Tinney Contemporary is proud to present Listening with Our Eyes, a two-person exhibition of works by Jeanie Gooden and Brandon Reese. The exhibition will be on display from September 28 to November 9, 2024. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, October 5 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. in conjunction with the First Saturday Art Crawl.
“We listen in order to interpret our world and experience meaning. Our world is a complex matrix of vibrating energy, matter and air just as we are made of vibrations. Vibration connects us with all beings and connects us to all things interdependently.”
-Pauline Oliveros
The works in this exhibition share a common focus on surface and texture. Reese’s and Gooden’s artistic practices both emphasize material investigation, drawing inspiration from architecture and the natural environment.
Jeanie Gooden’s large, abstract paintings juxtapose oil paint with found materials—fabric, salvaged copper and steel—on their heavily varnished surfaces. Multi-hued swathes flow into gestural markings and blocks of vivid color; metal scraps and found fabric are hand-stitched or nailed to the surface.
Brandon Reese’s works in ceramic are at once rugged and delicate. His carefully constructed large-scale works—freestanding, circular structures reaching 8 or 10 feet tall—push the boundaries of what is structurally possible within the medium. The larger pieces are accompanied by smaller works resembling simplistic houses and other domestic forms.
The work engages both natural and organic surfaces, but seems to hone in on the ambiguous space between the two—particularly as the effects of time and the elements create similar patinas by erosion, oxidation, even fossilization. The title of the exhibition emphasizes this attunement to one’s surroundings; the entanglement of the senses: sound and light, particle and wave; matter itself.
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All 0of the works in this exhibition are black, white, or a combination of both. I am interested in these stripped-down formal parameters—the extremities of contrast of black and white as constraint. Without color to provide context, works implementing only monochromatic visual components rely on composition, technique, and subject to narrate. It's a self-imposed limitation that I find fascinating.
Conceptually, black and white as a dichotomous pair have age-old meaning—opposing forces, light and dark, good and evil, truth and falsehood, right and wrong, etc. YIN-YANG complicates this binary opposition by depicting these supposedly contradicting forces as inextricable and interdependent.
-Joshua Edward Bennett
Tinney Contemporary is proud to present Beneath the Moon, Under the Sun, a solo exhibition of works by Lily Prince in the back gallery. The exhibition will be on display from August 17 to September 21, 2024. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 7 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. in conjunction with the First Saturday Art Crawl.
Beneath the Moon, Under the Sun is a distillation of Prince’s en plein air practice—capturing nature’s energy from a multiplicity of loci. These works specifically reference the duality of existence: day and night, sun and moon, good and evil. Beneath the Moon, Under the Sun alternates between anxiety and hope, symbolized by time of day and palette. It is up to the viewer to decide if we are headed from day to night or night to day.
Lily Prince has exhibited widely nationally and internationally and has had numerous commissions. Prince was honored with the Pollock-Krasner award in painting in 2020. She has participated in many national and international artist residencies. Prince’s work has appeared in a wide array of publications and is in numerous collections.
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“To know where we came from – and what we came through – doesn’t have to mean we know any more clearly where we are, except not there, anymore. The forest begins where civilization ends, so I’d been told.”
-Among the Trees, by Carl Phillips
Tinney Contemporary is proud to present Black Forest, a solo exhibition of works by Arden Bendler Browning. The exhibition will be on display from August 17 to September 21, 2024. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 7 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. in conjunction with the First Saturday Art Crawl.
The impetus for Arden Bendler Browning’s most recent body of work came from a trip to Rülzheim, Germany and its surrounding landscape—a place which her Jewish ancestors were forced to flee in 1935 after Hitler’s rise to power. Borrowing Daniel Mason’s notion of “Witness Trees,” Bendler Browning hones in on the landscape-as-observer and, in turn, makes careful observation of the “witness”—transcribing the arboreal sentries of the Black Forest using collage, spray paint, and gouache. The dark expanses in these works mark a departure in Bendler Browning’s practice, both visually and conceptually, as the shadows lend these landscapes a novel degree of depth. Contrasting with the immediacy of the screens embedded in several of the works, a dislocated, shifting sense of perspective plays out across the surfaces of the panels.
In Black Forest, Bendler Browning undertakes a transposition that is twofold: a rendering of three-dimensional space in two dimensions, as well as a translation of past to present. Taken more broadly, the work delves into the archetypal weight of forests: mythological places that shelter wolves and witches as well as wanderers and refugees. Moreover, it is the specific history of the Black Forest, as well as the artist’s connection to it, which emerges as a key. In some sense, history is literally absorbed and recorded within the rings of trees, as climate conditions, rainfall, scars from fires—even bullets, in some instances—are preserved in the concentric circles of their trunks. Bendler Browning’s lens-shaped tondos mimic these circular bandings, as well as most nearly approximating a human field-of-vision; a lens, a portal. Each piece becomes a document of the artist reckoning with a haunted landscape. Though the events of the haunting are sealed off, this reckoning is preserved as gesture, as color and form.
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Tinney Contemporary is proud to present The Sink, guest curated by Jodi Hays. The exhibition will run from July 6 to August 10, 2024. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 6 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. in conjunction with the First Saturday Art Crawl. Stay tuned for information on additional artist talks and other special programming.
The works in this exhibition embody disparate modes of making that are all process-driven in their own right, relying on accumulation of moments, of material, of pigment or studio detritus. These often-invisible processes—reflected in Hays’ focus on dyeing and “pooling” as a curatorial thread—yield works with a certain density.
The Sink gestures to the invisible domestic labor historically demanded of women; to submerging and cleansing (a banal sort of baptism), to the sink as hold-all (“everything but the kitchen sink”), to water pooling and draining; to what Hays aptly calls the “peaks and valleys of labor” (or, put another way, Dish Pit Sisyphus’ proverbial boulder). It points to the processes of staining and dyeing, porousness and dispersion, scouring and binding; to transformation, flux and fluidity.
The exhibition reflects the ambivalence of the domestic sphere: a place that signifies both safety and oppression. The Sink connotes sunken-ness, a depressive-detachment, wreckage lost beneath the surface, visible only when the tides are low: an inescapable past which haunts the present. The works here reckon with these ghosts.
Join the conversation with Tinney Contemporary, Jodi Hays, and the Nashville Pantheon on Instagram: @jodihayspainter, @the_sink_show, @tinneycontemporary
In Memory of Danila Rumold