Fragile Species: New Art Nashville

Through Sept. 25 at Frist Center for the Visual Arts

Putting together a survey show is a thankless task. No one ever approves of the curator's selections. The Frist Center's recently opened show of local art looks like a survey, but the organizers wisely hedged their bets. Surveys often have a theme, and the Frist emphasized theirs, the idea of human frailty and resilience. It's a reasonable topic, if a bit broad, and makes it hard to blame curator Mark Scala for leaving someone out (or putting someone in): he's just illustrating the theme.

Whatever the strategic intentions, it is great to see so many local artists displayed at the city's key mainstream venue and presented the way an art center like the Frist can, with its space, curatorial and design resources. The selections are good, too—all of the participants make interesting work that deserves to be taken seriously.

In pursuing its theme, the show doesn't try to represent all the artists working in Middle Tennessee. "Fragile Species" picks from the slice of the local art world that might be called emerging or early career artists, although the artists' age and experience range considerably. Many have college teaching jobs (Vanderbilt, MTSU, Watkins College of Art & Design, APSU, Fisk, Western Kentucky).

One reason not to do a survey based on geography would be if you believe, as Scala has said, that in modern America, with all its mobility, you don't find local stylistic differences. Building a show around a theme like "metaphors relating to humanity and other species," as one Frist Center program put it, will tend to reinforce the point. This is a common theme in modern art, and seeing it in Nashville doesn't distinguish the city so much as confirm its similarity to other places.

Even with a show that doesn't look for unique local qualities, at least one curious characteristic emerges. This is a show significantly about the body, with next to no nudity. Two pieces show women's breasts; several works are suggestive but not explicit. But don't jump to the conclusion that this is motivated by the Frist Center's excess of caution in face of civic censors; in fact, it accurately reflects a peculiarity of the local art scene. There is relatively little nudity in galleries around town, and our artists seem to exercise a natural reticence. This casts a stylistically conservative sculptor like Alan LeQuire, the maker of "Musica," in a radical role. This situation could change. For one thing, some of the students graduating from Watkins have incorporated nudity in their work, and if they stick around, they may continue along these lines. But as a reflection of art in Nashville today, the exhibit's discretion seems on target. It may point to a weakness in the scene, or to a limit that produces creative tensions, as in Iranian cinema.

Regardless of whether the show reveals any distinctive qualities about Nashville, we can appreciate seeing the work of local artists in this respect-filled setting. While most of the work has been previously exhibited, the context and selection cast new light on much of it, and there is some new work too.

Adrienne Outlaw, the one veteran of the Frist's "Art of Tennessee" exhibit two years ago, comes across more strongly in this show. "Fecund" consists of a series of breast-shaped forms taken from jars and bottles, funnels, lampshades and lab equipment. They are mounted on the wall pointy end out, covered in materials with different color and texture. You can peep into the ends and see interior kaleidoscopic assemblages of bees, bugs, cicada shells, seeds, feathers, sea urchins or porcupine quills. One is lit inside, and several contain a mirror that reflects back the viewer's eye. Within the shared breast form, the size, shape, color, patterns and textures of elements vary profusely and pleasurably like a collection of exotic objects. The variety suggests many ways of being female and providing sustenance, and also associates femininity with the status of a collectible object.

The show provides evidence for Outlaw's range with "Trapped," which takes a set of bed springs with no covering, pulls them together at the corners, and hangs them close to the ceiling. The compressed and folded coils create complicated patterns. Outlaw hit upon a simple idea that has appealing visual qualities while engaging her ongoing interests in psychological and domestic enclosure.

The most wrenching piece in the show is "Use It" by Erin Hewgley, a latex nude female torso (the artist's own) cut off violently at the waist, neck and arms. It is a reference to her rape, but you don't even need to know that for its violence to hit you. It looks like a cut of meat, placed on its back at a disturbing angle.

Hewgley's other pieces show a vivid sculptural imagination. One untitled piece consists of a floor-to-ceiling lock of blond hair, designed as a spiral inside a column made by strands of hair. The hair splays out on a platform at the bottom, with a few chunks of lipstick scattered like debris. The piece combines clever geometry, echoes of Rapunzel and a fetishized view of a woman reduced to her hair. With a shift of tone, "The Conundrum of Plumb" is a lectern made from a maze of metal pipe and fixtures that looks like the constructions in a Monty Python cartoon sequence.

Patrick DeGuira produces installations in which each element seems to represent the distillation of intense thought. He based his piece "LIFEFLOWER" on an incident from his mother's childhood, in which her own mother made her trim the lawn with scissors as a punishment. He reconstructs this event in a nearly gleeful way. A large photo of his mother wearing a blond wig and holding scissors presides over a room filled with yellow and green strips of paper confetti. Birds chirp through two cone speakers, and two trails of stylized tears run from his mother's eyes. The childhood feelings associated with this punishment have given way to playfulness, even while the title refers to a Chinese herb used to treat depression.

