It’s beginning to look a lot like 2019, guys. Most of the First Saturday Art Crawl’s participating galleries will hold opening receptions from 6 to 9 p.m. this month, and the downtown galleries are back in the mix after opting out of the crawl last month over the Fourth of July holiday weekend.  

Wedgewood-Houston

Kellie Bornhoft’s two-channel video installation, Boundless Sediments, will send tremors through Coop. Bornhoft’s videos blend sculptural images of smashed rocks and chalk drawings with sound and poetry in an environmental exhortation about the actual stuff of the earth beneath our feet. The press release — I haven’t seen the work yet — has me expecting something sensual and intense. That said, activist art has become an exceedingly boring space as unique individual expressions by socially engaged artists give way to artists putting politics before creativity, transforming their words, images and sounds into actual propaganda in the process. Bornhoft seems more like a scientist than an extremist — she claims “an interest in the way the earth moves in refusal.” If that’s just the press release, I’m here for the poetry.   

In addition to Bornhoft’s video verses, Matt Johnstone’s Free Nashville Poetry Library is holding its monthly Show & Sell: A Makers Bazaar at The Packing Plant during the crawl. The open-air market will host zine publishers, experimental comic book creators and small-press artisans. Expect DIY poetry, experimental printing, art books, screenprinting, handmade goods and more. Johnstone has organized many of these kinds of events at The Packing Plant, and we’re excited to see it becoming a more formalized, regular feature of the Wedgewood-Houston happenings. Let’s all meet at the bazaar along Gray Street this Saturday night.  

A couple columns back, I wondered about the changes that might come to the crawl events as social distancing and mask restrictions abated. It’s exciting to see projects like Show & Sell emerging in the spaces where we’ve recently lost Wedgewood-Houston event regulars like Infinity Cat. Another new feature at the Wedgewood crawl is Converge’s Grassroots Art Park outdoor performance space. That spot will host live music from The Pitch Meeting — a nonprofit founded by musician Eric Fortaleza that provides songwriters with experienced backing musicians — Saturday afternoon at 4 p.m., and a dance performance and interactive art project with Converge creators-in-residence Hannah McCarthy and Beth Reitmeyer from 5 until 7 p.m. Converge is a nonprofit project deploying art and design in the name of creative placemaking. Their Grassroots Arts Park is located at 1231 Martin St.   

David Onri Anderson opened his second solo show at David Lusk Gallery on Aug. 1, and the gallery will be open during regular Saturday hours from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m., just before the crawl starts to gather momentum. Anderson received his BFA from Watkins College of Art in 2016, and he’s already one of Nashville’s best-known emerging artists and independent curators. Elements finds Anderson using grass, flowers and nutshell stains along with acrylics and graphite to capture his symmetrical compositions of swirling sunflowers, glowing lanterns and burning candles. The result is an iconography of contemporary spirituality that’s too sincere to be a stoner goof, and too intense and personal to be part of the one-size-fits-all creative detritus of the New Age. Anderson’s stylized representations are grounded in simple, fundamental notions about nature and transformation, which he relates in his press release: “The ground is made fertile with respect, the seed grows from darkness into the sun’s love. The dark earth nurtures our roots, the sun blesses the day.” Cue the Wicker Man soundtrack and check out @davidluskgallery on Instagram for upcoming Elements events, including an Instagram Live tour of the show with Anderson this Sunday at 12:30 p.m., and a reception for the show on Saturday, Aug. 14, from noon until 3 p.m. 

Former Nashvillian Liz Clayton Scofield will be back in town to open The Play’s the Thing at Unrequited Leisure Saturday at 11 a.m. The artist uses the convention of a stage play to explore the performative nature of identity in an exhibition of sculpture and video. Unrequited Leisure will also be flying Scofield’s “Cloud Flag” from its AIRspace flagpole gallery. The gallery will host a reception during the crawl from 5 until 7 p.m. 

Downtown  

I’m stoked to have the downtown galleries back online for the August Art Crawl, and Arden Bendler Browning’s Escape Routes at Tinney Contemporary is a particularly plugged-in affair. Bendler Browning paints shamelessly luscious abstract landscapes with tweaked-out palettes inspired by the otherworldly color combinations oozing from the digital art space. Bendler Browning spent most of 2020 in a pandemic lockdown in the dense urban squeeze of Philadelphia. She weathered the storm in the modest natural spaces she could access within Philly’s concrete jungles, and in the virtual worlds she created in isolation during the longest days of the pandemic. Her big circular paintings offer viewers immersive portals of chromatic energy to simply get washed away in. The show’s VR component offers an even more extreme escape route, bringing the various paintings to life in nine different scenes, and inviting viewers to splash right through them in a hyperreal gallery in the metaverse. I love the digital-analog overlap in the VR, AR and blockchain digital art spaces right now, and this cybernetic display of natural spaces recalls the computers “like flowers with spinning blossoms” in poet Richard Brautigan’s “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” 

Just up the street from Tinney, Chauvet Arts will open an expansive new group showBalance: Order & Chaos. The multimedia display includes street photography, abstract painting and sculptures made from recycled debris, and features works from gallery faves like Mandy Rogers Horton, Denise Stewart-Sanabria, Jorge Yances and printmaker Paul Roden. Chauvet will be open from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. before hosting its Art Crawl reception from 6 until 9 p.m.

East Nashville 

Pam Marlene Taylor opens CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) at The Red Arrow Gallery with a reception from 6 until 9 p.m. on Saturday night. The show’s title references the half-real/half-virtual entities many of us became during 2020. Expect a selection of small framed textile weavings as well as larger draped and tasseled works that will speak to your humanity — it’s like Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampff test, but with crochet.