governor of Mississippi, and a bottlecap collection in Bend. Oregon (which I hear is particularly irksome to the Chihuly camp due to its proximity to world HQ in Seattle). Snarkiness aside (OK, that doesn’t really fix anything), it’s great to see the Frist and Cheekwood coordinating exhibits. They should do this more often. I think it’s good for both places, and good for increasing the sense of event around big exhibits. The two venues have different strengths as exhibition spaces, which these shows will capitalize on—Cheekwood will display work outdoors, the Frist will take advantage of its larger gallery spaces.

One piece of old business. I keep forgetting to mention that the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery is now open in its new quarters in the renovated Cohen Building on the Peabody Quad. Vanderbilt is in final exams, so the gallery will be open only through May 13. At least that’s the date that the inaugural show closes. Yes, they have every right to have me strangled for waiting so long to mention this.

Also, I keep slipping up on mentioning the various activities that Adrienne Outlaw has going on related to N-CAP. I think I failed entirely to mention any one of a series of events related to the Art Makes Place project. Right now she is curating at Seed Space in the 427 Chestnut building, where there will be a recap of Amelia Winger-Bearskin’s Performance for an Audience of One on May 8. The webstie also mentions a show by Alicia Beach for May and June (I think she’ll be showing her MFA thesis work from UT).

Since I failed to send out this listing last month, I missed many things, some of which are still up—like a show of prints at Sarratt (including Lesley Patteron-Marx), a continuing show by Martica Griffin and Jeanie Gooden at Tinney.

Also this month, Erika Johnson’s back in town preparing for her exhibit at Blend which opens this Saturday.

And Beth Gilmore has her thesis show at Downtown Pres, also opening Saturday.

And new paintings from Erin Anfinson (Rymer) and Anna Jaap (Estel)

April 30

Open Lot, ART.EDU. A show of work by recent or soon to be graduates from area art programs.

Terrazzo, Watkins Design Students. Senior show by Watkins Graphic Design students—Lindsey Armstrong, Brian Dennis, Andy Gregg, Valerie Hammond, Luke Howard, Janna Laxton, and Christopher Martin.

May 1

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Beth Gilmore. Beth puts together the threads she’s been working on a while for her senior show. It will have 2 parts, the first opening at Downtown Pres this month, then a second park in the Belmont Mansion opening in June. It’s clear that Beth’s continuing her engagement with history in images and objects, and with the spaces of that history. In addition to the systems of screened and drawn vintage images, she’s gone back to things like bell jars that she has used in shows before.

Rymer, Erin Anfinson, Michael Brown, and Jonathan Ferrara. A new series of paintings by Anfinson jumping off from the phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder among bees. Ferrara owns a gallery in New Orleans that always seems to have really good shows but I have not gotten myself down there to take a look when I’m in the city. Great to have him show his stuff here.

Estel, Anna Jaap, Steve Knudson, and Ian Kessler-Gowell. Jaap is one of my favorite painters in the areas, profoundly entwining beauty and wildness. And Estel is sort of piggy-backing on the Chihuly madness with Kessler-Gowell, who makes works in glass.

Blend, Erika Johnson Erika is back from Pittsburgh for project/exhibit with her friends at Beldn. So far the project has involved getting people together to make paper.

MIR, Matthew Shelton. Lightboxes.

Twist, Minor Victory. Group show by a bunch of printmakers from here and Chicago: Brady Haston, Mark Hosford, Patrick DeGuira, Keith Herzik, Chris Kerr, Jennifer Leach, Lesley Patterson Marx, Hans Schmidt Matzen, Paul Nudd, Onsmith, DeeDee Scacci, Tom Stack, Manuel Zeitlin

Davis Art Advisory, Stanford Kay and Iveta Simacek Prints and paintings by Kay, scarves by Simacek

Zeitgeist, Dwayne Butcher, Gadsby Creson, Tad Lauritzen Wright, and Bobby Spillman. They’re calling this show The Memphis School, which sounds like it has a provocative intent. I mean, I don’t think any of these guys is an abstract painter.

The Arts Company, Jane Davis Doggett Exhibit by a big figure in design, known for innovations in things like signage and “way-finding systems”—critical elements of the built visual environment.

May 2

Open house with Marla Faith, Margaret Krakowiak, Sue Mulcahy, Daniel Arite, and Thandiwe Shiphrah. I really liked Sue Mulcahy’s show at the Main Library in late 2008. One day show and sale at 811 Park Terrace, 2-5 p.m

Belcourt, SNAP. Month-long show by the SNAP photo coop in the Belcourt lobby. Reception from 5-6:30.

May 6

Art After Hours First Anniversary. All over town.

May 7

Sri Ganesha Temple, Mandira Lahiri (vocal) and Subhajyoti Guha (tabla). These artists are performing Hindustani classical and light classical music. Nothing against the very fine instrumentalists who come through Sri Ganesha, but the vocal concerts are the best. 7 p.m.

May 8

Seed Space, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Performance for an Audience of One. In a performance that seeks to overthrow the structures of performance, Winger-Bearskinoffers to perform for a single person who picks from a list of topics/actions. Narrowing it down to 2 people must eliminate any sense of separation, and at that point the other person is as much a performer as Winger-Bearskin, performing the role of audience, which is required to make this a performance, and which in this context gets close to the sense of the word as in audience with the Pope—private, privileged, personal. There’s a limited number of spaces and you have to RSVP of course. Go to the Seed Space web for those details. Seed Space is at 427 Chestnut.

May 9

Frist Center, Dale Chihuly. Chihuly has put modern glass (and Seattle glassmaking) prominently on the cultural map. His stuff is effusive, often elaborate and built to large scale, moving in out of the worlds of decoration and display.

May 14

Gallery One, Jeff Faust. Surrealist painter from California.

May 15

Studio East Nashville, Myles Maillie.

May 21

Frist Center, Aaron Doenges. Performance by a composer who is one of the masterminds of the Nashville Sound Crawl. Aaron’s work is compelling, and he’s extremely sensitive to location and context.

Open Lot, This is Not Art

May 25

Cheekwood, Dale Chihuly. After the Frist, then Cheekwood opens their Chihuly exhibit. This of course is going to be one of those Chihuly in the garden shows, including some in the ponds like he’s done at other botanical gardens.

Lew Spratlan's opera finally getting a full performance

2010-04-11T21:40:00.000-07:00

I'm going to have to figure out how to get to Santa Fe to hear Lew Spratlan's opera "Life is a Dream" finally get it's full premiere. Lew was my composition teacher in college.

More on Barnes

2010-03-30T19:31:00.000-07:00

Last night I moderated a panel discussion at the Belcourt for The Art of the Steal, a doc about the Barnes Foundation controversy. (Here's the url for the opponents of the move.) The panelists worked together great.

Jim Hoobler, who among other things is the most dedicated connoisseur of museums I know--he's been to practically every museum or historic home in the country with a program related to art, history, architecture and culture. Of course he's been to the Barnes a couple of times. And since he knows everything about Nashville cultural history he was able to talk about the other case in Nashville where an institution is having trouble honoring the wishes of the donor of cultural legacies--no, not the Stieglitz collection at Fisk, but the Cohen bequest of an art collection and gallery to Peabody--the Cohen Building, which has reopened as the home of the Art History Department and the Fine Arts Gallery. There's a whole story to that, for another time.

Mark Scala from the Frist was also on it, and what's great is that he is the curator for an institution that would not exist if museums did not lend art. He made some points I really wanted to see made, particularly how odd and out of step Barnes' curatorial stance was. The Barnes might be an exceptional place, but I find it hard to believe it is the ne plus ultra of art presentation. In fact it reminds me of those Baroque paintings of picture galleries where the loot was stacked top to bottom on the wall. But I haven't been there, and I do want to go before it moves in 2012.

And I had Jodi Hays there, the one artist, who had this formative experience of seeing the Barnes paintings when she was a teenager and went from Arkansas to see them in Texas. Jodi's points were subtle and serious, with plenty of healthy ambivalence. like her work. The first drawings of hers I saw appeared at first glance to be revealing, in terms of what you saw on their surface, but they turned away from the viewer, and were veiled in some more fundamental way. And of course that veiling suggested more about a character than the surfaces. I've been looking at her work for a while now, and it's changing the way I see the world and what I see, slowly. It's interesting to be around an artist's work for an extended time, for years, and to let it seep into you and take a place in your visual vocabulary. Those series of experiences differ so much from the singular encounter in the gallery, where there is a kind of collision with the work, emitting a spray of particles. And to see different pieces from the same person, intermittently, from different series and bodies of work, is different than taking one work home to reflect on it. I think the question of quality is fundamentally different when you experience an artist's work as part of an ongoing acquaintance. It may be the case that the work you absorb this way, through a communal familiarity, is not necessarily the best you've seen. Or it becomes good in a different way.

The point of this post is to add something to the conversation about Albert Barnes and his Foundation and collection. I think the panel made most of the important points. Art exists within a machine, within capitalism, and that machine grinds along in certain ways that are unpleasant all around. There are serious problems with the current Barnes Collection--it was hard to get to, and it seems a monument to the ego of one person, not necessarily the best curatorial use of the art. The idea of controlling the display of art works into perpetuity is likely a fool's errand.

Like I said, I really want to get up there to see it before it closes, but it also seems to me that at some point works of art become a kind of general public legacy, and transcend their owner and maker. But there was one point we didn't get to yesterday. I'm not convinced that Barnes' desire to stick it to the Annenbergs and Philadelphia big wigs from the 20s should prevail over an open consideration of the ways for people to experience this art. However, I think that someone like Barnes presents us with a challenge. If you decide that the terms of his will are no longer tenable, the world is more interesting if you still try as deeply as possible to understand what he was trying to do and really do it. The new museum sounds like it will be a fairly half-assed attempt to continue the Barnes Collection. I would say they are trying to recreate it, but I'm not sure that's right. They are planning to hang the paintings the same way alright, but I wonder about the rest. The choice of starchitects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien means that the building will compete with the art for attention. Also, they are planning to put educational space on each floor, but will you have to wonder if they could possibly pursue education with the same passion. I wonder about the profundity of the old Barnes educational program, but there is no doubt they were committed to it. The challenge for the new program ought to be to try to put themselves in Barnes' head, really try, and see what this means for everything about the collection and program in the new building.

Still, it's sad they couldn't find a way to keep the old facility going. I wish I could have taken a look at their internal budgets. I bet there was a way. But I still think the organization should also have been pushed, pushed to figure out what Barnes' ideas and notions would point to in contemporary terms. He was a demanding and rigorous figure, and his legacy deserves to be addressed with comparable rigor and daring. There is no doubt that there will be tremendous pressure to water it down, even in the new cutting edge lightbox.

Nashville Visual Arts Events March 2010

2010-03-04T00:27:00.000-08:00

Last month was a little thin when it comes down to it, but this month looks better. Ron Lambert has a solo show at Davis, Cumberland has a good double bill, and the installation at Twist looks fun as hell.

Also, the Belcourt films noir continue until March 11. And we’ve got our fundraising party this Sunday for the Oscars.

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.

March 4

Zeitgeist, Justin Terry and Richard Painter. Justin is a native Nashvillian now in New York doing interesting things—in addition to painting, he’s writing about art. Richard Painter creates ghostly images by burning wood in a nice bit of technical virtuosity crossed with a pervasive momento mori quality.

Cumberland, Kell Black book signing. APSU professor Black has done some notable work constructing surprising objects like insects out of paper. Now he’s got a couple of book projects going working from this sort of material, and will be signing one book and displaying the sculptures used in another.

March 5

Watkins College, Aftermath. A group show of more or less local heavies, curated by Pat DeGuira: Harmony Korine, Leigh Ledare, Angela Messina, Laurie Nye, Chris Scarborough, Rob Smith, Brent Stewart, Terry Rowlett, and Kurt Wagner.

Centennial Art Center, Kaaren Engel and Sydney Reichman artists’ talk. 5-7 in the afternoon for this.

March 6

The Arts Company, Snap Shots. This exhibit starts not with art, but poetry, by the late Robert Michie, which will be exhibited along with art work by Anne Goetze, Denise Stewart-Sanabria, and Pam Moxley

Rymer, Dan Addington, L.A. Bachman, Casey Pierce. Of the 3 artists, Pierce might be the most interesting—he has done paintings in the past that were dense with references and pattern.

MIR, Cryptozoology. A group show of work about imaginary and legendary critters: Charles Bennett, Nathan Parker, Steven Knudson, Andrew Casali III, Chip Boles, and Wesley Kinsman Hall.

