Open House
Zeitgeist gallery settles into its airy, spacious Hillsboro Village digs
by Donna Dorian Wall
New Art/New Space
Through June at Zeitgeist, 1819 21st Ave. S.
11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Fri.
Opening reception 6-8 p.m. May 29
For information, call 256-4805
A couple of weeks ago, with just four days to go before Zeitgeist’s reopening in Hillsboro Village, gallery director Janice Zeitlin was calmly making her way through a crowd of workmen. As the phone rang and electric screwdrivers buzzed away, members of Richard House’s Village Construction crew dangled from ladders like airborne dancers. Oil paintings, etchings, and all variety of mixed media—including a Greg Pond sculpture composed of a motorized buffalo hide—were resting along the walls, roughly marking the place where each, somehow, would be hanging by opening night. A member of Germany’s Bauhaus art and design school might have found all the commotion nothing less than creative bliss.
With the gallery largely ready to go on May 15, the opening went off swimmingly, with a capacity crowd jamming into the gallery’s spacious new digs and overflowing onto the sidewalks. It was so successful, in fact, that Zeitlin is hosting another opening this coming Saturday. Actually, she explains, the first event was for the neighborhood, a chance for people to “come in and see what has been going on.” Now that the gallery is fully in place, the coming weekend’s event is in honor of the artists whose pieces make up the new space’s inaugural exhibit.
Walking through the gallery, Zeitlin gestures to some of the 23 artists’ works on display. Most are by gallery regulars—Buddy Jackson, Heath Seymour, Susan Sisk, and Jeff Hand—along with some newer artists introduced over the last couple of years in the gallery’s former location, Cummins Station. Then, leaning down, she points out the birch plywood floors bounded with silver metallic strips. Polished, blond, and spiffy-new, they glisten with a handsome, clean, geometric look.
As attractive and intriguing as many of the artworks may be, at the moment, it’s Zeitgeist’s new space that deserves close scrutiny. Architect Manuel Zeitlin, Janice’s husband, designed the interior himself. Brimming with enthusiasm as he takes stock of the gallery, he runs his hand down a long, black table sitting in the middle of the skinny 120-foot-by-22-foot room. “This is my office, Manuel Zeitlin Architect, right here,” he says. “I always get more work done in an energized environment, so I designed this place to function more like a studio than a gallery—as a place where architects and artists can interact, and everyone can look at things differently. This space is really about how I think people should work together.”
Like the other buildings that Zeitlin has redesigned in Hillsboro Village for Fido, Sunset Grill, the Trace, and Pangaea, this one dates back to the turn of the century. As a longtime architectural consultant to the Heritage Foundation of Williamson County, Zeitlin could have taken a purist’s approach to the building’s preservation, but he chose instead to link the past and present by creating a loft-like space that brings a little bit of the architecture—and the buzz—of New York’s arty SoHo neighborhood to Hillsboro Village.
“It’s kind of like archeology, and then celebrating what was originally there,” Zeitlin explains of his redesign. His first move, he says, was to go back to the true bones of the building: The original ceiling is exposed, and in an homage to SoHo architecture, a shiny aluminum vent now runs the full length. Zeitlin also towed away the innards of the space, removing the many small enclosures that the former tenant, Tim Jones Photographer, had used for darkrooms.
When it came to lighting, Zeitlin didn’t consider traditional windows—after all, the gallery needs all the wall space it can get to display its wares. Instead, he decided on light wells that project above the existing room line, allowing a diffused light to filter into the gallery. Indeed, the room’s subtle luminescence is one of the first things the viewer notices upon walking in. For the window frames, Zeitlin devised another clever approach, using recycled industrial steel frames that he salvaged from the Music City Mix Factory. Although one has to stand right under the light wells to notice them, the frames are quotations from Zeitgeist’s previous home in Cummins Station, where Zeitlin often employed them in the design of that building as well.
Once the architect had created the framework for the oblong space, he was able to have some fun with a few of the interior elements. Take, for example, the movable walls. Easily maneuvered along ceiling tracks and big enough to hold large-scale pieces—such as the provocative work by gallery employee Lain York hanging in the current show—they allow the Zeitlins to manipulate the dimensions of their space and exhibit a number of small shows simultaneously.
Along the north wall, art isn’t even hung in the traditional manner—rather, the pieces are set on a long shelf and rest against the wall. Even more eye-catching are the tapered metal bookshelves that break the length of the gallery like columns. Cantilevered and painted black to stand out against the white room, they’re as design-savvy as they are functional, seemingly floating in the air like abstract configurations.
“This space is about materials—about steel, natural wood, and light,” the architect concludes. “I wanted to make a very functional space poetic. If we ever designed our own home, it would be like this.”
When asked if his design has any symbolic underpinnings—perhaps alluding to some fin de siècle idea about the commingling of art and design—Manuel Zeitlin’s response is simple: “No. I just wanted to create a space that Janice would like.” And when you get down to it, that’s probably the most important design criterion of all—a testament to the fertile partnership of this husband-and-wife team.
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