The whirlwind gallery tour

There were a ton of shows last night and Amber had an opening of her own, so we didn’t make the complete rounds. I also didn’t get to spend nearly enough time with any of the work. There was a time that I was convinced that it’d be nice if Memphis had a “Gallery Night” like St. Louis, where all the galleries in town are open on the same night. You wouldn’t have to constantly check three or four different places every week to see who’s showing what, where, and when. I’ve now become convinced, for a lot of reasons, that this wouldn’t be particularly good for Memphis.

The biggest reason is that there are a number of really good galleries spread all over town. Given the trends I’ve seen lately, it seems like people would just use this as an excuse to just go see their friend’s shows and not challenge them to get “outside the parkways” to see art. I actually heard someone today refer to David Lusk’s in space Laurelwood as “way out in East Memphis.” Considering I live another 8 miles further out and am still inside the Memphis city limits, I have to wonder what they think of us out here in East Bugtussle (if they even know this part of Memphis exists). For better or worse, we’re all in this together ya know…

The first of the three shows we saw was the “Alter Egos” show in the Jones Hall Gallery at the University of Memphis. It was a fun idea for a show, though I would have liked to see it taken a little further. Best I could tell, not all of the artists were working with issues of identity, but there were a few that really sold the curatorial concept. Probably my favorite was a piece called Empty Amazon by Marble Elmhurst (a.k.a. Caroline Gower). It was one of two very strong pieces by Gower that directly assaulted representational forms and the difference between identification and identity.

The largest and arguably most striking piece was an installation by Toot Prescott (a.k.a Rebecca Higdon) entitled Let Them Pass. It consisted of a series of cylindrical forms stooping over a constructed wasteland of sand and shards. The tubes take on forms reminiscent of Millet’s Gleaners, presiding over the scraps of their own making.

There were also artists there exploring the nature of traditional forms and the dialectic between the sculptural object and the functional ceramic vessel. Particularly noteworthy were Nobody puts Baby in a Corner by Kitty San Felipe (a.k.a. Renee Kane) and the unfortunately named Untitled by Lucky Glenbrook (a.k.a. Lisa Maners). The latter was a striking copper green torso and arm bent to resemble a roughly hewn classical teapot, as if frozen half way through some mystical transformation between the two.

The next stop on our whirlwind gallery tour was the David Lusk Gallery. The opening was for two artists, each having half of the gallery. Pinkney Herbert’s work was in the front of the gallery. His new work, a collection of grand canvases on display through the 29th, have a more subdued pallet than what I’m used to seeing from him, but what they lacked in color they made up for in scale and a buoyant energy. Anyone who’s ever been a fan of his work certainly won’t be disappointed.

Providing the contemplative Yin to Herbert’s formidable artistic Yang was Mary Bennett. Her collection of objet trouvé and altered object sculpture was nothing short of astounding. Coming around the gallery wall you are first confronted with a colossal, spiraling tower of art and art historical books which seem to have been frozen in mid fall. It sets the tone for a show which seems to find the beauty and sublimity in all sorts of every day encounters. The work is conversely capable of working with it’s viewer in the intimate and the abstract. On the one hand it seems to be entwined with myriad personal histories and at the same time speaking to an open and complex view of the archeology of information in an age where the written word is becoming ever more ephemeral.

Bennett’s Whose Recipe is It spoke to me particularly strongly as I’ve been dealing recently with how to preserve memories of my loved ones. The piece itself is a collection of photographs and hand written recipes transferred to acetate transparencies and mounted on a well worn cookie sheet. Each is laid one on the other in a fashion such that you are looking though the person at the hand written record of their domesticity. Across the gallery hang Down Under 1 and Der Sang ist Verschollen (literally “That Song is Forgotten”) each using different takes on the idea of a pattern (one sewing, one musical) as symbolic analogs of their traditional function, mapping an area between language and meaning.

Next on the tour was a group show at L. Ross. This was my first time in this gallery and I like the space. It strikes me (along with the before mentioned David Lusk Gallery) as one of the more successful attempts to convert a retail space into a contemporary gallery here in Memphis. This Gallery Artist show struck me as a bit schizophrenic however; there were lots of conflicting energies competing for mindshare. This isn’t particularly anyone’s fault, it’s just an unfortunate thing that often happens to group shows.

There were a few pieces that grabbed me, most notably David Comstock’s Black and White I, a free standing abstract painting with a twig growing out of it, resembling some sort of vestigial artistic antler. There was also a beautiful, if untitled, C-print by Ian Lemmonds, whose solo show last month I’m still kicking myself for missing.

Our gallery tour rounded out at Amber’s opening at Gallery 1688. While I liked a lot of the work there that wasn’t my wife’s, I’m going to resist the temptation to write about any of it.

Nepotism is bad for the soul.