Blend, Tina Ahyoka. Tina is working primarily with reclaimed glass. The plan for this show was to create an environment in the gallery inspired in part by a temple she came across in Thailand constructed from glass bottles.

Davis Art Advisory, Ron Lambert. Ron moves between dimensions and media, putting out 3D work (“sculptures”) as well as 2D and video work, where sometimes the sound is as striking a part of the experience.

Twist, Oliver and Lucha. From the pictures up already, this looks like a very theatrical and elaborate installation.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Anti-Depressants. Our annual group show for the Lenten season.

Tinney Contemporary, Lyle Carbajal. A painter with a strong art brut thing going on.

Cumberland, Ahren Arenholz and John Fraser. Arenholz makes appealing constructions out of found materials, painted white to add to their abstract, idealized character. Fraser puts together quiet, calm collages.

March 8

Rocketown, Clean Drips. The Workforce Rebellion group, and maybe others, exhibiting work at Rocketown.

March 11

Cheekwood, Virginia Overton, American Impressionists in the Garden, plus Courtyard and Video gallery openings. Cheekwood is holding an opening for all four of its spaces, including a new video show (which includes work by Kara Walker, Eleanor Antin, and Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley). Cheekwood organized theAmerican Impressionists show and it is traveling to a couple more venues.

March 13

Scarritt-Bennett Gallery F, Native. A group show by artists with connections to Native American cultures, doing work that explores those connections: Ronald Anderson, Adriana Larios, Sara Estes, Brandon Donahue, Jule Kaiser.

March 18

Tennessee State University, Cause Collective talk. Hank Willis Thomas and Jess Ingram from the Cause Collective will give a talk. Their video mosaic of people in Oakland is the inaugural exhibit in the Space for New Media

March 22

Tennessee State University, Annual student show.

March 27

East Nashville Art Stroll

Nashville Visual Arts Events February 2010

2010-02-05T11:50:00.000-08:00

Better late than never or something.

TSU is bringing in William Pope L. for a talk and a project. See below for details.

I really need to plug the Belcourt more often. Great series this month—French and English noirs—lots of Jean-Pierre Melville, Jules Dassin, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Carol Reed. Bob Le Flambeur, Rififi, Le Samourai, Diabolique for a few.

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.

February 5

Sewanee Carlos Gallery, Jim Lommasson. A social documentary project based on photos and interviews of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and their families, along with snapshots by the soldiers themselves. Opening reception at 4:30.

February 6

The Arts Company, Steven Walker and Lucius Outlaw. Outlaw, a professor at Vanderbilt, went to the Obama inauguration with his camera last year and trained it on the multitudes who came there. It was a marvelous day, a strange combination of the cold, which had everyone bundled up and sort of subdued, as you dealt with your own needs to stay warm, and thick coats and gloves seemed to dampen sound, and the energy of a massive crowd of people gulping in the brisk air of the watershed many could hardly believe came during their life, with others just breathing the most massive sigh of relief. It was remarkable to me how many older folks there were, but also not surprising. Many of the people I saw were old enough that they would have lived through almost every painful step of desegregation and the fight for full citizenship. Along with Lou Outlaw’s photos, the Arts Company has a series of Nashville urban landscape paintings by Walker that look like they take that unblinking look at desolate or overlooked but ubiquitous urban spaces that you see in Rackstraw Downes or Todd Gordon (who has shown at LeQuire and Tinney).

Estel, Scott Turri.

Rymer, Charles Clary, Kristina Colucci, Jamey Grimes, Brandi Milosavich and Dooby Tomkins. Closing reception.

MIR, Group Photography Show. Ashley Burress Smith, Barry Noland, Greg Sand, Jace Freeman, Jennifer Ford, Kay Ramming, Susan Walker, and Tammy Dohner

Blend, Workforce Rebellion. I’m familiar with posters produced by this collective with activist messages. For this show they worked with students at Jere Baxter Middle School who are part of a program at the Oasis Center training youth to take on active and activist roles in their communities.

Davis Art Advisory, Byron Jorjorian. Nature photographs.

Twist, Watkins faculty + 5. Watkins faculty members Brady Haston, Terry Thacker, Ron Lambert, Derek Cote, Kristi Hargrove plus several students at the school: Lauren Willis, Clayton Lancaster, Robert Dunn, Claudia O'Steen, Alexis Hicks, and Tim Marchbanks.

Tinney Contemporary, Eduardo Terranova. Terranova is an architect from Colombia who cuts, punctures, resews and stains canvas to produce works that memorialize those who have disappeared in the years of civil war in Colombia.

Cumberland, Art Feeds People. A group show benefiting Second Harvest Food Bank, with food–themed art by Andy Saftel, Ron Porter, Marilyn Murphy, Barry Buxkamper, Billy Renkl, Dane Carder, Jeff Danley, Johan Hagaman, Kell Black, Kit Reuther, and Max Shuster.

February 8

Scarritt-Bennett Gallery F, artists talk. The current show features work by the Off the Wall Collective, and they’ll be doing an artists’ talk: Jenny Luckett, Mahlea Jones, Jaime Raybin, Iwonka Waskowski, Nicole Baumann and Marcie Little.

February 11

Alias Winter Recital, Vanderbilt Turner Recital Hall. Typically interesting program. The group often programs one Baroque piece among more contemporary fare, and it’s often one of the highlights. This program has a piece by a 17^th century female composer, Bianca Maria Meda, and then a contemporary quartet by Belinda Reynolds scored for baroque strings. The first piece is a duet for English Horn and soprano that will be sung by the composer, Deborah Kavasch.

Parthenon Symposium, Barbara Tsakirgis. Dr. Tsakirgis is chair of the Classics Department at Vandy and will speak on the spaces, everyday life and events in the home in classical Athens.

February 13

Open Lot, Concrete Comedy. Performance featuring Anni Hi from Syracuse, NY doing a one-woman play dramatizing her experience as a self-made YouTube celebrity. Also doing performance pieces will be Shepherd Alligood and Amelia Winger-Bearskin from Nashville and Brett Williams from Saint Louis. 6-10:00

Marnie Sheridan Gallery, Harpeth Hall, Kelly Williams and Claire Brassil.

February 18

Tennessee State University, William Pope L. talk. William Pope L. is in Nashville conducting a project with Tennessee State, which you may run across. Look for people dressed up like Robert E. Lee. Pope L. is one of the bigger names in conceptual and performance art these days. He probably first came to wide attention for his “crawls,” when he would dress up in some way and drag himself along streets like Broadway. Other pieces involve participation and contributions by people in a community, like the Black Factory, in which he rolled into different cities and asked people to bring objects that represent blackness to them, and are incorporated in an on-line library or reconstituted into products made by the Black Factory. His talk is at 6:00 in the Humanities Poag Auditorium at the TSU Main Campus.

Tennessee State Museum, Sharaku Interpreted by Japan’s Contemporary Artists. This exhibit starts with woodblock prints by a Japanese artist from the late 18^th century, Toshusai Sharaku, along with works by 11 contemporary Japanese artists interpreting their predecessor. Sharaku used the ukiyo-e technique, which is the process that Chuck Close used in his collaboration with Japanese artists that was included in the recent show at the Frist, which showed how painstaking and demanding the process is.

Sarratt Gallery, Richard Painter. Painter makes his images by charring wood to produce fragile images that teeter on the edge of decay, pretty much one momento mori after another. Gallery talk at 5, reception at 6:30

February 19

Frist Center, Masterpieces of European Painting from the Museo de Arte de Ponce, and U-Ram Choe. The painting exhibit is from a museum in Puerto Rico sounds a bit odd—heavy both on Baroque and the Pre-Raphaelites. But it’s work that has a lot of appeal. Choe’s a Korean sculptor who makes kinetic pieces that look like big metal bugs.

February 20

Gallery One, Michelle Firment Reid.

Rocky Horton's new art criticism blog

2010-01-03T18:04:00.000-08:00

Rocky Horton has just started a new blog for critical writing on art in Nashville. It's called Nashville Critical. It is safe to say that's all you need to know. Keep an eye on it.

Nashville Visual Arts Events Special New Year's Eve edition

2009-12-31T15:06:00.000-08:00

It seems like we had this problem once before this year, maybe on the 4th of July. When is the First Saturday. Some people say it is in 2 days, on January 2. Others say January 9. Others say both. So to the best of my ability I am sending out a listing of the January 2 openings, which I guess are basically the Arcade galleries plus the benefit for the Contributor at Downtown Pres. I’ll followup next week with an email about the rest of the month. The galleries on 5th have sent out announcements for Jan. 9, but who knows, maybe they’ll open on Jan. 2. I don’t know about Estel—I didn’t have time to follow up with anyone, but I’ll update the listing on my blog if I hear from Cynthia. What I would say is that the gallery’s January show is a group show of gallery artists, which is normally not something that excites me, but the press release said they would have new work by two of their really good artists, Vanessa Oppenhoff and Anna Jaap. That could be a big deal. I’ll find out what they are doing by way of an opening.

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.

Twist, Jessica C. White and Matt Christy. Drawings and prints from White, who uses images of animals to play out contemporary social and psychological concerns. She draws from images produced for fairy tales and kid’s books, which really already are about more than their surface lets on. Matt has been focusing on collages lately that have the feel of classic surrealism—not the impeccable gallery paintings of a strange still life or landscape, but the more experimental stuff from the 1920s Paris—crossed with a more contemporary interest in semiotics and language.

MIR, Carissa Ricardi. Photographs of dream-like images using an old Brownie Hawkeye camera, a 1950s precursor to instant cameras

Blend, ASK Apparel & Connect 12 Artist Collective. ASK Apparel is a clothing design and marketing enterprise from Ali Bellos and her sisters. Ali is also a member of the Connect 12 collective, which also includes some of the movers behind Blend like Ben Vitualla, Eric and Tiffany Denton, and Samantha Callahan.

Davis Art Advisory, In a Nutshell, Under a Grand. Closing reception for the gallery’s December affordable art show.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Benefit for The Contributor. One of the challenges for homeless people is finding a way to earn a little bit of money to get themselves into housing and essentially build up the social capital—an address, decent clothes, a little bit of independence—that will allow them to change circumstances. One method that’s been developed and moved to Nashville is to create a street newspaper, which homeless men and women can sell within an organized vending program to try to earn some money. Nashville’s version is called the Contributor and has been around for a couple of years now. The newspaper serves multiple purposes—in addition to being a method for people to earn a buck, it also provides an outlet for writing by people on the streets and those working with them, and sheds light on the issues they face. Newspapers are not exactly big money earners these days, so The Contributor, like the others, is organized as a non-profit organization and relies on donations to cover production costs—you know, paper, printing, stuff like that. The Contributor is holding a benefit as Downtown Presbyterian Church’s contribution to the Art Crawl. There will be music by Mike Farris, art for sale from homeless and formerly homeless artists, astrological readings by the Contributor’s horoscope writer, Mr. Mysterio.

Last minute Nashville Visual Arts Events November 2009

2009-11-06T22:36:00.000-08:00

I thought this was going to be the month the listing died, but here I am with a few minutes to spare and we’ll see what we can get done tonight. And I’ll see what occurs to me as I type this up, but a couple of highlights this month are Gregg Schlanger’s installation at Twist, which I have high hopes for, and the concert at Sri Ganesha on Nov. 13, which has all the makings of one of the really transcendent ones.

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.

November 7

Tinney Contemporary, David Teplica. http://tinneycontemporary.com/

Blend, Jared Freihoefer. http://blendstudio.wordpress.com/

Twist, Gregg Schlanger, Monica Quattrochio, and Kelly Bonadies. I love Gregg’s politics and the issues he deals with—he’s dealt with water in a few different ways, including pieces that address the preservation of local rivers and the life in them. This piece is about the need for water around the world, which is a charged topic, taking you into worlds of development and corporate predation as well as environment. Monica is a photographer and Gregg’s wife and she’s contributing a photographic series on water. http://twistartgallery.com/

Twist, Handmade in the Arcade. If the shows upstairs weren’t enough, Twist has organized a market for local artists/artisans to peddle their clothes, accessories, prints, handmade books, all that. It starts at 1:00 and runs through Art Crawl.

