Critic's Pick — Dylan Camp: 'Back at Home'

Nashville artist Dylan Camp’s newest collection of paintings opened at Elephant Gallery on Nov. 6. Back at Home is teeming with examples of what the artist describes as “African Americana.” Camp’s stylized figures and strange scenes are rendered in hazy layers of acrylic paint that almost look airbrushed. Lots of her subjects are rural — farmers, barns, green spaces — but there are also UFOs, giant grandmas and people flying around like the floating figures in Marc Chagall’s paintings. Titles like “Friends and family (angels),” “Farmer #1” and “This light that flows (from me)” hint at the show’s themes of kinship, labor and spirit, and Camp’s canvases act as a meeting place where an idealized past and an imagined future blur and merge. There’s a dreamy quality about these works that pushes them in the direction of contemporary surrealism, despite their mostly down-to-earth subject matter. They’re irreverent but sincere. Uncanny but unpretentious.

Through Dec. 19 at Elephant Gallery

1411 Buchanan St.