“Congress Hall Sava Center in Belgrade,” Vesna Pavlović
Every now and then Nashville galleries shift their First Saturday events to accommodate an important event or a holiday weekend. April’s First Saturday falls on the first day of the month, but despite the April Fool’s Day’s penchant for practical joking, every word you’re about to read regarding the first Art Crawl of the spring season is as true as a tug at the end of a fishing line, as real as the light of the very first firefly of the year. It’s 41 degrees while I’m writing this, but a man will dream.
Wedgewood-Houston
Vesna Pavlović’s Perfect Memory continues at Zeitgeist on Saturday. If you made it to last month’s jam-packed opening during Nashville’s Tennessee Triennial celebration, you’d be forgiven if your memories of the actual exhibition amount to less than a blur. The pandemic taught us that the art world dies a whole lot when we can’t gather and socialize, but the return to normal gallery events is reminding me of the luxury of lazing in empty galleries on weekday afternoons. We want it all, really: the full return of galleries across the city holding evening events every First Saturday, and programming that has us scrambling back for a closer look.
Luckily, this is a show that rewards second — and third — visits. Pavlović’s images are predictably strong across selections from three different series, and my favorite part of the show is a grid of photographs from her “Searching for a Perfect Sunset” series. These pics all document the artist’s efforts to perfectly frame successive sunsets in Joshua Tree, Calif., using a box full of vintage photography slides she sourced off eBay. Each picture offers a similar composition of Pavlović holding a slide up to the horizon and snapping an image of it, backlit by the last rays of the day. I love Pavlović’s photographs of photographs, and the desert magic and the performative element of this series make it a great new take on the artist’s longtime preoccupation with photographing photographic archives. That said, another image of a still escalator descending into an ocean of perfect blue carpeting at the silent, empty Congress Hall Sava Center in Belgrade, Serbia, spotlights Pavlović’s penchant for bringing striking formalist chops to her documenting of abandoned spaces. Zeitgeist is also continuing its Triennial Room installation through the end of April. The exhibition-within-an-exhibition is a Tennessee Triennial project that includes a handful of multimedia works featuring Pavlović in collaboration with Alex Blau and Claudia Padrón Gómez.
DETAILS: See these shows — or see them again — from noon until 6 p.m. this Saturday at Zeitgeist Gallery.
David Lusk Gallery opened Carroll Cloar: Stories on Paper last week, and the show is sort of an about-face after Lusk’s excellent March display of abstract paintings and sculptures by Tad Lauritzen Wright. Cloar grew up in the countryside of Gibson Bayou, outside of Earl, Ark. And when he embarked on an art career in New York in the 1930s, his drawings and lithographs were full of the people and stories he knew from his own family, the pages of the Bible and the local legends of the rural South. Cloar captures all of these through the surreal lens of the daydream memories of childhood, resulting in meticulously rendered characters and narratives that still speak to Southerners and Southern culture three decades after Cloar’s death in 1993. Cloar’s prints read like collages with various images of church congregations, fish, angels, nudes, portraits of friends and family, baseball players and cowboys populating scenes tangled with numerous narrative threads. The exhibition focuses on Cloar’s intensely detailed lithographs, and they’re complemented by a number of drawing and tracing studies on paper and vellum. The studies appear minimal and spare next to the lithographs, and they speak to the attention to detail and craftsmanship that Cloar brought to his most imaginative scenes and crowded compositions.
DETAILS: David Lusk Gallery will hold an open house for the show on Saturday from noon until 5 p.m.
“Equality,” Rolin Smith
Downtown
Rolin Smith is one of the current artists-in-residence at the Downtown Presbyterian Church, and his new exhibition is hanging at the church’s The Browsing Room through April 28. Structure and Chaos is a series of geometric abstract designs representing the balancing act of maintaining a complex personality and an art practice between the Scylla and Charybdis of perfectionism and chaos. Smith’s own struggles with mental health issues inform these colorful and intricate works containing fractal-like designs of color-spectrum-spanning geometric shapes-within-shapes. Smith uses acrylic, watercolor, mixed media and digital tools to evoke circuitry, maps, video game screens and microscopic images all at once.
DETAILS: The Browsing Room will host an opening reception Saturday from 6 until 8 p.m.
Rockwall curator Ryan Rado will be presenting the third iteration of his Low Brow exhibitions featuring paintings, drawings and prints by Nashville tattoo artists. This time around he’s included work by more than 20 skin-inkers including Shannon Wages, Mike Kepper, Adam the Kid, Daniel Hughes, Carrie Cameron, Jake Hodson and many more.
DETAILS: Opening reception 6 p.m. at Rockwall Gallery.
East Nashville
Red Arrow Gallery’s Fifty Reds in Their Minds exhibition takes its title from Josef Albers’ legendary tome on color theory and perception, Interaction of Color: “If one says ‘Red’ — the name of color — and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds.” This exhibition is another example of how we’re seeing abstraction and formalism swinging the aesthetic pendulum back against a continuing flood of figures, narratives and content. Trends trend as they do, but I’ve been gratefully basking in the pure pleasures of color and texture and form and line at recent displays from Alex Blau at Zeitgeist and Tad Lauritzen Wright at Lusk (mentioned above). Come see works from Brianna Bass, Mathew Tom, Katie Hector, Duncan McDaniel and Jason Bard Yarmosky when they bring this colorful painterly display on Saturday night.
DETAILS: Opening reception 6 until 9 p.m. at The Red Arrow Gallery.
