I’m anxious to get on with the best gallery-browsing season of the year now that autumn has officially arrived. I want to look at paintings while wearing a turtleneck sweater. I want to walk to a gallery in the dark before 7 p.m. I want to spot the Great Pumpkin in the alley behind The Packing Plant. Can you get mulled wine in a box?
Wedgewood-Houston
Coop is hostingIn short, I would like to sayfor the month of October. The display of original movie-poster art and experimental short films is curated by Evan Roosevelt Brown. The mini-cinema installation includes movies and art from Tiffani Alexander, $eck, Taylor Bee, Devon Deshaun, LeXander Bryant, Shabazz Larkin and Christopher Latouche. The first iteration of the show was a highlight of the pop-up programming at The Arcade this summer. I’m looking forward to seeing the show in a bigger space where Brown can spotlight his posters and throw large movie projections on the gallery’s back wall. The show highlights what a great resource Coop’s big central gallery at The Packing Plant is, and it offers yet another example of how Brown continues to grow and improve as one of the city’s foremost independent curators. Don’t call it a comeback. Opening reception 1-9 p.m. Saturday at Coop, 507 Hagan St.
Khara Woods’ painting “Champagne Supernova” is perfectly titled for this pop-culture moment, when all things vintage Oasis have been made new again with the announcement of the band’s reunion tour. The work is hanging at Red 225 in The Packing Plant through November. It’s part of Woods’ exhibition of geometric abstract paintings Square Biz, which finds the Memphis-based artist offering multiple interpretations and numerous iterations of squares, triangles and rectangles to create a surprisingly varied selection of multimedia works. She produces op-art effects, restrained palettes and clean, hard-edged surfaces that speak to graphic design aesthetics. Woods is a professional graphic designer, but these works are admirably painterly due to her embracing of street-art materials like wood and spray paint. In another life, Woods’ work might have looked like the kind of hip-hop- and graffiti-inspired paintings we see from a generation of emerging artists who discovered Jean-Michel Basquiat and never looked back. Refreshingly, she goes in a completely different direction, creating formalist abstracts elevated by modernist constraint. Woods paints on wooden panels, and the whole display feels a little bit like a set of children’s wooden play blocks, brightly painted in contrasting colors and repetitive patterns. The work conveys a sense of serious fun — contemporary nonrepresentational painting, but unpretentious and accessible. Some of Woods’ most striking pieces — like “Champagne Supernova” — are painted on panels cut into shapes. It’s a natural choice to make in a show about shapes, and it brings a lot of variety to a display that might have otherwise looked too … square. Opening reception 5-8 p.m. Saturday at Red 225, 507 Hagan St.
"Garden Talk," Jeanie Gooden
Downtown
Like Khara Woods’ stuff, Brandon Reese’s large tower-form sculptures also remind me of kids’ toys. The tall, cylindrical works are pieced together from geometrical sections made of ceramic clay. The stacked sections might put viewers in mind of artsy Legos or a giant, pretty, expensive Jenga construction. Listening With Our Eyes at Tinney Contemporary pairs Reese’s work with Jeanie Gooden’s textured abstract multimedia paintings. It’s a formalist art show about surfaces and textures, but through the lenses of two different art forms that are separated by blurry boundaries.
Generally speaking, paintings are considered to be two-dimensional compared to the three- dimensional works created by sculptors. But when painters abandon figures in favor of increasingly abstract aesthetics, they embrace purely formal elements like color, texture and composition for their own sakes. Pictorial scenes are overturned for a strict exploration of the work’s surface as an end unto itself, and paintings are transformed from pictures of things into art objects.
Kind of like sculptures.
Gooden’s paintings speak to sculpture most overtly in their ramshackle textures and the mixed landscapes of her multimedia surfaces. The artist uses paint, pigments, paper, textiles, metal, nails and hand-stitching on canvas. Materials vary across the works in Listening With Our Eyes, and different combinations of stuff on their surfaces produce both smooth and deeply textured paintings. Gooden’s works are also a celebration of enthusiastic mark-marking. Some of her rough surface textures look like rubbings on sidewalk cement. They’re decorated with symbols rendered in heavy black outline, or painted lyrical loops or even swirls of calligraphic nonsense that remind me of Cy Twombly’s scribbling.
Reese’s sculptures are decidedly three-dimensional objects with substantial footprints or clusters of hanging works spanning feet of wall space. His painted and glazed surfaces are made to look worn and rustic — some works look like abandoned parts of antique farm machines, and combinations of earthy ceramics and raw wood keep the work rooted in the natural, even if the designs sometimes appear to be extraterrestrial. Reese uses color sparingly but effectively. He glazes his ceramics to look like wood and paints wooden pieces and components to look like stone. A gray glaze makes some of the ceramics look like metal, and group installations of Gooden’s smaller works read like tiny painting exhibitions within this larger two-artist display. Opening reception 2-8 p.m. Saturday at Tinney Contemporary, 237 Rep. John Lewis Way N.
