Opening Reception: Friday, October 9, 6 – 9 pm
Performance: Sunday, October 25, 2 pm
You Are the Hole is the theatre of desire, abstracted. By presenting the self as something constructed and performed, Joel Parsons gently prods the human dichotomy of yearning to divulge and yearning to conceal.
Using the structural components of a theatre, he establishes an installation space that is simultaneously formal and intimate. Occupying the transformed stage are sculptures in voluptuous pinks and nudes, a flesh-like latex curtain and dozens of small drawings. Parsons has made a zine to accompany the exhibition, which will be available in the gallery.
The culmination is Parsons’ performance of his originally-choreographed piece, “Beholding and Being Held.”
Joel Parsons is an artist, writer, and curator based in Memphis, TN. He is an Assistant Professor of Art and Director of Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College, co-director of Beige, an otherwise space for art and performance, and a founding member of the ArtsMemphis Artist Advisory Council. A graduate of Rhodes College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he has exhibited his work in Memphis at the Powerhouse, Material, and Southfork Gallery, as well as at Western Exhibtions in Chicago, and venues in Peru, India, and South Africa.
On Thursday, August 23, Crosstown Arts hosted a block party to celebrate the installation of the spinning bike wheel sculpture, aka Beacon, by artists Colin Kidder and Eli Gold. We were excited to recognize the artists and the community members who helped make this project happen.
The concept for Beacon was proposed by the artists at Crosstown Arts’ Memfeast 2 in April 2011 and was made possible with support from Memphians Harry Freeman and Sara Ratner.
Special thanks to Sara Ratner and Harry Freeman, Grinder Taber and Grinder, Inc., Peddler Bike Shop and Outdoors, Inc.
Many thanks to the Fuel Food Truck, Yolo and Dwayne Butcher for the food; and to Tout Lemon, Jeremy Shrader, Sean Murphy, Jamie Harmon and Amurica photobooth, Patrick and the drumline for entertainment, and Andrew J. Breig for the beautiful photos of the event.
Artists’ Statement
Beacon is an eye-catching kinetic sculpture that moves dramatically in the natural wind and shines brightly with reflected sunlight. It is made out of 51 repurposed bicycle wheels. Beacon also draws attention to the developing Memphis Greenline, which runs one block north of the sculpture. We want this sculpture to serve as a creative beacon, arousing interest in Crosstown Arts and in the Crosstown neighborhood.
Homepage photo by Karlyn Houcek, kalrnyography studios
Photos by Andrew J Breig, Matt Futrell, and Jamie Harmon
This one night only exhibition features sculptures and sound art created by MCA graduate student Gil Ngole. He creates his foam and fabric sculptures quickly to mirror the rate that people in his home of the Republic of the Congo must make their bundles when they are forcefully displaced. Their bundles hold the food, clothes, and necessities they will need to survive away from their homes. His sound art focuses on the noises that displaced people in Central Africa hear while they are fleeing from their homes: the sound of falling feet, explosions, and the rattle of food cans. These noises, coupled with the bundles move the viewers from the role of complacent observer and forces them into an empathetic position where they are experiencing forced displacement. This helps Gil deconstruct the image that western media has put forth about forced displacement. The exhibition will take place on a bus, the location itself emphasizing the theme of movement and transportation that permeates Gil’s work.
Displacement will be on view in the parking lot of Crosstown Art’s Flea Market, as part of Crosstown’s mission to expose the community to diversity and bring diverse communities together.
Crosstown Arts is pleased to present Cloud Morphology, an exhibition of new sculpture by Memphis artist Ben Butler.
Photo: Chip Pankey
Artist Statement
Every thing, under close enough observation, will reveal the complete story of its making.
In and around Blue Hill, Maine, the blueberry fields are littered with the stones, boulders really, which were dropped by migrating glaciers during the last ice age. They are not indigenous like the bedrock, they are visitors, and they generally sit on top of the earth.
Stones can seem like the most static and permanent objects we can imagine, but of course they are not static. Time spent with these particular rocks shows clear evidence of multiple processes – cracks where an enormous force once suddenly split the rock, concavities where a violent encounter with another stone took a small part away, a surface texture resulting from centuries of abrasion from ice and soil and smaller rocks, and a general smoothness, a softening of all features, from the gentle but endlessly persistent wind and rain. In the quiet of the blueberry fields you can study these features and reconstruct the story. A single stone was severed from a mountain, tumbled, was tossed about by heaving earth, carried across a continent by flowing ice, scraped and sculpted, and ended up here. And it is still moving, sinking into the soil, shifting upward and tilting when the ground freezes, softening in the rain, cracking, and rolling down hill, all at pace that is impossible to perceive. But the physical evidence is there in the stone.
My sculptures reflect the sensibility that an object stands as a momentary physical manifestation of an ongoing process. They provide evidence of unseen forces, and they point to the distinction between the human and the non-human. Throughout the natural world, unexpected complexity emerges from simple, persistent processes. When the order of things is not readily apparent, complexity is often mistaken for chaos. In the rush to comprehend we often miss the wonderful unseen forces at work. My response is to play in these boundaries between the simple and the complex, and between the complex and the overwhelming, and to offer a contemplative experience in which language gives way to physical understanding, and slow looking is rewarded.
Artist Biography
Ben Butler received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BA from Bowdoin College. His work has been exhibited in solo shows in New York at Coleman Burke Gallery and Plane Space, as well as at Zg Gallery in Chicago, John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York, Davidson Galleries in Seattle, and Clough-Hanson Gallery in Memphis, among others. He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Individual Artist Grant and numerous fellowships at residency programs including the MacDowell Colony, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and the Ucross Foundation.
He currently lives and works in Memphis, Tennessee and Quogue, New York, and is Assistant Professor of Art at Rhodes College.
