"Blind Jimmy," Jimmy Abegg
Downtown
It’s not fall yet, but when I sat down to write about the September art crawl, my mind was brimming with crunching leaves and backyard fires, the wooly warmth of sweater weather, and the best art season of the year.
Of course, it’s still summer until the autumnal equinox on Sept. 23, and the new show opening at The Arts Company is definitely not ready to go back to school. Summer Impromptu is an appropriately buoyant display offering one last carnival balloon, wildflower blossom, Roman-candle blast or late-evening sunset before we all start trying to figure out what to be for Halloween. This show highlights works by some of the freshest contemporary painters on the gallery’s roster, and these vibrant, playful pieces make up a super sunny send-off to the warm-weather months. Cassidy Cole’s “Chasing Sunset” is a creamy cluster of brushed bands of colors borrowed from the palette of a gelato-stand menu — it’s one of those paintings you want to eat. Bob Durham’s “King of the Mountain” pictures the most ambitious sock monkeys ever, and Eva Magill Oliver’s “Element 2” incorporates natural forms into abstract compositions that are as meditative as listening to a warm summer rain.
Catch the reception for Women in Abstraction at Tinney Contemporary Saturday night. This exhibition offers works by six different artists that range from the comparatively minimal mark-making of Jeanie Gooden to the chromatic geometric abstracts of Carol Mode. Mary Long’s encaustic works are as still as Mildred Jarrett’s acrylic paintings are effusive, and Martica Griffin’s vertigo-inducing works look like landscapes seen from above. The show also includes selections from one of my favorite local painters: Sisavanh Phouthavong’s vibrant, often uniquely shaped canvases are charged with meaning and political protest, rooted in the artist’s childhood experiences as a refugee from the United States’ secret war in Laos in 1964-1973.
Blend Studio at 79 Arcade hosts an artistic celebration of random chance for September. Fantastic Coffee Creatures offers a menagerie of java-jolted drawings by fantasy illustrator Heather Brothers McDole. The artist’s works begin with the random runs and splashes of coffee spills. McDole then investigates impromptu designs suggested by the coffee stains to inspire her discoveries of four-armed fairies and bird-winged cats.
Unrequited Leisure opens a new show that gallery co-curator Chalet Comellas describes thusly: “Work about work. Which I love!” The Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts collective includes artists, makers and creative workers of all kinds, and their exhibitions are often the result of call-and-response prompts. For ILSSA: Frameworks, collective members were asked to reflect on and write about the supporting structures that are essential to their creative processes. The result is a chance to gaze beyond gallery walls and into the day-to-day doings in contemporary-art-studio culture in America. Here’s a hint: It’s harder than it looks.
“Snowball I,” Caroline Allison
Wedgewood-Houston
Contemporary art is in the throes of a breakdown of hierarchies and categories. The dissolution of boundaries between fine art, craft, design and pop culture reflects a broader societal shift from scientific specialization to holistic generalism. Seen through this lens, Nashville artist Jimmy Abegg has always been ahead of his time. The musician, painter, photographer and sculptor has defied categorization and creative limitations, and it comes as no surprise that even Abegg’s struggles with macular degeneration haven’t put a stop to his relentless creating. A Blind Painter: The Work of Jimmy Abegg opens at Fort Houston on Saturday night. Proceeds from the show will help fund the completion of Abegg’s home studio. Expect lots of paintings on offer here, but this display also includes examples of this restless artist’s photography and sculpture. Abegg is emblematic of the burgeoning 1990s art scene that laid the groundwork for Nashville’s wider recognition as a visual arts destination. Stop here and support one of Wedgewood-Houston’s creative pioneers.
On the heels of its 25th anniversary show, Zeitgeist opens exhibitions by two artists who make some of the best paintings and photographs in Nashville. Alex Blau’s “Big Fluff” was the signature image for the gallery’s anniversary show. It’s an older piece that’s emblematic of the concise precision that marked an earlier period in the artist’s work. I love Blau’s candy-colored palette and the perfect surfaces of paintings like “Big Fluff” so much that the looser hand she brought to her 2017 Zeitgeist exhibition, Night Swimming, totally threw me for a loop before I learned to love it as well. Blau’s new show, Chasing the Sun, seems to find the artist aiming for a middle ground between her past and her more recent work, and it’s gorgeous, must-see stuff at the September crawl.
Caroline Allison is one of the few photographers on Zeitgeist’s roster, and she’s also one of the best fine-art photographers in the city. A History of Snow is a display filled with chilly blues and silent whites. This collection of photos and cyanotypes captures wintry images of snow-covered spaces and frosty surfaces in compositions that resemble the flat, two-dimensional picture planes we associate with contemporary painting. The push and pull between the practices of painting and photography will always be completely fascinating. While Allison’s work is always strong, this new series looks like it may be one of her most aesthetically sophisticated.
