Downtown art crawl showcases Lost Boys' art, a human snowglobe and soap-bubble imagery

Chol Garang's sculpture "Black and White Cat" doesn't look like a cat, exactly. It's a mask about the size and shape of a chubby human face, and its rounded nose and mouth are also vaguely human. The face has catlike ears, though, that point upward as if in surprise, and black patches surround its round, white button eyes, like a raccoon's. The face is memorable—likable, even—and Garang's playful blending of species is likely to inspire a laugh. This mix of ambiguity and wit is typical of Tinney Contemporary's current exhibit, "The Lost Boys of Sudan."

The Sudanese refugees known as the Lost Boys met photographer Jack Spencer when he began taking portraits of them. Recognizing art's potential to give a "sense of purpose," he set them up with pottery-making equipment. He's quick to point out that "these really are not tribal masks," and there's nothing particularly Sudanese about their designs; rather, the refugees wanted to make masks in the way Spencer himself had been doing. The pieces are constructed from clay and ceramic, embellished with eyes and other ornaments—Garang's "Black Mouth Mask" is wearing a gold nose ring.

A mask, as accessory, is powerful because it both conceals and amplifies its wearer's identity. These works exploit the blurring of identities that masks make possible. The face of Gabriel Wal's "Bird Dog #1" is surrounded by a decorative border or mane. Small, carefully modeled doglike ears perch on top of its head, but its defined brow and oval eyes are those of a pensive man. The bottom half of its face is taken up by an enormous nose-shaped beak. The expressiveness of the face contrasts sharply with its lack of a mouth. One can imagine the artist's amusement at having created this incongruous face, but it's also a little uncanny.

Spencer says he hopes the young men can ultimately become self-supporting artists—on December's First Saturday downtown art crawl, the crowd's enthusiasm for their work led to a couple of dozen sales on the first night. Not everything on the crawl drew as positive a reaction. Of "The Human Snowglobe," a gentleman who performed Christmas carols inside a transparent plastic sphere festooned with colored lights and artificial snow, one attendee cuttingly remarked that it "was not thought-provoking." We doubt it was intended to be, though, so we say, "Let it snow!"

More conducive to reflection, perhaps, was the exhibit upstairs in the Arcade at Twist. Rocky Horton, whose "photo paintings" are on display, returned to Nashville in 2003 after graduate school and began teaching at Lipscomb. A painter assigned to teach a photography class, he sought to engage with the medium by "mak[ing] it make sense in my work." He realized that "instead of looking at photography as a mechanical medium," he could see it as "a wet medium," using the chemistry of traditional black-and-white photography as his paint set. (As far as he knows, he's the only artist creating photo paintings; he shares the exhibit with his wife, Mandy Rogers Horton, also a painter.)

Horton uses photography paper but no film or camera; instead, he creates images by applying various dilutions of photo chemicals to the exposed paper. The shades of black, white, cream and sepia that appear will depend on the various proportions of developer and fixer he applies. He sometimes paints with a brush, but he has also used less conventional delivery media: cardboard panels, turkey basters, soap bubbles. While conventional printmaking follows a predictable trajectory (film, enlarger, developer and so on), Horton says that "every time I go in the studio, there's a process of experimentation." This leads to organic, unpredictable results—he's fond of paraphrasing a remark by Gerhard Richter, who "said that accident was a better painter than he was."

The resulting pieces play on viewers' expectations of photographic accuracy. "Rocaille 29" is seven or eight white clusters of bubbles lined up near the right edge of a black background. The complex roundish masses look like globs of dish soap on the side of a sink. Within, dozens of individual bubbles can be clearly seen. Wisps of a few more bubbles punctuate the black expanse surrounding it. It's an accurate record of the substances on the light-reactive paper, but also an abstract creation.

Photography has long flirted with abstraction to make viewers look closer; Man Ray made "Rayographs" by dispensing with film and arranging various objects—scissors, gears, glassware—on paper under an enlarger. Artists like Edward Weston would photograph details like a tree trunk, or the peeling wall of a barn, so closely that they became almost unrecognizable. In Horton's work, as he notes, abstract images can resemble "a skyscape or a landscape or a sunburst." "Rocaille 37," an array of white dots and points clustered at the center, looks like a galaxy photographed from space. Even if you don't find it thought-provoking, it's beautiful anyway. Which has to count for something.