The Arts Company, Ed Rode and Steven Walker. http://www.theartscompany.com/

Davis Art Advisory, Jeremy Hughes. http://www.seradavis.com/

Plowhaus at the Arcade. http://www.plowhaus.org/news.htm

MIR Gallery. Madonna Et Al http://www.myspace.com/mirgallery

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Installation Causation. Installations around the church building by most of the resident artists: Jodi Hays, Liz Streight, Beth Gilmore, Tasha French, Aaron Doenges, Richard Feaster, and Tom Wills.

Estel, Sean O’Meallie. I have not fallen for O’Meallie’s sculptures, but people whose opinions I trust are passionate about his work, so take their better informed recommendation, not mine, and check it out. This is a closing show. Estel will have something else together for Artrageous.

Zeitgeist at Terrazzo, group show. Patrick DeGuira, Brady Haston, Hans Schmitt-Matzen, and Manuel Zeitlin. Also, Zeitgeist opened a show by Lars Strandh at their main gallery on Thursday and his stuff is really compelling and it looks good from the street. I need to stop by there. So do you.

Masonic Lodgings Gallery, 1 Cannery Row, Impotent Dogs.

Gallery O, Olga Aleexeva

Dunn Brothers Coffee, In.Form.All

November 8

Scarritt-Bennett Gallery F: Aisha Cousins talk. Cousins is in town for her Diva Dutch project at TSU, which opened last week, and will be giving at talk at Scarritt-Bennett at 7. http://www.scarrittbennett.org/giftshop/galleryf.aspx

November 12

Vanderbilt Gallery 204, Complex Simplicity.

November 13

Sri Ganesha Temple, R. Suryaprakash. This is a concert of Carnatic vocals, and looks like it could be very good. Sryaprakash is accompanied by B. V. Raghavendra Rao on violin and Thanjavur K. Murugaboopathi on Mridangam. Concert starts at 7 in Bellevue.

Open Lot, Red Carpet. Big cast of characters for this: Matt Alexander, Mike Calway-Fagan, Laura Cavaliere, Skye Gilkerson, Kris Harzinski, Ron Lambert, Jonathan Lisenby, Adrienne Outlaw, Christine Peterson, Randy Purcell, Thomas Sturgill and Pulled Resources, and Ruth Zelanski.

Oedipus the King at the Parthenon. On Nov. 13-15 and Nov. 19-21, John Holleman’s 3-actor troupe will be presenting a version of the Sophocles play in the Parthenon.

Tinney, David Teplica talk. http://tinneycontemporary.com/

November 14

Shelby Bottoms Nature Center, Erika Wollam.

Little Hamilton, Undefined: A Study in Personal Identity. Art works submitted anonymously, one show at this coop space and resource center.

November 20

Watkins, Mandy Stoller Senior Show.

November 21

Rymer, Emily Leonard http://www.therymergallery.com/

Scarritt-Bennett Gallery F: Kaethe Wenzel talk and performance. Wenzel is an art historian who will give a talk about German art since reunification and will then do a performance that involves painting robots. I may be providing musical accompaniment for that. http://www.scarrittbennett.org/giftshop/galleryf.aspx

Charlie Bob’s restaurant, Southern Culture Lowbrow Extravaganza. Group show organized by Watkins students that includes Jeff Bertrand, Charles V. Bennett, Brandt Hardin, Ben Johnson, Stephen Jones, Erin Lord, Mandy Stoller, Brooke Elizabeth, and Brittany Smith.

Cumberland, Small Packages show. http://www.cumberlandgallery.com/

Review of Angela Burks show at Twist

2009-08-12T14:33:00.001-07:00

Here's a review I did of Angela Burks' show at Twist that came out today. Good show. She's relatively new as a faculty member at MTSU and it's good to get to know her work.

Nashville Visual Arts Events August 2009

2009-07-28T15:30:00.000-07:00

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.

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 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

Nashville Visual Arts Events July 2009

2009-07-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

It’s utter chaos. The first Saturday falls on the 4^th of July! What will we do? Will people come to openings before checking out the fireworks? Can we have openings on the second Saturday? What about that first Thursday thing, positioned as a warmup to the downtown openings? Don’t worry kids, it’ll be OK.

Here’s the deal. The first Thursday—Art After Hours—is still the first Thursday. But the first Saturday falls on the second Saturday.

Next month we’ll explain time zones in Arizona.

As for art, good looking group show at Tinney mid-way through the month—from Don Evans to Brandon Donahue. Also, I don’t think I mentioned the new Frist shows last month, Chuck Close prints and Dean Byington paintings. The Close show is very good, leaves you with a good appreciation of this guy’s mind and craft, if exhausted by the explanations of a plethora of printmaking techniques that bewilder the non-printmaker. Byington’s monochromatic paintings in the CAP Gallery perform nice bits of visual trickery.

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 2

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. LeQuire is inaugurating an expansion of their gallery space. http://www.nashvilleartdealers.net/news/2009/05/02/art-after-hours.10057

Zeitgeist, Oblique Strategies: Rene Copeland on acting. Zeitgeist’s discussion series this year brings people from outside the visual arts into the gallery to talk about what they do and about visual art. This month the speaker is Producing Artistic Director for the Tennessee Rep

Cumberland, Summer Showcase. Cumberland is continuing their show of three new artists—Patrick LoCicero, Jim Phelan and Valerie Stuart—and work by gallery artists like Billy Renkl, Kell Black, Bob Durham, Andrew Saftel, Carrie McGee, and James Lavadour. And for the Art After Hours event, they’ll have Heavenly Dog hot dogs for sale.

The Arts Company, The Art of Flags. Flag-themed art by Brother Mel, Jorge Arrieta, Myles Maillie, Norris Hall, and Bob McGill.

Gallery One, Summer Soup. This show features two new artists to the gallery, Mike Moran and Deloss McGraw, and a selection from gallery regulars. McGraw has done a lot of work in collaboration with poets, like W.D. Snodgrass. McGraw is also featured right now at the Main Library in an exhibit of works he made in response to James Agee to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of Agee’s birth.

July 9

Clarksville Customs House Museum, Alan LeQuire Dream Forest. The latest big work—magnum opus, literally—by LeQuire is an installation of large torso-like forms.

July 11

Plowhaus at the Arcade. Yes, the Plowhaus is joining the community at the Arcade. This is a very good news. They are inaugurating their new space with their annual Vlaue Menu Show, everything priced under $50.

Twist, Five + 5 and Nick Stolle. In the original Twist space, a traveling group show organized by Gallery [5] art in West Tampa, Florida. It consists of unframed works on paper by 5 gallery artists and five others: Ariel Baron-Robbins, Cameron Brian, Joe Griffith, Robbie Land, Diran Lyons, Tracy Midulla Reller, Kurt Piazza, Ruth Santee, Jasmine Schurrer, and Atsushi Tameda. Down the hall at Twist 58, recent Watkins grad Nick Stolle has come up with the best exhibit title of the month, We Are Going To Spend the Night at Meemaw and Pop-Pop’s. He also promises material on themes of shame, longing, and hope.

Cheekwood, Easton Selby and From Washington to Warhol: American Redefined. In Temporary Contemporary, photography-based work by Easton Selby takes up themes of traditional Southern belief systems, magic, and healing. In the main house, a selection from the museum’s permanent collection.

Gallery F, Scarritt-Bennett, Me, My Cat and My House. The new show at Scarritt-Bennett brings together five artists with disabilities and gets into the question of what their work says about the idea of Outsider Art. Outsider Art got identified as a genre through the work of people with disabilities which gave their work a sense of immediacy that has become integrated into the vocabulary of contemporary art. The artists in this show are Bill Guion, Lisa Manus, Tracy L. Martin, Paul Miktarian and Mike Rewis.

Tinney Contemporary, Donny Smutz and Craig Dongoski. This show is closing on the 11^th, so we can assume that it’ll be sort of a closing reception. Don’t know if the rent-a-cop will be there. Be sure to check out Dongoski’s delicate work.

Rymer, SCAD-N. Clsoing reception for their show of artists with ties to the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Studio 83. Not sure if they are opening a new show or continuing what they had.

Tennessee Art League, In.FORM.ALL, Ana1yze This. This group show doubles as a high security password with its mix of alpha and numeric characters. I hope I got it right, or the machine will eat my card. It’s also a group show featuring Arlene Bates, Betsy Clapsaddle, Charla Steele, Matthew DeBardelaben, Judy Klich, Merry Beth Myrick, Shonna Sexton, and Toni Hooper

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Concert. No Art Luck exhibit this month, but there will be another concert in the chapel and an open house for the studios. This month’s musicians will be Luke Skidmore, Natalie Prass, James Wallace, and the band Cheer Up Charlie Daniels.

July 13

Fringe Night at the Basement. Every other month, guitarist Charlie Rauh programs a night of bands that work through permutations of psych, free jazz, noise, punk, and general sonic assault. July’s installment features Sic Semper Tyrannus, Lylas, Dead Snake and Cavalcade (the last a Dave Cloud project with Joseph Hudson).

Twist, Experimental Music Jam. Music-making sponsored, inspired, or incited by Ben and Amy Marcantel in their Forest Bride mode.

July 14

Gallery 121, Leu Center, Belmont, Stacey Irwin. Photographs taken in the village of San Bernardo, Ecuador

July 17

Twist, Geoff Little book signing. OK, I don’t know if I’ve ever sullied myself by listing a book signing, but Geoff is a good friend, so he is covered by the provision that allows me to mention things outside of visual arts when they involve my friends. Geoff has put together a book of short stories which is hitting the streets.

July 18

Tinney Contemporary, My Magic Cape. A group show organized by Andee Rudloff with Don Evans, Myles Maillie, Ellen Stevens, Brandon Donahue and Keith Harmon. The thing that looks great about this show is that it includes Don Evans, retired from the Vandy art faculty and a man who has influenced half the people to come through this town, and Brandon Donahue, a recent TSU graduate who has had some notable pieces up at the Frist and Scarritt-Bennett. The age gap would be notable if Evans didn’t seem like a perpetual kid in the best sense.

Nashville Visual Arts Events late May-June 2009

2009-05-29T19:44:00.000-07:00

I’m sending this out a little early so I could get word around about the Fugitive 60 Second video festival and the TCASK fundraiser.

I learned this week that Libby and Ken Rowe are leaving town this summer—Libby’s starting a new gig at University of Texas San Antonio. It sounds like a good situation—big program, good facilities—but it’s sad to see them leave. Ken’s public art project for the Public Square is moving forward, and I hope Libby gets curated into shows here regularly. I’m glad she had the chance to do that Belmont show.

And then there’s Erika Johnson, who is leaving for Pittsburgh. Erika’s been important to Nashville as a member and organizer for Plowhaus and untitled, but her biggest contribution has been her own work, ambitious and compassionate. I’ve got all these notes on her installation at the Parthenon, but have never gotten around to giving that piece its proper due.

It is the time of year for these transitions.

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.

May 29

Matt Christy and Nick Stolle, Bad Apple Studio. A one-night show by two recent Watkins standouts in a studio in the 427 Chestnut building.

Frist Center, Museums in the 21^st Century. Drawings, models, plans and photos of 26 museum projects in development since 2000. No, they were not all designed by Frank Gehry. But it looks like the monstrosity proposed for the Corcoran Museum makes an appearance.

May 30

Fugitive 60 Second Video Festival, Harmony Landing, Pegram Short videos contributed by over 70 artists from the United States, France, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Cyprus, Austria, Brazil, Ireland, Egypt, Vietnam, Korea, and the UK. The participants include Scanner, Melody Owen, and Edward Davee. Harmony Landing is in Pegram—if you take Highway 70 past Bellevue, keep going west until you cross into Cheatham County—turn left at the Town Hall, then take the first left after you cross the railroad tracks that run parallel to 70. Doors open at 4, the program will probably start at 8.

June 1

Tomato Tomato, Group Show 223 West Main Street in Murfreesboro

June 2

Rodney Crowell Fundraiser for TCASK, Belcourt. Crowell, his daughter, Ranger Doug, and Ranger Doug’s son are doing a concert to raise money for the Tennessee Coalition Against State Skilling, the primary organization advocating against the death penalty in this state. Go to the Belcourt website for tickets: www.belcourt.org.

June 4

Art After Hours. The Nashville Association of Art Dealers is starting a program in which members stay open from 5-7 on the first Thursday of the month. Several of the galleries will have special programs—Zeitgeist is hosting a discussion on art with food writer Kay West and restaurateur Arnold Myint, part of their Oblique Strategies series. Cumberland is going to have a talk by Johan Hagaman, and LeQuire will have Jammie Williams drawing a portrait from life.

