Crawl Space: October 2019

Downtown   

Unrequited Leisure will open two new exhibitions for October. The gallery’s main space will feature Kelly Hider’s re:tracing, which will include the Knoxville-based artist’s glitter-embellished images found in a collection of vintage Kodachrome slides from the 1950s. Unrequited Leisure’s project space will host Carolyn Henne’s This Is Madness: A Proof. Henne’s anatomical portraits speak to misogyny and psychosis, evoking the sexist etymology of the word “hysteria.”

The South loves to celebrate storytelling in country music, around dinner tables and even in art galleries. The Arts Company’s The Storied South is a three-person exhibition of narrative paintings that relate regional realism alongside tales both tall and short. Ke Francis’ works combine Uncle Remus, Mark Twain and waterborne funeral rites in the most profound Southern mash-up since shrimp and grits. Charles Keiger’s “Curtain Call” speaks to Southern musical traditions, while Johnny Nelson’s “Oliver’s Ferry” is the strangely surreal standout of the show.  

Tinney Contemporary will open a lip-smacking display of photography by Tyler Shields Saturday night. This eponymous exhibition by the Los Angeles-based fashion and celebrity photog features — not surprisingly — images of gorgeous women. But Shields reduces his models to half-masked ciphers in a symbolic code filled with snakes, butterflies, drugs and chic black-and-red clothing to tell a cautionary tale about luxury, desire, consumerism — even capitalist mind control.  

Sarah Hart Landolt’s work was included in The Browsing Room’s last exhibition, which featured pieces by the Downtown Presbyterian Church’s artists-in-residence. She’ll get the space all to herself in October and November for a new solo display titled Feeling Heart. Lots of abstract painters claim to find inspiration and guidance from their moods, impulses, unspoken thoughts and spiritual states. What separates Landolt’s work is that it offers visual representations of various emotions based on social media polling. The artist’s works are informed by a kind of social science that’s aimed at creating a consensus-based color code for human emotions. I love the group participation and the idea of hijacking social platforms for creative communications. But the best things about this show are the paintings themselves: wailing-blue disappointment; bubbly-green nervousness; purple-projecting pride.  

Wedgewood-Houston

David Onri Anderson is an emerging Nashville artist who’s been ticking a lot of boxes this year: His September 2018 display at Elephant Gallery was reviewed in Art in America by Scene arts editor Laura Hutson Hunter, and shortly after, he made his Los Angeles gallery debut at Patrick Painter. Anderson gets his first solo exhibition at David Lusk Gallery this month with Fragile as Fruit — a brimming basketful of the artist’s colorful, abstract still lifes. Anderson likes to paint bananas and apples, but he renders them in odd palettes and with weird lines that play with patterns, mirror images and symmetry. The artist deconstructs familiar forms into their essential visual elements, but there is also a spiritual undercurrent to these meditative works, and Anderson’s best paintings read like contemporary iconography.  

Displays by abstract painter Alex Blau and photographer Caroline Allison that opened for the September crawl will continue to share the walls at Zeitgeist for most of October. Both artists are based in Nashville, and Blau might be the best abstract painter in an art scene brimming with abstract painters. Her Chasing the Sun exhibition is best described as predictably great. Allison’s The History of Snow is a breakthrough display that finds the photographer displaying her most conceptually and aesthetically sophisticated work yet.  

Jon Langford and Wayne White will open Bacon Grease & the Lost Song at Julia Martin Gallery. The show celebrates country music’s heroes with 30 works that range from pencil sketches to pastel drawings to large acrylic paintings. White will be attending Saturday’s reception, and Nick Woods and Greg Garing will bring the jams to Martin’s front porch.

At the Packing Plant, Channel to Channel will also continue a show from September. Heather Hartman’s abstract mixed-media work features paintings on paper seen through the gauzy textures of polyester mesh fabric. With Spare Room, Hartman’s mesh obscures the details of the oil, acrylic and gouache designs behind it while simultaneously drawing attention to the artist’s use of light in these dreamy compositions. These are romantic, dappled affairs that will have you remembering early summer days now that autumn has officially arrived.  

Don’t miss photographer Caitlin Ackerman’s Reflections of Love at WAG on Saturday night. This exhibition of self-portraits find the Watkins College senior restaging photographs that famous male photographers have taken of their wives.  

Linda King Ferguson’s Living Room will be at Open in October. Ferguson’s artist statement weighs these works down with a lot of conceptual baggage about social conversations and creating a counterpoint to contemporary political and climatological crisis. I’m skeptical of nonfigurative abstract painting as a medium for ideas and messages. For me, works of art like these are much more effective when they use the formalist language of line, texture, color and composition to emanate emotions and sensations. But October art crawlers are in luck, because when you strip all the verbiage away, these paintings still offer plenty to wonder at. The flat, square panels are hung from their corners, and they read like decorated diamonds. Colored quadrants and curving lines play out in an earthy palette of purple, ochre, cabernet-red and even the gray of raw unpainted linen. The surfaces of these works also include cutout sections, and I love how this show straddles a space that claims painting, sculpture and fiber art all at the same time.   

Last but not least, Picturing Home: Documentary Photography by Nashville Residents opens at Crappy Magic. Artist DaShawn Lewis organized 15 kids from the Brighter Days after-school program to document the place where they live using disposable film cameras. Designer Jennifer Bair displays a selection of photography that documents Nashville at the turn of the millennium. And yours truly will debut the new postcard sets from my ongoing street photography series, Pikes Project.