Nashville, Tennessee
Contemporary Art Gallery237 Rep. John Lewis Way N. 37219
Tuesday—Saturday
10 a — 5 p
615.255.7816
︎
UPCOMING:
NADA Miami w/
Sheetcake Gallery—
Adam Linn,
Joel Parsons, &
Esther Ruiz
Solo Exhibition
Charlie Goering
Solo Exhibition
Lana Scholtz
Collaborative Exhibition
Kole Nichols &
Sergio Suarez
RECENT:
HUMORS—
Dan Charbonnet &
Cletus Wilcox
ATL ART FAIR—
Devin Balara,
Jack Kenna, &
Paloma Wall
SPRUE—
Devin Balara &
Nick Fagan
VOLLEY—
w/ Whitespace Group Exhibition
FUTURE FAIR—
Megan Greene
Kimia Ferdowsi Kline
Erica Westenberger
NADA Miami Beach
December 1st—5th
a collaboration Sheetcake Gallery
BOOTH B9
︎︎︎ PREVIEW AVAILABLE WORKS
Exhibited Artists:
︎ Adam Linn
Adam Linn (b. 1995 Pittsburgh, PA) received a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 and an MFA in Visual Arts from SUNY Purchase in 2024. Linn has exhibited in New York, NY, Los Angeles, CA, Purchase, NY, Troy, NY, Montpelier, VT, Pittsburgh, PA, Greensburg, PA, Austin TX, Berlin, DE, Barcelona, ES, Tokyo, JP Central, HK, Shanghai, CN and London, EN. He has participated in residencies at Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Snowmass Village, CO) Brewhouse Association (Pittsburgh, PA), The Macedonia Institute (Chatham, NY), Millay Arts (Austerlitz, NY) Robert Blackburn Printshop (New York, NY), Manhattan Graphics Center (Brooklyn, NY) and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska City, NE). He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
︎︎︎ Download CV -
︎ Joel Parsons
Joel Parsons is an artist, curator, and teacher based in Memphis, TN where he is an Assistant Professor of Art, Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Director of Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College. His multidisciplinary art centers queer intimacy, and has been shown at Flyweight Projects in New York, NY; the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, CA; Yale University’s Greene Gallery; Western Exhibitions in Chicago, IL; and the Yerba Buena Art Center Triennial in San Francisco, CA. He is the cofounder of Beige, an alternative gallery and performance space devoted to the work of LGBTQ+ artists. His queer country music band and performance art project, The Sissy Dicks, has released three albums and regularly plays venues in the Southeastern United States, including Goner Fest in Memphis, TN and the Spellcasters Maritime Ball in New Orleans, LA. He received a BA from Rhodes College, Phi Beta Kappa, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded the John Quincy Adams Fellowship. His writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Art Papers, and Art in America. He is a founding member of the ArtsMemphis Artist Advisory Council and serves on the Board of Directors of the UrbanArt Commission. He is represented by Sheet Cake Gallery.︎︎︎ Download CV -
︎ Esther Ruiz
Esther Ruiz (b. Houston) received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art from Rhodes College in 2011. She has shown nationally and internationally at various galleries with solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Museum Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, Chart Gallery in New York, The Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon, Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and Brooklyn Academy of Music. She has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions at galleries including Tripoli Gallery, CHART, Monaco, Sobering Galerie, Deslave Tijuana, LVL3, and the Torrance Art Museum, among others. She has been featured in The Washington Post, Art News Magazine, Art F City and VICE. She has also been a visiting artist at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, New York, School of Visual Arts, New York, New York, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Santa Barbra City College among others. Ruiz currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
︎︎︎ Download CV
Curatorial Statement
Sheet Cake Gallery and TINNEY are pleased to share our presentation inspired by the cult film The Birdcage. Our booth features a selection of dynamic artworks by Adam Linn, Joel Parsons, and Esther Ruiz. Released 30 years ago, in 1996, The Birdcage flamboyantly slapped against the conservatism of the time, which targeted the arts and progressive ideals in pursuit of “decency” and “traditional values.” A raucous comedy that openly mocks the conservative characters and the performance of masculinity, the film was a retort to the politics of the moment and a balm for the grief and fear of the AIDS epidemic. Amid the current wave of conservatism (notably in the American Southeast, including Tennessee and Florida), this campy cult classic has an enduring relevance— finding power in humor, decadence, and community. Using The Birdcage as a curatorial prompt, these artists present drawings, sculptures, stained glass, and neon situated within elements from the film’s production design.
Adam Linn’s (Brooklyn, NY) richly saturated colored-pencil drawings are a subversive queering of architecture and domestic objects. With an aesthetic nod to the Italian Futurists, he animates banal objects: hardware and appliances (think door handles, brooms, and locks) become protruding body parts in ecstatic flux. These subjects are an amalgamation of the everyday with the weird and vulgar pockets of our fantasies.
Joel Parsons (Memphis, TN) is a multidisciplinary artist working largely between stained glass and drawing, exploring queer intimacy, pleasure, and anxiety. His work invokes celebration, humor, protest, and longing. Often situated in a fictitious disco club he calls a “speculative dance club for We Who Feel Otherwise in a world on fire,” Parsons pays homage to the sanctuary of disco and gay bars— sites of release, protection, and collective joy. His recent mirror-based works capture the hazy hours after a night out, when memory blurs and images dissolve into one another. Likewise, his stained glass objects shift with changing light, reflecting how we are shaped by the people and environments around us.
Esther Ruiz’s (Queens, NY) sculptures incorporate neon with mirrors, stones, fossils, and other geological materials. Synthesizing minimalism with a retro-futurist extravagance, Ruiz’s work gestures toward cosmology, the relationship between organic and artificial, and New Age spirituality. Her aesthetic approach marries highly technical craft with mysticism, the material with the transcendental. Her wall-hung Well pieces reflect the viewer in sumptuous blues and pinks, the warm neon recalling the glow of club lights or bar signage. Her Sentinel works pull at lost utopian visions of the past, unsettling normative temporalities and social formations.