Well, here we are again at the last Art Crawl of the year. This Saturday I'll be thinking about the months gone by, and all the shows I've seen and written about through 2015. Of course, I'll also be on the lookout for just the right photo, painting or handcrafted item to buy so I can check another name off my holiday shopping list. Don't forget that finding the perfect one-of-a-kind gift for a loved one can also mean shopping local, supporting Nashville's galleries and investing in artists who call our city home. There's plenty to see this month, including comic book heroes, country crossroads, a railroad gallery and a Minotaur's maze wrapped up in a bow.
Downtown
The Browsing Room at the Downtown Presbyterian Church will host an opening for Nick Hay's The Labyrinth Decoded. Hay is a Nashville-based artist whose ongoing collaboration with historian and space exploration pioneer E.C. Piedra has resulted in a body of work that highlights the storytelling capacities of language as the dividing line between the civil and savage worlds. For this exhibition, the duo presents Cold War-era photographs of U.S. missile silo bunkers wrapped in the mythology of the Minotaur's labyrinth. The result is a contemporary fable that reminds viewers that history makes a presence of the past while also pointing to the fundamental role language plays in the building of consensus realities.
And the winner for most inappropriate holiday season art exhibition title goes to Death Panels by Luke Howard and Cameron Lucente at Watkins Arcade Gallery. The show's title alludes to this duo's vivid comic art, which engages graphic storytelling to convey anxious, moribund narratives. This display of self-published zines, screenprints, comic pages, character sheets and process photos is a must-see for comics and animation fans at the crawl.
Corvidae Collective's dark aesthetics speak to the spooky autumn months more than any other time of the year, and might seem out of place in the jingling joy of the holiday season. But actually, the kind of art, jewelry, decor and books you find in galleries and boutiques like Corvidae is always in style for Nashvillians who like a little fear with their fashion, a little horror with their horn-headed architectural elements. This time of year Corvidae comes off more Krampus than Christmas, but there are still plenty of potential presents on offer from a host of artists including Cassie Soares, Stephen Watkins, Miranda Herrick, Chad Span, Megan Kelly, Nina Covington, Karen Short, Miranda Crump, Tina G. Gionis, Billy Martinez, Dina D'Argo, Kristen Frenzel, Jay Jenkins and Thaxton Abshalom Waters.
Jerry Park's recent photographs pointed a lens at the creative process itself, taking viewers into the workspaces of artists and designers all over Nashville. His latest work images the outdoors, capturing the natural beauty that can be found all over Tennessee's rural roadways. The photographs make up Park's new book, Slow Roads Tennessee: A Photographic Journey Down Timeless Byways. Seeking to evoke a sense of nostalgia in the photographs, Parks shot his scenes with a plastic film camera. The soft focus and dark corners of the images recall vintage photographs with all the light leakage effects you might find in a favorite Instagram filter. Take a look at the exhibition at The Arts Company, and take home a book for under the tree.
Painter Jason Craighead's Self and System opens at Tinney Contemporary. The exhibition explores the tension between the personal self and the consensual space we engage as a social species. The resulting works reflect on the creative process itself, and the artist's struggle to express a personal message in an unaffected voice.
Up from Fifth Avenue, the Coop Collective has taken over the Track 13 Gallery at Cummins Station for the closing of their Gazing Inland exhibition of abstract landscape painting. The show features work by artists from around the country, and the gallery-inside-of-a-railroad-car is itself a novelty for the uninitiated. I caught this show when it opened, and the wide variety of work found me loving one group of paintings and then hating another — it's an eye-opening display of how diverse abstract landscapes might be. The exhibition confirms my suspicion that Arthur Dove is the new black, and it features work by Rachel Budde, Mariel Capanna, Matthew Fisher, Elliott Green, Shara Hughes, J.J. Manford, Dustin Metz and Karla Wozniak.
Wedgewood-Houston
This month, Zeitgeist Gallery continues Three Carbon Tons, an exhibit featuring paintings by Jered Sprecher and sculptures by Michael Jones McKean. Tons is a big exhibition about technology and energy that's full of inspired forms and retina-rending color schemes. If you caught this display in November, take this opportunity to get one more look at McKean's exquisitely sculpted obsolete phones and gadgets.
If Robert Yasuda's New Paintings exhibition at David Lusk Gallery looks as good as the digital images I've seen, it'll be one of the most beautiful shows of the crawl. Yasuda's use of wooden superstructures results in paintings with sculptural texture and dimensionality — a rounded corner here, a tapered edge there. The shapes are covered with layers of paint and fabric that ultimately create a play of light that the artist equates with moments of transcendent perception or realization. Lusk will also open Wrapped, an exhibition of Nashville-based furniture designer Peter Fleming's one-of-a-kind pieces and objects.
Channel to Channel ended 2014 with OMG Mountains, an exhibition of Robert Scobey's abstract landscapes. The space will end this year with a display of drawings by Scobey. Figure Drawings includes charcoal, pastel and graphite drawings of the human form — some of which were begun at Channel to Channel's weekly life-drawing sessions. Other works were drawn from photographs and even from purely invented forms, offering results that range from minimal to analytical to poetic.
Invoking one part Big Agriculture Bad Guys and one part The Yes Men, the artist team made up of Wendy DesChene and Jeff Schmuki combine their talents to form PlantBot Genetics Inc. — a send-up of companies like Monsanto whose genetic engineering, genome patenting and pesticide spreading is the bane of environmentalists and healthy food advocates around the world. The duo's Monsantra presentation and exhibition at Seed Space features genetically modified food plants grafted onto remote-controlled platforms to create mecha-monster PlantBots. But the real highlight here is the weaving of the duo's fictional parody with real world information about food, science, the environment and the cost of unsustainable agricultural practices that put profits and production ahead of healthy people, healthy food and a healthy world to grow it in.
At Track One, CG2 will be hosting a holiday sale with the commercially titled Everything $500 group exhibition. Sometimes the best sales pitch is a straight shot, and with works on paper from Fred Stonehouse, Mark Hosford, Marcus Kenney, Mary Bucci McCoy, Margery Amdur, HYDEON, Jen Uman, Nathalie Thibault, Ryan Heshka, Sean Norvet, Adrian Brooks, Aaron Zulpo, Will Holland, Shane Darwent and Grace Levine on offer, gallery curator Jason Lascu might put a few elves out of work before Christmas.
While you're in Wedgewood-Houston, be sure to run down Humphreys Street to catch glass artist Wynn Smith's display at Pop-Up, and Julia Martin's show of new work at her eponymous gallery. End your evening at Fort Houston with Replication 2.0, a juried 3-D printing show featuring work from more than 25 local artists, architects, engineers, casual tinkerers and high school students.
The Arts & Music at Wedgewood-Houston events will be preceded by the WeHo Holiday Market at Track One from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Enjoy holiday shopping, live DJs, food trucks and even a bloody Mary bar there before the crawl.
Crawl good, y'all. Santa's watching.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com
