Crawl Space: August 2023

Nov 25, 2023

“10.19.2022-•-2.09.08pm,” Morgan Higby-Flowers

Morgan Higby-Flowers’ painterly video art is a great example of digital art done right. The glut of blasé design and illustration in the digital art space is numbing, and all the machined surfaces of AI-rendered art seem to be blending into a boring blur. But Higby-Flowers utilizes analog and digital materials, machines and methods to create moving images and stills that speak the language of formalist painting. This strategy places the artist firmly in one of the most vibrant digital art scenes, alongside digital/video artists like Sarah Zucker and Sara Ludy. Like them, Higby-Flowers makes work that speaks to larger contemporary art and tech conversations way beyond crypto and Twitter/X. He even does video installations in South Nashville backyard utility buildings. Timestamp(s) opened at artist-curator David Onri Anderson’s Electric Shed space on July 29, but First Saturday art crawlers can see it Saturday night. Reception 6-9 p.m. Saturday at Electric Shed, 254 Morton Ave.

Painter John Roberts’ The Long Passover opened last month at David Lusk Gallery and offers offbeat narratives about families and their evolving histories. Roberts is a talented technical painter, but he brings imagination and style to his scenes of people, animals, cars and farm fields. The artist paints traditional subjects through creative, contemporary eyes, transcending Southern art clichés and treating viewers to rare combinations of the unique and the familiar. Roberts will give a gallery talk at David Lusk this Saturday at 1 p.m. Artist’s talk 1 p.m. Saturday at David Lusk Gallery, 516 Hagan St.

Believe it or not, the Scene is already gearing up for this year’s Best of Nashville issue. And Unrequited Leisure’s August program finds 2022’s Best New Media Gallery winner continuing to spotlight the evolving intersections of tech and aesthetics. (Aes-tech-ics?) Artist Maya Man’s love for the high stakes of live performance is rooted in her experiences as a young dance student who had nightmares about forgetting her choreography on the nights before recitals. Her latest browser-and-code-based work, Recital, features random loops of text — diary entries, essay excerpts, random thoughts, hearts, sparkles and stars. Each loop of her program — running 24/7 — brings new words and phrases in unique expressions, punctuated by random choices, just like in a live dance performance. Man creates conceptual connections between natural bodies and digital minds, and her deployment of language as choreography calls to mind instances of choreography as language: semaphore, Masonic hand gestures and ASL. Opening reception 5-8 p.m. Saturday at Unrequited Leisure, 507 Hagan St.

Meticulous illustrations and found materials are combined in slice-of-live vignettes in HOME: Paula Rivera Calderón at Coop this month. Calderón’s painted scenes combine the imaginary with the mundane to picture a portrait of her life in Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community. Calderón’s painterly world is populated by dogs and butterflies, suns, moons, plants and rivers. She outlines her figures and forms in black, bringing a graphic look to her bold marks and bright colors. The scenes depicted in the exhibition don’t combine into a cohesive narrative. Instead, they linger alongside one another in a poetic display of everyday moments and observations: a child’s hand, lazy Caribbean waves, dense urban architecture, colorful schools of fish. Calderón’s exhibition is equally ambitious and naive. And the process-based production of the works only adds to the authentic feel of her experiential transmissions. Opening reception 1-9 p.m. Saturday at Coop, 507 Hagan St.

“Elmer,” Chris Cheney

Chris Cheney and Nieves Uhl’s Sawtooth Printshop was once a staple of East Nashville’s visual art scene, and a don’t-miss stop during the long-gone Second Saturday East Side Art Stumble. After Sawtooth closed its doors in 2018, Cheney’s designs have become synonymous with Jackalope Brewing Company, and his nostalgic enamel pin designs have celebrated everything from Davy Crockett and Universal monsters to mustachioed mandolinist Ricky Skaggs. Chris Cheney’s work makes a long-awaited return to gallery walls this month at Red 225. 1995: Dirt Roads Were Everything is a nostalgic look at the artist’s life through the lens of his experiences as a 16-year-old growing up in rural Minnesota. The exhibition offers a unique take on the familiar Nashville-transplant story illuminated by Cheney’s personal insights about childhood as well as fatherhood. Cheney uses letterpress, silkscreen and laser-cutting to illustrate his various scenes, which are informed by the erotic and violent woodblock designs of the 19th-century Japanese master printmaker and painter Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Opening reception 6-9 p.m. Saturday at Red 225, 507 Hagan St.

Joel Daniel Phillips and Shane Darwent’s Plastic Sunrise is a multimedia tag-team interrogation of the ideas of truth in artistic representation, and progress as viewed through the lens of the built environment. The show, on view through Sept. 2 at Tinney Contemporary, pits Romantic ideals against concrete realities to ask questions about our aspirations as artists, citizens, communities and nations, and how they don’t always match our outcomes. Darwent’s large-scale minimalist sculptures look like mutated storefront awnings. The intensely lit structures are made from vinyl stretched over steel ribs, and the results recall both prehistoric dinosaur wings and the wreckage from some top-secret aircraft. The works are ominous and alien but also familiar enough to draw viewers in, and they put me in mind of all the small businesses wrecked by years of hapless government responses to the pandemic. Phillips’ oil paintings on transparent acrylic sheets depict images from the “killed negatives” of the Depression-era Farm Security Administration archive. The administration punched holes in the negatives to prevent their reproduction, and those dark circles become abstract elements in Phillips’ works, speaking to both the images’ materials and history. Opening reception 2-8 p.m. Saturday at Tinney Contemporary, 237 Rep. John Lewis Way