Arts Immersion event at Icon in the Gulch. The Arts and Business Council of Greater Nashville and the Bar Association are sponsoring this multi-media event with bands Rachel Pearl and Milktooth; dance from the Blue Moves Modern Dance Group; film reels from FilmNashville and Nashville Film Festival; and visual art from Sheila B., Cindy Wunsch and more. I don’t think this is officially part of the Art After Dark event, but it adds one more thing to Thursday evening. It’s not a free event--$25 in advance, $30 at the door.

June 5

Centennial Art Center, Patricia Green, Robert Winnett Harrison, and Tim Weber. Tim is a fine potter, a former staffer at the Tennessee Arts Commission who now dedicates himself full-time to the studio. Also on display are painters Green and Harrision. Reception runs from 5-7.

June 6

Blend Studio, Home. Blend is a new venue in the Arcade, run by artist Ben Vitualla. For his initial show, he’s showing the results of work he did with students at Millersville Elementary School this Spring. He and students in a 5^th grade class collaborated on three visual projects relating to the students' diverse interpretations of home, family, location, and objects. The projects consist of photography, collage, and video.

Twist, Laina Seay and Erika Johnson. This is a farewell show for Erika, moving to Pittsburgh as I mentioned in the introduction. Her installation for this show is called accumulate/dematerialization, which she introduces with the question “What happens when objects are let go?” Sounds like it fits right in with someone closing up shop in one town and moving to another. Seay is a recent Western Kentucky grad who is trained as a ceramicist but has been working with raw clay and making videos as it dissolves, or working it into installations. She seems to be onto a new way of approaching this material.

Tinney Contemporary, Donny Smutz. Smutz is a surrealist painter who works hot button images, whether it’s suggestive pictures of Catholic nuns or President Obama as the crucified Christ. The paintings look pretty engaging, packed with detail, but courting controversy may take precedence. Tinney’s press release wants you to know that there will be a private security guard protecting the exhibit.

Terrazzo, new artists presented by Zeitgeist. This is Zeitgeist’s last in their monthly showings at the Terrazzo building in the Gulch. This time they are showing work by art students and recent graduates locally and from around the country, including Janice Zeitlin’s kids Anna and Nate who are at Columbia College Chicago and Bard respectively. It also includes Kelly Bonadies from Watkins, Christine Peterson and Lani Asuncion from MTSU, and Patrick Schlafer from Lipscomb, as well as students from Wash U, Sewanee, Alfred, and Bard.

Rymer, SCAD-N. This group show brings together several artists with ties to the Savannah College of Art and Design. The show will includes paintings by Michael Brown, Adin Murray, and Whitney Wood, paintings and video by SCAD dean Brett Osborn, and a room-sized installation by Charles Clary.

Estel, Be a Doll. A group show by women artists addressing women in today’s society. Typically for Estel, it’s got a great list of participants, and seems to include a bunch of folks who haven’t shown here before, or haven’t shown much, as well as important voices like Adrienne Outlaw and Lori Field.

Studio 83. This is a relatively new gallery in the Arcade, in the old Dangenart/TAG space. They have a running group show including Mary Sue Kern, Steve Hood, Raven Toney, Emily Roley, Chad Wilkerson, Jessica Hill, Andrew Watson, Kristin Abraham, Wendy Williams, Cynthia Markert, C.D. Hawks, Donovan Self-Destruct, Jonathan Lisenby, L.B. Toth, Andrew Najberg, and Carla C. Contreras.

Sera Davis: Pamela Staker and Allison Renshaw. Two painters who cover surfaces with busy bright color and jumbles of abstract and representative forms.

The Arts Company, Brother Mel. The latest from this multi-threat artist, Marianist brother, and perennial Arts Company favorite.

Plowhaus at TALS, Nashville Pride. A show celebrating diversity in anticipation of the Pride Festival on June 20. Artists include Catherine Chaput, Jon Downs, John Holland, Franne Lee, Stephen McClure, Jamie McCormick, Carrie Mills, Barry Noland, Mandy Peitz, Candy Robins, Franco Scaramuzza, Robert Bruce Scott, Coral Smith, Susan Striepe, Tom Winnet, James Worsham.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Art Luck and Concert. This month the Art Luck features the resident artists who have studios in the Church and the works the Church has purchased from the annual group show. Also, in the chapel the group Welcome to 1979 is going to put on a conert featuring The Fireman’s Daughter, Seth Wood, and Carl Pike. Welcome to 1979 is a bunch of audio fetishists with an all-analog studio who are going to record the show to take advantage of the Chapel’s pretty acoustics.

June 11

Frist Center, Artist's Forum with Joseph Whitt. Joseph, who has recently moved to Brooklyn to organize programming for Jules de Balincourt's Starr Space, comes back to town to do one of the Frist's artist's forums. I think of Joseph first off as a curator, who when given the right forum makes the role of putting together exhibits and performances a form of personal expression, collaboration, and performance by all involved. But even in more traditional exhibit organizing at the Vanderbilt Fine Arts gallery, he quickly developed a track record of putting together clever and revelatory shows.

June 13

Cumberland, Summer Showcase. For the summer, Cumberland introduces two artists—Patrick LoCicero and Valerie Stuart—and shows work by gallery artists like Billy Renkl, Kell Black, Bob Durham, Andrew Saftel, Carrie McGee, and James Lavadour.

June 26-28

Firefly Fine Arts Festival, Renaissance Center, Dickson. The Ren Center is putting together a nice big festival of art and music. The artists—a long list—include local people but many from the broader region and beyond. They’ve made an effort to reach out to some younger artists in Nashville like David Hellams and Tiffany Denton. They are running music on two stages during it. And admission is free.

Nashville Visual Arts Events May 2009

2009-04-29T22:31:00.000-07:00

Sam Dunson had a show last year at the Vanderbilt Divinity School with work that put a focus to the wilder style he’s taken on lately. I hope some of those pieces will be in this show (I’d like to see them again), and anything more recent will take us that much further. I saw a straight up Guernica quote poking its head into the frame of a piece in the press release.

Everyone in town should know Patrick DeGuira as one of the city’s most significant sculptors, and many know that he’s been a mainstay of the exhibits staff at Cheekwood. He’s recently been laid from there and has started a framing and art prep/installation/packing business. So if you want to have someone who knows what they’re doing handle some art for you, Patrick’s got his shingle out at www.finnsframing.com

Also, Beth Gilmore’s rescheduled exhibit at Belmont Mansion happens May 10.

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.

May 1

Cummins Station art student show To coincide with graduations at the local colleges, Jodi Hays (no doubt with help from others) has organized a show of work by MTSU, TSU, Sewanee, and Watkins students. The reception runs 4-7.

May 2

Mir, Christian Dye. The title of this show is Bleak: Searching for Beauty in an Otherwise Tragic World and the press release say the work uses materials that “are susceptible to time and the effects of pollution.” That could describe any number of things, so we’ll see what it is when we see it.

Twist, Beep Beep Gallery artists. Twist is exchanging artists with the like-minded Atlanta gallery Beep Beep. That Atlanta artists are Ann-Marie Manker and Jason Butcher. And in Twist 58, there will be work by Duncan McDaniel, John Whitten, and Erin Plew. Erin’s senior show paintings at Watkins are terrific.

Estel, Mr. Hooper and Samuel Dunson. See the intro re: Sam. His work is paired with Mr. Hooper.

Cumberland, Johan Hagaman and Dan Gualdoni. Hagaman deos sculptures of whimsical, surreal figures. Gualdoni paints natural scenes in ephemeral states dominated by fog, mist, and clouds.

Rymer, Janis Pozzi-Johnson. Simple abstract paintings built up from dense layers of paint.

The Arts Company, David Benson and David Swanagin. Narrative paintings by Benson and landscapes by Swanagin, both with Southern themes and scenes.

Sera Davis: Graffiti artists and urban designers. To celebrate the first anniversary of her space in the Arcade, Sera worked with Quincy Crutchfield to put together a show by Nashville graffiti artists and clothing designers. It’s great that Sera’s getting these folks in front of everyone at the Arcade.

Terrazzo, Zeitgeist artists. This monthly event keeps expanding, now including units on the 11^th and 5^th floor, with a whole bunch of Zeitgeist’s artists like John Donovan, Caroline Allison and Richard Feaster.

Tinney Contemporary, Greg Decker and Eduardo Terranova. A series of paintings from Decker called the Golden Paintings. Terranova is an architect and an artist, originally from Colombia, who is doing abstract pieces concerned with the experience of people disappearing due to the violence in that country. The gallery will also host a performance by singer-songwriter Denitia Odigie during the crawl.

May 4

Mercy Lounge, Forest Bride. We’re playing as part of 8 off 8^th.

May 7

Frist Center, Manzil Ezell lecture. Part of a series co-sponsored by Zeitgeist and the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects meant to look at art and architecture through the frame of other disciplines.

May 9

Gallery F., Amelia Winger-Bearskin and Carlin Wing. This is the second part of the collaboration by these artists about the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson, and his household. The first installment concerned Lyncoya, a Creek boy the Jacksons adopted. The artists conveyed a sense of memory and history as traces across the land, put across through a combination of documentary material and outright beautiful and poetic video and graphic material.

Studio East Nashville, Myles Maillie. An illustrator, designer, and painter showing new work. 1520 Woodland Street. Also on view Sunday afternoon, May10.

May 10

Belmont Mansion, Beth Gilmore. After a few delays, Beth is ready to go with her show at the Belmont Mansion. Beth works at the museum, giving tours and occasionally channeling Adelicia Acklen, and has talked them into letting her install art in an unrestored room of the mansion. Beth uses images from the historical collections of the house in her art all the time, and now she brings the images back home. Her whole approach is based on appropriating and absorbing images, and looking for a remix that allows a sense of historical presence/present to express itself. This show will let a couple of ways of telling history reside together. The show will be run from 5-9 on the 10^th.

May 14

Vanderbilt University Club, Olga Alexeeva. The idea for this exhibit is to start with black and white paintings and progress into full color from one end of the exhibit to the other. Reception from 5-8

3^rd and Lindsley, Dave Perkins CD release. This music listing is one of my exceptions for friends things. Dave is releasing an album of new material—he’s probably best known as a producer for groups like Over the Rhine, but not surprisingly he’s an expert musician with real fluency and sweetness of sound.

May 29

Two People I’ve Learned From Get Recognized

2009-04-25T21:24:00.001-07:00

Last week the American Academy of Arts & Sciences announced their latest class of members. The Academy’s been around since 1780, and one of its core purposes is to recognize people by naming them as fellows of the Academy. There are about 4,000 now, plus 600 something foreign members. One thing this does is provide a pretty good measure of whether a university is in the top tier of institutions, and provides some basis for sorting within that top tier. The number of Nobel Prize winners doesn’t work as well because there are fewer given, and not in all disciplines. The Academy makes 200 or so new members each year and covers most disciplines, so you can see patterns emerging. Most colleges and universities don't have any members, which reflects the extremely hierarchical nature of American academe. Each discipline decides whom it thinks are the best people in the field, and the best/most powerful institutions go out and get them. Of course a lot of this prestige stuff is self-reinforcing—if you get appointed dean to a school at Harvard, you’ve probably upped your chances of getting recognized here.

The fellows are mostly academics, but the Academy also picks up working artists and musicians, politicians, business leaders, and so forth.

This year one of those non-academic inductees is Emmylou Harris. I don’t know if they’ve ever chosen an Americana artist or a Nashville performer. There are precious few “popular musicians” on the list—B.B. King, Keith Jarrett, Wynton Marsalis, and Stephen Sondheim were the only ones I saw who remotely fit. I didn’t even see Bill Ivey on there. It makes sense that if they are trying to branch out, they would pick Emmylou Harris. I have always felt I was learning a lot from her albums about how to listen to songs. She chooses old songs you might not know, seems tuned into current songwriters, and shows the connections between the past and present of whatever you want to call this range of songwriting, singing and performing.

Maybe at the other end of the spectrum, my master’s thesis advisor at Chicago, Bob von Hallberg, was inducted this year. I studied Olson with Bob. It’s always hard to say what you learned from one teacher, but I will try. Bob has a way of reading a poem that involves simultaneously taking in the meaning and the music, and I can’t get close to doing it. He’s also very interested in the social and historical context of poems, thinking about questions like who is reading the stuff and why. He also has a distinctive discursive tone—he doesn’t toss around critical theory buzzwords, but formulates his theses and works his way through the material seriously. Here’s an article in the Boston Review that will give you a good idea of what he does. It’s a piece on several contemporary poets and how they have reflected on the condition of civic life during our wartime, life as a citizen of this empire. There’s a topicality to it, but what he takes this opportunity to show the particular ways poetry serves as discourse, the insights it is capable of bringing out through the tools that define the medium. Last year Bob also put out a book on lyric poetry that I need to get my hands on.

