“Untitled,” Bryan Jones
We’re already into the second month of the year, and Nashville’s winter gallery scene is heating up with exhibitions in alternative spaces, group shows with lots of local flavor, and even a new art venue in Wedgewood-Houston.
Wedgewood-Houston
Some big news in Wedgewood-Houston is the debut of Red 225 in The Packing Plant gallery space, which was recently vacated by Modfellows. Red 225 is the brainchild of Kathleen Boyle, a local art historian, professor and the senior manager of exhibitions at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Red 225’s inaugural exhibition is a display by 14 artists, many of whom will be featured in solo shows at the gallery in the coming year. Boyle’s been busy programming both national and local creators, and A Taste of Things to Come includes work by Nashville-based artists Chris Cheney, Bryan Jones, Kevan O’Connor and Lauren Markham,as well as Zoe Cohen, Malcolm Davis Jr., Regina Durante Jestrow, Meg Jordan, Adam Mele, Maria Carmichael, Scout, Anna Speer, Keith Telfeyan and Lee Tripi. The group show opens on Saturday night.
Tad Lauritzen Wright is a Memphis-based artist whose work has helped to define David Lusk Gallery’s contemporary Southern art aesthetic. Wright’s paintings and wall sculptures are made up of single lines that twist and swoop and tangle in ceaseless, colorful gestures across his canvases, and in spring-like expressions of bouncy enameled wire emanating from gallery walls. In an art age dominated by figurative and representational work, Wright offers fresh formalism unencumbered by narratives and messages, allowing viewers to immerse themselves in the ebullient moods of his loopy abstractions. Lusk will close the excellent William Christenberry and William Eggleston show this Saturday — gallery hours 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. — and Wright’s exhibition opens on Tuesday, Feb. 7.
“Tree Lined Thoughts Emulsify Like Tree Sap,” Sierra Luna
STATE Gallery at The Forge isn’t usually open on the weekend, but the gallery is bending the rules to host an opening reception for Sierra Luna’s new exhibition, Well Where Are We Anyway, next Saturday, Feb. 11, from 6 until 10 p.m. Luna is one of The Forge’s studio artists-in-residence, and this display of medium- and large-scale works reflects her interdisciplinary interests and finds her working with photography, charcoal, ink, etching and collage. I’m generally a formalist first, but Luna’s exhibition caught me by surprise with concepts and content that act as smart and sophisticated complements to her sure-handed mix-and-match aesthetics. Luna embellishes her photos with drawing and text to explore binary themes like life and death, flora and fauna, connection and separation, and the conscious and subconscious mind. The resulting eye-catching display asks big questions about the human experience.
Downtown
Tinney Contemporary opened its latest exhibition a few weeks ago, but the gallery will hold a reception for Carla Ciuffo’s Lunar on Saturday from 2 until 8 p.m. Ciuffo uses digital tools to manipulate her landscape photographs, desaturating images, adding noise and even shaping her pictures into circles and ovals. Some of the images look like captures of otherworldly spaces, and Ciuffo doubles down on the extraterrestrial vibes with titles like “Pink Planet,” “Titan” and “Mars.” Many of these works — especially the rounder ones — give the viewer the sense of peering through a portal or gazing out of a window at a passing planet or not-so-distant moon. Ciuffo’s concepts are cosmic, but her faded tones are brimming with vintage photography nostalgia, and her combining of the familiar and the far-out is what really makes these blast off.
Down the street at The Browsing Room in the Downtown Presbyterian Church, Sarah Hart Landolt’s A Coding Heart features colorful acrylic ink abstractions on synthetic paper. Landolt’s spontaneous, fluid art designs have previously taken inspiration from crowdsourcing data via social media, and these latest works are informed by her new career as a software engineer.
South Nashville
Artist and curator David Onri Anderson’s Electric Shed is the gallery space he curates in his backyard in South Nashville — it’s one of the city’s most unique artist-run projects. Anderson has recently hosted local creators like Yanira Vissepó, Jodi Hays and Scott Zieher, and this month he’ll welcome an exhibition by Memphis-based painter and sculptor Rahn Marion. The mythic figures, insects and astral entities in Back to the Dirt all play their parts in narratives about religion, race and sexuality in the New South. I love how the cartoonish crudeness of Marion’s figures reflects the raw materials of his sculptures, and this stuff is going to look great between the unpainted wooden walls of Anderson’s cozy art venue. See for yourself at the opening reception for Back to the Dirt on Saturday, Feb. 18, from 6 until 9 p.m.
East Nashville
John Paul Kesling, Danielle Winger and Olivia Tawzer bring Momentary to The Red Arrow Gallery this month. This exhibition finds each of these painters offering a colorful take on abstract landscapes — places that seem to have been discovered in dream imagery or idealized memories, or simply emerged organically from their creative imaginations. With all this in mind, the show feels organized around the Southernness in these scenes: Winger’s pink trees sag like weeping willows; Kesling’s Chagall-ian compositions are decorated with Appalachian pines; Tawzer’s outdoor scenes present Southern rituals — NASCAR parties and deer hunting — lit by fireflies. Momentary looks like a great example of how a group exhibition can present a survey of works by unique artists that still reads like a cohesive whole. The exhibit opens on Saturday night, with a reception from 6 until 9 p.m.
