QUARTET: Caroline Allison, Jodi Hays, Edie Ottestad, and Vadis Turner

A group show featuring four Nashville-based artists working in four mediums, exploring our shared emotional range through acts of ruin and reconstruction. Allison’s cyanotypes reflect cosmic force in snowballs exploding; Hays’ collage paintings are stitched with Jungian collective emotions; Ottestad sculpts the monumentality of the contemporary human condition; and Turner’s wall reliefs channel mythic angst and social constraint.

VADIS TURNER's hybrid sculpture drawings are three-dimensional wall works that marry the strength of construction and carving techniques with the delicacy of needlework. Her powerful brick dust encrusted bedsheets, ribbon and gravel grids on rebar anchor the viewer in a stirring, earthly, monolithic gesture of unlikely elegance. A recent essay by Melissa Messina sums up recent works which “harken to the visceral and conceptual qualities of art made in the area in late the 1960s and early ‘70s….  In her visceral and conceptual use of materials, and her embrace of the decorative, the romantic, and the bodily, Turner is clearly the daughter of this very rebellious revolution.” Her solo exhibition “Encounters” is currently on view at The Huntsville Museum of Art through November 27, and her work is in current group show at 21C Nashville in The Future is Female, as well as in the group shows Divided We Fall, KMAC, Louisville, KY, MATERIAL INVESTMENT, curated by Leslie Roberts at The Bank, Newark, OH. Past solo shows include at the Frist Art Museum and Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville and Geary Contemporary NYC.  

EDIE OTTESTAD’S Bystanders form a group of five austere, mostly featureless plaster human forms, standing mute and immovable, stunned and still. Their nearby offspring, small heads on wooden supports are not fully formed, but lend an optimism with their budding eyes, mouths and ears. Perhaps they’ve learned to use their senses better than their forebears. Ottestad’s recent exhibitions include solo and group shows at Stanford Contemporary, Nashville and a two-person exhibition with painter Edith Kuhnle at Galerie Tangerine, Nashville. Her film “White Privilege,” part of an ongoing documentary series of the interventions “Graffiti in Heels,” was part of the exhibit Occupy the Moment, Intersect History with Impact at the Bridgeport Art Center juried by Dr. Maura Reilly.

Arkansas native JODI HAYS scavenges, distresses and mystically re-charges ephemeral material from fabric fragments, long buried cardboard found in thrift store frames, and disassembled packing materials that are dyed and reconfigured into, at times, vast tapestries of abstraction, manifest as ancestor worship, or, as the artist so succinctly states “what an artist practices — a lifetime of searching for something.” Her work can currently be viewed at 21C Nashville in The Future is Female and recent solo shows include at Night Gallery, Los Angeles and ZieherSmith, Nashville.

CAROLINE ALLISON’S cyanotype photogram snowballs invoke childish play with an inherently natural violence. Like the anomalous “cold” dwarf star, the solar corona created by the explosive impact of a snowball counterbalances the artist’s recent conceptual consideration of the passage of time. Allison’s recent group and solo exhibitions include at 21C Nashville, Zeitgeist Gallery, Volunteer State Community College, University of the South, and Kennedy Douglass Center for the Arts, Florence, AL