Cecil Taylor and Charles Olson

2009-04-19T17:10:00.000-07:00

Stumbled across this interview with Cecil Taylor done in 1994, focusing on his poems and his engagement with poetry (and other art forms). It’s on the SUNY Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center website. As a student of Charles Olson and someone increasingly fixated on Cecil Taylor, I was so happy to find the following passage. Chris Funkhauser did the interview.

Taylor: I would say that it is difficult. Do you know Creeley's book The Island? Well, I read that. The thing-- Olson, Charles Olson might be easier to talk about, or Bob Kaufman, but the thing that allows me to enter into what they do is the feeling that I get. It's the way they use words. It's the phraseology that they use, much the way the defining characteristic of men like Charlie Parker or Johnny Hodges is the phraseology. And in the phraseology would be the horizontal as well as the vertical. In other words, the harmony and the melodic. Well, I also see that in word structures. One of the things I've found maybe odd about Quincy Troupe was that--and you used the phrase before, the tensions were always the same, the ideation was always bracketed in a particular kind of language with no abatement. Always the same kind of thing. And I find that true in a lot of rap that I hear. But then again I don't even want to talk about that kind of necessarily--I mean that's something else.

I'm very moved by the Kabuki theatre, and the usage of the voice there, and the movement there. And, of course, the Butoh dancing comes, is the modern development perhaps of the Kabuki.

Yeah, Olson, and particularly Duncan and Creeley--their syntactical structure was the thing that got, that I really liked. And I hear--Roi at a certain point had that too, had that. His of course was different. Ishmael [Reed] had it at a certain point but I wasn't too interested in it with him. In other words, what I'm talking about is the music, the music, the language. Like Genet has a language that is fascinating because it is so multi-faceted. It's real but it's not unreal, and what is unreal to us is real to him, and what is real to us is unreal to him. And yet when you really follow what Edmund White [Genet's biographer] is talking about, he's like making this man come alive by in a way not denuding of his magic, but making his magic more accesible to others. It's a dense book. It's also history of Cocteau, and of course that Sartre, and [Simone] de Beauvoir. And there was an Algerian poet who wrote a very small book about Genet, about a hundred pages, and that book was fascinating. When I asked Allen [Ginsberg] about this Genet book, he said, "Well, yes, I looked at it." He said, "Burroughs read it." He said he looked in it to see if his name was mentioned. Indeed. [Laughs] No, he would not be mentioned. As a matter of fact, Genet was asked by this Algerian, what did he think of Tennessee Williams? And he said, "I never think of Tennessee Williams."

Funkhouser: There was one place where Baraka wrote about your music as having "an emphasis on total area...giving it means to evolve, to move as an intelligently shaped musical concept" which is an idea seemingly relates to Olson's concept of...

Taylor: Projective Verse? Hmm...

Funkhouser: A movement towards form via activity--or activity via form--whichever way it works, though it's probably form through activity...

Taylor: Form through activity, or, the function determines the form, or is it the form that determines the function? I think it's the function that determines the form. So, yeah, through activity, yes.

Funkhouser: And total area. Olson used the page, and there's more to that connection when I think of your writing. The way that historical concepts, those "distant valleys," and mythology, your present--present moment, past moment and future projected. It seems like since you know Duncan and Olson that maybe...

Taylor: Oh, certainly they had an influence on me, sure. Also Mike McClure.

Kate Csillagi at Little Hamilton

2009-04-07T20:35:00.000-07:00

I got the following press release today for an event at Little Hamilton, and finally got myspace and website URLs which I would have found on my own a long time ago if I wasn't lazy.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Jenny Luckett (615)428-2472
Jennifer.baggs@comcast.net
http://www.myspace.com/littlehamiltonshows
www.littlehamilton.org

Fried Rice Fight: Art by Kate Csillagi
Friday April 17, 2009
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Little Hamilton Collective
1318 Little Hamilton Ave
Nashville, TN 37203

Former Nashville resident Kate Csillagi will be having a retrospective
art sale at Little Hamilton Collective on Friday April 17th. A mixed
media artist inspired by caves, waves, "total trash", and the absurd,
Csillagi creates the heroes and monsters of a perverse imaginary
world. Most recently, she has shown work in Oakland (Diving Swallow)
and San Francisco (18 Reasons Gallery). She was featured in Thurston
Moore's curated event "Art and Noise" and participated in an artist
residency at Skylab in Columbus, Ohio. Currently, Kate Csillagi lives
in Themiddleofnowhere, TX researching dilapidated youth and
astrological prophecies.

Little Hamilton is a warehouse space in South Nashville that houses
community projects, hosts live music, lectures, films, art shows, and
the occasional party. Little Hamilton is collectively owned and
operated, and is a not-for-profit space.

Nashville Visual Arts Events and Other Stuff April 2009

2009-03-31T18:56:00.000-07:00

Last month, I missed the fact that Sisavanh Houghton is exhibiting in the small gallery at Tinney Contemporary, in addition to the show by Rachel McCampbell in the main room (which features a big sculpture in the middle that looks energetic and fun, maybe a little creepy in a way that seems appropriate given the show’s theme of endangered species, the environment under threat). Anyway, Sisavanh’s one of the more versatile artists around, nice to see that she’s showing at Tinney.

Update: Beth's show has been pushed out to Sunday May 10. One of the more unusual things this month will be Beth Gilmore’s installation at the Belmont Mansion. Beth works there (and is sometimes called on to channel Adelicia Acklen) and has used images from Ward-Belmont College in her work. She’s getting a chance to bring things together in a one afternoon/night show in an unused room at the Mansion on May 10.

I’ve got a few readings here—I don’t really mean to get into that business with this listing, but one’s at an art gallery so it goes in, and others involve friends.

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.

April 1

Portland Brew 12 South, David Dark book release event. David is releasing his third book, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, and celebrating with a gathering at Portland Brew. He’s inviting everyone to bring a story, song or poem to read/perform, in keeping with an interest in people talking to each other. The new book is very good, a mix of media and pop culture criticism, social philosophy, and theology, and probably a bunch of other areas of inquiry if I spent some more time thinking about it. I think of David’s stock in trade being his reading of pop culture as sources for insight on the divine and on politics and community as aspects of the Divine. In this book he engages that, but also addresses more conventional political and theological discourse. He’s particularly convincing in his interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement as a basis for theory and practice of social and political life in the broadest terms. Things get going at Portland Brew at 7:00.

April 2

Zeitgeist, reading by Amanda Little. Little is a journalist who covers energy and the environment and will be reading from her book Power Trip, about the roots of the current energy crisis in America’s history of energy use. It’s based on reporting from the front lines—oil rigs, power stations, etc. 6-8 PM

April 4

Twist, Jen Cartwright and Off the Wall. Cartwright is doing a room-sized sculpture made from paper bound to wire forms, built up from small units. The Off the Wall group is showing work from an exhibition they did this winter at the Renaissance Center in Dickson—I’m glad they’re showing the work in Nashville. Janet Heilbronn has some luscious paintings, Iwonka Waskowski continues to develop her small drawings and paintings (to mention just two). The other members are Mahlea Jones, Quinn Dukes, Jenny Luckett, and Jaime Raybin.

LeQuire, Contemporary Portraits. In keeping with their mission to promote the vitality of traditional forms and methods, LeQuire’s showing work by several portraitists: Murat Kaboulov, Joshua Bronaugh, Alan LeQuire, Brody Vincent. Vincent makes interesting, technically polished symbolic images. LeQuire’s ability is this area is obvious (some small sculptures of nudes come to mind), and Kaboulov is one of several Russian artists connected to the gallery.

Estel, Deb Garlick and Tim Yankosky. Two artists focusing particular visual motifs. Many of Garlick’s paintings feature a simple white dress, on an anonymous figure or by itself. Yankosky’s totem is a goldfish. Both artists place their highlighted elements into different setting that represent psychological states and play around with stock verbal phrases.

Rymer, Hunt Slonem. A solo show of paintings of animals and bayou scenes.

The Arts Company, John Baeder. Nashvillian Baeder has created well-known photorealist paintings and watercolors of places like diners, hamburger stands, and Nashville neighborhood landmarks. For the last two months the Arts Company has been showing the photographs he took and used as references for his paintings, and they have one more installation of these photos scheduled for this month.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Exhale: Breath Becomes Word. For Art Crawl night, the church will host a spoken word/reading organized by Chris Leonard and featuring a bunch of folks, including David Dark (see April 1). And the annual group show for the Lent season continues, including a delightful drawing by David Hellams that was awarded a purchase prize.

Sera Davis: Kin Froshin, Griffin Norman, Jennifer Hecker.

Terrazzo, Zeitgeist artists. It seems like Zeitgeist is expanding its monthly series at the Terrazzo—they’ve got shows in 3 of the building’s suites with work up by Ciprian Contreras, Mike Calway-Fagen, Shane Doling, David Wright LaGrone, Brady Haston, Richard Feaster, Lain York, John Donovan, Buddy Jackson, Will Berry, Hollis Bennett. And Hollow Ox will be playing.

BelArt (Arcade), Marleen De Waele De Bock. This is Marleen’s space, a steady participant in the Art Crawl. She’ll show some of her recent work this month.

Tennessee State Museum, The People's House: A Temple of Democracy. A show celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Tennessee State Capitol building. Part of the show is 66 paintings of the Capitol.

April 5

Family Wash, Franne Lee. A new set of paintings of birds and animals on old wood panels by Franne, one of the founders of the Plowhaus Coop. The opening is from 3-5.

Frist Center, Paul Vasterling and Trinita Kennedy lecture. A talk on the 13^th century Latin poems that Carl Orff set in Carmina Burana, and the process of choreographing the Nashville Ballet’s interpretation of it (being presented April 24-26 at TPAC). The talk’s also in conjunction with the collection of Medieval art from Cleveland on display at the museum.

April 9

TSU, Chester Higgins, Jr. lecture. Higgins has been a photographer for the New York Times sine the 70s, and has published his photos of African-American and African experience in Time magazine and in book form. The lecture begins at 4:00 in the Floyd Payne Campus Center

Gallery F., Surface + Insight artists’ talk. This show opened in March and continues through April 26. The artists involved are Ruth Zelanski, Laura Young, Stephanie Brooke West, Jennifer Campbell, and Ryan Hogan. They are giving a talk at 7:00 on the 9^th.

April 10

Watkins College, Michael Jones and Justin Patterson, senior shows. Reception from 6-8, the show closes on April 22.

April 15

Cheekwood, William Christenberry lecture. I reviewed this show in last week’s Scene. Christenberry is a major figure in photography and Southern art, and an experienced teacher. He’s at Cheekwood to give a lecture at 6:00. Whether or not you make it to the lecture, you should see the show.

Sarratt, Charles “Teenie” Harris. Photos of African-American life in Pittsburgh by Harris, lent by the Carnegie Mellon Museum of Art and the August Wilson Center for African-American Culture. It’s odd how often you get a confluence like this exhibit and the Higgins lecture at TSU.

April 16

Frist Center, Andrea Zittel lecture. Zittel is a major artist, making self-enclosed environments, and designing clothes (uniforms) and furniture that are part utopian experiment, part critique of fashion and consumption. Lecture starts at 6:30

APSU, Terminal Short Video Festival. Austin Peay’s on-line project Terminal will be going in Barry Jones’ words a “real world” event at 8:00 projecting videos onto the front of the Trahern Building.

Parthenon, Hans Goette lecture. Goette, from the German Archeological Institute in Berlin, will speak on the architecture and history of classical Greek theatres and how they were used for the presentation of plays, choral competitions, sacrifices, and civic ceremonies. The lecture is at 7:00 and free, but you need to call 862-8431 to reserve a seat.

April 17

Twist, Camille Jackson, Watkins Senior Show. Show open from 4-6

214 3rd Ave. N, Ellie Odom, Watkins Senior Show. Like the other one, running from 4-6 one day only.

April 18 and 19

4 Bridges Art Festival, Chattanooga. This is what Jerry Dale McFadden ran off to direct. It’s a big 2-day show with 150 artists at the Tennessee Pavillion, covering all media, “crafts” as well as “fine arts.”

