“How to Hold Something In Your Hands,” Kevan Joseph O’Connor
Wedgewood-Houston
One of my favorite First Saturday stops is the Show & Sell Maker’s Bazaar at The Packing Plant. The DIY art-and-lit sale is organized by local poet and Nashville Free Poetry Library founder Matthew Johnstone. The event feels like a farmers market for creative freaks and geeks — local publishers, scribes, painters and fashionistas sell their wares at folding tables and under tents, often accompanied by a soundtrack provided by live music and poetry performances. Sometimes there are even WXNA DJs spinning records on the lawn — the radio station and the poetry library are both located inside The Packing Plant. The bazaar is a great example of the kind of creative happenings that were able to thrive during the pandemic when small open-air, sunlit gatherings mostly posed no health threats. In fact, it’s become so popular with local creatives that Johnstone has recently shaken up a semi-permanent lineup to create more opportunities for new artists and writers to get into the rotation. One of my favorite discoveries at the bazaar is Melissa Smith. The painter moved to Nashville from Chicago in 2019, and her formalist style and candy-aisle color palettes make her one of my faves in the May lineup. Smith is also a great example of the renewed trend of accomplished fine artists foregoing gallery representation to present and sell work directly to collectors, and events like Show & Sell radiate the open, inviting hospitality that some traditional galleries and arts institutions are still struggling to conjure. New treasures at the bazaar this month include multimedia art by Sophia Gulley, henna tattoo art by Ania K. Diallo and ethically sourced taxidermy art and jewelry by Kale Crunch Art.
DETAILS: Enjoy the music, art, poetry and more outside The Packing Plant on Saturday — it’s at 507 Hagan St. from 3 p.m. until sundown.
Nashville painter Kevan Joseph O’Connor describes his works as “visual poems,” but that feels like an unnecessarily complicated way to describe his multimedia abstract paintings. That said, there are direct connections between abstract painting and poetry. The best poetry transcends the mundane meanings of words, freeing itself from the strictures of the very language it’s made from. Similarly, the best abstract painting frees itself from words by ditching narrative-inspiring figuration. The best abstract paintings and poems don’t convey messages or ideas — they throb with emotion, glow with nostalgia, rumble with wrath. O’Connor will likely be showing smaller works in the abbreviated confines of Red 225, where his solo exhibition, Clumsy, opens Saturday night. I love O’Connor’s restless textures and looping lines, and his use of pencils, pastels, brooms, wooden tools and finger-painting make this another example of the kind of multimedia exhibitions that are dominating Nashville’s art calendar this month.
DETAILS: Visit O’Connor’s opening reception at Red 225 inside the Packing Plant this Saturday from 6 until 9 p.m.
“Infinite (Ojai),” Saskia Fleishman
East Nashville
There are any number of techniques that might go into making multimedia art, but sometimes what makes a work most remarkable is the actual stuff that it’s made of. Philadelphia-based artist Saskia Fleishman grew up in Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay, where her father was a landscape architect, her grandmother was a landscape photographer, and her grandfather was a pioneering wetlands scientist. Fleishman’s attraction to natural subjects is a family tradition, and her unique works combine unusual, unexpected materials and methods to render designs that combine landscape elements like clouds and trees and water with obscure symbols. The works evoke Fleishman’s metaphysical connections to a place that holds many personal memories and family ties, and her application of sand to printed and painted chiffon make her family’s story feel just within reach. But please don’t touch the art. Liminal Horizons is Fleishman’s first show at the newly rebranded Red Arrow — formerly The Red Arrow Gallery.
DETAILS: The East Nashville spot has a reputation for lively exhibition openings — don’t miss it this Saturday from 6 until 9 p.m. at 919 Gallatin Ave.
Downtown
Tiffany Calvert’s Adversarial Nature offers another intriguing take on multimedia art downtown at Tinney Contemporary. The 17th-century origins of Dutch floral painting coincided with the “tulip mania” that saw the Dutch flower market skyrocket before crashing. The hellish economic bloodletting that followed the tulip run was as miserable as the paintings of the flowers were gorgeous, and the weird juxtaposition of a beautiful art period and a devastating economic downturn sort of reminds me of the way the digital art space has evolved. Calvert actually uses an AI tool called StyleGAN (style generative adversarial network) that she trains on a dataset of classic Dutch floral canvases. The AI generates its own take on Dutch Golden Age plant paintings — complete with all the glitches and weird effects we’ve come to expect from the unsettling AI image posts flooding our socials. Calvert reproduces the remixed masterworks as water-based latex prints, which she sticks vinyl to and paints over, applying gooey oils with a loose, imperfect hand. Adversarial Nature boasts a knockout title and collects numerous contradictions within one ambitious series — artificial versus human intelligence; digital art versus traditional art; AI as a plagiarist; art as plagiarism; natural versus artificial interpretations and expressions of beauty. It’s a lot, but it’s a super timely show for springtime 2023.
DETAILS: See Adversarial Nature at its opening reception this Saturday at Tinney Contemporary, 237 Rep. John Lewis Way N., from 2 until 8 p.m.
