Crawl Space: January 2022

After chaotic holiday happenings that saw seasonal revelry squelched by canceled flights, disrupted events and a surge of hospitalizations due to the latest spike of COVID cases, Nashville’s visual arts community may be greeting the inaugural Art Crawl events of 2022 less rested and recharged than they had planned. A persisting pandemic is a bummer of a way to start a new year — again — but as the U.S. health emergency nears its two-year anniversary in March, I’m hopeful looking forward, because of the resilience, resourcefulness and responsibility I see looking back. Nashville’s gallery scene has proven to be incredibly adaptable, and while we might see some scaled-back receptions and continued indoor masking in art spaces, Nashville’s winter arts calendar is banging. And this Saturday’s January Art Crawl is a strong start for the season.  

South Nashville 

Nashville native Mika Agari proved to be one of our most inventive emerging local artists before graduating from Watkins College of Art in 2016, creating a pair of challenging local shows and moving to New York. Agari staged a mobile sculpture installation in her Nissan Sentra (Car Show, 2017) using materials like felt, rice, stickers from the greeters at Kroger and dead wasps. She also embedded digital tablets in black sand at artist David Onri Anderson’s former curatorial space, the Bijan Ferdowsi Gallery, and encouraged viewers to lounge on a mattress while they watched her performances on video (Friction Fruit, 2017). In January, Agari’s back in Nashville for a show at Anderson’s new DIY gallery, Electric Shed. Agari is in her element when she’s responding to specific spaces, combining natural and manufactured materials and found objects in arrangements of sometimes unexpected combinations. Agari’s installations can feel charged with ritual intention, infused with erotic messaging or just splattered with charming, dumb humor. Consequently, we can’t predict exactly what the artist has in mind for her I Bend a Branch show, but I know it will be worth the short trip to South Nashville. Follow @electricshedtn on Instagram for updates and information.  

Wedgewood-Houston 

Coop will literally be making moves this month as it relocates to a bigger space at The Packing Plant. The inaugural show in these new digs — which had housed Channel to Channel before the gallery moved to Chattanooga — will be a display by Louisville, Ky.-based artist Shohei Katayama. I dig art about art, but it’s always refreshing when artists push past the art historical ouroboros to use aesthetics to examine and combine elements and strategies in other far-flung fields. Katayama’s practice is primarily concerned with how people perceive themselves and the world through the lenses of nature, technology and science. As a result, Katayama’s work touches on everything from physics and sustainability to sociology and cultural history. Coop specializes in bringing visiting artists to Nashville, and as an artist who has created ambitious exhibitions in venues all over the globe, Katayama makes a great choice to begin this next chapter for this local arts institution.  

The news of Coop’s move comes with a wave of shifting galleries at The Packing Plant: Coop will be taking over the former large Channel to Channel space, which includes the two side galleries that Channel to Channel was subletting. Open Gallery will continue to sublet one space, and Risology Club will be moving into the other side gallery. Risology Club is a full-service risograph print shop and bindery, and they’re already regular guests at the Nashville Poetry Library’s Show and Sell events during most First Saturdays. It’s great to see the club making a permanent home at The Packing Plant, and knitting the visual art and lit communities that gather at The Packing Plant tighter than ever. 

The former Coop space will become a new satellite showcase for South Nashville’s Modfellows Art Gallery beginning in February. This Saturday, the gallery will host Art Can’t Love You, a pop-up of new work from Colombia-based creators organized by ZieherSmith. Participating artists include: Esteban Ocampo Giraldo, Juan Uribe, Nicolas Bonilla Maldonado and Julian Burgos.  

Julia Martin Gallery will welcome artist Andy Ness on Saturday night. Ness’ abstract paintings feature colorful combinations of circles and lines — the overall effect reads like impractically expressive design drawing, and maybe that’s the point. There is something intrinsically irreverent about these compositions of repeating shapes and marks rendered with a loose but never lazy hand. Ness’ The Satellite exhibition is a great fit for the Wedgewood-Houston gallery scene, and I’m predicting this won’t be the last we see of Ness’ playful, unmistakable work.

East Nashville  

Interior/Exterior is a group exhibition at The Red Arrow Gallery that features work by half a dozen artists who all identify as female, but create varying expressions about gender identity and feminism. These themes can be compelling, but the reason I read Ashanté Kindle’s artist statement about beauty standards and the “culture of hair” is because her gorgeous monochrome-blue abstract paintings are sumptuous feasts of texture and hue. The ubiquity of political, racial and sexual identity art makes for trendy programming, but many artists lose the trees for the forest, crafting broad works with big messages, but lacking intense, individual signatures. Work about identity that still manages to be unique to an individual always stands out. See Lauren Gregory’s “Ol’ Splashy” animated video, or Tess Davies’ exquisitely flat-surfaced Hermetic interiors as examples. This show at Red Arrow also includes work by Dana Oldfather, Reneesha McCoy, and Annie Brito Hodgin.