Alternative Medicine Transcends at Red Arrow Gallery - Nashville Scene

Alternative Medicine astatine Red Arrow Gallery is simply a two-woman abstract coating accumulation afloat of big, colorful works that are organized adjacent to each different on the spacious walls of the East Nashville gallery. The layout ensures that viewers announcement the similarities and the differences betwixt the 2 artists’ paintings — the congruous palettes and compositions marque the amusement consciousness astir collaborative astatine turns. But noticing those likenesses simultaneously highlights their melodramatic textural differences and understandings of what a representation level — oregon adjacent a substrate — tin be. 

Both artists besides stress the connections betwixt the mystical and earthy worlds, but they travel to that speech from other ends. This is an exceptional show of art-for-art’s-sake that should person formalist creation nerds making aggregate visits — snapping pics, making notes and taking portion successful the painterly speech astatine the halfway of the show.  

Nashville-based creator Amelia Briggs’  signature artworks interval successful a sometimes unsettling space, occupying sculpture, textile creation and coating simultaneously. Her sewn and stuffed pieces callback the inflatable rafts and excavation toys we often subordinate with carefree summertime days, but they instrumentality connected visceral and adjacent alien-seeming forms, conjuring mortal and existential anxieties on with the sting of chlorine and the odor of coconut oil. If I had to sanction the champion modern creator successful Nashville, Briggs would automatically marque the abbreviated list, and Alternative Medicine includes a predictably beardown caller enactment from the artist.  

“Prance” is 5-and-a-half feet gangly by astir 4 feet wide, and it’s the astir eye-catching enactment successful the show. It’s made of reclaimed materials, latex, fiber, lipid and acrylic, constructed successful the acquainted benignant that makes truthful galore of Briggs’ works look similar inflated vinyl successful the summertime. The basal creation includes a rusty-orange rectangle balanced upright connected a slab of yellowish — it’s astir Rothko-esque, speech from the slimy squirming lines. The full signifier feels gooey and undulating similar a surviving system, and the reddish rectangle that makes up the larger portion of the creation resembles a ample intestine, portion besides acting arsenic a representation framework for the puffy, striated, wrinkled and glossy forms that ooze wrong it. “Prance” reflects the past of American abstract painting, questions the aesthetics of accepted assemblage display, and probes astatine the slippery fundamentals of beingness — each successful 1 coating that I privation to instrumentality cliff diving astatine Percy Priest. This is wherefore Briggs is 1 of our best.  

Brooklyn-based creator Calli Moore’s “Flaming Jasper” hangs alongside “Prance” successful a pairing that’s truthful melodramatic it acts arsenic the exhibition’s default instauration wall. The painterly duet engages a dialog that expands passim the remainder of the display. “Flaming Jasper” is rendered successful lipid and acrylic connected taut stretched linen. Moore applies her overgarment successful thin, sometimes astir transparent layers. She doesn’t look to usage gesso oregon different primers, and the texture of the linen cloth is readily disposable passim the work. There are a fewer spots of dense exertion of overgarment that permission gooey lines of opaque pigments supra the aboveground of the image, but these are lone occasional accents successful a mostly precise level and precise adust painting. Moore uses accepted substrates, and doubles down connected level representation planes with precise spare applications of paint. Briggs’ substrates are modern and idiosyncratic, and her painted imagery really occupies the 3-D spaces implied by Cubist deconstructions.  

Briggs and Moore had ne'er met until a week earlier the amusement opened, but the works successful Alternative Medicine often play unneurotic truthful nicely that the amusement sometimes feels similar an progressive collaboration. The palettes of “Prance” and “Flaming Jasper” are truthful astir identical that it’s a spot eerie, and the aforesaid tin beryllium said for the pair’s paintings connected the other partition — Moore’s “Anthuria Aqua Blossom” and Briggs’ “Patricia” — which stock gold, blue, greenish and chilly whites. Briggs’ sewn and stuffed pieces marque up abstract compositions that sometimes callback earthy biomorphic oregon adjacent anatomical forms. Moore’s compositions aren’t truthful afloat abstracted, but they’re highly stylized renderings of works forms and crystal shapes, and their mostly symmetrical compositions bring a consciousness of plan and artifice to her earthy subjects. The painters upwind up successful astir the aforesaid place, but 1 makes abstractions that flirt with naturalism portion the different abstracts and stylizes earthy subjects.  

All these leaves and crystals, organisms and assemblage parts propulsion the strikingly modern works into creation humanities conversations with Romantic ideas. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) named awe, panic and information arsenic earmarks of sublime experience, and proclaimed quality to beryllium the astir sublime subject, influencing generations of Romantic artists who sought to seizure the transcendent successful the chaotic world. Moore and Briggs some interaction connected the sublime successful their works, but each successful their ain unsocial manners. Briggs’ much visceral works (“Patricia”), the ones that look similar bacteria (“Fiona”), the ones that look similar off-world creatures (“Flourish”), each deed the panic enactment of the sublime — their float-toy forms and candy-shop colors lone marque them much clownishly freaky. 

On the different hand, Moore uses an airbrush to blast flares of airy disconnected the edges of her crystals, and her foliage forms determination with a deliberate grace, implicating the sentience surging done them. Moore’s works absorption connected the awesome aspects of the sublime, flirting with psychedelic creation aesthetics and techniques (airbrush), and resulting successful a bid of works that could astir straight construe into divination-card designs.  

Alternative Medicine features 2 caller bid by a brace of fantastic painters, but much importantly, it offers a speech astir what coating has been and what it tin be. It’s a modern creation amusement that speaks to creation history, and an abstract show that puts viewers successful interaction with a transcendent acquisition of the earthy world.