June’s First Saturday events find Nashville’s visual art scene at the end of its spring season, and overwhelmed by the incessant choruses of Cicada Orgy ’24. Those red-eyed horndogs are going to make for a wild crawl this weekend, where the highlights include Southern-centric abstract painting, an ambitious and vast survey of women’s art, and a down-home display of oddball found-object assemblages that’ll have you slappin’ your grandma till the cows come home.
Wedgewood-Houston
Austin Reavis’ Red State at Neue Welt isn’t inspired by one of Kevin Smith’s best films, and it’s not a collection of activist art brimming with political commentary during this presidential election year. The exhibition’s title refers to Reavis’ upbringing in rural Tennessee, in a house his hippie parents built in the woods in Sewanee. With this in mind, Red State is a little like a collection of landscape works made from materials and objects directly gathered from grocery store dumpsters, alleyway trash cans, yard sales, flea markets and even the Chattanooga-area Craigslist — its “free” category features a variety of orthopedic devices, lots of bike parts and endless wooden pallets.
I’ve been following Reavis’ work for years. It’s always been a little weird, a little whimsical. But when he became more active on his Instagram account (@austinhammetreavis) about a year ago, it was clear that Reavis thought he might have something worth sharing. He was right. The work is still weird, still whimsical, but also much more formally coherent and technically innovative. Reavis has cut the colorful brims off trucker hats and arranged them on gallery walls to look like outcroppings of bracket fungi. He’s applied hide glue to camouflage hunting coveralls and formed the woodsy onesies into sculptures that resemble animal forms. He’s turned hot-rodded Realtree Camo pants into soft, glowing lamps that cast light like the sun setting in the Tennessee woods. He’s created surprisingly striking sculptures by stacking stainless-steel ice tea urns on top of one another, erecting gleaming obelisks to summertime refreshment. Reavis’ formal ingenuity puts his art firmly in the contemporary art conversation, and his materials and old-fashioned country-boy resourcefulness make it as familiar and accessible as a Cottonwood shed or the icy touch of a TVA dam tailwater. I’m not sure exactly what Reavis has planned for Red State, but I predict at least one ant farm, and probably at least a few cicadas crashing the opening.Opening reception from 5-9 p.m. at Neue Welt, 507 Hagan St.
Curator Kathleen Boyle’s Red 225 space at The Packing Plant has become a hot spot for small solo exhibitions from artists like Chris Cheney, Lauren Markham, Bryan Jones and Kevan Joseph O’Connor. Boyle’s been following the artists on her roster for years, and part of the motivation behind her gallery was simply having a space where she could put her unique spotlight on the work and the artists that she’s been inspired by. The solo show formula is a great fit for Red 225, as the gallery’s dimensions can most favorably be described as “cozy.” By my estimation it’s the smallest space in The Packing Plant, and it even has a big front window that eats up a large chunk of valuable art-hanging space. It’s made a perfect home for single artists to display small bodies of work, and that formula could easily be branded as Red 225’s curatorial signature. But Boyle doesn’t seem interested in letting a little thing like actual wall space cramp her style. Intimacism is a show she’s been conceptualizing and reimagining for 20 years. This month, the exhibition of women artists will finally become a reality. Intimacism offers feminine and feminist takes on familial, sexual, emotional and spiritual intimacy.
When I got the press release, none of this took me by surprise — until I saw that the show’s lineup includes single works from 80 international artists. The artists are all given a 2-square-foot limit. Although the gallery does have a high-ish ceiling, I’m at a loss to understand how this show will actually work. It’s definitely going to be one of the most unique and immersive displays opening in Nashville this weekend. Nashville artists in the Intimacism lineup include Alison Mosshart, Alison Underwood, Amy Hoskins, Anna Wise, Ashleigh York, Bex Olesek, Bridget Curtis, Cara Lynch, Charlotte Straus, Christiana Odum, Dalia Garcia, Eliana Gorden, Emoke Pulay, Eve Greenberg, Jess Peoples, Lauren Markham, Leslie Marnett, Lindsey Goller, Liz Chagnon, Margaret Pesek, Marla Faith, Meg Jordan, Melissa Newman, Nija Woods, Martha Morales Purucker, Paz Suay, Rachel Karr, Shahnaz Lighari, Wendy French Barrett and Tara Dugger.Opening reception 5-8 p.m. at Red 225, 507 Hagan St.
Downtown
I keep writing about how the future of American painting will look like a return to the abstracted landscapes of early modernism in the U.S., and Elspeth Schulze’s Hold Waterat Tinney Contemporary is a multimedia example of the trend. Schulze was raised in Southern Louisiana in the liminal marshlands that mark the ever-changing boundaries between soil and sea. Schulze uses paint along with cut paper, wood, ceramics, dyed linen and CNC-cut frames with unique forms. The techniques and materials blur the lines between handmade and digital, and the overall effect of their combinations is a blend of natural forms and floral motifs that seem simultaneously artificial and magically emergent. Schulze extends her aesthetic into furniture, textiles and wall sculptures to create a complete environment you’ll want to linger in and savor.Opening reception 2-8 p.m. at Tinney Contemporary, 237 Rep. John Lewis Way N.
