Alchemy Abounds in Texturextra at Zeitgeist

In the opening of her 1966 essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag writes: “The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual.” Sontag recalls ancient cave paintings, which allowed people to shape their visual reality through a type of everyday magic. A similar sentiment is conveyed in art critic Charlotte Cotton’s book, Photography Is Magic, in which contemporary photography is framed as a type of everyday magic that calls upon “our capacity to script our own sense of visual reality.” Today, crystal healing, occultism, tarot cards, goddess worship, psychedelia and talismans collide in our digital landscape, transforming into visual and cultural rites. 

Such is the magical thinking at play in Texturextra, an exacting exhibition of new-media sculpture, installation and painting on view at Zeitgeist through June 29. It explores the ritualistic link between art-making and ancient practices. Organized by Zeitgeist and Locate Arts, Texturextra is the latest in a series of statewide exhibitions that pair local and out-of-state artists. Featuring Nashville artist Richard Feaster and Atlanta-based artist Zipporah Camille Thompson, the exhibition is a revelatory collaboration that expresses material, methodological rituals of art making across two-dimensional and three-dimensional works. 

Feaster, best known for his experimental and processed-based multimedia works, continues his investigations into the ritualistic aspects of mark-making in Texturextra. In his new works, Feaster nearly forgoes painterly convention, opting instead to approach the canvas with collage and the sensitivity to place we expect from a sculptor. As seen in “Promise of the Universe” and “Bemsha Swing,” reflective pools of textured gold and chrome Mylar are affixed across the canvas, overlaying layers of diaphanous graphite, oil and enamel gestures. These metallic forms affirm the flatness of the canvas and remind us that in painting, depth is an illusion. 

This is best iterated in works like “Psychicemotus” and “Chasing the Bird,” in which Mylar is indented to create a relief. In the resulting image, the Mylar shapes appear to be immobilized within the canvas much like graphics on a digital screen. Elsewhere, Feaster’s canvases appear purely alchemical, vacillating between divination pools, Rorschach inkblots and cast shadows. Viewing the work is not unlike visualizing Plato’s cave. 

Thompson’s work functions with a similar amorphousness, although with greater physicality. The artist debuts at Zeitgeist with the materially complex, altar-like sculpture and installation work she is known for. In Texturextra five elaborate installations anchor the exhibition. “Acid rain” transforms a corner of the gallery into a subterranean altar, with pinched ceramic vessels arranged before a densely shrouded form. The work is presented ceremoniously, atop a bed of stark-white stones. 

In “blue haze equinox,” a careful grouping of irregular vessels and ornate ceramic artifacts emerges from a bed of black sand and dirt; above, a thin black light reads as a techno-artificial horizon. In Thompson’s work, light and reflective materials function differently from how they do in Feaster’s. They appear as a site of entry that suggests a brief interior opening — psychological, metaphysical or incantatory. In “queen cobra,” inky black plastic, zip ties, sequined trim and tinsel-like material is woven with jute, neoprene, rope, mesh, fake plants and tassels to form the dense, cacophonous body of a textural talisman that hangs from the ceiling like a nest. Similarly, the rosy glow cast by the Himalayan salt lamp in Thompson’s “crystal vortex” evokes a subtle sense of magic. 

These familiar reflective materials, repeated throughout the exhibition, become the visual equivalents of palpable energy, wending throughout Thompson’s work, imbued with a new magic that transforms the gallery into a ritualistic space.