Crawl Space: February 2021

Editor’s note: Most of Nashville’s art spaces are open by appointment for in-person viewing. Check the gallery’s website before planning your visit.

Wedgewood-Houston 

In the 21st century, the invisible borders that once separated art from craft have all but dissolved. The ubiquitous presence of sewing, textiles, knitting, crocheting and soft sculptures in contemporary gallery spaces is some of the clearest evidence of this change. That said, all things fabric are not created equal, and not every needle-and-thread artist’s work successfully makes the leap from the craft-show space to the exhibition opening. Nashville gallerygoers curious about transcendent textile art will want to catch Alicia Henry’s new exhibition at Zeitgeist. Henry’s layered, mask-like multimedia portraits offer humorous, disturbing and insightful explorations of identity and beauty rendered in an engaging balance of rough materials and fine detailing. Henry’s new exhibition showcases works made during this time of mass mask-wearing. Alicia Henry: 2020 and 2021 opens on Saturday.  

The world’s social and political upheavals have only become more tumultuous during nearly a full year of social distancing during an ongoing global pandemic. This constant chaos has put our day-to-day lives on precarious footing, and predicting the world we’ll inhabit even a few weeks from now can seem like a foolhardy exercise in fortune-telling. Sarah Hobbs’ Twilight Living exhibition at Channel to Channel is all about inhabiting contemporary ambiguities, and the ways we deal with — or avoid — the uncertainty that colors these times. Hobbs’ photographs of interior installations mix and match rugs, chairs, tables and curtains in off-kilter and unsettling combinations that speak to these off-kilter and unsettling days. Twilight Living opened in January, and runs through Saturday, Feb. 20.

In studying history, we use abbreviations like B.C.E and C.E. to differentiate between this common era and the times that came before it. In art history, we might use the abbreviation B.W.E and A.W.E. to describe fine-art photography before and after the ascendancy of William Eggleston and his chromatic compositions. Eggleston is Tennessee’s best-known contemporary artist, and the Memphian shutterbug is credited with single-handedly establishing color photography as a fine art. David Lusk Gallery opens a new show of never-before-seen Eggleston photos on Tuesday, Feb. 16. The images in the For Lucia, Series date back to the 1980s, and the show namechecks Eggleston’s longtime mistress and muse Lucia Burch. The collection of images offers Egglestonian expressions of monumental mundanity captured in the Mississippi Delta.  

SV Randall’s Fell Prey at Coop tells a cautionary tale for the digital age. In a time when most of our art browsing happens online in virtual exhibition spaces, an IRL installation about the dangers of digital mediation is hilariously contrarian. In Randall’s display, a mirrored medicine cabinet hangs from Coop’s ceiling, there are sculptures of binoculars, and the color yellow symbolizes cowardice and caution in the age of the communications-technology industrial complex. Randall’s installation speaks to how the digital expansion of human communication has also facilitated a narrowing of human experience, and a resulting loss of empathy and connection. What would Marshall McLuhan do?  

Unrequited Leisure’s Post: Processing is another mail-art project inspired by nearly a year of social distancing. This art period finds both old-fashioned snail-mail art and digital non-fungible blockchain token art trending simultaneously. Our culture has one foot in Technicolor Oz and one foot in black-and-white Kansas right now, and American traditions like presidential elections have been warped into grotesque rituals. Featuring art from across the country, Post: Processing documents these twilight times since the November election like so many blind men’s hands on the elephant in the room. The show opens online at unrequitedleisure.com, and videos documenting the mail art will be on the screen at the Packing Plant gallery on Saturday, Feb. 13.

Vanderbilt   

Ashley Mintz’s Resilient Souls: We Rest Then We Rise celebrates Black History Month in a new virtual exhibition hosted by the Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Mintz is a local self-taught artist whose best multimedia drawings look like surreal comic-strip panels — or even muted, psychedelic stained-glass windows. Some of Mintz’s images are packed with text and read like contemporary parables addressing themes of poverty, mental illness, injustice and the loss of innocence. It’s vibrant, cathartic stuff, and Mintz’s flat compositions, spectrum-spanning colors and bold outlines are particularly well-suited for on-screen viewing. The show went live on Feb. 1, and you can find out more and register to view at vanderbilt.edu/religionandarts.

Downtown 

Alice Zilberberg’s work lives between wildlife photography and digital fantasy painting. She uses layered images and digital tools to create meditative portraits of giraffes, zebras and bears that range from surreal to post-apocalyptic. The photographer claims the work is meant to inspire a meditative state in the viewer. Zilberberg isn’t heavy-handed with environmental messages, but they’re unavoidable in work with these subjects. I’m mostly interested in her aesthetics, and my favorite pieces in this show look like film stills from an intense science-fiction movie. Finding Calmness in the World is at Tinney Contemporary through Saturday, Feb. 27. Browse the show online at tinneycontemporary.com.  

Just down the street from Tinney, Chauvet Arts opens Afterimage: Sensations of Color on Feb. 20. This spectrum-centric display of boldly colored art feels like the folks at Chauvet are getting the jump on the spring art season, and who can blame them? We’re feeling jumpy, too.