The Chromatic Lens at Chauvet
At Chauvet Arts on 5th Avenue there is a bright and beautiful exhibition going on called Chromatic Lens. Made up of a very diverse group of local artists, the only thing bringing them together seems to be the chromatic or the color, but this diversity is excellent because the exhibition is guaranteed to present something for everyone’s taste. I, and my cohort visited in late August, these are some of the things we saw.
Some of the most colorful works on display are those by Brandon Jones, an interdisciplinary artist with a “dynamic background [that] includes extensive work in the music industry” as a composer and producer. It is said that his artistic practice centers on vibrant mixed-media canvases, reflecting his rich personal experiences, whatever they may be.
For example, his Nashville, depicts a surrealist gunslinger with four spidery arms with nine elbows set against a rich desert backdrop. The shadow he casts doubles the arms to eight. The arachnid theory is further supported by webs on two of the ‘slinger’s elbows, while the tattoos “Isobel” and “RKJ” remain mysteries. The light that casts the shadow seems brighter than the background, has he been caught? It’s almost noir. In any case, the paranoid side-eye glance suggests that the late night that has run through into the sunrise, while the grey under his eyes seems to reflect a negative emotion, as threatening as the guns and cigarettes filling his four hands.
Chattanooga-based artist Daryl Thetford’s New Woman 2 (Colorful), a mixed media collage, presents a beautiful woman’s face as the result of an extraordinary assemblage of texture, typography, color, shape and pattern. Her only partial appearance in the frame seems to give the impression that she is moving through the space, while the collage extends beyond the borders of her features, leading to the idea that the two (her and the chaos of her surroundings) exist independently. The faces of clocks, the trails of orbiting planets and the complete words like: “waiting,” “perceive,” “sunset” beg for interpretation. Is the chaos of the patterns a depiction of the woman’s thoughts, her experiences, or a group of forced effects placed upon her? Thetford says that generally, his “collage provides a means to reflect and express the tension between our fragmented struggle for understanding and simultaneously articulate the beauty that can emerge from disorder.” In this I think he was successful. Also, his work, Big City at Night, is still on display in the backroom of Chauvet, I stop to see it whenever I can.
Greer Wilkins, a Middle Tennessee native and recent alum of MTSU, has a website which describes her style as thriving “on contrast, precision, and unexpected harmony,” balancing “…sharp detail with softer elements.” This is readily apparent in any of her paintings of wildlife, whether they be foxes, horses, birds or hare. Her still life The Hare carries an interesting balance of symbolic objects. The grapes, many of which are off the vine, have long been a symbol of bounty and debauchery. There is tension there with the pearls in front of them, a jewel that often symbolizes prosperity and vanity. Between lies the fertile hare, in wonderfully drawn realistic detail. All are set upon a table covered in a white tablecloth—is it a fine restaurant? An altar? (It is hard to know, as a religious man, if I am seeing things that are not meant to be!) The darkened fore- and back- grounds allow the color, especially the various whites, to pop off the canvas in a most amazing way. In a notable visual irony, for the pearls, Greer employed a dark grey to set the light onto the object, while for the grapes she used a white. It’s a really cool painting.
In the tradition of Wayne White’s added texts and Shawn Huckins’ added texts, textiles and fabrics, Denise Stewart-Sanabria enters the fray of intertextual (intersubjective?) juxtapositions with her The Garden of Retro Porcelain Love, combining Rococo-inspired figures with ceramic figures and pastries (from D’Andrews Bakery on Church Street). Her background is Jean-Antoine Watteau’s The Festival of Love (1718), which Green Club Magazine describes as “…a place of happiness and seduction, where perfect harmony between man and nature reigns.” One assumes that Stewart-Sanabria has personalized it with the addition of the figurines and sweets, after all, as she states regarding the pastries, “I also brought the food. Why didn’t they have anything to eat back there?”
But don’t let the irreverence fool you, this work is composed. The sitting figurines complements those in Watteau’s painting, joining their picnic festivities, while the paired, walking figurines also match those in the painting, all in a very Baroque detail and motion. The pastries provide a marvelous border of texture as though they were colored marble stones, demarcating a line between foreground and middle ground in the painting that seems to reset the entire work inside a curio cabinet with mirrored shelves. Overall, the movement across the canvas still draws the eye up and to the right to the statue of Venus and her son, Cupid. The topic remains love and the style remains Baroque. While I know and understand (and share) the joy of a good pastry, the painting, I think, also provides a wonderfully astonishing glimpse at the joy a person might derive from their porcelain collection…the Garden of Love indeed!
We move now from the Garden of Love to Cookevill’s wood sculptor Brad Sells and his Garden of Angels, described as a “…larger sculptural vessel crafted from warm-toned wood, showcasing the artist’s mastery of organic form and movement.” Indeed, all of Sells’s works on exhibition are remarkable for the way he manages to have wood do something it’s not supposed to be able to do. Whether thin and shiny like a piece of glossy paper, angular and jagged like hewn crystal, flowing like a river or flying like an alien spaceship, or just a plain old depiction of the time space continuum, for me, (a garage carpenter who can barely complete a dovetail) these pieces are just incredible. The finish, here with the green tint, brings out the wood grain, which at some angles is celebrated with reverence as if it were a structural support and at other angles discarded as though physics was always only a fictional construct.
These pieces are just a small selection of the collection available for view (and purchase) at Chauvet on 5th Ave Nashville. Make sure you also check out Gina Julian’s Optical Art, and Mark Jackson’s Axes! Chromatic Lens continues through October 31. For more information see www.chauvetarts.com
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
