Still image of large-scale video projection using Max MSP, an auto-generative software, Chalet Comellas
Wedgewood-Houston
Nashville-based artist and curator Chalet Comellas has been busy. The new media displays she curates with Clint Sleeper at Unrequited Leisure are always don’t-miss offerings at Wedgewood-Houston’s First Saturday happenings. And Comellas and Sleeper just closed their excellent Shaman in the Loop multimedia exhibition at Gallery 204 at Vanderbilt University. That show explored the connections between technology and esoteric systems of divination and healing, asking questions and offering critiques about our developing relationships with AI and machine learning. Comellas is also showing in the group exhibition Éramos Semillas / We Were Seeds, which is on view at Stove Works in Chattanooga through Nov. 11. On Saturday, Comellas is opening yet another new show at Zeitgeist. I love the irreverent title — Can I see like a planet? and other questions for chatbots. It’s a self-reflexive display that explores the expanding role that nonhuman intelligences are playing in the realm of art generation. The show also includes contributions from real living human artists — including Kelli Shay Hix, Mark Baker and Comellas’ frequent collaborator Sleeper. This show is asking illuminating questions about the nature of creativity in the age of artificial intelligence, and you can find your own answers on Saturday night.
Details: 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Saturday at Zeitgeist, 516 Hagan St.
The Frist’s Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage has Nashville’s art scene preoccupied with all things cut-and-paste. It’s perfect timing for Billy Renkl’s new show at David Lusk Gallery, which opened Oct. 14. The Comfort of Crows includes 52 of Renkl’s collages of ornithological and botanical illustrations, maps and cyanotypes, sheet music and more. Part of the general appeal of collage is the shock of an unusual juxtaposition or the appealing synchronicity of a complementary match of images, designs, colors and textures. In fact, collage’s penchant for camp is a direct result of these inherent ironies. But Renkl operates well beyond caprice, bringing a formalist’s eye for materials and design to his careful constructions of mixed-up media. Each of the works responds to an essay in his sister Margaret Renkl’s book of the same title. The volume is a nature memoir that reflects on the cycle of one year’s worth of the migrations of birds, and the ebb and flow of animals, plants and weather through the author’s backyard. Billy Renkl’s collages build a narrative of their own, and this exhibition reads — like local and global ecosystems — as something greater than the sum of its parts.
Details: 3-5 p.m. Saturday at David Lusk Gallery, 516 Hagan St.
Like Moonlight on a Yellow Ferrari claims the best exhibition title this Saturday night. The display by Chris Uphues and Devin Goebel creates a conversation about pop culture through the lenses of yellow emblems like the smiley face and the No. 2 pencil. The yellow smiley face was created by designer Harvey Ross Ball in 1963, and No. 2 pencils can be painted any color. But yellow faces and yellow pencils have amassed the kind of cultural gravitas that outlasts economic trends, political shifts and the ebb and flow of popular taste. Ball’s beaming face has seen six popes — so far. And yellow has been the emblematic color of graphite writing utensils since the 19th century. Should you brand yourself, and how badly does it hurt? When do camp luxury items inspire as much devotion as religious iconography? When is a logo just a logo? You may just find the answers to these questions and more.
Details: 6-9 p.m. Saturday at Julia Martin Gallery, 444 Humphreys St.
Downtown
Abstract painter Jane Braddock has been showing her work at Tinney Contemporary since the gallery opened back in 2008. The artist’s abstract fields, forms, gestures, spots and splatters draw on vibrant palettes to create energized layers of chromatic movement. Her work also often includes text in poetic grids without punctuation — her words and lines snapping into pieces at the edges of her canvases. Braddock’s fragmentary phrases often linger on natural and spiritual subjects, but they also speak to the way gallerygoers “read” two-dimensional wall art and the way they read into it. Braddock’s 3 Rivers solo exhibition debuts at Tinney’s opening reception this Saturday.
Details: 2-8 p.m. Saturday at Tinney Contemporary, 237 Rep. John Lewis Way N.
“Make Out a Meal,” Lindsy Davis
East Nashville
Lindsy Davis has been showing her paintings and sculpture at Red Arrow since it was a tiny one-room gallery next to the Fond Object record store in Riverside Village. The gallery and Davis have both come a long way since then — Red Arrow is now one of the best contemporary art spaces in the city, and Davis is one of the artists who best represents the women-owned-and-operated showcase and its painting-centric roster. Deconstructing Dogmatic Domesticity doesn’t look like anything new from Davis — the show of canvases and objects is full of the blacks and whites and natural materials that have informed most of the artist’s recent work. Instead, this show refines Davis’ preoccupations with perception, texture and color. And it finds Davis’ recent curious sculptural explorations evolving into a fully articulated display of forms that comment on domestic routines using materials like concrete and wood, wire and fire. Deconstructing Dogmatic Domesticity finds Davis’ objects catching up with her impressive abstract painting, announcing the artist as a true double threat with knockout power in both mediums.
