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.

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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.

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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.

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The stories within Huger Foote’s images don’t stop with the still moments he captures on film. For the new body of work in “Now Here Then,” currently on view at David Lusk Gallery, the artist sifted through his extensive archive of discarded images, looking for past moments that could be revived and given a new future. Between 2005 and 2008, Foote lived with and worked into the found images by exposing them to a combination of physical weathering and experimental editing processes, the result of which is a series of rough, tactile artifacts that bear the scars of time and their continuous making.

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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.

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Traditional painting and folk art collide in the work of Memphis-based Tad Lauritzen Wright. Mining popular culture and art history, the artist has developed a practice that balances a childlike style with a challenging conceptual framework. In his latest solo show, “Instructions Included” atDavid Lusk Gallery, Lauritzen Wright uses his eclectic, whimsical approach to tackle our relationship with the natural environment.

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The mystery of the summer in the local art world has been where the new David Lusk Gallery will be. Lusk closed his well-known eponymous gallery in the Laurelwood shopping center on May 30, operating since then in temporary quarters in an old Quonset hut on Flicker Street.

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It’s cool and dim in the old Quonset hut on Flicker Street that serves as the temporary quarters of David Lusk Gallery, or DLG TEMP. Owner David Lusk still declines — or is “refuses” the correct word? — to say where the permanent location will open several months from now, so the element of mystery persists. Speaking personally, I drive around the neighborhood of the Poplar Viaduct, Union and Walnut Grove looking at buildings and wondering if any of them would work.

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Maysey Craddock explores themes of transience, impermanence, and memory in the landscape. Her watercolor and gouache paintings on sewn paper bags reflect the strength and promise that can be found in profound change and loss. Based on her own photographs of shifting landscapes, her paintings are intricate renderings of the intersection of humans and nature, conjuring an atmosphere of absence and reclamation.

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Self-taught, Memphis-based painter Jared Small’s works have an eerie aura to them—of decay and dilapidation, but also of the remembered traces of a greatness-that-once-was.

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