Victor Simmons incorporates S&H Green Stamps into his works. These stamps were like cash register coupons, given out at groceries and other stores based on the amount of your purchase. You collected the stamps and redeemed them for appliances and other merchandise. In "Map Fragment: Desire," Simmons made a large sheet out of blocks of stamps affixed to yellowing paper. Some of the stamps are faded or torn, and he includes the marginal sections that have instructions and whatnot, all of which provides textural variety. His sheet is the size of a blanket, suggesting the pursuit of security, warmth and comfort in the face of a tough world. It evokes the emotions of a person who works hard and longs for some relief, even something as simple as getting an item without spending scarce cash.

The exhibit's visual signature comes from Barbara Yontz's "Especially Considering Exposure." A sleeveless blouse and skirt float in the air surrounded by a few long wisps of string. They're made from pig intestines, the material used for sausage casing, which has a fragile, crinkled and light appearance. This piece was shown at the Tennessee Arts Commission over the winter, but the installation here gives the viewer a more three-dimensional perspective, which emphasizes the way the skirt encloses the space of a missing body. Another Yontz work, "The Gift," works less well in this context. Also made from pig intestines, it consists of several folds of fabric hung like bunting. In previous exhibitions in smaller spaces, the work had a sacramental effect, but that gets lost in this larger room.

Among printmaker Lesley Patterson-Marx's pieces in the show is one from a series of prints documenting her experiences during and after pregnancy. When several items from the series were displayed together at Belmont's Leu Gallery, they read as a sophisticated journal. This show includes just one print, "Letting Down," which encourages viewing it in a more focused way. A breast points downward, drops of milk falling from it. The form of veins or milk ducts in the breast are cut out from a top layer of the paper, revealing a map in the background, a visual pun for Earth Mother and Mother Earth. The image links the life-giving liquid of a mother with the skies' life-giving water. Motherhood becomes something rooted to mappable ground and part of a larger, dynamic system of population, community and family growth and change.

Kristina Arnold is known for installations that deal with biology and medicine, jumbling forms and structures made out of plastic and string. Last year she studied glass casting at the Pilchuck School in Washington state, and this show includes some of her first forays into this richer material. "Beautiful Tumors" are two castings of tentacle forms with the extrusions from the mold still intact, creating improvisatory sheets of glass that form fringes growing from the main form. Her primary work here, "Drip," consists of a series of red glass pieces arrayed across a freestanding wall, each with a drip of varying length forming in its center and protruding horizontally from the wall. The pieces are grouped like blood cells under a microscope. The base includes a pool of circulating water that reflects flickering light up onto the wall. This work has a more institutional feel than Arnold's earlier efforts, and it lacks the variety of color and texture, and the strangeness, that make much of what she does so engaging.

Andrew Kaufman shows a protean quality by working in widely disparate formats. His piece here, "Offensive Wall," is a construction with visual ties to Op Art. He mounted a grid of razor blades inside a shallow box and covered the box with a fabric sheet. The fabric blurs the blades, and its weave creates a directional effect where the blades fade as you walk past the piece. The fabric has been sewn where the work "cut itself" in handling. This is not a purely static artwork, but an object with dynamic optical effects and latent kinetic qualities. It makes obvious references to the interplay of surfaces and substructures with contrasting qualities, and to the characteristics of skin and other forms of membrane, in particular their vulnerability.

Throughout the show, there are cases where this exhibit sheds new light on work or doesn't do as good a service as other presentations. It can be as simple as Julie Roberts' videos getting shown in a darkened room with the intended fixtures (a bed as the projection surface in "Wake"). Kristi Hargrove is represented by photos of the inside of her mother's throat and ear at extremely close range, which provide the context for a large drawing of hard-to-place body details, also on display. (A show of her more recent work is running at Finer Things Gallery through July 22.) On the other hand, Michelle Anderson's overhead views of stylized people in social contexts display more range in her current show with Erin Anfinson at Ruby Green (open through July 30), where among other things her sense of humor comes across more strongly.

This show does as good a job of surveying artists in Middle Tennessee as any survey can. It includes nine artists other than those discussed in this review, all of them represented by worthy pieces. It would be great if the Frist Center could do this kind of show frequently. They could even go back to the same artists—what will Andrew Kaufman come up with next, and what will Kristina Arnold's work with glass yield? An equally good outcome would be if the show prompted a few more people to search out these artists in other galleries.