“Dream Pit,” Nick Fagan
The March art happenings always seem to arrive much too quickly, even after a leap year’s extra-large serving of February. Weren’t the holidays just a few weeks ago? Nashville’s creative community is gearing up for a rambunctious spring season, but let’s not rush past the winter-weather offerings just yet. March’s First Saturday events include impressive holdovers from February along with a slate of new shows — and even a gallery shake-up to keep crawlers emotionally engaged this Pisces season.
Wedgewood-Houston
The big news in Wedgewood-Houston this month is that Unrequited Leisure will be giving up its headquarters at The Packing Plant. Curators Chalet Comellas and Clint Sleeper are taking their shows on the road with a slate of new curatorial projects in the works. These two have always been big thinkers. And even though they’ve done wonders with their new media and installation art presentations in their small space at The Packing Plant, I’m looking forward to seeing how their ideas will evolve at a much larger scale. Unrequited Leisure has been a local treasure from the moment this duo opened their original space in the living room of a house next to Third Man Records. The gallery’s presence in Wedgewood-Houston filled a specific niche in Nashville’s contemporary art landscape, but it feels like an especially big empty chasm now that Comellas and Sleeper are no longer there to plug in the art and press the power buttons every month.
I’m anxious to see how Nashville’s digital art/video/blockchain/experimental filmmakers might step up and step into the very big shoes Unrequited Leisure is leaving behind. That said, the gallery’s space in the southwest corner of The Packing Plant has already been snatched up by local photographer and curator Mauro Antonio Barreto. Local gallerygoers have seen Barreto’s portrait-based photography at Open Gallery and in various Nashville university galleries — he’s taught photography at Belmont, Lipscomb and MTSU. The Packing Plant gallery is now the home of Barreto’s Neue Welt curatorial project, and he’s launching the space with a sculpture installation by former Nashvillian Brian Jobe. Pax is a thoroughly Jobe-ian sculpture installation featuring arrangements of found manufactured materials. Jobe doesn’t construct or build anything with his cinder blocks and foam, steel, marble and paper. Instead, he thoughtfully stacks them together. He leans them against one another and stuffs them inside of each other. Jobe’s heavy-duty manufactured materials come together in organic displays that are subtle and sometimes fragile. And it’s that tension between permanence and precarity that charges Jobe’s gifted eye for composition and his hand for gravitas. Here’s hoping that Barreto will also be bringing more contemporary photography to a scene that’s extremely thirsty for gallery walls with camera art. Opening reception 5-8 p.m. Saturday, March 2, at Neue Welt, 507 Hagan St.
It’s no surprise that Caroline Allison’s Waiting Between the Trees opened to a packed gallery at Zeitgeist last month. The exhibition finds the local photographer showing a variety of light-based works in displays that emphasize materials, forms and surfaces over imagery. Waiting Between the Trees is a photography show that reads like a sculpture exhibit, and the artist’s formalist preoccupations are as smart and engaging as they are timely and novel. The show offers up an exciting new evolution in Allison’s recent explorations of natural spaces, and of the boundaries of landscape photography itself. This show is yet another giant leap forward for this artist, whom I can barely recall as a former expert documenter of quirky interiors. Reception noon-8 p.m. Saturday, March 2, at Zeitgeist, 516 Hagan St.
Downtown
I first saw Nick Fagan’s work at Coop’s previous space at The Packing Plant back in 2021. Fagan’s Labor and Its Large Souls practically swallowed the gallery with a display of his packing blanket quilts. Fagan sourced his raw supplies through his work as an art handler, and when I wrote about the show I invoked everything from sympathetic magic to quantum entanglement to describe how Fagan’s formalist textile sculptures convey so much emotion through his use of found materials. The artist’s new Sheet Ghost display at Tinney Contemporary features plenty of Fagan’s familiar moving blankets and found quilts, but here the artist wraps his fabric constructions around panels of various shapes, simultaneously making the exhibition read as more painterly as well as more object-based. It’s a cool way for the artist to evolve a winning aesthetic while continuing to mine his penchant for color and texture. Sheet Ghost is paired with a show by Nashville artist Lori Anne Parker-Danley — a contemporary art scene veteran who is leveling up with a wild display of textile paintings at one of Nashville’s best galleries. Parker-Danley deploys a number of techniques to create these works, but her Instagram hashtag #improvquilting is my favorite descriptor. Uncanny Visions & Tangled Terrain highlights Parker-Danley’s penchant for applying fabric cutouts of biomorphic and natural forms to send surreal landscapes creeping across her soft surfaces. Parker-Danley came to visual art through dance, and her boldly colored scenes vibrate with spontaneous gestures and tireless movement. Opening reception 2-8 p.m. Saturday, March 2, at Tinney Contemporary, 237 Rep. John Lewis Way N.
East Nashville
Last but not least, Red Arrow will open up a trippy new group show on the East Side this Saturday night. Dance in the Waterfall is loosely organized around themes of psychedelic experiences, spiritual sightings, dream narratives and visionary phenomena of all kinds. It’s the kind of curating that’s open to wide interpretation, and it looks intriguing, given its winning roster of artists: Ashanté Kindle, Benji Anderson, Brianna Bass, Jeremy Shockley, Kelly Williams and Wansoo Kim. Opening reception 6-9 p.m. Saturday, March 2, at Red Arrow, 919 Gallatin Ave.
