"Wild Indeed,” Cassidy Cole
Downtown
Local painter Cassidy Cole will make her Arts Company debut on Saturday night with a solo exhibition of abstract paintings. Cole’s colorful, vibrant canvases and works on paper read like landscapes — even when the artist is representing internal emotional and psychic spaces instead of the changing face of Nashville. Get your crawl started early with a talk between Cole and Nashville Arts Magazine’s Paul Polycarpou at 5 p.m.
For July, The Browsing Room will continue Artists at Work, a group show featuring the Downtown Presbyterian Church’s artists-in-residence. The Browsing Room is a don’t-miss downtown art space for me, and I’ve managed to get by to see this show twice since it opened last month. The exhibition includes work by Tom Veirs, Cary Gibson, Megan Lightell, Lauryn Peacock, Hans Schmitt-Matzen, Sarah Shearer and Richard Feaster. Feaster’s “Moonbeam” is a large canvas that’s dressed in a confetti-colored palette and draped with the glossy-white skins of poured paint and patches of colored Mylar plastic. The artist’s polka dots of poured paint have recently evolved out of Feaster’s preoccupation with the drip and its role in abstract composition. But don’t get bogged down in art history and surface details — just stop and take a look at this beauty. Another favorite is Veirs’ “I Am You, You Are Me,” an abstract work that offers a black-on-red composition of something like two faceless figures standing at the edge of a forest on fire. It’s intense, moody, sensual stuff.
Wedgewood-Houston
The summer season is usually a slow one for gallery-going, but the collaborative exhibition opening at Zeitgeist in July is one of the most anticipated shows on Nashville’s 2018 art calendar. Greg Pond and Banning Bouldin’s multidisciplinary display, Guncotton, pairs Pond’s polymathic studio practice with Bouldin’s avant-garde dance troupe, New Dialect. The result is a sensory spectacle of dance, video, sound and sculpture that explores the adage — often attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and/or Friedrich Schelling — “Architecture is nothing but frozen music, music is nothing but liquid architecture.” The show includes contributions from musicians, conductors, software coders and 3-D printing artists, and the results offer improvisational dance governed by game theory, and sculptures based on the movements of the dancers. I especially like the setting of Zeitgeist for this show — the space has always been dedicated to programming avant-garde performance and music in addition to visual art. This is Saturday night’s don’t-miss opening event.
For July, David Lusk Gallery will host a group exhibition featuring local painters David Onri Anderson, Christina Renfer Vogel and K.J. Schumacher. Group exhibitions can be difficult to install, as unintended clashes and complements can affect each artist’s individual works. Generally speaking, Anderson paints small, meditative abstracts that “resist the spectacle,” while Schumacher often creates big abstract works that aren’t too shy to flirt with bombast. Add to the mix Vogel’s floral still lifes and you’ve got a visual puzzle to solve on Saturday night. The exhibition’s tripartite title, Ripple Nature Bodies, points to each individual artist’s work. I’ve got a clue about how Lusk might separate these disparate collections, but I’m hoping the gallery just mixes them all together, unintended consequences be damned.
Tennessee art wizard Mike Calway-Fagen and Provo, Utah-based artist Julian Harper are bringing their own takes on multimedia performance art to Coop on Saturday night. StudentTeacher examines, explores and even skewers the hierarchy in pedagogy, highlighting the role status plays in the exchange of knowledge. Calway-Fagen and Harper’s project interrogates contemporary academia while recalling the mythic models of teacher-student relationships.
Emma Courtney Cook and Austin Swearengin’s Lemon in the Night probably boasts the best exhibition title of the summer, and when this strange display made its debut at Mild Climate at last month’s crawl, it stole the show at the Arts & Music at Wedgewood-Houston events. Both artists are based in New York, and the show was curated by former Nashvillian and current New Yorker Zack Rafuls. This display of paintings and sculpture is sometimes formal and stately, but it’s more often equal parts amusing and disturbing. Most importantly it’s a display that radiates sensuality — I stand in front of art because I want to feel something.
The Kith and Kin (and clouds) show at Watkins Art Gallery captures both community relationships and family dynamics, asking questions about how each influences the other. Watkins alumni Heather Dawn and Alison Moore teamed with adult artists with disabilities in cooperation with the Friends Life Community to create these works, whose collaborative makings reflect the interconnections between their subjects.
After a great two-month run for Channel to Channel founder Dustin Hedrick’s adhesive-tape-wall-painting installation Cobwebs & Catacombs, it’s back to regular programming at the Wedgewood-Houston gallery, where Birmingham, Ala.-based artist Chloe York opens a solo show that will run through August. York is an abstract painter whose work hovers between bouncy, biomorphic pattern-making and something like candy-colored naturalist studies of oceans on distant planets. York grew up near the ocean here on Earth, and her works are buoyed by a scientific curiosity about saltwater ecosystems as well as a child’s sense of wonder kindled by bright patterns and the strange movements of oddly shaped plants and animals.
