Amelia Briggs and Eleanor Aldrich Prove That Texture Is Cool

There was a time when texture was considered passé in contemporary painting. Blame Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein, but it seems like everything in the postmodern era was glossed up and slicked down, a direct departure from the gunky Impressionist styles that preceded it. But in the days of Instagram filters and face-swapping technology, perfection is now easy to attain. Artists can create visually precise works, but they can also treat their subjects with a casualness akin to snapshot photography, and play with texture like kids on a playground.

There are two excellent exhibitions currently hanging in Nashville galleries that encapsulate what I like to think of as an ugly-precious aesthetic. The artists — Amelia Briggs and Eleanor Aldrich — are markedly different, and both deserve individual attention and praise. But when viewed together, their work shows an unintentional like-mindedness that elevates them both.

Briggs works as gallery director for David Lusk, and is represented by The Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville and Uprise Art in New York. But at Elephant Gallery in North Nashville, which is painted a dainty periwinkle shade for this exhibition, Briggs exudes a confidence in craft that pushes the work into the territory of greatness. To create these paintings — which she sometimes refers to as “inflatables” because of their similarity to swimming-pool floats — Briggs packs fabric and stuffing around a wooden frame, wraps it in canvas and covers it with candy-colored paint. The resulting sculptural paintings are based on Briggs’ childhood, and anyone else who grew up in the late ’80s and early ’90s will instantly recognize the neon-pastel colorways reminiscent of My Little Ponies and Popples.

There are eight pieces in Briggs’ Moppet — including two large-scale showstoppers and a sculptural table on a blue faux-fur rug. One of the largest pieces, “Smokestack,” is a giant triangular mound that brings to mind a Christmas tree or a pile of soft-serve ice cream. It’s painted in a gradient rainbow with a fuzzy top, and it’s so tall that to see the whole thing you have to crane your head up — a posture akin to that of a curious, captivated child.

But the works aren’t over-the-top cute, and they’re not nostalgic for the sake of being nostalgic. They’re actually somewhat gross — lumpy and misshapen and shiny to the point of looking wet. There are tattered, ruffled edges and wads of fur painted with the audacity of a tourist shop’s airbrushed T-shirts. Briggs isn’t paying homage to a serene, Precious Moments childhood — her work is much more nuanced than that. Moppet is a pair of beat-up Reebok high-tops, or a bath toy that’s beginning to blacken with mold.

On the other side of town at Channel to Channel in the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood, Knoxville-based artist Aldrich’s Main Squeeze pushes a completely different set of memories, but with a similar eye for idiosyncratic detail. With 10 paintings, Aldrich has captured the very specific observation that skin tends to poke through the net of a hammock or a plastic woven lawn chair. If you’ve never considered those small mounds of flesh to be worthy of artistic attention, drop by the gallery — the works in Main Squeeze will change your mind. Aldrich, who co-directs the artist-run space called C for Courtside in Knoxville, creates her paintings from the perspective of an extreme close-up, discarding typical details of portraiture — there are no faces or background settings — to focus almost exclusively on panels of skin pressed against grid-like patterns. But by doing away with those bases of traditional information, Aldrich is able to concentrate attention on the often unobserved details that if viewed closely, expose even more.

For example, in “Lawn Chair With White Tee Shirt,” it looks like a woman is sweating through her shirt, making the graphic tee underneath visible through the wet fabric. In “Lawn Chair With Country Magic,” the plastic tubing of a shitty lawn chair is approximated with lines of silicone that Aldrich has applied like icing on a cake, and the painting’s title is emblazoned on the T-shirt of the person sitting in the chair. In Aldrich’s works, the paint itself functions like flesh — squares of glossy pigment poke through the hammock strings in “The Reader in a Hammock” like globs of fudge.

Want to see what the next era of art looks like? It might look a lot like Briggs’ fucked-up but well-loved toy box, or Aldrich’s sweat-stained, tramp-stamped cellulite. It might be a mess, but it’s still beautiful.