Diverse Visions

Through June 8

Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery

23rd and West End avenues

Hours: noon-4 p.m. Mon.-Fri.; 1-5 p.m. Sat.-Sun.

For information, call 322-0605

You don’t have to be a Vanderbilt student or staff member to recognize the names of the university faculty whose works are included in the current exhibition at the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery. In fact, these teaching artists are at least as well known in local and regional art circles as they are in academic ones.

Michael Aurbach, for example, was chosen to create the inaugural exhibition for the Frist Center’s Contemporary Arts Project gallery last year. Marilyn Murphy’s paintings have been featured in more than 230 exhibits from Nashville to Australia. Susan DeMay’s ceramics are sold at the museum stores of the Smithsonian, the Tennessee State Museum, Cheekwood and the Frist Center. Ron Porter’s paintings are in public, private and corporate collections across the country. Photographer Carlton Wilkinson not only owns In the Gallery, one of the city’s oldest art galleries, he is also among the featured artists in a retrospective of African American photographers scheduled for the Frist Center next year. The only name Nashville art lovers may find unfamiliar is that of Mark Hosford, who moved to Nashville last year to teach at Vanderbilt. Still, his work has already been featured in numerous solo and group shows from Minnesota to California. It’s all enough to make you wonder when these folks have any time to teach, although they obviously do that too.

Though the group show has no theme per se, Michael Aurbach’s sculptural installation at the center of the gallery suggests an intriguing connection among the works. The installation is called “The Critical Theorist,” and it adroitly lampoons ivory tower interpretations of art. “Critical theory is a fashionable form of scholarship practiced in the humanities,” notes Aurbach. “When applied to the visual arts, strange things happen. I am constantly amazed at the kind of things being 'cooked up’ and 'manufactured’ by these scholars. Suddenly, the art object becomes incidental to the scholarship.”

In light of that view, Aurbach has cooked up an assembly line for art theory that features a huge aluminum pot, three meat grinders, a number of pipes and spigots, a couple of sieves, a meat cleaver, a teapot, a garbage disposal, a conveyor belt and a book. Printed red labels indicate the function of each piece of equipment: The sieves are “Fact Removers,” the teapot an “Art Evaporator,” and the cleaver provides the “Cutting Edge” so often referred to by arts theorists and critics (including this one). Real art goes in at one end, Aurbach’s work suggests, and comes out at the other as an unappetizing byproduct called “Critical Theory.” Though you’ll be tempted to explore Aurbach’s work first, it’s much more amusing if you study the rest of the art in the show and then consider what might be made of these paintings, photos and drawings if they were actually run through the “Critical Theorist” mill.

Theorists would have a field day with the works of Marilyn Murphy, Ron Porter and Mark Hosford, all artists who offer visual puzzles with open-ended solutions. Murphy’s latest graphite drawings and oil paintings continue the artist’s exploration of what might be called nostalgic surrealism. Murphy draws inspiration for her invented environments from such retro sources as 1940s issues of Popular Science, art deco architecture in Miami and the eccentric life of composer Erik Satie (1866-1925). A painting called “Life Guard,” for example, offers us a view of an art deco-style lifeguard platform on a deserted beach, neon-lit by an eerie glow on the horizon and the bright white form of an open book floating in the black sky. It’s easy enough to enjoy the artist’s exquisite draftsmanship and use of color and light, but you are on your own to decide what the story is here. Or as Murphy explains, “The viewer must determine what has happened to bring the characters or elements to this point and how the situation will resolve itself.”

Porter likewise presents scenes that defy rather than provide pat interpretations. “The Myth of Permanence” offers a view of a room inhabited only by a Venus de Milo-esque statue emerging from a large upright brown paper bag. The figure is positioned near a window half covered by a lace curtain. Everything is rendered in a photo-realistic style—including a scrap of masking tape on the edge of the painting that looks so real you’re tempted to peel it off. The effect is what the artist calls a “shifting between clarity and enigma that is like arm-wrestling yourself.” In other words, it’s an engaging but confounding experience.

Mark Hosford’s works on paper (and in one animated video) are also perplexing and enjoyable at the same time. The little boy in “The Bunny’s Gift” looks a bit like the toy-torturing kid in Toy Story, and the two-headed little girl clutching a worm-like infant in “Baby’s Butcher” isn’t exactly endearing either. And yet the artist’s narratives of alien-eyed bunnies evolving from cocoons and creatures processing cuts of meat are also strangely alluring. Like Hieronymus Bosch and others, Hosford’s scenarios offer a personal critique on contemporary society with all its quirks and oddities.

The functional ceramic creations of Susan DeMay and the computer-generated color photographs of Carlton Wilkinson add balance to the show. DeMay has long been known for the beauty of her glazes and the classic nature of her designs, inspired by such sources as quilt patterns and nature. Among her works on view are platters adorned with bold circles, triangles and squares, bowls covered with scenes of trees under a full moon, oval vases with repeating flower-like designs, and serving trays with condiment cups.

Wilkinson has been a photographer in Nashville for more than 25 years, with many of those years spent exploring the human figure in black-and-white prints. Recently, however, Wilkinson has become intrigued with digital color photography, and his works in this show reflect that interest. He continues to be interested in the human figure, though he now prefers candid rather than studio-posed shots of African Americans. Subjects range from a dancer at a street festival to funeral participants to street gamblers, all depicted with a sense of celebration in vivid computer-enhanced colors and textures.

The Vanderbilt art faculty show is an annual spring tradition, and this year’s is a strong edition. If, with apologies to Aurbach’s “Critical Theorist,” the show isn’t exactly cutting edge, it is one that lives up to its title in diversity of vision, style and media.