One of the chief joys of being an art critic in Nashville is watching local artists stretch and evolve. Charging into the unknown requires courage and a willingness to take risks. Bedfellows — an exhibition of Vadis Turner’s new work, currently on view at Zeitgeist — shows that the Nashville-based artist is game for such a mission.
The central piece in the exhibition is called “Red Gate,” an arch-shaped wall relief that’s as big as a king-size mattress, filling an entire wall of the gallery. For this, Turner braided second-hand bed sheets and dyed them two tones of bright red. She wrapped the braids around a wooden frame and loosely arranged some across it, the way you would drape tinsel on a Christmas tree. That’s just one image that comes to mind when looking at “Red Gate.” It can read as a literal gate with the draped pieces mimicking a wrought-iron design, or you might see it as a messy red tangle of blood and guts.
“Black and White Rounds,” Vadis Turner
“Red Gate” is the first piece that caught my eye when I entered the gallery, and it served as a sort of portal into another world. I immediately saw the wall relief as a sail, and the gallery as its vessel. Turner’s previous fantastic Nashville shows, like Time of Day at David Lusk Gallery in 2015 and Tempest at the Frist Art Museum last year, featured gorgeous ribbon paintings of stormy skies and sunsets, and textured landscapes based on literary characters and mythology that popped with color. Interested in the domestic sphere, Turner meditated on female rites of passage.
But as I thought more about Bedfellows, I realized “Red Gate” is a different kind of metaphor. While some of the femininity remains in Bedfellows, Turner largely pivots toward masculinity here. A vessel, which Turner previously used as a symbol of the womb, maintains that connotation while also calling travel to mind. The ropey braided bed sheets that coil into shiny black ovals in “Black Pods” might be just as much at home on a ship carrying sailors and goods around the world. Across the ages, male mobility has figured prominently in art and literature. Women, on the other hand, were trapped within the domestic sphere. According to superstition, women couldn’t even board a ship without cursing it with bad luck. Bedfellows, then, might be about Turner leaving the safety of what she knows and striking out into new territory.
“If you don’t go into the unknown, you might as well stay home,” Turner tells the Scene. Bedfellows pulls from a different well than Time of Day and Tempest. The artist didn’t work from a story or narrative with a verbal or visual foundation. That might be why Bedfellows feels unclassifiable.
For four remarkable sculptures, Turner used fabric and resin to form vessels. They can resemble teacups, seashells, clouds or landscapes — your interpretation is as good as mine. If you look closely, especially if you peer inside the cups, you can see that they’re made from antique quilts. Bedfellows uses many of the same materials as in Turner’s previous work — among them ashes, breast milk, fabric, dye, resin and quilts — and asks us to forget the original function of the materials and imagine them as something new. It’s a stance both playful and serious: Must we dwell on the individual components we recognize, or can we alter our perceptions and see the artwork as more than the sum of its parts? The reward is a new way of seeing, one that is surprising and transformative. Also, Turner’s sparing use of color shows her progression as an artist who knows how to edit. Fans of her work may expect an eye-popping show of colors. But Bedfellows relies solely on black, white and red to carry the day.
William Faulkner is credited with describing editing as killing your darlings — being objective about your own work. That ability to edit oneself is essential in developing confidence as an artist.
With Bedfellows, Turner proves she’s got what it takes.
