The month of June is all mixed up — and just like her Gemini babies, she often appears to be multiple things at once. She starts out spring and ends up summer. She is thought of as the wedding month — but according to Hallmark, August makes the most matrimonial matches. And June features the birthdays of the socially concerned realist painter Gustave Courbet and that dynamic duo of pure aesthetics, Christo and Jeanne-Claude (both of whom were born on June 13, 1935).
This month's crawl is, likewise, all over the place. Expect a plethora of posters, levitating landscapes, one hell-bound redhead and some lonesome fairy tales.
Twist exhibiting artist Danielle de Picciotto is a Berlin-based artist whose intricate ink drawings seem like illustrations from some lost volume of children's fantasies. But, instead of presenting heroes and villains, Picciotto's Invisible offers narrative scenes that dwell on the loners and rejects who play bit parts at the edges of our stories and our society.
At Twist Etc., the triple-named Emily Sue Laird brings a triple threat of arts, crafts and style to bear in her new sculptural installation, Totem. The show explores the metaphysical relationship between us and our ancient ancestors, and Laird's list of materials alone has me anxious to see what she's wrought: plaster, wood, glass, bone, metal, porcelain, preserved animal parts, dirt, moss, mirrors, paint, paper and textiles.
I haven't seen any images from Alumni: New Ground — Director's Choice, but I'm looking forward to this show at The Rymer Gallery. It's an exhibition of work by newly graduated MFA candidates from Maryland Institute College of Art, Savannah College of Art and Design, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. MICA is gallery director Natalie Dunham's alma mater, and she curated her fellow alums' work in the show.
Seeing how I'm constantly plied with releases for shows that have purposefully misspelled titles with creative combinations of upper and lowercase letters, Blend Studios' Carved Utilitarian Wooden Bowls comes as a breath of fresh, lumberyard-redolent air. Offering exactly what the title announces, artist Denny Adcock's designs take their cues from the natural colors, blemishes and curves found in his materials.
The Arts Company launches the first of three Fresh Art Summer exhibitions, which will feature group shows from a dynamic variety of artists. The first installment will include work by Wayne Brezinka, David Robert Farmerie, Anne Goetze, Jerry Park and Rusty Wolfe. Brezinka will be including his elaborate cut-paper collages, while Farmerie, a globetrotting photographer based in Nashville, will show his 21st century rethinking of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Just like June blurring the line between spring and summer, John Folsom brings the materials and techniques of mixed-media painting to his landscape photography. Anodyne Frontiers at Tinney Contemporary captures the soft surroundings and severe, spiritually inspired architecture of Shaker Village near Pleasant Hill, Ky. Many of Folsom's images are both enhanced and obscured by his use of digital technology and encaustic techniques, which create hazy, floating places that hover between the documented reality and the created ideal. Expect a big turnout for Folsom. He called Nashville home for a decade, and many of us still think of him as our own.
Bob Godby will have his first-ever gallery show at Picture This on 5th. In Tangled Up in Blue, Godby combines borrowed images, text and textures using various digital techniques. Meanwhile, Marleen De Waele-De Bock will be showing a series of summertime paintings at her BelArt gallery at Arcade 56. Stop by and see what she's been up to all winter.
The new show at Coop Gallery explores the relationship between time and language. According to the gallery's propaganda, "A clockmaker is called a horologist, a Greek term derived from their word for time and speech." Alicia Eggert's Keeping Time will use drawing and photography to examine this relationship from multiple angles, but look for her kinetic sculptures to steal the show.
Last but not least, Brick Factory brings its After Crawl event back Saturday night with Here and Now, a group exhibition of Nashville printmakers, including Andrew Vastagh, Chris Zidek, A. Micah Smith, Drew Binkley, Robert Beckham, Clayton Pollard, Bingham Barnes and Betsy Ochoa.
Stay cool, crawlers. It's almost summer.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
