Best Photography Exhibition

It feels like a lifetime ago that Tennessee artist Benjy Russell led me through his mid-career retrospective, You’re on new bridges made of home (you found the light in a dark poem) at the then-Germantown-based gallery Wilder. It was the last place I went before Metro Nashville’s shelter-in-place order closed down the city. By using Hollywood lighting techniques and magician’s tricks, Russell creates surrealistic effects in his photography. Sculptures appear to be floating in the air above lakes and valleys like monuments to beauty. Portraits of his friends are both tasteful and porny, rendering the subjects as beings elemental to the earth and transcending space and time. The exhibition imagined a radical queer utopia — seductive and healing, sensual and pulsing with life. Whenever we get back to interacting normally with the world again, I want it to be the one that Russell envisioned here. ERICA CICCARONE

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