April 21

Sewanee University Art Gallery, Art Majors Senior Show.

April 22

Belmont, Edie Maney. A solo show by a Nashville painter who takes an abstractionist’s approach, but sometimes with hints of figurative results.

April 23

TSU Art Gallery, Senior Show. Reception from 4-7

April 24

Watkins College, Erin Plew, Myrna Talbot, and Ashley Steverson Senior Shows.

Customs House Museum (Clarksville), David Farmerie lecture. Lecture by the artist in conjunction with a photo series on the theme of the 7 Deadly Sins.

April 25

Gallery One, Katharina Chapuis, Marc Civitarese Meditative abstract paintings by Chapuis, hazy wetlands landscapes by Civitarese.

May 10

Belmont Mansion, Beth Gilmore. As I said in the intro, Beth is getting to install her art in an unrestored room of the mansion, which is so appropriate since that’s where a lot of the images come from. Her whole approach is based on appropriating and absorbing images, and then looking for a home that allows a vivid sense of historical presence to express itself. This show will let a couple of ways of telling history reside together. And I think it’s been a while since Beth has shown her work on its own, and I’ve probably never seen it with this opportunity to occupy a space. The show will run from 6-9 on the 10^th.

Pegram needs a Godard festival

2009-03-29T20:21:00.001-07:00

Yesterday Maria and I went to see the Godard movie playing at the Belcourt, Made in U.S.A. It was made in 1966 but never released in the US because of rights issues. It was made quickly, and does seem tossed off, a bunch of riffs barely strung together. Now some of the riffs are good, like a scene in a bar that works out an extended language philosophy game and ends with Marianne Faithfull singing "As Tears Go By" a capella. There are also lots of nice looking people in the movie, starting with Anna Karina.

In one of the early scenes in the movie, she is in a hotel movie reading a book, and later on one of the other characters is reading the same book. It's Adieu La Vie, Adieu L'Amour, which is the French translation of a book by Horace McCoy. I assume it's the French title for Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, which was the basis for a Jimm y Cagney movie. It's one of a bunch of nearly constant film references in the movie, starting with a dedication to Sam Fuller and Nicolas Ray, and including a name check to the King Vidor movie Ruby Gentry and a major character is named David Goodis, who was the author of Dark Passage and the book that Truffaut turned into Shoot the Piano Player.

Now here's the interesting thing. Horace McCoy (1897-1955) was born, in off all places, Pegram, TN, and grew up in Nashville. Pegram really needs to capitalize on the Godard connection to their native son. (Sounds like a job for Lain York!)

Review of Christenberry show

2009-03-25T12:46:00.001-07:00

Here's my review of the Bill Christenberry show at Cheekwood. Christenberry is one of those artists every Southerner (or fellow traveler) should know about.

The other shows at Cheekwood right now are very good also--nice selection of abstract paintings from around the state, very cool Michael Baggarly sculptures, and another set of video curated by Greg Pond.

What a metaphor

2009-03-07T20:16:00.000-08:00

Slogging my way through Augustine's Confessions--I say slogging because I've got a short attention span--and getting towards the end I came across a metaphor that stopped me in my tracks. For those of you who haven't read it the Confessions has an odd structure--it starts out as autobiography, taking you through Augustine's whole life up to the point at which he becomes baptized as a Christian. This being the whole point of telling his life story, he promptly moves into discussions of philosophical and theological questions.

Towards the end of the book, in what in my translation (the translation is by John K. Ryan from 1960--I'm not sure it's very good, but let's hope it's not too far off) is Chapter 15 of Book 13, he describes the scriptures as a firmament of authority over our existence. "Who except you, our God, has made for us a firmament of authority over us in the form of your divine Scriptures? For 'the heavens shall be folded together like a book' and now they are stretched over us like a skin." It's actually a double metaphor, of the book (the Book) as sky and the book as skin. To me this seems the opposite of the more common metaphor, that the sky is a book upon which meaning has been inscribed. In this case, the book, the bearer of words and meaning is seen as doing what the sky does in its primary state--which would be something like envelope, enclose. What does the sky do functionally when seen from a human perspective--it brings down sun and rain, it defines the extent of the possible field of vision. Like I said, this seems a reversal of metaphorical position, and it forces new, strange questions about what Scripture does functionally.

But there's more. He goes on to say "Other waters there are above this firmament...immortal and kept free from earthly corruption." It is the realm of supercelestial beings who have in one instant, no need of reading, but also see God's face and "read upon it what your eternal will decrees." I really need to check this translation, but its fascinating to think that Augustine sees waters above the sky. And of course the sky here is Scripture, so what is the "water" that takes position above the scripture. The idea of angels or the blessed transcending the need for earthly language seems familiar enough, but this idea of an ocean above the sky is odd. Among other things it reverses the relationships on the horizon line.

I'm not sure I have that much to say about this, other than commenting on how striking this sequence of metaphors is. I have a sense that these metaphors--book as sky, book as skin--will prove useful in time to come. It also connects a little with Stellet Licht, which starts and ends with images of the night sky--the firmament for sure--and the sky figures prominently in many of the shots. Augustine's metaphor gives me another way to think of those skies--not as something to read and interpret, but as a reminder of the all-encompassing structures that envelope and define us.

Photo of night sky by Andew Crampton from Wikimedia Commons.

Silent Light

2009-03-06T20:47:00.000-08:00

We just got back from seeing Stellet Licht (Silent Light) at the Belcourt. It's a remarkable film by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas about people in a German-speaking Mennonite community in Mexico. It's a story about adultery, filmed with non-professional actors in their dialect, which is a version of Plattdeutsch. It operates on so many levels, and I'm not sure I'm up to writing about it. The main thing I want to do is let people know it's playing, because it's only going to be at the Belcourt for this weekend. There was some sad story with distributors so the film has never gotten decent distribution here.

Its portrayal of the psychological, emotional, and spiritual effects of adultery hit me really hard. It also all goes much farther, into the questions about the nature of divine in human experience, the difficulty in discerning how God speaks to us. Aspects of the film are devastating, but the people and the story are so firmly grounded in steady corporeality that the divine goodness comes out, the goodness behind the formation of the world out of formlessness. In this setting, and with the movie opening with the night turning to light and then closing back into night, creation is on your mind.

I found myself identifying strongly with the leading character Johan's weaknesses. There were other personal connections, some small details, like film of Jacques Brel (an artist I'm quite fond of) showing up at one point, and the fact the dialogue is in Plattdeutsch, which as I understand it is the dialect spoken in my Grandfather's community in Nebraska before WWI.

It's also about the most beautiful thing I've seen in a long time. The countryside in this part of Mexico (Chihuahua) is stunning, the farmlands and interiors beautiful and beautifully filmed.

This seems like a perfect film to see during Lent. It's an extended contemplation about the things Lent contemplates, if not seen through a devotional lens.

Another small detail--in a funeral scene, the people sing passages from the scriptures. It's strong, ancient stuff, and it reminds me a lot of Scots Gaelic psalmody. Some of my distant ancestors were Mennonites, and it was amazing to listen to this and think this is what my family sounded like 150 or 200 years ago. It would have sent a shivver down my spine except that it's part of a complex scene and I had a lot of other emotions going on simultaneously.

Nashville Visual Arts Events March 2009

2009-03-04T14:14:00.000-08:00

Cheekwood is opening several shows at once, and I’ll get to that in a minute, but I think the biggest news is that Nancy Saturn is closing American Artisan gallery on March 31. (BTW, this edition contains a lot of deep thoughts from me—I wouldn’t blame you for scrolling down to the listing of events.) The card in the mail says she’s been in business for 38 years. And I should say upfront that the American Artisan Festival in Centennial Park will continue. I don’t know the reasons for the closure—she’s been doing it for quite a while, but you’ve got to think this economy can’t be good for business. Its closure will leave a hole. The craft world and market place consists in part of a network of stores around the country like American Artisan that specialize in crafts at a high level. They vary in the degree of emphasis on wearability/usability and collectibility/investment—American Artisan was on the useable end. Other stores and galleries in town carry work by a few to a bunch of jewelers, and the Arts Company carries some fine art potters and wood turners, but a place like American Artisan brings in a wide range of artists and offers pieces that represent much more of the range of craft art, and it edges closer to fine art. As the economy change, and has been changing, the fabric through which a scene like the crafts stays alive starts to fray. Other models to connect artists and buyers emerge like the big fairs—especially the ones sponsored by the American Craft Council, but they won’t penetrate as far. There’s also a shift of energy from the traditional high crafts to the DIY and Etsy world. The idea of say jewelry as fine art may fade significantly, ornaments as art objects giving way to ornaments as fashion, which in a way is a return to origins. As (OK, if) the country gets poorer overall, art as object of collection, investment and speculation may give way to art for use, even if it for decoration or reflection. This may not be unhealthy, but it would be a shift in the nature of art as produced and experienced.

Nancy Saturn deserves thanks and respect for bringing this art to Nashville for so long. Maybe someone will step into the vacuum, but that will certainly have to wait until happy days are here again.

Cheekwood’s shows this month include one that’s important for sure, the William Christenberry exhibit in the main galleries. Christenberry is an important figure, one of the first photographers known for color work, along with William Eggleston. Like Eggleston, Christenberry’s a southerner, from Alabama, and his work dealt with the vernacular landscape of the South. Over the years he has expanded into sculpture, and has always had an interest in social critique, like pieces on the KKK. It’s important for artists and art audiences from or living in the South to know Christenberry’s work. This exhibit was one of the inaugural exhibits for the renovated galleries of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and was displayed next to the installation of that museum’s fine folk and outsider art collection—I think Christenberry chose the works for that exhibit as well. The show at Cheekwood is just Christenberry’s work, but it’s useful to keep in mind his affinity for vernacular and self-taught artists. Cheekwood’s exhibit of William Edmondson’s sculptures in the gallery next door is very appropriate.

At the same time, Cheekwood is opening a show of abstract paintings from Tennessee and Michael Baggarly’s work. Baggarly’s show will include the really fun metal sculptures he had at Zeitgeist and maybe more along the same lines.

APSU’s on-line Terminal project has launched a new piece, From Red Paint Hill by Phillip Andrew Lewis. This is the first piece they’ve commissioned you can find it here.

I should plug the Belcourt more, and am remembering to do so because of the film Silent Light coming up this weekend only. It’s by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, about a German Mennonite community in Mexico. The descriptions remind me of another great film of spiritual stillness, Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left For The East? Another highlight for me, the dialogue is in Plattdeutsch, which was the dialect they spoke in my Grandfather’s community in Nebraska.

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.

March 6

Watkins, Jeff Daniel Silva. An exhibit of work by experimental filmmaker and video and installation artist from Boston.

Customs House Museum (Clarksville), David Farmerie. A photo series on the theme of the 7 Deadly Sins by a photographer who has worked for National Geographic among others. There will be a poetry reading by R. MonaLeeza during the opening (7:00).

March 7

Twist, Shana Kohnstamm and John Dowell. Shana will be in the main (main? original? most westward?) gallery, John Dowell in Twist 58. Shana’s got a bunch of new work, abstraction that morphs into surrealistic organisms. Dowell is a printmaker from Philly, and his exhibit here will be part of a project where he goes to cities and makes photographs and lithos of what he sees in the streetscape. If this works, the effect of someone coming into the city fresh should yield unexpected perspectives on familiar scenes.

Plowhaus at TAL, Mel Davenport, Ayjey, Dirk Mooth, Mar Augelli. Mel will be showing a pop art style painting and several sculptures.

Tennessee Art League, Brenda Stein. A new exhibit from wood-turner Brenda Stein.

The Arts Company, John Baeder. Nashvillian Baeder has created well-known photorealist paintings and watercolors of places like diners, hamburger stands, and Nashville neighborhood landmarks. Last month the Arts Company exhibited a show of the photographs he took and used as references for his paintings, and this month they have a new set of those photos, these ones focusing on street signs and Nashville in the early 80s.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, DIG Show: Embodiment. The church’s annual group show, part of our Lenten observance. Like usual it’s a mix of people, artists from around the community and people affiliated with the church (these are not mutually exclusive groups). The show went up last weekend and one of my favorite pieces so far is a drawing by David Hellams. I won’t say more and let it be a surprise. BTW, we are also starting our annual Tom Wills-curated Lenten film series at the Church this Thursday with a viewing of John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing. The series runs every Thursday into April. There’s a couple of silent films this year and some unusual older films.

