It’s been another busy year for art in Nashville. The Frist Center had its fifth birthday, a cluster of downtown galleries kept everybody hopping with a barrage of monthly openings and Vanderbilt brought in major artists for projects. The high points covered a lot of geography, visited serious topics and indulged visual pleasure.
“The Quest for Immortality,” Frist Center for the Visual Arts One purpose of the Frist is to provide a setting for blockbuster shows, and this show of rarities from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo fit the bill. The galleries were filled with gold stuff, mummies and coffins, and even a full-scale replica of the tomb of Pharaoh Thutmose IIII. Loosely focusing the show on this ruler allowed the exhibit to dazzle and still deliver a cogent account of ancient Egyptian culture.
“100 Artists See God,” Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art As you would expect, the show was all over the map (a guaranteed result with 100 or so artists) and aggravating at times (a guaranteed result with this topic), but hands down it achieved its purpose of portraying God as something multifarious.
__nym, 310 Chestnut Members of _nym, who are students of the Watkins College of Art and Design, put on an ambitious one-night show about language and the things it can be. They worked braille and Morse code into pieces, and made the aural visual by converting speech into graphs. Simple pieces showed many layers of meaning—for example, Ken Nakamura’s single grain of rice, rigged on a spindle and rotated rapidly against a turntable stylus that drew sounds from the grain surface. The result was a sweet rumble with evocations of decay, cultural identity and philosophical quandaries.
Iwonka Waskowski, Kristi Hargrove Studio A recent Watkins graduate, Waskowski seemed to hit a post-graduation stride with a series of small, finely wrought pieces combining drawing and painting on clayboard. The clean, cool texture of this material seemed to make the fleshy colors even more vivid. Formally she offered lots of surprises, including subtle reversals of perspective between pieces.
Carol Mode, Leu Gallery The work in this exhibit has the dramatic energy of classic Abstract Expressionists, delivered through the use of vibrant colors in compositions that anchor complicated and chaotic color work with simple geometric elements. She has the critical “x” factor for an abstract painter, the ability to choose and combine color in ways that introduce enough contrast to stay above mere decoration and enough continuity to feel integrated. (The show is up through Jan. 25.)
Caroline Allison, Mark Bynon and Richard Feaster, Zeitgeist The gallery’s strongest show contrasted a photographer with a sculptor and a painter. Allison’s photos look at forgotten environments like VFW post interiors and an abandoned fast food drive-through in Alaska, and find a pervasive aesthetic sense. Bynon and Feaster operate in luxurious abstract realms, Bynon with simple wood sculptures where the surface is everything, layered and polished to give it a gleam and depth, and Feaster, who dripped pigments made from metal that glints in the light.
Kendall Buster, Cheekwood Temporary Contemporary Buster filled the little Temporary Contemporary room with a piece called Subterrain (Column Field). A series of floor-to-ceiling hexagonal fabric columns made you feel like you were entering a cave, and their yellow color brought to mind honeycombs. Being surrounded in color had a visceral impact on basic pleasure centers.
Todd Gordon, LeQuire Gallery Gordon makes plein air paintings of scruffy New York City settings like empty lots and industrial sites. In a very literal approach, he tries to show exactly what he saw, which gives the paintings a bit of fisheye perspective distortion, and that lends them a greater sense of scale, like they are straining to pull in the entire vista. A painting of the gray water of New York Harbor, subtly curving upward with the city pushed to the margins, was majestic.
James Lavadour/Barry Buxkamper, Cumberland Gallery Lavadour paints landscapes near his home on the Umatilla reservation in Oregon. In his hands, the clear shapes of Western topography and the lines of its geological strata record dynamic motion and violent upheavals. In the details, he layers paint into impossibly vivid colors. Buxkamper’s surrealist paintings are rich in the density of their symbolism from science, nature and the workday world, with a brilliant set of riffs on Charles Darwin.
Vitus Shell, Tennessee Arts Commission Shell riffed on a singular, tough theme, the issue of judgment based on skin tone within African American culture and in our society more generally. To devastating effect, many of his pieces drew on the “brown paper bag test,” a ritual that African American social organizations once used to judge social acceptability.
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