There are several centers of gravity in the local visual arts scene. One of those is Middle Tennessee State University, where a young trio of present and former faculty—Andrew Kaufman, Tom Thayer and Michael Baggarly—have made their presence known, most recently with their inclusion in the Frist Center’s “Fragile Species” show. Now come two more shows, one by the entire trio at Ruby Green and a solo show for Kaufman at the Tennessee Arts Commission (TAC). The irony is that this flurry of local attention comes to Kaufman just as he is leaving the area to join his wife in Ellensburg, Wash., and teach at Central Washington University. There are several centers of gravity in the local visual arts scene. One of those is Middle Tennessee State University, where a young trio of present and former faculty—Andrew Kaufman, Tom Thayer and Michael Baggarly—have made their presence known, most recently with their inclusion in the Frist Center’s “Fragile Species” show. Now come two more shows, one by the entire trio at Ruby Green and a solo show for Kaufman at the Tennessee Arts Commission (TAC). The irony is that this flurry of local attention comes to Kaufman just as he is leaving the area to join his wife in Ellensburg, Wash., and teach at Central Washington University. Kaufman takes a highly conceptual approach that crosses media, achieves surprising emotional resonance and results in attractive and engaging art objects. His tightly focused TAC show seems to have two ideas as its kernel. The first is a question: what is a painting stripped of its illusions? The second is a cluster of thoughts related to being deeply connected to but separated from another person. Kaufman’s inquiry on painting views the medium in its mundane forms. If you revert to a technical description of a painting as an object, most paintings consist of woven cloth (canvas) covered with paint. “Dethreaded” starts with a primal state of painting, a canvas primed white. Kaufman removed the horizontal threads from a rectangular section in the middle of the canvas. This leaves vertical threads that almost shimmer and define an obscure space in the center and beneath the surface of the canvas, revealing parts of the painting’s frame. This act of undoing the weave forces attention on the painting as an object in space. Kaufman’s inquiry on painting views the medium in its mundane forms. If you revert to a technical description of a painting as an object, most paintings consist of woven cloth (canvas) covered with paint. “Dethreaded” starts with a primal state of painting, a canvas primed white. Kaufman removed the horizontal threads from a rectangular section in the middle of the canvas. This leaves vertical threads that almost shimmer and define an obscure space in the center and beneath the surface of the canvas, revealing parts of the painting’s frame. This act of undoing the weave forces attention on the painting as an object in space. Across from this piece, a number of balls of primed canvas threads, each with a tail like a cherry bomb, sit on a platform as a composition called “Codification.” These balls are made from material Kaufman removed from “Dethreaded.” The act of pulling the strings from the canvas raises the question of what to do with those strings, and rolling them into balls is a response, the next step in his inquiry. He literally ties up loose ends, and together “Dethreaded” and “Codification” make up a complete “painting.” Another answer to Kaufman’s question is that a painting is something that one buys and hangs on a wall. Paintings appreciate in value, which makes them an investment, and as such they become commodities whose primary characteristic is their price. “The 10 Most Expensive Paintings Ever Sold” addresses this issue. Kaufman made fiberglass forms matching the height and width dimensions of the world’s most expensive paintings. He covered the forms with resin, then sanded and stained the surfaces into a mass of abstract smudges and occasional holes. A guide sheet identifies the names, painters and prices of each work. (Seven are by Picasso or van Gogh, ranging in price from $50 million to $104 million.) When a museum or collector purchases a painting at these prices, it pushes the object into superstar status. But when you ask what makes one of these paintings worth more attention than any other, the answer is the money. People come to see what $104 million looks like—the subject of the painting no longer matters. Kaufman could have represented this idea with a series of primed white canvases like “Dethreaded,” but chose instead to create these weathered abstractions. The effect is ghostly, as if these are residual traces of paintings, or perhaps, as Walter Benjamin would put it, these are auras, viewed directly and independently of images. This acknowledges that there’s something more to a painting than money—the mysterious qualities that encase and transcend colors and designs to lend the objects a spiritual status. The other aspect of the exhibit is its reflection on paired-ness. The center of the gallery contains a series of matched pairs of drinking glasses stacked on top of each other lip-to-lip, a work titled “Kiss (Perfect Lovers).” The sets of glasses have different designs, sizes and colors, and each set traps water inside the space created by the glasses. The effect is lovely visually, and the implications sweet. The pairings are delicate and inexplicable. You wonder how the water got inside, and why none leaks out. These constructions seem prone to disruption, as if one bump would send them tumbling. At the same time, each pair becomes a single thing, and sometimes it is hard to discern the boundary between the two glasses. The metaphors for love, relationship and partnership abound. At Ruby Green, Kaufman shares the space with his former MTSU colleagues Thayer and Baggarly. Like Kaufman, Thayer is a restless artist who crosses media, while Baggarly concentrates on a single range of sculptural technique and materials. Another work within this line of thought is “Towards Synchronicity (Perfecting Lovers),” a mixed-media piece that includes video of Kaufman and his wife, Donna Stack, each drawing a circle extremely slowly with their right hand, then their left hand. According to the description, they take an hour to draw each circle, and it looks like they are doing it without guide marks. The resulting drawings are remarkably uniform, given that they were created by two people using both hands. This simple but laborious act carries with it the sense of great effort required to do small things, and the gratifying result when synchronization occurs. These are hallmarks of a relationship as it grows. At Ruby Green, Kaufman shares the space with his former MTSU colleagues Thayer and Baggarly. Like Kaufman, Thayer is a restless artist who crosses media, while Baggarly concentrates on a single range of sculptural technique and materials. Thayer’s work includes at least four elements: puppets; drawings that have a quick improvised feel; mixed-media abstractions on fragmented, constructed surfaces; and digitally manipulated photographic images that he uses within mass-media forms like video or books. He constructs his puppets out of detritus like cardboard and marginal scraps of wood, hung together loosely, often with masking tape visible and marked with pencil scratchings. Sometimes the figure is obviously human, other times a truncated human, others bird-like. All of the forms seem to devolve toward the status of universal creatures. He works endless variations within this style of figuration, like pasting the figures onto a frame or a piece of board or letting them lie in an exhausted, crumpled mass. Thayer’s photographic work is represented in a small book, titled “Failure,” that contains black-and-white images apparently shot around the MTSU campus. They include scenes that look like rubble, trees, floors, duct work, stairwells—many of the forsaken parts of a university campus. He digitized the photos and gave them varying levels of pixilation. The ones with lowest resolution turn into grids of rectangles that are difficult to trace to source images. This book is similar in form to self-published zines, suggesting the extra-institutional visual culture of underground music and publishing. The puppets have a similar effect, pointing toward a world of theatrical performance that operates in fringe theater festivals more than academic settings. The prolific quality of Thayer’s output also connects to the ephemeral nature of what occurs in “street culture.” It seems he’s trying to put himself between the sustained artistic production and intellectual ambitions of university art departments and galleries, and the anarchic energy of performances and bookshops. Baggarly takes furniture forms and modifies them in ways that interfere with their functionality and expose their darker social and psychological dimensions. He often uses one-piece children’s school desks, the ones with a writing surface that extends in front of the chair. “In Our Own Company” puts several of those chairs into a circle facing outward, attached to a single curved surface that runs continuously from one end to the other, making it difficult to get into the chairs. This piece of furniture doesn’t work as it should—it locks sitters to their desks and forces them to look away from each other, metaphors for what school and other institutions can do. Of Kaufman’s contributions to the Ruby Green show, the video “Half-Herculean” provides the most continuity with the TAC show. It records a person performing a series of domestic tasks in real time: unlacing and relacing shoes, darning a sock or opening a bottle of wine. The camera shows the hands (the face is never visible) as they fumble through the small difficulties of these tasks—getting the sock turned all the way inside out, figuring out how to hold the bottle in a steady grip, etc. The video records the effort that goes by unacknowledged every day. The difficulty of simple things must be apparent to a couple trying to build a relationship at long distance. In that context, the video is quite poignant. Kaufman fills his work with longing and a sense of attachment to his wife; though his departure is a loss to the Middle Tennessee art world, these two shows make you pleased that he is moving to be with her.