“A Taste of Your Own Medicine,” Abraham Lara
Over the years, lots of artist spaces in the city’s core have been sold out from under the creative renters who’ve actually made the locations happening and valuable. Nowadays, it’s hard enough for a Nashville artist to afford the rent on a place to live, let alone another one to make work in. And ever-rising home prices and prohibitive interest rates make the option of purchasing a house a no-go for many artists who aren’t otherwise flush with cash. A few decades ago, when populations began to migrate back into downtown centers in cities all over the country, I began to wonder if the suburbs were going to get super weird as creative populations were pushed to further reaches of boomtowns like Nashville. A new display of art and fashion from a creative collective based in South Antioch says the city is getting outré in the outskirts.
Keep Dreaming, on view through Aug. 27 at Zeitgeist, features Levi Morales, Abraham Lara and Sebastian Lara. The display includes a variety of work, from paintings, posters, animation and sculptures to a whole rack of printed, dyed and painted T-shirts. The Keep Dreaming artists grew up together and sharpened their skills while they were students at Watkins. They’ve been showing their work at various house-party pop-ups, and one of the biggest questions about this show was whether the work would translate into a formal gallery setting. Zeitgeist is one of the roomiest showcase spaces in the city, and its big white walls might have swallowed a show of cartoon-inspired art made mostly of upscaled materials and plain brown cardboard. But instead, the show reads as whimsical and inventive, and it brings an irreverent sense of humor to the often self-serious business of exhibiting.
“Apocalypse,” Sebastian Lara
The group’s pop-ups remind me of underground music’s house show strategy, and the artists’ collective practice shares the collaborative ebbs and flows musicians experience playing together as a band. The show at Zeitgeist feels of a piece mainly because of the reused materials and ubiquitous deployment of rainbow-rivaling palettes. That said, each of these artists has their own unique style, and Keep Dreaming’s biggest strength is the wide variety of work on display.
If I were going to sum up the show with just one work, I might pick Abraham Lara’s “A Taste of Your Own Medicine.” This piece features a photocopied black-and-white image of Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 readymade “Fountain” — a porcelain urinal the artist signed “R. Mutt.” Abraham Lara adds a cheeky drawing of Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame, dropping his drawers and taking a leak in the artwork. The piece embodies the refreshing irreverence of the exhibition, but it also points to the fact that these seemingly spontaneous, cartoon-crazed creators are also educated artists enjoying a very serious brand of fun. Abraham also has a selection of geometric abstract paintings in the show — Abraham’s lines look almost pixelated, and the compositions remind me of digital glitch art. They’re my favorite works in the show.
Sebastian Lara’s interactive flipbook animations deliver some of the most surprising and innovative thrills of the show. Sebastian’s drawings are connected to axles in handsome wooden boxes that have been mounted to the gallery wall. When visitors obey the text instructions to turn the cranks on the boxes, the drawings start flipping to life as little narrative cartoons. One of the animations features a woman with heart-shaped glasses and a creepy-big smile driving her car into the side of a house. Another features a panicking bald eagle flapping through a cloud of dust on an endless loop. I love the vintage cartoon aesthetics and the expressive worry on the bird’s face. The act of cranking these yourself is playful and delightful, and gallerygoers can also leaf through an issue of Sebastian’s art-filled newspaper, “Paperboy,” for another interactive experience.
Sebastian Lara's contributions to the show also include his action-figure-like sculptures. The little sculptures include a driver in a tiny race car, a bodybuilder flexing his biceps, an airborne skateboarder, and a figure in a dress decorated with the signature Barbarian Studios logo. Levi Morales and Abraham Lara's T-shirt designs combine printing, bleaching, spray-painting and tie-dyeing. Some of them feature elements like clouds or text, but they’re often abstract affairs that manage to make formalist fine art into something as chill as a comfy T-shirt.
Keep Dreaming is a flashy display of over-the-top images, characters and clothes. It also reminds viewers that serious art can sometimes be a fun party for you and your friends.
Update: This story originally misattributed Sebastian Lara's works to Levi Morales. We regret the error.
