Crawl Space: December 2020

Wedgewood-Houston   

I recently found out that the upcoming Sundance Film Festival will be completely virtual. The step back from in-person events has also inspired smaller programmers to create their own virtual movie presentations. Coop held a microcinema event in September, and Unrequited Leisure’s Adjust the Lens series of experimental video and film runs from Dec. 3-6. Unrequited’s commitment to screen-based exhibitions means that its programming always offers nearly identical experiences for viewers in the gallery and online. This project represents the evolution of a traveling program of strange cinema that the gallery has curated annually since 2018. Adjust the Lens will be screening online with new work premiering every day. The entire selection will also run on a loop in Unrequited Leisure’s Packing Plant space for the duration of the festival. Go to unrequitedleisure.com for virtual screening times and more information.  

Paul Collins painted 350 get-out-the-vote yard signs during the 100 days leading up to November’s election. The works were given away and displayed all over the state — one was even on the cover of the Scene’s Election Issue. Coop will host an outdoor display of 60 of the signs outside their digs at The Packing Plant on Saturday from 5 to 6 p.m. Expect fire pits, refreshments and only a bit of lingering post-election anxiety. An outdoor art show is a super cool concept for an alternative exhibition during this time, but don’t miss Collins’ display of photographs and early versions of the signs on the walls inside the Coop gallery space. Coop asks that visitors wear a mask, mind their personal distance, and enjoy the art.  

Jared Small’s paintings of crumbling Victorian houses, flower bouquets and trees are meticulously rendered against abstracted backgrounds and decorated with spontaneous gestures that can leave the viewer feeling like they’re falling into the space inside the frame. In Small’s new exhibition at David Lusk Gallery, the painter’s latest works are simultaneously gorgeous and mysterious, and they speak to contemporary anxieties about disappearing history and architecture with magical surrealism.  

East Nashville 

The Red Arrow Gallery closes its 2020 calendar with a show of works by recent Austin Peay State University graduates Ashanté Kindle and Khari Turner. Kindle’s monochrome black paintings speak to the textures of Black hair in impasto waves of dark reflecting pigment washing over canvas. These works speak generally to identity and the particulars of Black hair culture. But they’re also formally gorgeous works that are engrossing as purely sensual abstractions removed from cultural narratives. Turner’s abstracted portraits and narrative scenes feature figures whose faces are often obscured by chromatic smears of oil, acrylic and watercolor paints, and even ocean water. Like Kindle, Turner makes work that reflects Black experience, and — beyond their subjects — these works vibrate with the tension between Turner’s precise execution of representational elements and the chaos of the unchecked materials he lets loose in his abstracted spaces.  

South Nashville 

While it’s refreshing to see most of Nashville’s gallery scene forgoing the usual holiday-group-show route, it’s also still nice to see spaces like Modfellows Art & Design Gallery fully committing to it. It just wouldn’t be the holidays without a display that offers something for every price point just in time for the gift-giving season — it’s as traditional as mulled wine, twinkling lights, gingerbread and indoor trees. Modfellows’ second annual Art for the Naughty & Nice show is a salon-style cornucopia of works that are available for same-day cash-and-carry purchases. The show includes work by Maggie Sanger, Mark Hobley, Nathaniel Covington, Andy King, Danielle Krysa, Dooby Tomkins, J. Todd Greene, Price Harrison, Dion Johnson, Christopher Pate and Mason Peters. This exhibition runs through Jan. 16, or until the gallery walls are stripped bare like how the Grinch did with that Christmas tree.  

 Downtown 

The Art of Unity at Chauvet Arts isn’t exactly a gift-centric holiday show, but it does focus on the importance of supporting artists during a year when exhibition spaces and opening receptions have become a public health hazard. The exhibition includes work from across Chauvet’s broad roster, and utilizes all the display space in the sprawling gallery. The group show aims to remind viewers and collectors about some of the gallery’s legacy artists, while also introducing new faces — making sure all of the gallery’s artists have a chance to sell work and maintain our region’s creative class through to the other side of this pandemic.  

Wendy Walker Silverman’s solo show at Tinney Contemporary will close out the year at the downtown space, and it’s a great exhibition to end 2020 on. Silverman is a longtime painter with a BFA from Louisiana Tech, but her recent run of Nashville exhibitions only began in 2013. At that time, Silverman was making work that was pleasant and decorative, but in the very short time since, the painter has relentlessly honed her vision — and the exhibition at Tinney finds Silverman at the top of her game. Two similarly titled paintings, “Divining Rod and Circling Crows” and “Divining Rod and Embers,” are gorgeous arrangements of black, white and orange lines, fields and forms that could hang alongside the work of any of Silverman’s formidable peers from Nashville’s very deep bench of talented abstract painters.