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Jessica Wohl exhibit featured in The Tennessean

Jessica Wohl's collages of found fabrics are eerily personal

Sewanee professor and multimedia artist Jessica Wohl has spent most of her career creating artwork about the underbelly of domestic life. From collages to embroidered photographs to sculpture, Wohl is known for exposing dark sides of family units, housekeeping and the so-called American Dream. "Letting Go," her new exhibit at Zeitgeist Gallery in Wedgewood-Houston, is the final installment of a years-long exploration of the discrepancies between how we present ourselves and how we actually are.

The exhibition is comprised of eight large-scale wall sculptures that blur the line between two- and three-dimensional art. Using found fabrics and quilting techniques, Wohl's abstract compositions allude to the home as a living being, both sinister and inviting. Each work feels like eerily personal, like it's been resurrected and re-configured from the memory of someone else's past.

Wohl incorporates intimate materials and items that, for her, carry the energy of the people who used them: bed sheets, pants, underwear, stained napkins. "These garments feel alive and lived-in to me," said Wohl. "I want that history to be visible."

A distinctly human element sets this work apart from simple fabric collage: hair. Wohl incorporates hair — growing and graying, real and synthetic — to imbue the sewn fabrics with a sense of the corporeal.

"On a purely formal level, it's another texture," she said. "But it's also a material that we tend to associate so clearly with people. It gives the sense of someone living in the materials."

Closing a chapter

"Letting Go" represents the twilight of a conceptual obsession with the illusion of picture-perfect domestic life. "I've said everything I can on this topic," Wohl remarked.

The abstract forms are intended to look limp and weary to reflect the idea's final stages. The heavy-hanging objects seem to exist largely as evidence of the life they once had in them.

"Blue Bunches," the first piece completed in the series, is an embroidered collage made of napkins, pillowcases, underwear, faux fur and hair. "There were parts of it that looked like phalluses, parts that looked like breasts — it was surprisingly bodily," said Wohl. "The notion of hanging, drooping and sagging started to make sense conceptually after I realized I was repeating it a lot. The lifelessness, the loss of elasticity, the notion that things are wearing out."

For much of her childhood and adult years, Wohl remained suspect of blissful family life. Growing up in a dysfunctional family, she worried she would never be able to have one of her own. "I thought I wouldn't be able to trust that mirage," she said. But now, happily engaged, she says found resolution in her own personal life and wants to move forward in her artwork as well.

"It's a celebratory parting," said Wohl. "The work I anticipate coming after this — which I don't yet have visuals for in my head — still deals with my family and issues that revolve around it and the home, but in a very different way. My work will eventually move more toward notions of race, because that's what my family will be dealing with."

Also at Zeitgeist, don't miss contemporary dance company New Dialect's last two performances of "Planes," a groundbreaking 1968 installation by Trisha Brown, at 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. Saturday in the gallery's back room.

Brown's "Planes" installation is a film of aerial footage, shot by Jud Yalkut, projected on an 18-foot long, 13-foot high wall that has concealed holes at equal intervals across its entire surface. Three performers traverse the surface in slow motion, giving the illusion of falling through space. The 20-minute-long installation aims to reorient viewers' perception of gravity as the performers move across the wall.

"It's an honor for us to have the opportunity to participate in the tremendous legacy of Trisha Brown," said New Dialect director and founder Banning Bouldin. "She's had a enormous impact on how contemporary dances are made today — rule games, chance operations, spatial architecture, structured improvisation, and inter disciplinary collaborative are the bedrock of what we call 21st century dance."

The multiple performances of "Planes" at Zeitgeist, a total of nine throughout the month of May, are organized in conjunction with OZ Arts Nashville and the Trisha Brown Dance Company's "Retrospective in Three Parts" that premiered at OZ earlier in May.

"Brown's work is timeless," said Bouldin. "The collaborations and methods she began exploring in the '60s were groundbreaking then, and are still thought provoking and inspiring today. Each time I speak with viewers after we perform, I find a few who had no idea the work was created 47 years ago."

Sara Estes, for The Tennessean

Article on hyperallergic.com about Kevin Cooley and Phillip Andrew Lewis

Big Bang Vinyl

Kevin Cooley and Phillip Andrew Lewis, “Plane of Impact” (Performance Still) (2014), HD Video, 14:00 Minutes, Edition of 3 (1 AP)

Kevin Cooley and Phillip Andrew Lewis, “Plane of Impact” (Performance Still) (2014), HD Video, 14:00 Minutes, Edition of 3 (1 AP)

Using the breaking and reformation of a thousand vinyl records, artists Kevin Cooley and Phillip Andrew Lewis interpret the creation of the cosmos. The relics of this process and its final cacophonous product are on view at Pierogi gallery in Williamsburg.

