Nashville, Tennessee
Contemporary Art Gallery


 
237 Rep. John Lewis Way N. 37219
Tuesday–Saturday 10:00 a.m. — 5:00 p.m.

615.255.7816



REPRESENTED ARTISTS


EXHIBITED ARTISTS




RECENT & UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS








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Tinney Contemporary is proud to present ctrl + alt + del, an exhibition featuring works by Sisavanh Phouthavong. The exhibition will be on display April 6, 2024 through May 18, 2024. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 6th from 2—8 PM in conjunction with the First Saturday Art Crawl. 

Sisavanh Phouthavong Houghton is a Lao-American, mixed media visual artist born in Vientiane, Laos. She creates vibrant paintings, collages, and sculptures, utilizing abstraction as a means of exploring refugee identity, colonial violence, and the generational impact of displacement. Having fled Laos with her family amidst the fallout from the Vietnam war, Phouthavong engages both personal and collective memories of armed conflict with particular attention to the “Secret War” on Laos, during which the US government dropped over 2.5 million tons of ordnance on the artist’s homeland—the largest bombing campaign in recorded history.





The works in the exhibition render glitched and abstracted translations of images taken during conflicts in Laos and Vietnam, as well as from ongoing conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. These “map-based” works take the aerial viewpoint of state surveillance and drone strikes; of ever-shifting, contested national borders. However, by virtue of Phouthavong’s geometric distortions and glitch-like aberrations, the map is thwarted by the war-torn territory. The works might be read as an attempt to collapse the gap between past conflicts and the present—a distance embraced in Empire’s tendency to sanitize its own colonial past. Though narrated in the anesthetic, historical past-tense, the trauma of colonial violence remains present—in the case of Laos, quite literally, as roughly 50 civilian casualties of unexploded cluster bombs are reported each year.

ctrl + alt + del takes up the contemporary conditions of war with regard to media representation. While propaganda has been integral to any conflict, this battleground has expanded infinitely since the advent of digital media. Misinformation campaigns, state-sponsored propaganda, the corporate news industry are entangled with social media platforms, in which users are enlisted as soldiers in what PW Singer terms “LikeWars.” Facts seem to be as arbitrary as borders. The rigid distinctions and hierarchies demanded by war are reified by violence, but the on-the-ground experience of war is inherently at odds with this stratification.



Abstraction seems to emerge not only as a palliative, but as the most apt form for speaking to the effects of war on the individual. A fracture necessarily follows from violence, which is itself always beyond logical description; broken bodies amongst ravaged landscapes, glossed over with statistical detachment; the dislocation from one’s homeland, culture, and mother-tongue that comes with displacement. In Phouthavong’s work, beauty persists in tension with the weight of her subject matter. In the artist’s words, the work “ invites viewers to confront war's often uncomfortable realities while striving to unravel the intricate tapestry of human experience, particularly within conflict and its aftermath. These paintings serve as a visual exploration of memory, resilience, and the passage of time.”



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Tinney Contemporary is proud to present Sheet Ghost, an exhibition featuring works by Nick Fagan. The exhibition will be on display March 2, 2024 through March 30, 2024. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 2nd from 2—8 PM in conjunction with the First Saturday Art Crawl. 

Fagan’s multidisciplinary approach engages with language, masculinity, and spirituality by repurposing found material. Coming to assemblage and sculptural installations by way of his background in drawing, Fagan approaches form systematically, resulting in a symbolic web that stretches across the work.


Colorful repurposed crochet and salvaged moving blankets wrap shaped panels in graphic patterns. The initial cacophony of color, shape, and texture slowly reveals itself under closer scrutiny: a salvaged army bag, second-hand, homemade crochet blankets—items with lost and implied histories—are remixed, alongside what the artist aptly describes as “flaccid” sculptural forms.

With a sense of play which manages both irony and optimism, Fagan loots the fragile fabric of American identity. Kitsch subsumes traditional masculinity, the sacred is interwoven with commonplace, labor and leisure are enmeshed. Here, the historical meanings of symbols aren’t forsaken but reanimated—freed from rigid and predetermined systems of meaning and alive with possibility.

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Tinney Contemporary is proud to present Uncanny Visions & Tangled Terrain, a solo exhibition featuring works by Lori Anne Parker-Danley. The exhibition will be on display March 2, 2024 through March 30, 2024. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 2nd from 2—8 PM in conjunction with the First Saturday Art Crawl. 

Parker-Danley’s artistic practice attunes to moments of transformation, pressing into often-arbitrary notions of difference and acknowledging the interconnectedness of all things. Through dance, drawing, painting, and textile works, the artist works to communicate the inherent textures and movements of objects. Employing traditional quilting techniques, the works feature vivid organic forms, entangled foliage, fruit, vines, and flowers. Parker-Danley quilts with an improvisatory flair that manifests in lively, sprawling compositions.

The wall-hung tapestries in Uncanny Visions & Tangled Terrain are simultaneously familiar and strange. Thin cotton converses with thicker felt, and delicate thread sketches palimpsest over wilder thread lines and bold, colorful shapes. Angles merge and contrast with biomorphic shapes eliciting imaginations of abandoned cityscapes, underwater tableaux, landscapes from another planet, or feral vegetation from unknown worlds.


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Tinney Contemporary  is proud to present Clear Mirror, the latest installment at the Collection at Bobby Hotel. The exhibition features artists who engage in some variety of alternative portraiture. The emphasis here is not on objectivity or realism, but instead on the shifting nature of subjecthood and representation.

Clear Mirror draws reference to a surface both transparent and reflective: a barrier which obstructs, but allows the viewer’s gaze to pass through while simultaneously producing a mutated reflection of the self. In the age of selfies, surveillance, facial recognition, and deepfakes, portraiture as an artistic practice has been turned on its head.  As subjects, individuals are offered supposedly infinite control over how they are represented, with tools like photoshop and facetune. At the same time, corporations and state entities constantly capture and repurpose our likenesses for obscure ends. 

A newfound level of anxiety around self-image has propagated on this shifting ground. Indicative of a larger movement within portraiture, the works in the exhibition evade the various apparatuses which mediate identity and exert control over the ways we see ourselves and others. Some works express a dysmorphic alienation; others might be viewed as an attempt to wrest back the reins of representation. Through the distortion, a moment of recognition: if our differences are to be used as a means of control, here we become abstract—not formless, but spectral.

Through a glass, darkly; through the clear mirror, I see you through me.



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Reed Anderson (b. 1969 NYC) creates abstract paintings that confront ideas of decoration and abstraction, craft and chance, that mirror the natural world. Anderson’s body of work multiplies and blooms of its own accord; a fractal unfolding into a woozy psychedelic cloister that beckons the viewer down its lush, overgrown painted-path. Tender Garden features large scale works on canvas joined by a series of 10 smaller works on paper.

Anderson employs a unique method of hand-cutting, printing and folding paper that explores the relationship between serial production and unique object. The artist incises these patterns into the paper, doubling the sheet back on itself and using these voids as a stencil.
The process yields a variegated motif which shifts between cut shapes and layered paint.  The work itself becomes a tool in the act of its own creation in a narrative of the object's desire to survive amidst an entropic cycle.

Eden, Deer Park, Babylon—each setting a fecund witness to human enlightenment and fragility. Anderson’s work takes this setting as protagonist. What does the garden teach us? Perhaps it’s an inversion of the anthropocene, an invocation not to mistake tenderness for passivity. Like Baucis and Philemon, the works grow roots, transfixed and eternal: a monument to care, reminding us with Voltaire to tend our own garden.


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