Nashville, Tennessee
Contemporary Art Gallery237 Rep. John Lewis Way N. 37219
Tuesday—Saturday
10 a — 5 p
615.255.7816
︎
UPCOMING:
- Title TBD—Dan Charbonnet & Cletus Wilcox
- Atlanta Art Fair—Devin Balara, Jack Kenna, & Paloma Wall
- Title TBD—Tiffany Calvert
- NADA Miami with Sheetcake Gallery—Adam Linn, Joel Parsons, & Esther Ruiz
RECENT:
VOLLEY—whitespace group show
Caitlyn Blomstrom, Morgan Ogilvie & Ripley Whiteside
Paloma Wall & Hannah Rose Dumes
TINNEY is proud to present SPRUE, a two-person exhibition featuring works by Devin Balara and Nick Fagan. The exhibition will be on display from August 8 through September 12, 2026. The opening reception will be Saturday, August 8, from 6 to 9 PM, in conjunction with the second Saturday Art Crawl.
In fabrication, sprues are the ventricles through which material flows to reach a desired molded shape. This material solidifies, and creates a frame of sorts for the form actually being fabricated, as in the thin plastic armature that holds the individual pieces of a plastic model kit.
There is much hand wringing around problems of context these days; things are often taken out of context—we bemoan a lack of narrative framing, which allows images and words to be used for purposes other than their authors may have intended. This lack results from a hyperabundance of the other long-con, content. It’s become very hard to trace a thing back to its origin; there’s too many images, replicating and moving too fast, changing shape along the way. We might see a sprue as the congealed path of material after it has traveled from source to its destined form, a solidification of origin—wherein context becomes frame and container.
Devin Balara has of late developed a practice of visiting her local academic library in New Orleans, shopping the stacks in search of arcane symbols and forgotten diagrams, avoiding the dense text framing these runic emblems, avoiding too much context, which might deaden the mystical power of the image.
In fabrication, sprues are the ventricles through which material flows to reach a desired molded shape. This material solidifies, and creates a frame of sorts for the form actually being fabricated, as in the thin plastic armature that holds the individual pieces of a plastic model kit.
There is much hand wringing around problems of context these days; things are often taken out of context—we bemoan a lack of narrative framing, which allows images and words to be used for purposes other than their authors may have intended. This lack results from a hyperabundance of the other long-con, content. It’s become very hard to trace a thing back to its origin; there’s too many images, replicating and moving too fast, changing shape along the way. We might see a sprue as the congealed path of material after it has traveled from source to its destined form, a solidification of origin—wherein context becomes frame and container.
Devin Balara has of late developed a practice of visiting her local academic library in New Orleans, shopping the stacks in search of arcane symbols and forgotten diagrams, avoiding the dense text framing these runic emblems, avoiding too much context, which might deaden the mystical power of the image.
These abstractions then inform shapes Devin expertly crafts in metal in stained glass, and in mosaic and concrete sculpture. It’s hard not to feel the former ritual significance of these materials: to picture greco-roman mosaics, clerestory windows. The ritual subjects have been traded for abstractions, as if transmuted in some mystic and modernist iconoclasm.
Nick Fagan’s goodwill bin foraging yields afghans and doilies and halloween masks that germinate into framed textile works and tapestries. Seams emerge as linear compositional elements; sites of tension, like fault lines building tectonic stress. Some of the work evinces a violent flattening: the planar reduction of the foraged object, transmuted from 3-to-2D, demands the object be splayed open. Other objects refuse to be confined to the plane which Fagan has bound them to, transgressing the frame, reaching out across the Z-axis. Fagan’s work oscillates between delicate seamster’s patterning and a punky Dr. Frankenstein-ing that takes reappropriated granny textiles rather than body parts as source material.
SPRUE embodies a fixation on material. Immersing oneself in Balara and Fagan’s work, it’s hard not to grant the work a mystical quality. The commodity speaks, as they say, containing and relating its own material history to those that listen. The chosen materials and mediums both have their own abundant histories; the exhibition has its own ecology, a terroir of “contexts” that unravel, intertwine, and grow into something else altogether.
Nick Fagan’s goodwill bin foraging yields afghans and doilies and halloween masks that germinate into framed textile works and tapestries. Seams emerge as linear compositional elements; sites of tension, like fault lines building tectonic stress. Some of the work evinces a violent flattening: the planar reduction of the foraged object, transmuted from 3-to-2D, demands the object be splayed open. Other objects refuse to be confined to the plane which Fagan has bound them to, transgressing the frame, reaching out across the Z-axis. Fagan’s work oscillates between delicate seamster’s patterning and a punky Dr. Frankenstein-ing that takes reappropriated granny textiles rather than body parts as source material.
SPRUE embodies a fixation on material. Immersing oneself in Balara and Fagan’s work, it’s hard not to grant the work a mystical quality. The commodity speaks, as they say, containing and relating its own material history to those that listen. The chosen materials and mediums both have their own abundant histories; the exhibition has its own ecology, a terroir of “contexts” that unravel, intertwine, and grow into something else altogether.
August 8 — September 12, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: August 8, 2026
6:00-9:00 PM
CLOSING RECEPTION
September 12, 2026
6:00-9:00 PM
︎︎︎ Exhibition List
