Crawl Space: October 2018

Downtown

Autumn is made for brisk walks, cozy crowds, warming wine and, well, nearly everything there is to love about getting out and going to galleries. Luckily for Nashville’s art scenesters, October’s exhibitions are well worth crawling after. 

Start off your downtown crawl on the right foot at the Browsing Room in the Downtown Presbyterian Church. Tom Veirs joined the church’s venerable artists-in-residency program just last year, and this is his first solo show in the space. Veirs’ abstract canvases are candy-coated choreographies that marry the tension of geometric abstraction to ooey-gooey surfaces that embrace every bold line, every hard angle, in cake frosting texturalities. Worth a look. 

Dane Carder’s Better Angels display at The Red Arrow Gallery back in spring 2017 felt like the culmination of a decade-long painting practice rooted in the visual excavation of Civil War photographs, and resulted in ghostly abstracted images that sometimes distilled scenes of carnage into studies approaching pure sensation. And then something weird happened: Carder started posting colorful, minimal abstract paintings on his social media accounts. “What the hell are these?” I thought. We’ll get answers on Saturday night when The Arts Company hosts an exhibit of Carder’s latest works, which are multimedia affairs that replace the artist’s soldiers, cannons and flags with fields of color, bold stripes and swatches of fabric. The gallery will also be opening exhibitions by Denise Stewart-Sanabria and Brad Sells. 

Tinney Contemporary director Sarah Wilson has been hard at work organizing the third installment of the New Real series, which makes its debut this weekend. Realism will probably always be a part of painting, but then again, it has been with us only since the mid-19th century, when artists like Gustave Courbet rejected the stylized ideals of romantic art in favor of reflecting the actual — sometimes ugly and vulgar — world around them. It was a radical shift that signaled the beginning of modernism. The realism in the New Real series is often highly stylized, but it’s strictly representational in capturing the often-surreal era we’re all living in now. The show includes both painting and photography, and features work by Brian Tull, Eric Zener, Erin Cone, Joel Daniel Phillips, Alex Hall and Kay Ruane. 

Wedgewood-Houston

If you like to start your First Saturday early, get to SNAP by 4 p.m. for an artist’s talk, poetry reading and the chapbook release of Brenda Butka’s Drawing the Resistance. Butka’s book of drawings captures the police, protests and poverty the artist encountered while participating in the Poor People’s Campaign earlier this year. Converge — the collective whose home base is located in the second floor of the SNAP building — curated this event and designed the chapbook, and Manuel Zeitlin will host the artist talk. 

Josh Elrod, who co-owns Germantown design shop Wilder with his wife Ivy, will really tie the room together — or maybe even break your heart — with his display at Julia Martin Gallery on Saturday night. And don’t miss a porch set by Cassie Berman, whom Nashvillians will remember as the bassist and occasional vocalist from the last rockin’ iteration of indie greats Silver Jews. Blessed be their name. 

Vesna Pavlović’s MixTape will continue at Zeitgeist Gallery in October. I had high expectations for this show when it opened last month, and I wasn’t disappointed. Pavlovic’s photographic practice has often explored a super meta deconstruction of light-based imagery. There’s some of that here, but MixTape’s photos of the countercultural currents in 1990s Serbia during the collapse of Yugoslavia offer a stripped-down documentation that’s pure punk rock. 

Following Brandon Donahue’s knockout display in September, David Lusk Gallery will open an exhibition of painting and sculpture by Kit Reuther on Saturday night. Unruly is a minimalist exhibit of shapes and forms accented by occasional bursts of color. 

If you missed Atlanta-based artist Eric Mack’s show at Channel to Channel last month, don’t make the same mistake twice. The multimedia paintings in Alpha Numerics offer a compelling study in abstraction in which the grids of maps and satellite photos, and the lines of blueprints, become geometric elements in the artist’s large, palimpsestic panels. This show reflects on the language of abstract painting while also commenting on the impact of development in the New South. Also, it’s gorgeous. 

Coop Gallery will be showing Regan Wheat’s Contingency through Oct. 27. Wheat’s painted portraits of children living in conflict zones around the world are intimate and global all at once. The works are based on images pulled directly from the daily news, but here they’re offered without commentary or context, and the results are a sad and sometimes surreal display that evokes helplessness and even hopelessness. 

Nashville-based artist Eddie Love’s Classic Clean opens at Fort Houston for October. Classic Clean includes both sculpture and painting incorporating pop-culture images in colorful cacophonies of overlapping patterns and designs. I haven’t had a chance to see the work that the prolific Mr. Love will be showing at Fort Houston this month. While Love — like many emerging artists — can wear his influences on his sleeve, he also brings irreverent, anarchic energy to his surfaces, and the world needs all the irreverent anarchy it can get right now. 

A highlight at recent Arts & Music at Wedgewood-Houston happenings has been in the alley behind The Packing Plant, where various artists and designers have transformed the space into an outdoor celebration of wheatpaste poster art. October’s artist will be Zach Hobbs, whose piece exploring the masks we wear in public connects to the release of his limited-run visual arts/politics/literary zine, Salt Weekly. 

Have a tasty crawl, y’all.