Taking a line from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 sci-fi novel 2001: A Space OdysseyMy God, It’s Full of Stars started at Nashville’s United Record Pressing. There 500 grooveless black records, and 500 grooveless white records, were made, only to be shattered by volunteers against a grey wall (a perhaps heavy-handed suggestion of black and white color mixing). A video of the destruction projects against one wall in Pierogi, in which bits of dark and light vinyl pile up against the shattering noise. This sound was recorded on one side of new records pressed from the shards, with the other side imprinted with the sounds of the records’ creation.

Cosmic references aside, the project is definitely a successor to “Box with the Sound of Its Own Making” by Robert Morris from 1961 — a wooden cube which played a recording of its construction. That along with the 2001 reference and the vinyl record itself make the whole project a bit of an art and pop culture throwback. One of the Harmony of the Spheres records made from the melting of black and white vinyl bits spins silently in the gallery, the uncut edges from the pressing process left in a gnarled ring of encircling plastic. While the LP’s birth, death, and rebirth is on center stage — with limited edition box sets available — the experiments with the vinyl byproducts can be just as interesting. In “OMG, It’s Full of Stars,” raw PVC beads act as the darkness of the universe over a flat screen while suggestions of galaxies and stars beautifully emerge from the cracks; “Oddity” has a record reduced to a black blob meant to look like a meteorite. The two feel more immediately engaged in the vinyl record-cosmos crossover.

My God, It’s Full of Stars, which was exhibited in another edition earlier this year at Zeitgeist Gallery near United Record Pressing in Nashville, is the first New York solo show for the duo of Kevin Cooley and Phillip Andrew Lewis. Cooley has exhibited with Pierogi before, with last year’s Skyward film installation on the ceiling of the Boiler. Together they’ve also collaborated on the video and installation “Through the Skies for You” (2013), a tribute to the missing ship of 17th century explorer Robert de La Salle, lost somewhere in Lake Michigan. Both artists have an intense interest in process and the materials, and while you might not think of the Big Bang or black holes or the formation of universes when you accidentally drop a vinyl record, there can be these grand echoes even in the simplest of destructions.

Kevin Cooley and Phillip Andrew Lewis: My God, It’s Full of Stars continues at Pierogi (177 North 9th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn) through July 27.

Burnaway Reviews Zeitgeist Exhibit Harmony of the Spheres

Harmony of the Spheres, video still, 2014

Harmony of the Spheres, video still, 2014

http://burnaway.org/many-ways-vinyl-kevin-cooley-phillip-andrew-lewis/

For the latest exhibition at Nashville’s Zeitgeist Gallery, multimedia artists Kevin Cooley and Phillip Andrew Lewis have achieved a rare feat. They’ve produced a diverse exhibition with a single material: vinyl.

When I first heard about the exhibition, I assumed an all-vinyl show would be gimmicky or nostalgic. You know, the way exhibitions of art made out of old books can be.

I was wrong.

When you walk into the gallery, the space feels charged with an ominous quietude. Three undulating black vinyl sculptures, titled Dark Matter 01, 02, and 03, greet the viewer. Perched on white pedestals and each dignified with its own spotlight, the organic formations teem with potential energy, as if at any moment they could worm their way down from their towers and onto the floor. Overhead, Dark Star, a large tentacled form suspended from the ceiling, reaches out in all directions.

Borrowing the title from an ancient Greek concept linking music and celestial movement, Harmony of the Spheres uses vinyl as a tool to explore themes of creation and destruction, black hole theories, points of singularity, and flat-earth philosophies.

Digital scans of vinyl records hang on the main wall. Here, the vinyl records—seen broken, eclipsing one other, or fading into a black abyss—are abstracted to the point that they read more as omniscient oculi than as music devices. Standing in front of the images, which feel simultaneously cellular and planetary, the mind oscillates between perceiving the looping grooves of LPs and the celestial patterns of the cosmos.

Cooley and Lewis push their material to new limits in each piece, from a starry sky made using vinyl pellets on a light box to a dense nugget of torched vinyl to a two-toned wavy tower of layered vinyl.

The exhibition also includes two video works: one is the documentation of a record-breaking performance (literally) and the other, Point of Singularity, is a meditative video featuring thousands of vinyl pellets being sucked into black-hole-like central point.

The vinyl for this project came directly from United Record Pressing, the largest vinyl record pressing plant in the country, which happens to be located near the gallery. The artists made many of the works inside the factory walls. “We were able to not only have records pressed, but also conduct our own long ‘shifts’ at the factory.” Inside, they built sculptures straight from vinyl remnants as they came off the presses and generated the photographs, videos, and sound for other pieces.

Cooley and Lewis, who met and began working together a year ago as residents at the Bemis Center in Omaha, Nebraska, are a powerful team. While accomplished artists individually, their combined vision and aesthetic senses have the ability to chart a lot more territory. “Problem solving, critical engagement, and making connections happens much faster with two brains,” they say. “In general, it has changed the way we approach our own work, and has been a very productive way to make art.”

If their first collaborative piece, which won the 3-D Award at ArtPrize 2013, is any indication of the future trajectory of their artistic partnership, then Cooley and Lewis are just getting started.

