"Pollinators," Catherine Irwin
Purple Reign isn’t about David Berman.
The beloved frontman of indie-rock bands Silver Jews and Purple Mountains died by suicide five years ago, and his friends — gallery owners Julia Martin of Nashville’s Julia Martin Gallery and Brett Ralph of Louisville, Ky.’s indie record store/bookstore/art gallery Surface Noise — conceptualized the show at Berman’s wake at Congregation Micah. But although both Martin and Ralph are adamant that the theme is little more than a tip of the hat to Berman and his final album, also named Purple Mountains, his influence reigns supreme.
“Our whole circle of friends was all connected by the David Berman thread,” Martin tells the Scene by phone a few days before the show is installed in her Wedgewood-Houston gallery. “I thought it’d be really beautiful to do a monochromatic show choosing the color purple in honor of David, but leaving it at that.”
The purple theme was Ralph’s idea. He’s been curating shows around specific colors for years, inspired by the black-and-white show Robert Fraser curated during London’s “Swinging ’60s” era. He was preparing a pink show when Berman died.
“When we were dedicating David’s tombstone, I was telling Julia about the [color-themed] show we had coming up,” says Ralph. “And she’s like, ‘I would love to do a monochromatic show together. And we’ve got to do purple, because we’re both friends of David’s, and we were thinking about him at that moment.’ And I was like, ‘Fine — purple.’
“Purple is my least favorite color. I like purple, I just like every other color better.”
The two installed Purple Reign on the fifth anniversary of Berman’s death: Aug. 7. The artists with work in the show are gallery favorites — many of them also musicians, many of them also friends of Berman.
Ralph, who had just gotten back from a three-day memorial for prolific indie-rock producer Steve Albini when we spoke, is clearly enthusiastic about art and music, and has a deep appreciation for his friends’ creativity.
“As of Yet 183,” Letitia Quesenberry
“Catherine Irwin from Freakwater is a legendary Louisville musician,” he explains, “but she also went to the Louisville School of Art, where punk rock in Louisville was kind of born, and has been a painter in the underground here for years.”
Irwin’s painting “Pollinators” is a folk-art-influenced mixed-media work on a wooden panel, packed with euphemisms of romance and sex — a naked man is depicted as small in the palm of a woman’s hand, and they’re separated by a wilting flower.
Letitia Quesenberry’s “As of Yet 183” could remind you of either Hilma af Klint or a New Age album cover, depending on your perspective. It’s part of a series of 17-by-14-inch works that the artist makes in addition to her larger pieces, which often incorporate LEDs — imagine if James Turrell and Georgia O’Keeffe switched places, and you’d be somewhere close.
“You know, I think there’s a tendency to think of nonrepresentational work as cold or cerebral, and certainly less sexy,” Ralph says. “But I think there’s a lot of sex and playfulness in her work that kind of belies that notion.”
"Purple," Elsa Hansen Oldham
Elsa Hansen Oldham’s embroidered works lend themselves to the free association of both memory and grief. The purple-themed work is like a cross-stitch sampler of the artist’s purple-centric interests, starting with Berman himself, bearded and bespectacled, labeled “Purple Mountains.” Around him swirl other purple-related cultural totems — Prince, the Purple One himself, in repose on a bed of flowers, as on the cover of his 1988 album Lovesexy; an oversized Ursula from Disney’s The Little Mermaid (the 1989 version); an equally oversized Violet Beauregarde from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (the 1971 version); The Color Purple author Alice Walker; and on and on. It’s at once playfully obsessive and reverent — kind of like being a fan.
The Louisville artists are in good company with some Nashville favorites. Wendy Walker Silverman, who is represented by Tinney Contemporary, has a standout piece that fuses at least two shades of purple with browns, oranges, and a distinctly midcentury mint green. It has the composition of a color field painting, but its shapes all seem to be made from negative space — there’s celebration, but there’s also absence.
“I personally think it’s such a cool thing, because it’s just a simplification of curation,” says Martin of the show’s purple parameters. “There’s no pretentiousness about it.”
“Part of one’s job as a curator and tastemaker — you know, selling books and records and turning people on to culture — is to share my vision and taste with other people,” Ralph explains. “But I also don’t want to damn my clientele to the vagaries and the pitfalls of my own prejudices.
“If something seems viable and audacious, and I think other people would be excited about it — fine.”
The exhibition opening operated under a similar guise, with a mix of Louisville and Nashville musicians playing on the gallery’s front porch. In an act as viable, audacious and exciting as it gets, Berman’s band, Silver Jews, played a set without its frontman. In his place, Cassie Berman led the band, and her duet with Will Oldham on the Silver Jews’ beloved “Punks in the Beerlight” was the last song they played.
