"Searching for a Perfect Sunset," Vesna Pavlović
March tiptoed up on me this year, and I can’t believe the winter art season will technically be over in just a few weeks. Knowing Nashville weather, we might still see freezing temps and a few snowflakes before we can pack up our winter coats and head for the ol’ swimmin’ hole. No matter — this month’s gallery offerings are ending a great cold-weather season in strong form. March gallery events include a surprising number of formalist art exhibitions as well as a number of shows that are happening under the banner of the Tennessee Triennial, which is focused on Middle Tennessee this month.
Wedgewood-Houston
Photographer Vesna Pavlović’s recent exhibitions have been a departure from installations of reproduced images, and have seen her get back to the documentary style that first got her noticed as a young photographer. Perfect Memory includes three different bodies of photographs that Pavlović captured in Cuba, the U.S. and in her onetime home in the former Yugoslavia. “Sites of Memory,” “Jardines de Hershey” and “Searching for the Perfect Sunset” explore notions around memory-making within the context of the political and cultural histories informed by the Cold War era. Images of theatrically staged cinematic props snapped inside the defunct Avala film studios in Belgrade are emblematic of Pavlović’s wry-eyed cultural commentary, and pictures of an abandoned amusement park in Jibacoa, Cuba, are a haunting reminder of communism’s legacy of failed utopias.
DETAILS: Perfect Memory opens at Zeitgeist on Saturday, with an artist reception from 4 until 6 p.m.
Memphis-based painter and sculptor Tad Lauritzen Wright has honed his practice down to bold expressions composed from single lines. His paintings are packed with looping arcs and crazy curves, and his cartoonish sculptures pop from the gallery’s walls in wild, tangled expressions of enamel-coated aluminum wire. In Beauty Is a Byproduct, Wright’s abstractions are buoyant and energized displays, resulting from meditative experiments that push at the edges of what formalist art can be and what it can mean.
DETAILS: David Lusk Gallery will host an open house for Wright’s latest exhibit on Saturday from noon until 5 p.m.
Wright’s focus on single lines is matched by Louisa Glenn’s preoccupations with color. The artist builds abstract layers of color on her canvases, mixing and matching chromatic conversations on the surface of her works between hues and tones that jibe, and some that completely refuse to vibe. Glenn’s works feature repeating patterns that are inspired by quilt-making, but the colors are the real stars here — her bold experiments at the edges of color theory result in paintings that are at turns both silly and sublime.
DETAILS: Glenn’s The Cracks Are How the Light Gets In opens Saturday night at Julia Martin Gallery, with an artist reception from 6 until 9 p.m.
Renata Cassiano Alvarez is currently a visiting assistant professor at the University of Arkansas School of Art. She’s also the recipient of Coop Gallery’s 2022 open call to artists. Espejos takes its name from the Spanish word for mirrors, and Alvarez’s exhibition is packed with reflective surfaces that reference the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca, who is often represented with a mirror at his feet or in his chest. Alvarez focuses on Tezcatlipoca as a deity that represents transformation and change, deploying a series of glaze and obsidian mirrors alongside a collection of oversized clay and obsidian knives and artifacts. The installation also includes tiled structures that recall architecture and decorative details from Alvarez’s home in Veracruz, Mexico.
DETAILS: Espejos opens Saturday with an artist reception at Coop from 1 until 9 p.m.
Unrequited Leisure’s March offering is ...displacing — a multi-artist video installation that creates a critical conversation around global tourism, the historical impacts of colonialism, and the ecological and cultural consequences of people in motion around the world. Alejandro T. Acierto is an artist, musician and curator whose multimedia explorations of space document particular places with an eye toward history and technology. Lani Asunción deploys a similarly multifaceted approach, using wearable sculptures, voice activation and projection mapping to explore subjects from biopolitics to militarism. Anxious to Make is the collaborative practice of Liat Berdugo and Emily Martinez. Their work addresses economic themes with an aesthetic that matches the absurd extremes of late neoliberalism. All three videos screen on a single monitor at the gallery, allowing for plenty of comparing and contrasting between the works of these provocative creators.
DETAILS: The show opens Saturday night with a reception from 5 until 8 p.m.
“Four Options—Really Only Two,” Wesley Clark
Downtown
Wesley Clark’s A Human Synthesis is a display of the artist’s graphite-on-paper works. The show’s monochromatic palette emphasizes the erratic mark-making that Clark uses to create interacting deep-black fields, zig-zag patterns, grids and squiggles that fill the works to their edges. He also employs erasing and scratching to create layers upon layers in these palimpsestic pieces that fall somewhere between art and artifact, documenting the process of their own making. This is another show of strong formalist works in a March art gallery calendar that’s brimming with abstractions and the elemental thrills of art for art’s sake.
DETAILS: Tinney Contemporary hosts an opening reception for A Human Synthesis on Saturday from 2 until 8 p.m. They’ll also be hosting special programming this month in collaboration with the Tennessee Triennial.
The Artist Collective Program initiative of Daybreak Arts is an art therapy program for artists struggling to find affordable housing. These homeless and formerly homeless creators enjoy the healing benefits of creative work, and Daybreak also creates opportunities for them to exhibit and sell their art, empowering their efforts to achieve more economic stability in their lives and their practices. Artists A.M. Hassan and Paul Collins have curated a new display of the artists’ works — Daybreak: Showcasing the Artists of Daybreak Arts’ Artist Collective.
DETAILS: The show opens at The Browsing Room at The Downtown Presbyterian Church Saturday night with a reception from 6 until 8 p.m.
East Nashville
Last but not least, The Red Arrow Gallery opens Buket Savci’s Beyond the Dreampond for March. Savci’s large canvases are so crowded with half-naked people and inflatable pool toys that her sensual tangles of lips, skin, vinyl and sunglasses take on an almost abstract quality.
DETAILS: The gallery is hosting a reception on Saturday night from 6 until 9 p.m.
