by Audrey Molloy

Response > Nashville, Tennessee
April 25th, 2018

Leticia Bajuyo. “Turf Rolls” 2017. Installation view. “Land Report East 5” Curated by, Land Report Collective, 2018. Coop Gallery, Nashville. Courtesy of Coop Gallery and Land Report Collective. Photo: Brian Jobe.

Land Report Collective debuts at Nashville curatorial-collective space Coop Gallery with Land Report East 5, an incisive exhibition of sculpture, installation, and works on paper that negotiate human material and spatial interactions with the landscape. Comprised of artists Leticia Bajuyo, Jason Sheridan Brown, Brian R. Jobe, David L. Jones, Patrick Kikut, and Shelby Shadwell, Land Report Collective is a geographically disparate group of artists whose interdisciplinary practices intersect with shared dialectics of contemporary space. East 5 continues the collective’s critical-visual dialogue with landscape, but also suggests an emergent deference towards the poetics of space—interior and exterior, psychological and psychical, architectural and organic.

Notably, the works in East 5 nod to the formal and theoretical hallmarks of early Land Art, constrained in scale to the intimate dimensions of a white-cube gallery space. Shelby Shadwell’s untitled series of 4”x4” graphite drawings playfully pairs archetypal landscape imagery not too dissimilar from photographic documentation of Walter de Maria’s 1968 Earthwork Mile Long Drawing, Mojave Desert with the visual format of internet memes. The sizable re-contextualization of these dissimilar photographic reference materials as minute drawings are made further absurd by the textual components Shadwell has encoded upon their surfaces. “RUIN A BOOK / WITH JUST 1 LETTER” clashes cognitively with the image content of a man lying extended upon vast desert sand. The text functionally disavows its function to meaningfully describe, leaving viewers to parse the associative variances between a man/landscape, book/letter, meme/action.

Likewise, Leticia Bajuyo’s Turf Rolls (2017) readily nods to the concise formality and physical interaction of Robert Smithson’s seminal Earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970) in her gallery-scaled iteration of coiled ground matter. However, Bajuyo deftly underscores this visual similarity through her cumulative use of AstroTurf, a material critically discordant with the organically entropic state of Smithson’s Jetty. The presence of a miniature blue house at the lagging edge of AstroTurf in Turf Rolls asserts a disquieting sense of scale and weight to the composited greenery which precedes it—a symbolic gesture towards consumer behavior frequently seen in Bajuyo’s work.

Bajuyo’s use of quotidian materials in Turf Rolls corresponds with a specifically human interaction with the landscape, and is a material and topical thematic which pervades the works on exhibit. In a critical trio of softly rendered oil paintings, Wyoming-based artist Patrick Kikut presents three solitary icebergs submerged in varying horizons of muted violet, yellow, and blue/green. The paintings, aptly entitled Temporary Marker - Sea Ice (After Church), are framed by hyper-detailed digital scans of grave-marker facades. Jason Brown’s Extractive (2018) and David L. Jones’ Truck Stop For The Interstate That Never Was (2018) respond to human interventions of place in their suspended cast topographic sculptures, allowing viewers to interact dimensionally with models of post-industrialist detritus. Peering into Extractive, a seamless basin-like casting of a mountaintop removal site, pedestaled on spindly yellow steel, the psychological discordance between one’s human body and the small, stagnant, replica of intervened earth is overt.

Jason S. Brown. “Extractive” 2018. Installation view. “Land Report East 5” Curated by, Land Report Collective, 2018. Coop Gallery, Nashville. Courtesy of Coope Gallery and Land Report Collective. Photo: Brian Jobe.

David L. Jones. “Truck Stop For The Interstate That Never Was” 2018. Installation view. “Land Report East 5” Curated by, Land Report Collective, 2018. Coop Gallery, Nashville. Courtesy of Coop Gallery and Land Report Collective. Photo: Brian Jobe.

Brian R. Jobe. “Mirror” 2018. Installation view. “Land Report East 5” Curated by, Land Report Collective, 2018. Coop Gallery, Nashville. Courtesy of Coop Gallery and Land Report Collective. Photo: Brian Jobe.

One of the more surprising works here is Nashville-based Brian Jobe’s site-specific Mirror (2018). Installed in the far corner of the gallery, it features an elongated grey window screen standing erect between two mirrored cement rectangles with a pale blue tangent of foam-core extending horizontally from the top of its frame. Adjacent, a variegated stack of cement and blue foam triangulates the base; a spatiality which is directly transposed by a densely marked sheet of graphite transfer paper on the opposing wall. Mirror maintains none of the representational imagery seen throughout the exhibition, it’s material presence more closely evocative of reductive spatial planes and gestural mark-making seen in contemporary painting. Yet, with Mirror, Jobe mediates this aesthetic language with a sculptural sensitivity to weight and materiality evocative of shared memories. Encountering Mirror denotes an experience of space contiguous with a collective understanding of landscape; it is largely shaped by our individual relationship to it.

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Audrey Molloy is an arts writer and educator currently living in Nashville, Tennessee. She regularly contributes regionally-specific reviews and criticism to BURNAWAY, Nashville Arts Magazine, and is an Editorial Assistant at Aint-Bad. She most recently was in residence with Art Practical.

audreymo.com





ABOUT COOP GALLERY

Coop is a curatorial collective made up of artists, curators, thinkers, and professors who are committed to expanding Nashville’s dialogue with contemporary art by presenting challenging, new, or under-represented artists/artworks in the community. COOP is committed to exhibiting art of diverse media and content, with a goal to provide an alternative venue for artists free from the constraints of the retail market. COOP seeks to initiate a discourse between Nashville and art scenes across the country by inviting artists to show, develop projects, and interact with the Nashville community.

507 Hagan St
Nashville, TN
37203

www.coopgallery.org

GALLERY HOURS
Tuesday - Thursday | 2:00PM - 6:00PM 
Saturday | 11:00AM - 3:00PM
and by appointment

RESPONSE
A feature of project reviews experienced in person. Response will provide artists with much needed critical response to their work. Response is opinion-based but is not an op-ed.