Spring Exhibitions
Crosstown Arts presents three exhibitions: Shades of Heritage by Wiley Henry, A Rabbit With a Gun by Lawrence Matthews, and Club Walrus, Fluvial Effluvia, and Know No Now by Karl Erickson. The exhibitions bring together three distinct artistic practices that explore themes of heritage, perception, identity, and humanity’s relationship with the wider world.
On view through June 7, 2026, the exhibitions highlight artists working across painting, drawing, animation, installation, and multimedia forms, each approaching the act of representation from a unique perspective.
Shades of Heritage — Wiley Henry
In Shades of Heritage, Wiley Henry presents a selection of paintings and drawings centered on the human figure and the formative influence of personal history. Through traditional realist techniques, Henry explores how heritage shapes identity and artistic expression.
The exhibition reflects Henry’s belief that his work emerges directly from the experiences that shaped him. As the artist explains, the works collectively “reflect my identity, artistic perspective, and creative approach,” emphasizing the role heritage plays in both subject and meaning.
Henry’s fascination with the human form allows him to depict figures with ease and emotional immediacy. He describes this connection as inseparable from his upbringing and the environment that formed him: “I am who I am because of my heritage.”
Although the exhibition is not explicitly religious, Henry notes that spiritual themes often surface within his work. In several pieces he depicts gatherings of Black angels and children in celestial settings, continuing a long tradition of artists who have portrayed angelic figures throughout history.
Henry is a Memphis-born artist whose work has been widely reproduced and commissioned for portraits of prominent individuals, including judges, actors, politicians, and community leaders. A graduate of the Memphis College of Art, he has built a career rooted in traditional realism and a distinctive ability to capture what he describes as the “essence of the human spirit.”
A Rabbit With a Gun — Lawrence Matthews
Lawrence Matthews’ A Rabbit With a Gun explores the unsettling feeling that reality itself may be unstable. The exhibition grew out of the artist’s immersion in media and ideas about altered perception and the uncanny nature of everyday life.
Matthews describes his recent years as a period spent grappling with the feeling that something about existence feels “off”—that space, time, and social interactions sometimes behave in strange or unpredictable ways. “People are confusing,” he writes. “Time moves in ways which it shouldn’t. Months zoom past in hours.”
In this body of work, Matthews imagines what might happen if one actively pushes against those familiar routines and expectations. He describes venturing “further and further into spaces off the path—in the world, in my past and in my own head.” The works become attempts to share those moments when perception shifts and the boundaries of reality feel fluid.
Born and raised in a neighborhood between the Mississippi border, Memphis city limits, and the surrounding suburbs, Matthews’ life experience informs a sensibility closely aligned with Southern Gothic traditions. His work draws from the emotional tension of those environments—places both overlooked and deeply personal.
Matthews holds a BFA from the University of Memphis and has spent more than a decade exhibiting, performing, and collaborating with arts organizations. His multidisciplinary practice blends visual art, performance, and narrative into works that reflect the intertwined experiences of memory, place, and identity.
Club Walrus, Fluvial Effluvia, and Know No Now — Karl Erickson
Karl Erickson’s exhibition combines digital animation, installation, and audio-visual experimentation to explore a world in which humans are only one of many active participants. His work asks viewers to consider the agency of the “other-than-human” entities that share the planet with us.
For Erickson, this includes plants, animals, machines, trash, electricity, and the microscopic systems that underpin life itself. The complex tools he uses—such as photogrammetry, modular synthesizers, and 3D animation—mirror the complexity of ecological systems.
Within these animated environments, meaning becomes unstable and identities shift. Erickson intentionally disrupts conventional structures of logic and interpretation, allowing nonsense, humor, and absurdity to proliferate. This approach challenges what he describes as the “authoritative, single-minded way of understanding the world” that privileges strict rational order above all else.
Many of Erickson’s digital puppets are built from discarded materials, emphasizing the interconnected assemblage of things that make up the world. By animating these objects and giving them uncanny life, he invites viewers to reconsider their relationship with the physical environment.
Erickson’s work has been presented widely in galleries, museums, film festivals, and performance spaces. His animation Know No Now has screened internationally and received the Best Animation award at the Chroma Art Film Festival in Miami.
On View at Crosstown Arts
Together, these three exhibitions offer distinct but complementary perspectives on the human experience—from the shaping power of heritage, to the instability of perception, to the broader networks of life and matter that surround us.
The exhibitions remain on view at Crosstown Arts in Memphis through June 7, 2026.