Coop’s annual new-members exhibitions have become a rite of Nashville’s winter art season, and this year’s display — in the gallery’s brand-new digs in The Packing Plant — feels extra extra.
Coop just moved from The Packing Plant’s small northwest gallery to the larger central gallery space that was formerly home to Channel to Channel. The Coop folks are only about 15 feet down a hallway from their old space — which is now occupied by Modfellows — but the extra space makes a big difference that’s especially evidenced in this inaugural display, which features a pair of large installation works. The footprint of Coop’s new digs restores the gallery’s display space to something more like they enjoyed during their run in the downtown Arcade. It was a very savvy move for Coop to jump to Wedgewood-Houston once the focus of the local art zeitgeist shifted from downtown to Wedgewood-Houston — but the move meant a significant downsizing for the collective. Coop’s new space keeps them in the center of Nashville’s best contemporary art scene, but will also open up their programming for all sorts of projects that simply require more wall and floor space.
The aptly named Locational Shift exhibition is focused on the latest creations by Coop’s newest members, but the show features lots of familiar faces. Lisa Bachman Jones is a new name on Coop’s membership roster, but she’s a local art scene veteran whose work was regularly featured in the programming at the recently closed Rymer Gallery. The most fascinating part of Jones’ work isn’t in the details revealed in individual pieces — it’s the artist’s overall approach, which finds Jones deploying a magpie multimedia practice that utilizes painting, sculpture, video and more to investigate liminal spaces. The artist’s inquiries examine boundaries like those between natural and artificial materials and structures, and she’s particularly attentive to the effects of entropy on everything from man-made structures to the collective consciousness of a culture. Jones’ display at Coop reads like its own mini exhibition against the gallery’s back wall, and she includes a photograph (“Threshold”), wall sculpture (“Folded Floor”), a standing sculpture (“Supported Form”) and work on paper (“Cut Ties”). The photo gives us an artificial, reproduced image of a natural subject, and “Folded Floor” is an artist’s canvas made to resemble a section of garage floor. All the works evoke multiple themes, and Jones’ conversation-circle arrangement of these pieces brings out more complexity from the sum of its parts.
Beth Reitmeyer’s colorful, whimsical, immersive installations are Nashville art staples, and her “Share the Love” display embodies the positive, optimistic themes that are the artist’s signature. “Share the Love” is literally a pink tent-like form decorated with glittering hearts, floating above the gallery floor, suspended from the ceiling. After nearly two years of pandemic anxiety and various levels of social distancing, the piece’s cozy confines read like a valentine to the healthier, more intimate tomorrows we’re hoping for sooner than later.
Yanira Vissepo’s prints and textile works are also familiar to gallerygoers who recall her artist residency at Coop back in 2020 — when the gallery briefly hosted working artists instead of exhibitions during the darkest days of the first year of the pandemic. Vissepo studied traditional woodblock printing techniques in Japan, and her works are predictably poetic and elegant. In Locational Shift, Vissepo offers a trio of oil-relief-on-paper prints titled “Monochrome Experiments.” The series includes one work each in tones of yellow, blue and red. They feature geometric shapes and natural forms in quiet compositions that draw attention to the varieties of shades and tones on display. Like the best chromatic minimalism, Vissepo’s works help viewers uncover new insights from even the most common colors.
Quintin Watkins is an artist and graphic designer who is most at home working out his creative ideas on a keyboard at a screen. For Locational Shift, Watkins brings his digital creations to Coop’s gallery walls with a three-piece series of works that blur the line between traditional and digital art. Watkins is preoccupied with the altered realities and artificial worlds we find in video games or at the VR NFT art galleries popping up in a metaverse near you. This “Don’t Be Afraid” series speaks to how personal perspectives result in personal narratives, but it’s also about the creative courage it takes to question fundamental art cornerstones like color theory. All of these works include symbols of access and escape — doors (“Doorway”), windows (“Opportunity”) and staircases (“Spiral”). They also combine natural imagery like clouds against abstract digital designs, creating a very surreal sensibility of overlapping worlds or dreams within dreams. These works are tantalizingly raw and simple, and much more punk than most fine-art offerings from pro designers. These works also play well with Vissepo’s prints, nicely rounding out a strong show that bodes well for Coop at the beginning of this new chapter.
