Crawl Space: December 2018

Downtown

We’re about to hit a slow gallery season, with art spaces shifting focus to group shows and bazaars brimming with creative items for sale. The rest of the year is a fine time for browsing, but holiday season is a great time to buy one-of-a-kind gifts that also support local artists. And besides, your friend or favorite relative would appreciate an original work by a local artist more than that tourist garbage you were prepared to foist on them in a few weeks. Tinney Contemporary’s Group Holiday Exhibition is a great example of how this season can bring art and commerce together in the joyous tradition of gift-giving. Tinney is among the most consistently challenging of the downtown galleries, and this show features work by standouts like Jaq Belcher, Andy Harding, Carol Mode and more — including painter James Perrin, who gave Tinney its best show of 2018.

Here/Now: Painting Nashville is a collection of recent work by local contemporary painters who take our city’s streets and spaces as their subjects. This exhibition at the Browsing Room is curated by Downtown Presbyterian Church resident artist Megan Lightell. The practice of landscape painting provides a backdrop for this show of urban artists who are surrounded by more mini-malls than meadows, more telephone towers than timberlines. Just like the earliest American painters, these artists capture their surroundings while also making comments on the values of our times. The works capture uneasy boundaries between the natural and the built environment, or use abstraction to indicate the mix of comfort and anxiety that comes from living in such a dynamic and growing place. Here/Now includes work by Amanda Joy Brown, Greg Dennie, Michelle Faro, Jodi Hays and Tony Sobota. 

In the Arcade, Studio 66 will open a new exhibition by Bart Mangrum and Christine Hall. Trash Art Show isn’t trashy at all — some of the work feels positively minimalist and muted — but it is a show about garbage and the disposable nature of consumer culture in America. Plus, it has great timing, opening just about a week after the biggest shopping day of the year — and it reminds me that contemporary art has consistently engaged the climate-change conversation, even when politicians and the media won’t. Great job, art! 

Artist Butch Anthony — who’s based out of the small town of Seale, Ala. — will debut a site-specific installation at The Rymer Gallery. The space will also host an exhibition of the artist’s altered found paintings. Anthony refers to his multimedia approach as “intertwangleism,” and while there’s a lot of the Weird Old South in these works, there’s seriously silly surrealist high jinks here as well. Don’t miss this Dixie Dali if you crawl downtown.

Wedgewood-Houston

The Crappy Magic Experience returns to the Music & Art at Wedgewood-Houston events in December with a one-of-a-kind junk shop/video installation in the Silo Room at Track One. This show will open on Friday night from 7-10 p.m, and on Saturday it will run from 3-9:30 p.m., and be followed by a benefit auction. Come on down to rummage through bins full of odd thrift-store toys and objects — take your own photographs to share on Instagram using the hashtag #crappymagic. Or pick one of the premium discarded objects on display, scan its barcode at a video kiosk, and watch a short art movie featuring the object you’ve chosen. Crappy Magic is a Duchampian art game that recasts refuse as relevant cultural relics, and Saturday’s auction of these newly minted masterpieces will benefit Turnip Green Creative Reuse, a “nonprofit designed to divert usable material from our landfills.”

Zeitgeist will continue two shows from November. Ky Anderson’s The Lighthouse offers muted tones and a chilly blue palette in this series of chunky, comforting compositions. There are textures and energy here, but this collection favors balance over bombast, and these meditative works seem perfectly paired with the season. Speaking of bombast, Vadis Turner’s Bedfellows exhibition (see our review in last week’s issue) marks a major breakthrough from an artist whose 2017 show at the Frist, Tempest, was full of bold experimentation. Turner’s best-known fabric wall sculptures create a dialogue with painting, but Bedfellows finds the artist transforming braided bedsheets and antique quilts into totemic objects and ritual vessels that speak to space as their antecedents spoke to surfaces. 

Bojana Ginn’s Sensory Architecture at Channel to Channel is one of the best photography exhibitions Nashville has seen this year. The Atlanta-based Ginn uses her camera to explore the energized aesthetics of action painting, and the results are vibrant, textured affairs that reveal a deeper understanding of the talents many painters have. 

The Packing Plant’s 185 Alley Gallery will host artist Hal Hefner, whose poster installation features Old Saint Nick as a demonic Krampus-like patron of consumerism. Hefner’s style borrows from John Carpenter’s classic conspiracy theory film They Live. Better be good and not miss this one on Saturday night.

Also Saturday night, abstract painter Ashley Layendecker will open In Reflection at Open in The Packing Plant. Layendecker’s insightful surfaces reveal the painterly possibilities of color and texture in meditative explorations of uncluttered lines and grids.

East Nashville

Once you’re crawled out west of the river, cross the bridge for New Material II: A Variety Show! Featuring acts from the musical to the theatrical, this happening at Soft Junk includes performances by Eve Maret, Internet Boyfriend, Crystal Wood, Sassyopathic, Flesh Eater and Diatom Deli. This Scorpion Beach production will be hosted by multimedia artist Ana Echo — aka Lambda Celsius, aka AC Carter — who also created all the performers’ costumes. 

If you’re crawling early, start across the parking lot from Soft Junk at the Red Arrow Gallery. East Nashville’s best art gallery will be hosting a closing reception for Amelie Guthrie’s mystical wire sculpture exhibition, which has the great title The Splendor of Living.