My thoughts about current art shows in Memphis...

As of 5/30/08, THE art galleries of Memphis, TN have a couple things thrown up on there walls - all of which are respectively different from one another.

Damask III - Kat Gore

The David Lusk gallery, located in East Memphis (THE art center of Memphis, and hey, it's right next to Sears!), is showing two artists - Kat Gore and J Ivcevich. Gore's paintings are immediately surrounding you as you enter. They decorate the gray walls with patterns that appear to be ripped from grandma's doileys, slightly off-centered and painterly/artistically washed with whites and even more grays dripped and drizzled and layered and wiped and re-layered upon their surfaces. Unfortunately, that's as far as I think they go - conceptually and otherwise. Unfortunately, they will all probably sell in ridiculously little-to-no time to the uber-shiek elite - those people grasping to be hip and decadent over in East Memphis. If you turn around, there are a series of smaller paintings that are brown with what appears to be paper cut-outs of black silhouettes - all of which depict objects in different degrees of technological advancement (or lack thereof). Again, the ball stops rolling there.

one of Kat Gore's aimless silhouettes

In the back of the gallery is a completely different story. Ivcevich's paintings focus primarily in depicting urban objects and settings - traffic cones, traffic barriers, graffiti, clothes on a line hanging from a loft.

Untitled (Roadwork) - J Ivcevich

These paintings aren't necessarily realistic, but they offer more to hang on to visually than Gore's meanderings. The colors that Ivcevich has chosen to use are, for lack of a better word, fresh - solid pastel blues and reds, vibrant orange, greens, and purples. There is also a bit of stylized technique enforced, as subtle raised outlines make the objects more present and less 2-dimensional. In addition, a bunch of ceramic, prototype-gray remotes to television sets pile up in a corner, while a white painted sign post reads something in Arabic in the other - a sign displays even more Arabic text in lights plugged into an outlet and hanging over a doorway. The atmosphere as a result is very modern and urban (again for dire lack of vocabulary) and also very fleeting, but at the same time I am able to relate to its "street" credibility.

Congee - J Ivcevich

Moving onto another Memphis center for art (or in this case art marketing/arm, leg removal), the Perry Nicole artstore is displaying a lovely array of rural landscapes from an artist named Barth (Eric Barth?). Basically, I stop seeing these pieces and focus more on their prices which range from something like $800 to a couple grand. Again, the ball stops abruptly. It is unfortunate that the best pieces in this "art space" is in the back, packed away.

Barely Heard by Eric Barth...$1000

The final show I've seen recently is the Glen Ligon installations/paintings at the Powerhouse downtown. The Powerhouse is a unique place - they get "internationally known" artists to come to Memphis, observe Memphis, and inevitably make art about Memphis. In this case Ligon holds nothing back as his show pokes holes in a town that, from the outside, is a great southern CITY. Memphis, as us "insiders" know, is mostly comprised of black people - not necessarily a bad thing at all (for all of you whose red flags have told you to start shouting at me). However, its inherent "blackness" has been less about empowerment as a race and more about indifference to racism, lack of economic structure/infrastructure, crime, and most importantly electing incompetent "leaders" that fail to care about our city. Ligon creates a commentary of Memphis through reappropriation - the genius of this work. He has silkscreened lines from Richard Pryor sets onto gold canvases - completely taking them out of the context of comedy and pointing them directly at the African American race. On the bottom floor of the gallery, Ligon has painted quotes that he supposedly heard from walking around Memphis:


The power in this comes from the act of writing these things down and displaying them - they have more weight, more meaning(?) when they are right in front of your face as text. It isn't hard to tell where these quotes came from - let's just say he wasn't hanging out by David Lusk or Perry Nicole. Ligon also takes a shot at the art world - more specifically the presence of black people within - with a piece that situates the same civil rights-era sign next to itself:


On the left is the original infamous sign. On the right, it seems a "critic" has circled "craft issues" and made notes (I chuckled when I saw a fingerprint circled with the statement "finger smudges - from the artist?"). This ridiculous dissection of what was once a powerful statement and object further juxtaposes what is REAL and what is ART - two things that maybe should be more closely related, but often couldn't be further apart, as the previous shows (with the exception of Ivcevich's pieces) have definitely proven in various anti-climactic ways.

god i'm so bitter...