Crosstown Arts presents an Opening Reception for the Autumn Art Exhibitions in the Galleries at Crosstown Arts.
The Galleries at Crosstown Arts
Friday, September 1, 2023
Time: 6-8 pm
Tickets: Free and open to the public
Celebrate the opening of the autumn/winter 2023 art exhibitions by Ahmad George, Noah Thomas Miller, and Coe Lapossy with an evening of art, conversation, and food at Crosstown Arts. The menu for the evening is prepared by Chef Cole Jeanes, founder of Kinfolk Restaurant, and the food is generously provided by Ben E. Keith Co.
The Molasses Man & Other Delta Tales serves as an anthology of stories based off of Ahmad George’s life and experiences with people they’ve encountered here and not. These works feature scenes with existing and non-existing figures from folklore and mythology sourced from the American South, elsewhere, and created.
Ahmad George is a painter and multimedia artist from Memphis, Tennessee. They’ve shown at NADA Miami as well as national and international group and solo exhibitions.Through their work, they explore the liminal space between reality, mythology, folklore, and self. Their world-building thins the veil of this world by mixing imagery of the American South (mostly scenes from Tennessee and Mississippi) with local and sourced myths from different parts of the world. Oftentimes, they use people from their own life to be the protagonists of these narratives. Major themes they explore in their paintings currently include generational history, transformation, consequence, and spiritual alchemy.
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Days follows the everyday observations of the structures we interact with. The houses become more than just a residence, but become individuals themselves. The shadows start to blur the line of where the walls stop and where a presence might begin.
Noah Thomas Miller is Illinois-born but finds his home in Memphis. He works in multivalent mediums, whether that be woodworking, film, sound installation, or a combination of materials, to preserve memory and tell stories.
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But Then, Suddenly I Was Looking From the Inside Out is about “no compartments.” Everything is mashing together in life all the time — and while Lapossy longs for stability and order — it’s all happening at once and they love how that feels — what that allows for. Not to be confused with multitasking, this is a kind of nurtured chaos.
Through a resistance to the tenants of modernism, Coe Lapossy centers erased histories and marginalized labor. They create work that revels in the subversive, how it sneaks in and makes change, how it works undetected because it must. They revisit artifacts of queerness wedged within a seemingly straight world, choosing these references, linking narratives from various times throughout history, things forgotten, erased, messages that “flew under the radar.” With the reuse of these artifacts they create a meditation on what bodies we value, how we memorialize, and what/who survives under the conditions we create.
