ZieherSmith participated in the first annual Artville with new works by Tennessee-based artists Jonathan Edelhuber and Lindsey Rome. Artville is an annual visual arts festival featuring public art installations, contemporary art, and immersive experiences highlighting the creative culture of Nashville.

The skeins of deeply saturated color created by Lindsey Rome’s heavy touch on paper are an amalgamation of broad swaths of mid-century sensibility, summoning Marsden Hartley, Arshile Gorky, Saul Styeinberg, and Maria Lasnig. The results beg a range of interpretations -- evoking maps, puzzles, Seussian caves, or medical graphing -- joyous and mysterious at once. Begun in 2015, the labyrinthine detail in Rome’s work required countless hours of intense focus and self-forgetfulness. For years, she focused on developing intricate detail in her colored pencil drawings. Only after developing bursitis in her shoulder from pushing so hard with the pencils, did she transition to larger oil paintings in the same vein. Full of tiny twists and turns and contrasting pigments, the paintings themselves are a study in persistence and what she calls “color therapy.” Born in Columbus, Ohio, Lindsey Rome received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She currently lives and works in Nashville, TN.

From his studio in Clarksville, Tennessee, Jonathan Edelhuber invokes canonical art historical references through his stylizations of the human face. From templates of a toothy, bright-eyed visage in extreme close-up or a cross section of laughing skull, Edelhuber summons the grief and joy in our complicated, universal brotherhood with its careworn optimism. In his population of memento mori, we lose sight of mortal reminders and concentrate instead on the joyous variety of gesture, color and touch in each individual work. Like humanity, they are generous and complex, bursting with possibility. “When making these faces and skulls I thought a lot about what humans are— how we’re all the same, but so different. The biblical creation story was constantly on my mind because that’s what I know. Not just the idea of the physical man and woman being made but the psychological and emotional aspects of humans. God must have the same dark humors we have, the same love we have, possibly the same fears in a way. Maybe even the same fear of how we handle our fears. There’s also our need to create which is a complete mystery to me since we’re the only “animals” that feel this pull. I want people to think about what we are and even though we’re all so different, we’re all essentially alike.” An Arkansas native, he received his BFA from Harding University and has exhibited internationally.