Crawl Space: April 2018

Wedgewood-Houston

One of the Saturday shows I’m most excited about is the Studio Exchange: Memphis display opening at Zeitgeist Gallery (516 Hagan St.). Curated by Memphis artists Dwayne Butcher and Georgia Creson, this exhibition includes work from a variety of artists across Memphis’ studio scene, including Coriana Close, Melissa Dunn, Mary Jo Karimnia, Lawrence Matthews III, Meredith Olinger, Terri Phillips, Alex Paulus and Lexi Perkins. These artists address themes like environmentalism, race and history in a variety of media. Close is a photographer, but I’m hoping she’ll bring one of her multilayered video collages to this event. Matthews is also a photographer, but his print work exploring black identity in marketing media is as strong as his portrait pictures. No doubt there will be lots of surprises here this weekend. 

Next door, Kelly S. Williams’ Stars Align exhibition at David Lusk Gallery (also in the 516 Hagan St. building) features detailed paintings on birch that reference the patterns found in quilting and fabric design. Some of the works incorporate biomorphic shapes and organic designs in loud combinations of color, but I prefer the stricter, more symmetrical geometric arrangements wherein these large, round works more explicitly explore the overlap between fine-art painting and design disciplines. 

Across the street from Lusk and Zeitgeist is the Packing Plant (507 Hagan St.), where Coop Gallery’s April exhibit is Unfolding Vantage. The show includes works by Steve Basel and Tiffany Marie Tate that explore space and time through touch and texture, degrees of structural stability, temporal shifting and the residue of history. How do our lives define spaces, and how do those same spaces define our lives? See for yourself on Saturday night.

Also inside the Packing Plant, Mild Climate continues I’ll Be Your Mirror on Saturday night. This group show features work in a variety of media from Yevgeniya Baras, Erin Lee and Nikola Pottinger. If you’re not familiar with Mild Climate, try to make this show — it includes all the playful humor, surprising textures and unexpected color combinations the gallery’s known for. This exhibition was a highlight of the last month’s crawl, and it demonstrates that Mild Climate’s curatorial vision is as clear, crusty and cracked as ever. 

Tristan Higginbotham is a co-curator of Mild Climate, but she’ll have her own work on display for April at WAG further inside the Packing Plant. If I Sees You offers a compilation of drawings and sculpture that explore playful interactions of materials and take mimetic translations of bird calls as their conceptual jumping-off point. Higginbotham’s various projects offer a great example of how our city’s emerging artists are producing prolific practices across multiple disciplines. It’s a testament to the work ethics of these young artists, and this trend can only bode well for Nashville’s ever-developing visual arts scene. Also in the Packing Plant, Astri Snodgrass’ less-is-more paper-rubbing drawings continue at Channel to Channel. This quiet, monochrome show might have been overlooked at last month’s crawl, but its exploration of the relationship between drawing and sculpture makes it one of the most engaging displays showing at the April events. Slow down and spend some time taking in this display. 

For April, Seed Space (1201 Fourth Ave. S.) will show an installation of short films that Kevin Jerome Everson shot in North Carolina during August’s total solar eclipse. If you were in Nashville at the time, you might remember the celestial event as one of the most profoundly trippy experiences ever — I’m hoping Everson’s Polly exhibition will bring all those weird sensations rushing back. 

Surroundings and the Self is at Ground Floor Gallery (942 Fourth Ave S.). The show is curated by Naomi Bartlett and features work by Nashville artists Erin Murphy, Sibley Barlow, Amanda Brown, Georganna Greene, Matt Christy, Celeste Jones, Bobby Becker, Kim Hipps and Janet Decker Yanez, as well as offerings from Bartlett herself. Surroundings of the Self explores the way that artists bridge their experience of the exterior world with their interior lives and imaginations. I’m hoping Christy will have more of his recent painted banners on display for this one, and if you missed Greene’s recent work at her February exhibition at The Red Arrow Gallery, don’t make the same mistake twice. 

Be sure to stop by Converge (1224 Martin St.) for Force of Nature, an art exhibition and fundraiser for the Tennessee Environmental Council’s Radioactive Waste Education Program. This show was organized by Belmont University Honors Program students Katie Murdock, Hope Siler, Lauren Weber and Claire Dugan, and I definitely recommend popping in here to get schooled on how our beautiful state has become a dumping ground for the nation’s low-level radioactive waste. 

Downtown

The Browsing Room in the Downtown Presbyterian Church’s Fifth Avenue entrance opens a new exhibition by the church’s longtime artist-in-residence Sarah Shearer. A Color Darker Than Black explores the artist’s own struggles with depression through a series of water-based works on paper that offer symbolic narratives about trauma, loss, peace and freedom. These surreal works incorporate imagery from the artist’s dreams and memories in Nashville’s most fantastical art display outside of the Roman mythological figures currently showing at the Frist Center. 

White Noise marks the return of gallery favorite Jaq Belcher to Tinney Contemporary (237 Fifth Ave N.). The artist’s cut-paper works incorporate textural designs that are so precise and complex it can be easy for viewers to overlook the fact that all of Belcher’s works are presented in sheets of bright-white paper. This new exhibition will also feature a site-specific floor-covering drawing that will likely be the show’s highlight. It’s the downtown show you won’t want to miss this weekend.