"The Minotaur's Maze," Germán Rojas
What happened to 2023, y’all? Home Depot had towering tree-and-Santas displays decking the aisles before Halloween. I’m blaming the pandemic hangover for the quickness with which this year has flown by. And I’m also predicting that Nashville’s gallery scene will get its groove back at the highest BPMs ever in 2024. I’m feeling very optimistic about the new year in local art, but first we’ve got to get this cold weather season started. It’s not officially winter until the solstice on the 21st, but the whole of December is really just a runway rushing toward that last week of religious and secular celebrations, signaled by the shortest day of the year. Now’s the time to look forward to a creative year ahead.
Wedgewood-Houston
Germán Rojas is a local artist who positively blasted out of the last days of the worst of the COVID times: He was part of the team that brought the Number art journal back to life and relocated it from Memphis to Nashville in 2022; his painting “The Horse of Malta” stole the show at a Modfellows exhibition back in February; and Rojas just finished a sharp hand-painted mural design on the front of Random Sample’s little gallery/venue/art-gift-store building off Charlotte. Rojas opens A Dimly Lit Path at Ryan Rado’s Rockwall Gallery Saturday night. Rockwall’s recent Instagram reels capture Rojas working on some large-to-very-large canvases featuring the painter’s signature combinations of antique subjects and contemporary palettes. Rojas is an accomplished technical painter who brings a tight, confident hand to figurative scenes decorated with design elements, evoking historical and mythological narratives. I’ll be interested to see how these large works translate in the cave-like confines of Rockwall, which you enter through Earnest Bar & Hideaway. The space is pretty cozy for such big works, but the medieval dungeon vibes might also make a perfect match for Rojas’ new-Old World works. Opening reception 6-9 p.m. Saturday at Rockwall Gallery, 438 Houston St.
Zeitgeist had a strong year that garnered the evergreen local spot two Best of Nashville notices — for David Piñeros: Skullcap and Karen Seapker: Green’s Your Color. The Wedgewood-Houston cornerstone closes out 2023 with a pair of conceptual multimedia shows that explore how people look to natural spaces, places, formations and phenomena in order to discover their own locations in relation to the wild, wooly and winged. Local artist Patrick DeGuira’s Down Pressed Sunshine deploys video, photography, sculpture and text to investigate various spiritual symbols meant to guide humans in relation to the nonhuman world. The formal precision of DeGuira’s work contrasts both ethereal metaphysical notions and the natural chaos of wild spaces. And his investigations into looking at flora and fauna simultaneously give rise to questions about how — and why — we look at art. Andrew O’Brien’s Drift Alignment connects with DeGuira’s display as another attempt to look to the natural world to understand our man-made circumstances. O’Brien employs astrophotography and celestial navigation to engage a dialogue about geography, ideology and the history of colonialism along the U.S.-Mexico border. The show includes photographs and video installations that combine archival information about 18th-century missionary activities with contemporary GIS data regarding migrant deaths in southern Arizona. One of the best things about the paired exhibitions at Zeitgeist is the unintended connections that emerge from their juxtaposed displays. I’m looking forward to a lively conversation between these two shows in December. Opening noon-7 p.m. Saturday at Zeitgeist, 516 Hagan St.
"Red Sky in the Morning," Sarah Budeski
Coop Gallery upgraded its digs and moved into the largest gallery space at The Packing Plant at the beginning of 2022. They were able to manage the rent increase after opening up their membership roster and expanding their collective to its biggest numbers ever. Coop has a reputation as the place where new-to-town artists can get directly plugged into Nashville’s contemporary art scene, and find opportunities for exhibiting and curating. Growing their official ranks was a great call for Coop, and the bigger gallery has resulted in a huge leap forward for their exhibition programming. December brings the perfect opportunity to get to know a number of Coop’s newest members and their work at Textural Tangents: A New Members Show. This group show boasts nearly a dozen artists whose creative practices include painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking and curating: Sarah Budeski, Elisabeth Moss, Caitlin Blomstrom, Bethany Yankie, Hayes Hatfield, Nina Covington, Kate Blake Giordan, Amanda Lomax, Tawna Webber, Amy Hoskins and Anna Wise. Opening reception 1-9 p.m. Saturday at Coop Gallery, 507 Hagan St.
East Nashville
Julian Rogers’ abstract canvases are all about color and light and texture. And the way he uses digital photography of cloud formations as a starting point makes his formalist obsessions more familiar and accessible for viewers who aren’t ready to completely abandon subjects and content. Rogers has lived and worked in Thailand for years, but I still think of the Nashville native as one of our best local painters, and this new Liquid, Solid, Gas, Ghost exhibition at Red Arrow feels like a sequel to the artist’s Wave Upon Wave show at Red Arrow in July of last year. Both exhibitions use images of clouds as a jumping-off point for paintings about painting and perception, formalism and Romanticism, and how the subtlest art making can evoke the sublime. Opening reception 6-9 p.m. Saturday at Red Arrow, 919 Gallatin Ave.