Sera Davis, Group show curated by Ron Lambert. I got over at the last minute to see Ron’s February show at Sera Davis. I especially like a video piece that I hope I’ll get a chance to post about. This month Ron curated a group show of works on paper, several of the people with Watkins affiliations: Iwonka Waskowski, Brady Haston, Kristi Hargrove, John Whitten, Erin Plew, David Hellams, Terry Thacker, Jodi Hays, and Ron. One of Iwonka's pieces is the visual with this post.

Terrazzo, Zeitgeist artists. Zeitgeist is curating their second show at this new building at 12^th and Division, with work by Caroline Allison, Will Berry, Alicia Henry, Farrar Hood, Buddy Jackson, James Perrin, Greg Pond, Bjorn Sterri, and Lars Strandh.

March 11

Gallery One, Chamber Music and Lori-Gene In a nice bit of cross-programming and collaboration, Gallery One will present a chamber music recital in the gallery “accompanied” by Lori-Gene making drawings during the performance. The musicians will be Sean Neukom (violin), Alicia Storin (cello) and Evan Cobb (oboe), and they perform a Ravel cello sonata, a solo sonata for violin by Ysaye, and a trio by local composer Alyssa Weinberg. So far Nashville hasn’t gotten big into classical music programming in unconventional venues (it’s happening in New York, like at Le Poisson Rouge), but it’s really worth exploring. As for making art during music performance, we in the Transcendental Crayon Ensemble had painters working away during our shows for years, and I think the practice should be encouraged. This concert marks the opening of Lori-Gene’s exhibit in the gallery.

March 12

Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, The Printed Page. An exhibit of Old Master and modern prints from the gallery’s Anna C. Hoyt Collection. Reception from 5-7.

Vanderbilt Sarratt Gallery, Edie Maney. Maney's paintings work their way through the process of their to arrive at non-objective figuration. Things that emerge from pure shape take on enough aspects of figures to suggest the human form. A reception at Sarratt from 5-6:30.

March 13

Untitled, Barely Legal, at the Icon. The quarterly show of this group probably promises more trouble with obscenity statutes than it delivers, but really it’s all about the group’s 18^th birthday. More significantly, it’s another effort to bring the visual arts world into the Gulch, and like the monthly series by Zeitgeist untitled is borrowing space in one of the new residential developments going up. There is a sense that the visual arts community belongs in the Gulch, given its status as a hot area. I think it’s great if people can find good spaces for what they are doing, but the visual arts usually lead, don’t follow, real estate development of this sort. Anyway, back to the untitled show, this time out they’re hooking up with the Nashville Film Festival, who will be showing shorts at the event.

March 14

Snow Gallery, Eggshibition. This is a group show of work by 8 women exploring, you guessed it, the symbolism of the egg. Like everything Catherine does, it promises to be a thoughtfully constructed exhibit. First of all the artists exhibiting—Lesley Patterson-Marx, Nicole Pietrantoni, Gina Binkley, Claudia Lee, Laura Chenicek, Julia Chenicek Korn (maybe Laura’s daughter?), Joan Curry, and Paula Heaphy. It looks like it will include work that Nicole has done since she headed off for her MFA program at Iowa. The piece on the gallery PR looks like a new direction, possessed of a completely different internal sense of motion. And I always fuss on Lesley’s work, so here I go, but the PR says she’ll have a new art book in this show, called the Egg Book, which sounds like one more step forward with the ideas she’s been going to deeply for several years now. And again, as is Catherine’s practice, she’s matching the contemporary work with vintage prints from her collection, in this case hand-colored 19^th century prints of eggs.

Cheekwood, 4 Exhibits. First, the big Christenberry. See the intro for more on that. Then there’s Michael Baggarly’s show in Temporary Contemporary. Again, check out the intro. The Tennessee Abstract painting show was picked well—Brady Haston, Carol Mode, Terry Thacker, Dwayne Butcher, Hans Schmitt-Matzen, John Tallman, Hamlett Dobbins, Richard Feaster, Ron Buffington, Melissa Dunn, Rocky and Mandy Rogers Horton, Jered Sprecher, and Lain York. This really does capture most of the best energy in abstract painting happening in the state right now. And there’s a new installation in the video galleries, Lens with a Conscience.

March 17

Parthenon symposium, Rabun Taylor, “Reassessing the Pantheon in Rome.” A talk by a professor from the University of Texas at Austin. The talk will be at 7:00; call 862-8431 to reserve a free ticket.

March 18

Estel, Deb Garlick and Tim Yankosky. This show opens on the 18^th but the reception will be on April 4 in conjunction with First Saturday. So I’ll have more on this in April missive.

March 21

Tinney Contemporary, Rachael McCampbell. Paintings of endangered species with a percentage of sales going to the Land Trust for Tennessee

Cumberland Gallery, Kit Reuther and Allison Stewart. Reuther’s painting have something of Cy Twombley’s nervous scratchiness. They are near abstractions in which parts of scenes have been broken apart and simplified, but rendered almost as if rather than painting objects, she has painted out objects.

March 26

TSU Hiram Van Gordon Gallery, Student Art Show. Art by TSU students selected by their faculty. Given the quality of recent outings by TSU students, a TSU student show deserves as much attention as Watkins student shows. Reception from 3-6

Off the Wall in Dickson

2009-02-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

Just got a chance to see the Off the Wall group's show at the Renaissance Center.

A couple of things that seemed worth mentioning. Janet Heilbronn has really luscious paintings, one of those maybe it's abstract, maybe it's geologic sort of things. One of the paintings, untitled, has a sort of collar-formation, like some sort of sponge. The center is dominated by a brick-red color, but has flashes of blues in it. The structure is surrounded by a midnight blue background. Then the next painting over, What We Know, has really different color things go on. A diagonal line divides the painting--under the line are swirling forms I seem to remember from earlier work. On top of the line are clearly delineated pebbles with thin bright colors--it's the kind of colors that shouldn't work, but they do. This is a case where I just like what an artist is doing with color. I have a similar reaction say to James Lavadour's work when they show it at Cumberland.

I've been watching Iwonka Waskowski's work with interest since she showed some color drawings on clay board in a show at Kristi Hargrove's studio. They seemed like anatomical cut-aways, but not so much of discernable forms, and with shapes of things like teddy bears embedded. The shapes have a kind of analytical quality, like the working out of systems of shapes and relationships, but it's also very intuitive. I realize it's a way I think about the way Francis Bacon shapes images, and Iwonka's work in color has the raw meat quality that is ever present in Bacon. She's been working with these forms for I guess a couple of years now. The work at the Renaissance Center is graphite drawings, so no color. She continues working with those shapes, but in this media they have Hargravian qualities of fine detail, little hairlines and whatnot. "Tortured Madonna" takes the exterior shape of Mary with her head covered from religious paintings, and strips off the surface to show the shapes of strange organs or body structures, although the folds of cloth are still sort of present. She's also done a lot of paired images, and in this show there's two, "The Way I See It" and "The Way You See It" are very similar abstract shapes with slight variations. This is what I mean by an analytic piece, where you try out variations on the same forms and work shifts in combinations.

These are examples of stuff Iwonka's been working on for a while. The big shift is the introduction of figures with mask-like faces on a couple of these--much more literal, more explicitly figures, and a step into cartoon-inspired areas. Like with the work to date, it will be interesting to see where it goes.

I'm not going to talk about everyone's stuff because this is just a quick blog post. Quinn Dukes, Jenny Luckett, Mahlea Jones, and Jaime Raybin are also in the show. Jaime's taking images like her Milk Shelf series in a new direction with photographs inserted as vitrines in thick-walled boxes, but still working on recollections of childhood and teen-age years. Anyway, the show is up through March 14.

Maybe the best thing about this trip was seeing the new sculptures of the Jackson brothers, the 3 Dickson doctors who founded the local hospital, sold it to HCA, made a lot of money on their HCA stock and funded the Renaissance Center. The Ren Center took a wall in the rotunda area and installed three bronze busts of the brothers, looking very stern in their doctor's coats. With their uniforms it reminded me of a display honoring General Zhukov and other commanders of the Great Patriotic War.

Review of Paint Made Flesh

2009-02-04T20:16:00.000-08:00

Here's my review of the Frist contemporary painting show that appeared in the Scene today. This really is a great show. I went back last weekend just to see the Lucien Freuds. And a lot of the others are really fine. I'm going to try to get back regularly while it's here.

Nashville Visual Arts Events February 2009

2009-02-04T19:55:00.000-08:00

This month we’ve got a few promising things coming up. Another group show at Estel with Lesley Patteron-Marx and Desi Minchillo, another installation from Lauren Kusso at Twist.

TSU Gallery is not listed this month, but they organized the panel discussion at Vandy on the 19^th, which is related to TSU’s current showing of Diva Dutch, a documentary about Aishia Cousins and a “performance sculpture” project she did. I assume it involves jumping rope, which I’ve never thought about much but I can see how it is an important performance practice for African-American girls and women. I imagine there’s a lot to work with there.

For those of you who get out of town, Barbara Yontz is in a 3-woman show that opens tomorrow night at Phoenix Gallery in Chelsea. There will also be an artists’ talk for the show on Feb. 19.

There’s probably a zillion errors and omissions this month. Let me know what you catch, and I’ll try to fix it, at least on the web site.

February 5

Zeitgeist, Georgeanne Harmon poetry reading. This reading by Georgeanne Harmon is in conjunction with the current exhibit at Zeitgeist of paintings by her brother Paul. The exhibit incorporates selections from her works into the gallery exhibition. This event is the first in a planned series at Zeitgeist which will bring in prose writers and poets for readings and discussion in conjunction with each of the gallery shows this year.

February 5

Sarratt Gallery, Rob Lambert. Photography and sculpture that moves back and forth between the landscape and abstract forms. I left this one off earlier, so I may come back and fill in some more detail.

February 6

Centennial Art Center, Members of the Plate Tone Printshop. Six members of the group will be exhibiting—Mar Augelli, Kaaren Hirschowitz-Engel, Patricia Jordan, Reesha Leone, Jenny Luckett and Jaime Raybin.

Watkins Juried Student Art Show. This is one of the best ways to see what the students at Watkins are doing. These students remain one of the most important sources of energy for our art scene—there’s real talent there, and certainly an engagement with the larger art world.

Gallery F, Unusual Sympathy. Carlin Wing and Amelia Winger-Bearskin have produced a show about Andrew Jackson, but it focuses on Lyncoya, a Creek boy orphaned on the battlefield and adopted by Jackson. Wing is teaching photography at Watkins, and Winger-Bearskin is a lecturer in video, performance art, and drawing at Vandy. This sounds like another complex show at Gallery F, with drawings, video, text, and photography. Winger-Bearskin will give a vocal performance the night of the opening, and the two artists will deliver a talk at the gallery at 3 on Sunday the 8^th. This show will be the first of several parts to this collaboration.

Forest Bride at the 5 Spot. This is the group Ben and Amy Marcantel lead, mostly by setting some nice parameters for musicians to work around in. I play in it, and other folks like Ryan Norris, Jonathan Marx, Luke Schneider, Scott Martin, Joseph Hudson, and Derek Schartung, depending on what they’ve got going on.

February 7

Estel, Paper Rock Scissors. This show picks up the words in the old game, which in their various combinations determine the works involved—works made from stone, cut paper, or with any of the 3 things as subject matter. It makes perfect sense for the the artists chosen. The most complicated of Lesley Patterson-Marx’s prints usually involve cutting the paper, forming masks and cut-throughs. I haven’t seen much of Sabine Schlunk’s work yet, but one piece did involve stones collected, as I remember it, from Germany. Samantha Callahan had great cut paper pieces in a show at Downtown Presbyterian Church, as did Desi Minchillo at Estel. That’s just four out of 18 artists in that show. And one of the side galleries will show drawings by Marcello Halmenschlager—I thought his work in Estel’s group drawing show was very interesting and wonder how well it will hold up on second viewing. Also, Harry has new work up.

Twist, Lauren Kussro. This installation makes a companion to the Estel show—Kussro’s primary material is paper, printed, cut and turned into objects that she suspended throughout the gallery space. Her previous installation at Twist was dreamy, peaceful, and surreal, and it looks like this one, with the enticing title “The Luminous Bower,” will hit some of the same marks and more—this time she’s working lights into the paper forms, which should deliver a nice warm sense. MiChelle Jones did a nice preview of it in the Tennessean. Twist will complement that installation with Irene Wills’s garden and floral paintings. In their second space down the hall in the Arcade, they’ll show paintings by Duncan McDaniel.

