Prone, this man resembles the protagonist of a Greek myth in Tom Lee's "Bricoleur" exhibit at on the street gallery.
In title and content, "Bricoleur: New Works by Tom Lee," on exhibit at Memphis College of Art's on the street gallery at 338 S. Main, reads like a salute to 100-year-old French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.
Prone, this man resembles the protagonist of a Greek myth in Tom Lee's "Bricoleur" exhibit at on the street gallery.
"The Savage Mind," Levi-Strauss' 1962 work, addresses the work of the "bricoleur," an improvisational-minded craftsman who makes creative use of whatever materials are at hand. "Mythical thought," writes Levi-Strauss, "is therefore a kind of intellectual 'bricolage' -- which explains the relation which can be perceived between the two."
Lee, a resident of Coldwater, Miss., who works as an associate professor in sculpture and foundations at Memphis College of Art, has used bricolage to create a world that easily bridges both definitions.
Red track lighting is suspended from the ceiling of the narrow gallery space, bathing Lee's series of five larger-than-life vignettes in a warm, rosy glow.
These scenes, broken down into line drawings done piecemeal on odd-sized scraps of paper, then constructed and hung with T-pins, are reminiscent of James Thurber's thick black cartoons, popularized by the New Yorker in the 1940s.
On the east wall of the gallery, an anthropomorphic wolf-dog battles with a naked man wielding a flaming sword; above, the shadow of another creature, fashioned from Kraft paper, looms menacingly on the horizon.
Further down the wall, the same man -- recognizable by his receding hairline and his inward-curling toe -- rests in a prone position. Rendered in a style that lies halfway between a serious, anatomically correct sketch and the animated characters of "The Simpsons", he resembles the protagonist of a Greek myth, or perhaps the sixth century B.C. moralist Aesop, trapped in a series of fables gone awry.
On the gallery's south wall, a mean-spirited blackbird perches on a storybook branch; nearby, a goat struggles to reach the fruit hanging from the lower branches of another tree.
That scene gives way to a disconcerting panorama of four stout, muscular horses, who are chased by Lee's man, again brandishing his fiery sword. Three of the horses look back with genuine fright in their eyes; the fourth has fallen, its head severed to reveal a simplified, nearly cartoonish cross-section of bone and jugular vein.
A rudimentary line that runs the length of the gallery serves as connective tissue between these vignettes and a pair of steamships that rise onto, and then above, the horizon.
Taking Levi-Strauss' theories into account, Lee's work seems to harness man's unconscious instincts, employing illustrations of missed opportunities and slain demons to depict problems that have plagued humankind since the very beginning of civilization.
"Bricoleur: New Works by Tom Lee"
On view through Saturday at Memphis College of Art's downtown gallery, on the street at 338 S. Main. A closing reception is 6 to 9 p.m. today. Regular gallery hours are Thursday and Friday, 4 to 9 p.m. and Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. For more information, call 272-5100.
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