“As in Heaven, So on Earth,” Nicole Kutz
Nashville’s spring art season started strong — Vivienne Flesher’s paintings at Zeitgeist, Benji Anderson’s mixed-media exhibition at Elephant, and Mary Addison Hackett’s videos at Unrequited Leisure have been early-season highlights. For May, Nashville’s gallery scene is showing no signs of fatigue, with strong shows opening in spaces across the city this Saturday night.
Wedgwood-Houston
Jonathan Swinney is a multimedia outsider artist based in Texas. His wide-ranging creative practice includes video, photography, animation and music. Swinney’s Inspired by Dreams exhibition at Open Gallery is a surreal display of colorful maximalism with a flair for the dramatic and a splash of irreverence. This show is a very rock ’n’ roll happening, and images of angels holding burning roses alongside roaring leopards speak to Swinney’s more high-profile work in album art and music video. This exhibition goes to 11.
When we talk about “artifacts” in digital media, we’re talking about distortion resulting from compression. Raheleh Filsoofi’s Artifacting installation at Unrequited Leisureoffers a more visceral take on compression and distortion that finds the artist imprinting elaborate designs into the rims of unfired clay plates by biting them. This display includes many of Filsoofi’s teeth-marked plates along with a video of her masticating performance/process. Filsoofi’s toothsome tactics recall Hannah Wilke’s bubble gum art and even Indigenous birchbark biting traditions — I’m always here for interdisciplinary installations like this.
New Work: Vivienne Flesher, Ward Schumaker and Matthew Schumaker opened at Zeitgeist last month, and I was fortunate enough to be invited to a chill soirée at the gallery where Matthew Schumaker walked a gathering of music and dance performers through his music-generated video art. Maybe it’s better to call his work digital painting, but there’s an animation element at play here, too. It’s pretty fascinating stuff, and its painterly qualities make a fun match with the rest of the show, which features Ward Schumaker’s text paintings and Flesher’s gorgeous abstract landscapes. Flesher’s dreamy paintings stand out. I love her titles, like “The Bitter Tears of Love.” As I mentioned, this is some of the best work I’ve seen this spring, and I recommend numerous visits and viewings while the show continues through May 28. Zeitgeist’s First Saturday hours are noon until 6 p.m.
Memphis-based artist Greely Myatt brings his brand of monumental whimsy to David Lusk Gallery’s Nashville outpost for the month of May. Pointing Fingers and Throwing Bricks finds the found-object sculptor in strong form following a busy 2021 schedule that included two museum exhibitions. The works in this show contain wide-ranging references from Mickey Mouse to Philip Guston, and they’re constructed from quotidian materials like broken gardening tools and discarded metal shelving. Anxious crawlers may want to make Lusk their first stop, as the gallery is still opting out of the crawl in favor of an earlier open house happening from noon until 3 p.m.
Sculptor Laura Bigger brings her Ascend exhibition to Coop on Saturday night. This show is a fascinating exploration of materials and value that’s focused on the kinds of building supplies that make up the spaces where we live and work. Bigger references the straw, wood and brick from the fable of the Three Little Pigs here, but also points to how we make synthetic materials appear natural, and make cheap stuff look more valuable. Bigger creates this conversation by printing on cardboard blocks to make them appear to be bricks or wooden. It’s a playful display that touches on capitalism, advertising, housing and status at once.
Carrie Neville’s senior thesis show Victory Begins at Home: Color Theory in Propaganda runs through May 8 at Watkins Art Gallery. The show’s fascinating premise speaks to the ways that color can communicate emotionally, symbolically and practically. A white wedding gown, a red fire hydrant, and rolls of yellow crime-scene tape all speak to the kinds of nonverbal communication we accomplish through the use of color, and it can be a powerful tool whether you’re trying to get out the vote or drum up a war.
South Nashville
As Above, So Below at Modfellows’ Grassmere location wins the best exhibition title award this month. Nicole Kutz and LYNX invoke Hermeticism’s Emerald Tablet in this display, which celebrates the harmonic correspondences between the natural and the spiritual worlds. Kutz’s dyed-paper abstractions are indigo dreamscapes infused with meditative stillness. LYNX’s abstract works are rendered in an equally meditative practice, which finds the artist making multiple tiny marks with a ballpoint pen to create sophisticated works exploring geometry and tone. Form over content shall be the whole of the law.
East Nashville
In her 1978 book The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Symbol, Myth, and Ritual), Barbara Babcock defines a mundus inversus as “any act of expressive behavior which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values, and norms — be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious or social and political.” Mundus Inversus is a group exhibition at Red Arrow Gallery organized by Nashville-based multimedia artist Emily Weiner with support from a Tri-Star Arts 2021 Current Art Fund grant. The show features sculpture, painting and installation displays that all aim to subvert common assumptions about material value and symbolic form. Artists include Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, Sara Mejia Kriendler and Linda Lopez. Donté Hayes is a ceramics wizard who can make clay seem pettably shaggy, and Weiner’s contribution to the show is one of her signature oil-painting-in-ceramic-frame works.
