There was a lot to love in local galleries and institutions in 2015, so let's not delay and get right to my roster of the 10 Best Exhibitions. The list is ordered in backward chronology.
If we measure the beginning of the holiday season by the first time we hear "The Little Drummer Boy" issuing from the speakers in a big box store, then we have been deep into Yuletide since before Thanksgiving. And Christmas is a week from today, and the shopping is not finished, and the traffic on Poplar between Oak Court Mall and Fayette County is manic, torturous and impassable.
Quiet sensibility is spread all over this beautiful monograph by the Southern-born artist Huger Foote. It is rather easy to recognize a close kinship with an important Southern master, William Eggleston (they are very close friends), although Foote’s work appears more introspective and imaginative than Eggleston’s.
Beth Foley and Veda Reed are painters who, at first glance, might seem to have little in common aside from the fact that they are both realists. But a closer look at Reed’s new series of night-sky paintings and Foley’s latest portrayals of ne’er-do-wells, both at the David Lusk Gallery, yields some unexpected commonalities. Despite wildly different subject matter, both artists manage to impart a tangible sense of the ominous nature of modern life, where unseen forces prowl just around the corner.
It's easy to assert that abstract art and representational art exist in different spheres. After all, abstract art has no content, so to speak, and representational art is all content, or so it would seem. The truth is that every painting creates its relationship with content, the world in which it lives and in which we perceive and understand it. Abstraction and representation often are much closer in spirit than we might suspect, a proposition confirmed, I think, in the exhibitions "Oh Happy Day," by Beth Edwards, through Nov. 24 at DLG-TEMP, and "Layers: Work through the Decades," by Anton Weiss, through Nov. 28 at L Ross Gallery.
The Ewing Gallery’s new exhibit, “Distilled: The Narrative Transformed” by Pinkney Herbert opened on Monday evening with a small reception.
Herbert, an artist based in Memphis, Tennessee, brought together a collection of works spanning his thirty-year career as a professional artist. Most of the pieces on display are on loan from their owners and private galleries, including some from Herbert’s own galleries in Memphis and New York.
Maysey Craddock took the title of her show, “Langsam Sea,” from a poem by Anne Michaels, which reads, in part: “In time, night after night, we’ll begin to dream of a langsam sea, waves in slow motion, thickening to sand.” A German term, often used in musical notation to direct the musicians to play slowly, “langsam” also describes the gradual but inexorable pace of change along the Gulf coastline.
