“Holus Bolus,” Arlyn Ende
This has been a crazy year for Nashville’s art scene: The Arcade’s once-lauded cavalcade of accessible art spaces may be gone for good, but The Packing Plant has become home to a bigger-than-ever Coop. The loss of Channel to Channel was palpable in Wedgewood-Houston, but The Browsing Room came back from its pandemic pause with a strong run downtown. Nashville artists got lots of national press this year, and Tennessee’s oldest art journal, Number, was reinvented — again — and relocated to Nashville.
All in all, it’s been a pretty good run for the gallery scene, and it feels like a well-timed surge as we head into the upcoming inaugural Tennessee Triennial, where the state’s contemporary artists and curators may find their biggest stage yet. December’s First Saturday brings a strong finish to a strong year with deserving holdovers from November, brand-new standout shows, and the delightfully predictable holiday gift-centric displays. Happy holidays!
The Nations
Local multimedia artist and musician Robbie Hunsinger wowed Nashville’s experimental music heads at Centennial Park’s Black Box Theater back in October. Her double bill with Tim Kaiser blended acoustic and electronic sounds in a program that combined ambient music, oboe expressions, creative coding, audio loops and live visuals. Hunsinger debuts a sequel performance to the Black Box show in the form of a new solo happening at Barbershop Theater this Saturday afternoon. SynthX4 includes contrasting audio synthesizer loops that feed video synthesizers to create live eye candy in response to the musical inputs. All these sounds and visuals free Hunsinger to add oboe, alto saxophone, clarinet and vocals, and the live acoustic improvisations are also layered with the synthesizer loops in real time. Hunsinger is planning an interactive “Playtime” segment of the show, allowing audience members to use Xbox Kinect to control her music-fueled visuals. The artist will also be available for a Q&A after the show to illuminate the secret alchemy of her live audio architecturing.
If Hunsinger didn’t play her instruments so well, I’d simply call her a performance artist. But she’s plainly talented, deeply learned and wildly inventive in both her techniques and concepts. I just call her one of Nashville’s most important artists, and our best ambassador for more crossover at the edges of our city’s art and music scenes. SynthX4 makes contact at Barbershop Theater this Saturday at 3 p.m. There’s a $10 suggested donation.
Wedgewood-Houston
Ellen Letcher and Julie Torres’ Needle in the Hay opens at Unrequited Leisure in Wedgewood-Houston on Saturday. Unrequited Leisure is seriously dedicated to screen-based new media displays, but the gallery is ending a year of outstanding programming with a show that includes paintings hanging on walls — it’s an otherwise typical gallery display that translates as subversive in the UL alterverse. Letcher and Torres co-run the LABspace curatorial project in Hillsdale, N.Y., and their installation explores the aesthetic intersections of video art and painting. I’ve seen lots of shows that speak to the mutual historic evolution of painting and photography, but this novel moving-images-meet-painting display puts me in mind of everything from Stan Brakhage’s hand-painted film frames to painter Julian Schnabel’s movie about Vincent van Gogh, in which actor Willem Dafoe created paintings on camera. Opening reception is 5 until 8 p.m.
If you hit Wedgewood-Houston for last month’s art openings, you might have discovered The Packing Plant bathed in darkness after a traffic accident took out part of the neighborhood’s power. The Modfellows space at the The Packing Plant still managed to sell several pieces from the anonymous artists exhibition Senza Nome, and the gallery has decided to extend a restocked version of the show for December. All the works are priced to sell for gift-giving season at $250 apiece. Senza Nome includes work from some well-known Nashville artists — but I’m not telling. Opening reception is from 5 until 8 p.m.
“Jade Window at the Villa Doria Pamphili,” Calli Moore
East Nashville
I reviewed Amelia Briggs and Calli Moore’s excellent Alternative Medicine at The Red Arrow Gallery right after it opened during November’s First Saturday events. The show will run through the first half of December, so see it for the first or fifth time before it closes on Dec. 17. Alternative Medicine ends a year of great shows for Red Arrow before the gallery winds down for a tender Tennessee Christmas.
Downtown
Tinney Contemporary will open The Essence of Their Tickingon Saturday. The show is a retrospective on the lives and work of artists and curators Arlyn Ende and Jack Hastings. The exhibition’s title is a reference to the pair’s previous duet at Tinney Contemporary, The Essence of Our Ticking in 2012. That show featured work from five decades of the couple’s itinerant lives as partners and creative collaborators. Hastings studied mural painting in Mexico before building a career as a sculptor of metal and clay. Ende’s painterly assemblages deploy formal designs in service of poetic metaphors, and the artist was also a beloved director of the University Art Gallery at the University of the South in Sewanee. This show recalls the earlier display, but includes more personal context about Ende and Hasting’s life together inside and out of the studio. The exhibition runs through Jan. 7. Tinney Contemporary’s Saturday hours are 5 through 7 p.m.
