On the media preview for the exhibit THE BIRTH OF IMPRESSIONISM MASTERPIECES FROM THE MUSÉE D’ORSAY at the  Frist Center for the Visual Arts I was excited to hear Nashville Mayor Karl Dean say that “This is a city that values art”. (see TwitVideo below – Mobile Users Click Here )

The pictures are wonderful and if you live anywhere near, or can get to, Nashville before January 23, 2011, please be sure to visit all of the exhibits at this museum as well as an assortment of other fantastic commercial art galleries and shoppes that bring truth to his statement.

While the rest of the press and bloggers made note of the importance of the pictures in this exhibit, I became distracted by the interesting frames and the stories they literally held in place.  I’m sure some of the frames were original and some may have been replacements, we’ll have to ask the curators about this.  The experience left me thinking philosophically about what type of frames we place around our own stories.

The accessories of our life are all are version of our artful pallet that tells the story of who we are. As we live our artful life, it is important to remember just how we frame things may change the story itself.

See a full set of photos take of frames at the preview

How do you frame your story?

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When I saw Katharina Chapuis’s Untitled #SQ-TU9 a cool breeze came over me and I was all at once relaxed. It has been a long time since a work has completely centered me and I want to share it with you. See it at the opening April 25th 6-8pm.
Katharina Chapuis says she relies on “direct, sensuous perception and intuition” in creating her luminous, color field paintings on canvas.

“I paint to draw out the compelling interplay between matter and spirit,” says the Zurich, Switzerland native who settled in Boston after graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. “I let the painting exist as such, let it have its own inner life, its own pulsation and vibration. In this way, the painting becomes a luminous veil – empty and abundant at the same time.”

In creating her layered, translucent paintings – each an oil on canvas work with gesso-plaster ground – Chapuis says she aims to create “visually fluid fields in which things shift at the beholder’s inner rhythm.”

“Stripped of any kind of pictorial codes,” says Chapuis, “these spaces are left open for viewers to enter at their own pace without a great deal of direction and so to induce an art experience that is contemplative and experiential.”

Chapuis received the Jurors’ Choice award from the Attleboro Arts Museum in Attleboro, Massachusetts in 2006, and her work can be found in collections throughout the U.S. and Switzerland, including the Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago; Straumann USA, Andover, MA; Fidelity Investments, Boston; Novartis Institute of Biomedical Research, Cambridge, MA; and the Phoenix Building in Atlanta, GA, among others.

Gallery One, located at 5133 Harding Pike, is open Tuesdays through Saturdays 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and by appointment. For more information about the exhibition call 615-352-3006 or visit http://www.galleryone.biz/.

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Lalla Essaydi – Converging Territories #10, 2005
Chromogenic print, 48 x 60 in.
Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts opened in the Gordon Contemporary Artist Project Gallery and exhibition of 17 photographs by Moroccan artist, Lalla Essaydi. The images will be on view through January 29, 2009. The multi-layer complex images are created in what she calls workshops. Essaydi gathers with as many as 20 women and girls in her family’s country home where they sit for lengthy sessions during which the artist covers their skin and often their clothing and the walls around them , with an elegant Arabic calligraphic scripts.

The act of combining the female craft of henna body painting and the traditional male art of Arabic calligraphy is a subversive act. By doing so , she ignores long-standing gender associations of both art forms and the hierarchical distinctions between them. Be sure to pick up a copy of overview of this work by Trinita Kennedy, associate curator during your visit.

January 8, 2009 6 :30pm LECTURE: “Unspoken Words: Contemporary women Artists from the Middle East and North Africa”

FREE in the Frist Auditorium

Dr, Maryam Ekhtiar, senior research associate in the department of Islamic art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will explore art produced by women from the region with a particular focus on Lalla Essaydi. All the artist use calligraphy as their chief mode of expression as the grapple with issues of gender, socio-political orientation and cultural identity.

Lalla Essaydi – Les Femmes du Maroc #36, 2007
Chromogenic print, 48 x 60 in. Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

As I prepare for what I consider to be a new phase in my own artful life I have been drawn back to Lalla’s photographs now on a third visit to the Gordon Contemporary Gallery at The Frist. The thoughtfulness of her work is intense. 2009 in my studio will brings a new chapter of symbols, history and advocacy. I hope you can find the time to visit this show and find a way to create your own subversive act of hope and art in the new year.

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