Downtown
One of the biggest shows anywhere on Saturday night will be Brick to Canvas: A Survey of International Street Art at Tinney Contemporary. The opening of a two-part series featuring street artists from around the world, this first installment will include work by Herakut, Rone, Niels "Shoe" Meulman, Adele Renault, Augustine Kofie, and DALeast. The gallery will also display Banksy's iconic "Haight Street Rat" during the exhibition. Herakut, Rone, Meulman and Renault will be in Nashville to paint public murals for the Nashville Walls Project, and will be present for the opening reception.
In the Arcade, WAG will open an exhibition organized by Watkins alumnae Sharon Stewart and Sharyn Bachleda in cooperation with Healing Arts Project Inc. HAPI is an art-therapy nonprofit, and the work in Let Everything Happen reflects the hardships and victories experienced by the company's artists in their struggles with addiction and mental illness.
More big news at the Arcade is the soft opening of Brikolaj, the new vintage boutique and audio-video art gallery curated by Jared Brennan. Brennan has hosted ambient music pop-ups in the Arcade previously, but Saturday's Perpetual Useless program is his most ambitious. At 6 p.m., Austin Alexander of WXNA-FM's Sound Mind and Proxy will have a DJ set; at 7 p.m., Financier will perform ambient sound improvisations; and at 8 p.m., Ben Marcantel will be on hand for one of his Sugar Sk*-*lls chiptune performances. A video installation by Rhendi Greenwell will also be on display.
Coop Gallery will be hosting Astri Snodgrass' Inwards, Without Words, which bridges painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. Snodgrass' collages address how our experiences of the virtual and the digital affect our negotiation of real-world spaces — including the painted space of a picture plane. The show marks the beginning of the end of Coop's reign as the Arcade's top art gallery. The big news this First Saturday is the ongoing evolution between Coop and The Packing Plant: This summer, Coop will be inviting guests to curate shows at their new space inside The Packing Plant in Wedgewood-Houston, where they'll have a permanent space by the end of the summer — more on that below. I have mixed feelings about this — Coop is certainly a perfect fit for Wedgewood-Houston, but its exodus from the Arcade will be a massive loss for the downtown Art Crawl. Also, the new space will actually be smaller than their already-small Arcade spot, and I'd rather see them upgrading into a more expansive facility that would allow them to broaden their consistently inspired programming. Where is the patron with the good taste, moolah and civic sensibility to make that happen? Seriously. Where are you?
Wedgewood-Houston
While the Coop story continues to unfold, The Packing Plant is also evolving: The curator who defined the space, Ann Catherine Carter, has already moved on to other projects; her gallery partner Zack Rafuls will be moving to New York in the coming months to work with Zieher Smith & Horton; curators Mika Agari and David Onri Anderson are already working with Rafuls and will take the reins by the end of the summer; and in addition to Coop Gallery taking over a space inside the building, the gallery already inside, previously known as The Packing Plant, has gotten a new name — Mild Climate. Mild Climate won't have a show this month, but Coop asked Tennessee arts booster Locate Arts to curate Coop's inaugural exhibit in its future home, and that show will be opening Saturday under The Packing Plant's roof. Locate Arts deferred to Mike Calway-Fagen, who put together Mysterious Flight of the Peacock, which includes work by Agari, Eleanor Aldrich, Devin Balara, Coriana Close, Jennifer Danos, Christopher Miner, Corkey Sinks, Tad Lauritzen Wright and Elysia Mann, whose poetry informed Calway-Fagen's curation.
Group shows are typical of the spring art season, and the exhibition of new-to-the-gallery artists at CG2 is right on time. Recent Additions includes work by Lyle Carbajal, Christian Clayton and Ryan Heshka. All three artists deal in vivid colors, and while Heshka's works hang together like book covers from a series of neo-noir novels, look for Carbajal's hard lines and rough textures to steal the show.
The last time Kevin Cooley and Philip Andrew Lewis opened a show at Zeitgeist Gallery, they addressed the creation and destruction of the cosmos in the making and smashing of vinyl records — and the show was a hit. This Saturday, the duo opens an exhibition called time//lines, which combines sound and drawing to examine time at its most crushing, and its most cosmic.
Opening at David Lusk Gallery, Rob Matthews' Dawn-Watchers Watch for the Dawn uses symbols to investigate social and political issues. The works range from monumental to miniature, and feature ink-and-gouache works on paper that have been adhered to canvases, which are then stretched on wood. Lusk will also host a show of Ted Faiers' Western landscape paintings, which date back to the 1940s.
Mary Addison Hackett has won a lot of my attention with her process-driven painting practice, but this month at Seed Space, Hackett will display clothes and other items that she's mended, and the artist will be available at the opening to do small repairs on items visitors bring her. The artist will ask for a donation for her services, and the work will be more practical than aesthetic, celebrating the labor that created the original pieces, and in the process opening a dialogue about the value of the labor of art.
Nashville painter Daniel Holland will be showing a small display of new work at Sauvage as part of Matt Johnstone's Et Al. poetry reading event. Holland is one of the city's most prolific artists — he just closed a major show at The Red Arrow Gallery in January. Johnstone will be hosting visiting poets Chris Hosea and Douglas Piccinnini, along with Vanderbilt lecturer, instructor, poet and critic Keegan Cook Finberg.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com