“Harmony of the Spheres” is on view at Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville through April 26.

Sara Estes is the gallery coordinator at Fisk University and curator of the art space Threesquared. She lives, writes, and works in Nashville.

 

Zeitgeist Neighborhood Wedgewood/Houston Focus of Nashville Business Journal Article

Wedgewood/Houston is the focus of E.J. Boyer's new article in The Nashville Business Journal, "Where Art Lives: Neighborhood's Revival Fueling Nashville Arts Scene." You can read the whole article here.

Zeitgeist Gallery

Zeitgeist Gallery

Describing the old Mays Hosiery Mill, Boyer says, "Inside the building, quiet hallways still bear vestiges, like an outdated time-card punch, of the building’s former life. But behind closed doors, a creative class is bringing the building — and subsequently the neighborhood — back to life."

On Zeitgeist's move to the neighborhood she says, "Last summer, Zeitgeist moved to Wedgewood-Houston, bringing its followers and commercial presence to the community.

“We knew that we were going to have to move from 21st Avenue, and we looked at several areas,” said Lain York, the gallery’s director. “This seemed to be natural. … It made sense to Janice [Zeitlin, the owner,] to move the gallery closer to the studio community.”

York, a painter himself, has rented studio space in Wedgewood-Houston for 18 years.

“First and foremost, this community is about the studio space,” he said. “Us and David Lusk are just retail points. We hope to serve as a resource and provide education when we can. … The studio community is really the lifeblood of a visual art scene.”"

Core Development has a 7 acre project planned in the area, "Vice President of Development Andrew Beaird said it’s too early to know what the final development plan will look like, but said the company wants to preserve the neighborhood’s artisan and maker history.

“What we like about this neighborhood is the fact that there is a significant concentration of artisans, the music industry and a lot of people who are making and creating,” he said. “They need access to a raw space that they can customize.”"

Will Berry/The Tennessean

On a hot autumn afternoon, a few hours before the opening of his first show at Zeitgeist in 11 years, Will Berry looked remarkably cool in a crisp white short-sleeved Oxford shirt tucked into neatly pressed khakis. His appearance matched the calmness of his work.

“The Night of the Iguana” is an understated, subtle collection of paintings, a quiet show with no labels (all the pieces are untitled). Manuel Zeitlin, whose architectural firm shares space with the gallery, described it as Zen-like.

Curated by Victor Zamudio-Taylor, the show remains on view through Oct. 26.

The larger paintings use three metals — aluminum, lead and graphite — and layers of patterns based on Mississippian Indian motifs, simple drawings referencing autobiographic details from Berry’s family history (“symbiotic autobiographical sketches,” he calls them) and varying hues created by oxidation of the metals.

Though conceived as individual paintings, the works are particularly effective when grouped either as a triptych or in a block of six: graphite, aluminum and white over aluminum, white and graphite.

The aluminum paintings have the patina and reflectivity of antique mirrors while the graphite paintings are full of barely perceptible hues, faint reflections and just-discernible designs.

“The metals fuse, contaminate, change each other to become something new,” Berry said.

“This is really two different shows when seen in natural light versus artificial light at night,” Zeitgeist’s Lain York said. He also said the presentation of the show pushes the limits of minimalism, which is something he and Janice Zeitlin wanted to explore in this new space.

Zeitgeist is at 516 Hagan St., Suite 100, and is open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. There is no admission fee. For information, call 615-256-4805.

— MiChelle Jones,

for The Tennessean

Best of Nashville

best of.jpg

We are very proud to be included in the Nashville Scene's Best of Nashville 2013 list.

Best Curation: Patrick DeGuira at Zeitgeist

"The Medium’s Session was the first group show to christen Zeitgeist’s new location in the Wedgewood-Houston district, and its curator, Patrick DeGuira, played the part of an artistic alchemist, casting a spell on the space with his selection of works by Chris Roberson, Emily Clayton, Ron Lambert, Brent Stewart and more. Viewing the exhibit felt like gathering clues to a great mystical puzzle." Laura Hutson                                           

Best New Gallery Space: Zeitgeist

"Back in the day, Zeitgeist was located in Cummins Station in what used to be my favorite Nashville gallery space. But for the past 15 years, its home had been a cramped retail storefront in Hillsboro Village. With its stylish and spacious new digs in the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood, Zeitgeist has reclaimed the title of best gallery space in the city." Joe Nolan                                            

Best Photography Installation: Vesna Pavlovic

Pavlovic's new Real Images installation at Seed Space realizes a similarly enveloping experience in a much more challenging environment. The gallery features four low walls with no ceiling, in the middle of artist Adrienne Outlaw's studio in the Chestnut Square building. The floor inside the space measures about 90 square feet — generously. "Display, Desire" showed in a Frist gallery about six times as big. Pavlovic's laudable negotiation of the comparatively tiny Seed Space speaks to her abilities as a creative problem solver, and Real Images is the best installation so far this year.