A few highlights from the NuLu Galleries July 2010

Flame Run Gallery, 838 East Market Street: Even when it isn’t moving, the glass art work by University of Louisville faculty member Che Rhodes demands attention. It’s a glass ball cupped by two opposing glass bowls, held in tension by machine arms with an industrial beauty of their own. It’s the kind of arresting oddity that makes you stop and wait for something to happen. Beneath the ball is a sprinkling of white dust, which doesn’t make sense until a gallery attendant turns on the machine, demonstrating how the ball rotates between the cups, which grind it at the rate of geologic change. Should you acquire the piece, you probably won’t want it to run all the time. The noise is industrial-grade fingernails on blackboard in a baritone pitch.

Cool light seems to emanate from the four-foot-high tower of blocks in blue and icy clear glass; the colors remind me just a bit of a frozen gel pop. (Or maybe I was just hungry.) But a closer look at the twelve stacked forms reveals these pieces are not just random shapes but glass reproductions of Styrofoam packing material, right down to the faint honeycomb outlines that etch the surface of the blocks. This sculpture, and a second one of two forms in gentle glowing pink, is the work of artist Sungsoo Kim, an adjunct faculty member at The Cleveland Institute of Art.

Kim’s work is all about finding art in the mundane. While you have to see the pieces in person to appreciate the play of light and color, as well as the level of detail, his website shows a great number of these outstanding pieces, bringing home this theme of unsung art.

Sometimes, art just wants to have fun, and Jeanne Nelson’s playful glass pull toy reflects that aesthetic. You may remember the toy from childhood: Pull the string and a little man raises his arms and legs. In this case, the limbs are solid glass and weighty, and the “string” is heavy wire. Best to lift one appendage at a time if you’re going to try this piece. “I wanted to make glass actually move,” Nelson says. “I didn’t want it to be so stagnant.”

Surface texture on this detail from a much larger work by Denise Furnish

Garner-Furnish Studio, 642 East Market Street: It’s always interesting to see an artist’s ideas evolve. The quilts on display at Garner-Furnish are the latest iteration of Denise Furnish’s encounter with an idea. The basic material is old quilts, sometimes cut up and reassembled, and painted with a single color. The paint transforms the quilt into a study of surface texture. “I used to paint abstract, textural  paintings,” Furnish says. The quilts turned out to be the ideal extension of that work. “I think of my work as paintings. They evolved from my painting, although lately I’ve been getting into quilt shows.” (She’s also taken home some quilt show awards.)

Furnish first employed old quilts by adding her own designs, creating a sort of artistic commentary within this traditional “women’s work,” which went generations before its recognition as legitimate art. But this latest series is more elemental, and while the pieces can produce big drama with stunning colors, they’re also full of surface subtlety.

Furnish is so well known for this work, she no longer hits the thrift stores and yard sales looking for cast-offs. “Now people bring them to my door and drop them off. I’m the orphanage for used, unwanted quilts.”

Tim Faulkner Gallery, 632 East Market Street: If you’re bored at Faulkner Gallery, check your pulse.

Again, this second floor gallery, which you have to duck down an alley to find, is the most happening and most surprising venue in NuLu. This month Faulkner scored a coup hosting the show with the most press exposure in months: “Foreclosed,” the photos of Phoenix Lindsey Hall. Major buzz for the show stemmed from Hall’s casual admittance that she broke into foreclosed homes around Louisville and took pictures. If it was only a gimmick, it was a creative one. But there is no gimmick here. Hall brings us images of life interrupted: dog houses in trackless snow, a Tonka truck abandoned, a mattress with a book waiting to be read. When I read about the show, what I feared was sentimentality, but this is closer to reportage, yet with an artist’s intimacy. Hall recently moved from Louisville to pursue a master’s degree in New York City. Can’t wait to see what she does next.

The rest of Faulkner’s walls were a smorgasbord of local artists. A few that caught my eye:

• The brown-and-sepia palette of Chasson Higdon in a pair of paintings with a noir-ish 1930s feel.
• A fun, childlike painting called Melting Man by George Scott, in primary colors.
• Two stripey works by Billy Hertz. These vibrant pieces are like something you might see from an airplane.

Chasson Higdon

George Scott

Maybe the biggest surprise was seeing horse racing paintings by renown Louisville painter David O. Schuster. It might be the most conventional art the gallery has ever shown.
Zephyr Gallery, 610 East Market Street :
I didn’t get a chance to talk to artist Janis Kirstein about her “Under the Knife” series, so I don’t know what led to the title of the exhibit, but the paintings are bold slashes of blacks and grays, wielded with the energy that has more in common with “Psycho” than surgery. These powerful

Janis Kirstein

Billy Hertz

paintings on Tyvek, accented by occasional bright color, hang suspended from black painted boards, which means they move with the air in the room, adding a dash of vulnerability to all this energy.

Story by Jenni Laidman
Photos by Joey Harrison

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Tags: Art, Artists, Community, Galleries, Louisville

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