Benjy Russell is a self-taught, multidisciplinary artist who blends photography, sculpture, set design and land art into images that document physical moments of constructed wonder. Russell eschews digital manipulation, preferring midcentury Hollywood lighting techniques, filters and mirrors to achieve in-camera effects. He handcrafts his interventions in the landscape over extended periods. He plants, builds and observes before capturing an image that can transform a mundane space into something much more magical. Dreamscapes is a 16-year retrospective of work made at and around the artist’s Middle Tennessee home. Nashville gets a lot of attention as a letterpress printing scene, and the Frist’s In Her Place show mostly highlighted local painters, but there’s an argument to be made that Nashville’s photography scene is its most formally challenging and experimental. I’d offer Dreamscapes as my Exhibit A.
Through Jan. 31 at The Untitled Nashville Hotel
221 Second Ave. N.