Plowhaus at TALS, Contrast: A Celebration of African-American History. This show brings together a bunch of the Plowhaus artists with some of the Lost Boys of Sudan artists and students enrolled in the YMCA’s artEMBRACE program. The artists from these 3 groups are addressing how African-American history has influenced their lives. It’s a great way to frame a Black History Month theme, leaving room for everyone to address this history from whatever perspective they bring.

Tennessee State Museum, premiere of documentary on John Baeder. Directed by Curt Hahn, a filmmaker who among other things is documenting some of the pivotal figures in Nashville’s cultural life with his previous films on the Fisk Jubilee Singers and Sylvia Hyman. The showing will be at 3:00, and is in conjunction with a retrospective of Baeder’s work at the Tennessee State Museum.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Elizabeth Streight and Sarah Hearld. Two photographers who literally have worked from opposite ends of the globe. Sarah’s pictures come from her travels in New Delhi, while Liz’s sensitive, caring work is drawn from the people right around her, right here. I would say Liz’s work is more domestic and intimate, but from the samples I’ve seen I’m not sure Sarah doesn’t share similar interests.

Tinney Contemporary, Lyle Carbajal, Sharon Lee Hart and Jason Lascu. Art brut paintings from Carbajal, photographs composed of composite images from Hart, and figurative sculptures in wax by Lascu.

Rymer, Doug Schatz, Dooby Tompkins, Thomas Petillo, Ted Whisenhunt. Sculpures by Schatz, pop-culture infused paintings by Tompkins, large format Polaroid images by Petillo, and sculptures from Whisenhunt.

Ruby Green, Open Studios. Ruby Green is converting its gallery space into studios for the next few months, through September. The artists with studios (right now the line up is Lori Anne Parker, Olga Alexeeva, John Newman, Susan Saruda, and Caroline Allison) are going to have open studios every month on first Saturday. This is a return to Ruby Green’s roots, which was studio space before the gallery was formed. Keeping the gallery program going was hard for Chris Campbell and the others involved, but it’s disappointing that they’ll be taking a break from putting up curated shows.

Cumberland Gallery, paintings by Xin Lu, and wall sculptures by Ahren Ahrenholtz, John Fraser, Ben Dallas, David French, Tom Pfannerstill. Xin Lu was the winner of the Hamblet Award at Vanderbilt. She uses all sorts of Chinese cultural imagery, a reflection of her exploration of her heritage. Just to pick one of the sculptors, Ahrenholtz had some really nice assemblages in Cumberland’s Small Packages show over the holidays. They had that quality of mysterious industrial formations, like fixtures in a Terry Gilliam movie. The pieces, made from common materials like rope, cloth, or nails, are slathered in white paint that gives everything a uniform surface texture and a sense of semi-firmness.

Terrazzo, Zeitgeist artists. 3 units in this new building at 12^th and Division will be used as galleries for work by Jim Ann Howard, Terry Rowlett, Greg Pond, Hans Schmitt-Matzen, Megan Lightell, Gene Wilken, and Richard Painter. The intersection of real estate and art, not always benign, takes a slightly different form here where the parties pursue a mutual interest in getting the public to see what they’ve created.

MIR, Michael McKelvey

February 12

Alias concert, Turner Recital Hall, Blair School, Vandy. The winter concert by Nashville’s main chamber music group includes one of the great Bartok string quartets (#4), one of Dvorak’s string quintets, and two pieces in Alias’ series this year of works by female composers: a piece for cello and piano by Gabriela Lena Frank, which includes some improvisation, and a duet for violin and piano by Lili Boulanger, younger sister of the great composition teacher Nadia. Starts at 8.

February 13

University Art Gallery, Sewanee, Lauren Kalman. Kalman taught for a year or so at Watkins—now she’s at Brown. Though I’ve seen sculptures by her that use metal, it didn’t register on me she has background as a goldsmith. This show brings out that part of her background. She makes gold objects (“adornments” she calls them) that she attaches to her body. The objects in one series take the form of disease symptoms—cysts, tumors—jewelry as a form of disfigurement rather than decoration.

Three Squared Gallery, Erin Plew, John Whitten, and Kelly Bonadies. A show by three of the sharper students near the end of their time at Watkins. The gallery is located at 427 Chestnut Street, studio 223.

Frist Center, Medieval Treasures from Cleveland and Mike Hoolboom. The first show appears to be self-explanatory from the title—sculptures, metalwork, carvings, etc. from the period before the Renaissance. Contemporary Artists Project gallery has video from Mike Hoolboom, who combines original footage and material taken from other films.

February 17

Parthenon symposium, Bronwen Wickkiser, “From Hippokrates to Asklepios: the Medical Marketplace in Ancient Greece.” The talk will be at 7:00; call 862-8431 to reserve a free ticket.

February 18

Vanderbilt Studio Arts Building, Space 204, Clay Carroll and Ruth Stanford. Carroll’s another Hamblet Award winner (see Cumberland), now studying architecture at Harvard. This show has large-scale photos white boxes he positioned in the landscape, which he has brought into the gallery. He’s clearly interested in non-rational spaces, as he showed in his contribution to the Judy Chicago project at Vanderbilt. Stanford is a sculptor who has titled the work in this show “Cryptoecology”—her imaginary environments are dioramas placed inside the mouths of fish heads.

February 19

Panel discussion, The Image of the Black Female in Art and Education. Participants include Aisha Cousins, whose work is on display at TSU, Amelia Winger-Bearskin from Vanderbilt who is currently showing at Gallery F, and Cynthia Gadsen and Jewell Win from TSU. Jodi Hays from TSU moderates. 6 p.m. in Room 126 at Wilson Hall on the Vanderbilt campus.

Nashville Public Library, Main Downtown Library, Alan LeQuire, “Cultural Heroes.” An exhibit of LeQuire’s monumental bronze busts of singers—Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Leadbelly, Paul Robeson, and Woody Guthrie, plus a new one to be unveiled at the reception on the 19th. These are labors of love for LeQuire. Observant Nashville frequent flyers will have seen them on display earlier on the concourse between the A/B and C terminals at the Nashville airport.

Waltz with Bashir

2009-01-31T20:58:00.000-08:00

Maria and I saw Waltz with Bashir tonight at the Belcourt. This is the Israeli animated documentary (written and directed by Ari Folman) about the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, perpetrated by Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen with Israeli assistance. Everyone should go see this movie. Not only is it a devastating picture of this terrible war, absolutely heart-wrenching, even more compelling coming from an Israeli perspective, but it's also a thoughtful exploration of how memory works. Imagined memories, waking dreams, and hallucinations have as much status as more accurate recollections of events because these "false" memories serve different purposes. The animation results in beautiful images, and also allows the director to create an environment where past and present stand on a visually equivalent stage.

But the main thing this movie does is take an unflinching view of this war, and war in general, in its devastation and absurdity. And the timing of the film's release is spooky, coming upon the heels of the attack on Gaza.

One of the things that made this film compelling for me is seeing men about my age putting together and dealing with their memories of the war and the massacre. If I were Israeli, this might have been "my war," although I guess I would have already done my conscript service--my brother would have been more like the right age.

Put all this together, the terrible events of '82 and middle-aged ruefulness, and you get about the saddest movie I've seen in a long time.

Here's A.O. Scott's review of the film in the Times.

Review in the Scene of show at Rymer

2009-01-18T15:40:00.000-08:00

Here's my review in this week's Scene of the current show at Rymer. Bunch of interesting stuff there recently, and I didn't even get a chance to write about Casey Pierce's paintings. Also, Rymer gallery director Herb Williams is in DC, having gotten a piece featuring Obama into the Manifest Hope show in DC, organized by SEIU, MoveOn.org and Obey Giant (that's the organization around Shepard Fairey, the guy who designed the Obama Hope poster). It's at 3333 M Street if you're going to be in town--not sure what that is, other than its in Georgetown.

Cruising around looking into the show, I ran across a notice that the Hope painting of Obama has been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery. That's good. It belongs there.

Nashville Visual Arts Events early January 2008

2009-01-01T17:41:00.001-08:00

OK everyone, wake up from your New Year’s naps. Art continues its irresistible advance and Gallery Crawl will occur this Saturday, bigger than ever. At least Twist will be bigger than ever.

I’ve only got information on a few things happening later in the month. With the holidays over I’m sure announcements will start will start rolling in, so there will for sure be a mid-month update.

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.

January 3

Twist, Rocky and Mandy Horton, Brooke Grace, the Doling brothers, and Todd Greene’s Butcher Paper Collective Project Twist has taken on additional space in the Arcade which they’re using for a few purposes, including space for an office and a second exhibition space. In the main (Original? Room 78? We’ll see) gallery they are continuing with Rocky and Mandy Horton, but they’re bringing in new pieces. New and bigger pieces. The back room will feature photography by Brooke Grace and Shane and Tony Doling. Then down the hall at space 58, Todd Greene is going to show the results of a project he has done with students at Ravenswood High School, where he’s teaching. Todd would start a painting or drawing on a piece of butcher paper and then have students add to it, with Todd making more contributions to it as it progressed. This of course is a variant of the surrealist Exquisite Corpse practice. The show will include some pieces from this project plus something he and a few of the students will do on-site in 3 days (like starting today). Todd always seemed to have a great interest in incorporating structures for tapping intuition into his teaching. This should be more than a little interesting.

Rymer, Jordan Eagles and Amy Hamblin. Eagles has an attention-grabbing m.o. in the work he’s bringing into Twist—samples of blood (his own I think) sandwiched in resin and plexiglass. It takes the form of abstract splashes of red ink. This is something that may be a one-liner—“wow, it’s blood. Cool.” Hamblin is a sculptor, from Portland, Oregon. Rymer’s press material describes her work as mesh and wire exoskeletons and organs. In addition to these, the installation by Catherine Foster will remain up, the natural world transmuted through a sequence of photographic and fabrication steps, as will some of the wide-ranging paintings by Casey Pierce.

The Arts Company, Annual Artists Preview. The Arts Company uses its January show to give everyone a taste of what’s coming up for the year. They’ll also be inaugurating use of some of their second floor space as a gallery for photography

Tinney Contemporary, Winter Wall. Tinney’s doing a selection from their gallery artists, about 15 people.

Sera Davis, In a Nut$hell: Under a Grand. Sera Davis is continuing her December show..

Mir Gallery, Steven Knudson. Going just on the image on the gallery’s MySpace page, Knudson looks like he does semi-gothic cartoon-like drawings and paintings, in the post-Gorey/Tim Burton mode.

January 8

Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Photography by Harmony Korine. Korine, a Nashville native, is of course best known for work in film--writer for Larry Clark's Kids and director of several films (most recently Mr. Lonely) . Joseph Whitt organized this show that draws on Korine's photographs. The results look continuous with his work in film, cinematic, distinctly narrative (albeit it looks to be of an amorphous sort), edging into transgressive domains.

Vanderbilt Space 204 Gallery (Art Department), Gary Chapman and Watkins students. Two shows opening, one featuring Gary Chapman and another a bunch of current Watkins students (Kelly Bonadies, Adolfo Davila, Lisa Deal, Cayless Griffis, Erin Plew, Nick Stolle, Mandy Stoller and Stephanie West). I think it’s great that they are using the space to get some cross-communication going between the Watkins and Vandy students, although you can’t help thinking Vandy’s bringing in work from Watkins to give their students an idea of what is possible. But I haven’t talked to anyone at Vandy about this show, so I’m talking completely out of school as it were. One thing will be to see if Watkins does a show of work by Vandy students, making it a cultural exchange program. The reception is from 4-6.

January 23

Frist Center, Paint Made Flesh. A big show of contemporary painting organized by the Frist and curator Mark Scala. It promises to have a lot of very good paintings by the kinds of artists one wishes were in the holdings of local museums, like deKooning, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, George Baselitz, John Currin, Wangechi Mutu. This looks like it picks up where Mark left off with the Fragile Species show of local artists, which also was organized around painters’ treatment of the body and human frailty and mortality. Like Vanderbilt’s Guayasamin show, this one is going to travel to other institutions, which is a big deal, and this one is going to the Phillips Collection in DC, which is a particularly prestigious place—usually the Frist is receiving stuff from the Phillips.There will be a symposium on Friday and Saturday featuring John Edlerfield, Emily Braun, Richard Shiff, and Eric Fischl as well as local luminaries.