Crawl Space: June 2021

Nashville’s First Saturday gallery-crawling events continue to creep back to normal as we reach the halfway point of 2021. Virtual presentations and talks are waning as real-life displays and happenings return, but social distancing and less-than-festive vibes still hold a significant sway over the scene. Lots of galleries have new shows opening in June, but it looks like we won’t have a return to a full First Saturday night slate of celebratory opening receptions until later in the summer. That said, maybe more than a year of masks and distancing and lockdowns will have a permanent effect on the shape of First Saturdays to come. Perhaps afternoon events are here to stay for some galleries that don’t want to return to providing the cheapest date night of the month for less-than-engaged art audiences.

Wedgewood-Houston  

Coop opens an exhibition by the newest members of its collective this Saturday, but the opening will be an afternoon affair at the space in The Packing Plant from 3 until 6 p.m. Climate Change includes work by Amirmasoud Agharebparast, Blythe Colvin, Han Service-Rodriguez, Alicia Thompson and Patrick Vincent. The exhibition’s title conjures images of melting glaciers and seared farmland, but Climate Change is also about political, social and economic climates in this unusual moment when the future feels like it’s up for grabs. Agharebparast’s documentary photography reflects his perspectives as an Iranian native, and Service-Rodriguez’s rough collage works spark with vibrant potential. Colvin’s surreal portraits cast personal anxieties in cartoon colors, and Thompson’s intensely chromatic paintings and sculptures incorporate found and recycled objects to point at the new religion of consumerism. Vincent’s prints feature human/plant chimeras and reference myths and narratives to demonstrate how people are simultaneously enmeshed in and stand apart from the natural environment.   

At Unrequited Leisure, Memory Work is an exhibition by three video artists exploring their heritages and femininity. Tiffany Joy Butler adds a welcome dash of the absurd to her videos examining subjects like addiction, colorism and the life of her Black Puerto Rican family. Sarah Imani is a U.S.-based Iranian artist whose surgeon father inspired her interest in how intimacy manifests in clinical environments. Julie Yunhee Moon borrows from pop culture and casts her own Korean American family in her videos examining stereotypes of Asian femininity. The gallery will hold an opening reception from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. on Saturday.   

One of June’s most anticipated shows is the multimedia Structure-Identity-Transformation group show, which will span both the Nashville and Memphis outposts of David Lusk Gallery simultaneously. Curated by former Nashvillian Brandon Donahue, Structure-Identity-Transformation includes photography, installation, video and sculpture in its examinations of its eponymous subjects. Paul Stephen Benjamin is an Atlanta-based multimedia artist whose photographic portraits examine Blackness while simultaneously pointing at the metaphorical capacities of photography as an illuminating medium. Dell M. Hamilton’s body-centric works investigate gender and citizenship by drawing on the colonial and folkloric traditions connected with her Caribbean roots. Shaun Leonardo’s drawings of 1991 New York City police brutality victim Freddy Pereira address the reductive nature of memory and its effects on future narratives. Leonardo’s work asks questions like “What is being forgotten?” and “What is being ignored?” Justin Thompson’s videos are inspired by diverse sources from Martin Luther King Jr. to Ezra Pound, and Leila Weefur’s video installation features Black men recalling the first time they realized they were visibly Black and male. Donahue will be displaying a pair of large tapestries made from airbrushed T-shirts sewn together in the style of memory quilts. The show opened on June 1, and David Lusk will hold its Nashville reception on June 12 from noon until 3 p.m. The gallery will be open during regular hours on Saturday from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m.

Brianna Bass is primarily a painter and Brian Jobe is primarily a sculptor, but Modular Stages at Channel to Channel demonstrates these artists’ shared preoccupations with minimalism and grid-like compositions. Jobe’s distinctly formal sculptures employ found industrial objects and construction materials to arrange sensual displays highlighting textures, mass and space. Bass’ paintings translate sound data into colorful canvases that nod to Op Art and interact unexpectedly with viewer’s perceptions.  

East Nashville  

Speaking of unexpectedly interactive art, June finds the great Lindsy Davis returning to the walls at The Red Arrow Gallery. Davis is one of my favorite local artists — her abstract works are gorgeously composed, and they’re informed by the artist’s obsessive examinations of gestalt design principles, which involve how human vision naturally groups similar shapes together and interprets various degrees of change in tone as a change in the depth of the picture plane. If you like your art to be both beautiful and smart, Davis delivers. If you follow Davis on Instagram, you know that the prolific artist created a new body of sculptural works during the pandemic lockdowns, and the debut of these new 3-D pieces makes Objective Nostalgia’s opening reception a don’t-miss destination this Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m.

Downtown  

An exhibition of James Perrin’s intensely dynamic abstract paintings is always an event, and the artist’s latest exhibition at Tinney Contemporary includes new lighting systems developed by the artist to cast his canvases in optimal color temperatures and rendering indexes. Opening this Saturday from 2 until 8 p.m.

Chauvet Arts will be opening a new group show of equine art featuring works by Jaime Corum, Meagan Kieffer and Rachael McCampbell. Reception this Saturday from 6 until 9 p.m.