Art Review: MCA exhibition 'Local Flavors' all about the South, sort of

"Cupcakes No More" by Adam Yungbluth.

Is there a Southern vernacular in visual arts? Are regional artists connected by threads of geography, taste, style, concern or the schools they attended or where they teach?

On the testimony of "Local Flavors," a group exhibition displayed through April 10 at Memphis College of Art, the answers to those questions are Yes, No and Maybe.

Adam Yungbluth's "Cupcakes No More" and "Excitation Field" by Wayne Edge, in background, are on display at Memphis College of Art's "Local Flavors" exhibition.

Dwayne Butcher, one of the curators of "Local Flavors" along with Jennifer Sargent, said that initially the show was a response to the "Heartland" exhibition that took place at the Van Abbe Museum and the Smart Museum in Chicago. "I wanted to put together a group of artists that I felt represented our immediate heartland," said Butcher, a well-known local artist and blogger. "I love this area, the people in it and the work they make."

As for the "Southernness" of the exhibition, Butcher tries to eat his cake — the show includes a giant ceramic cupcake — and keep it too: "I think the work in the show wittily comments on art and artists in the South," he said. "There is nothing particularly Southern about the show, but I do feel that the work is specific to our region, our heartland." So ... Yes, No and Maybe.

The first impression the exhibition conveys is of elegance and spareness. With seven artists from within 200 miles of Memphis represented, most by two pieces, "Local Flavors" may not offer as many enticements as Baskin-Robbins, but the amount and the servings feel just right. In addition, the arrangement, with plenty of white space separating the works and a profitable sense of resonance among them, allows for thoughtful viewing and connection-making ... or not.

This is primarily a mid-career show, with gallery veterans like Wayne Edge, John Salvest and Stephen Crump sharing the space with familiar but under-utilized artists such as Emily Walls and Brian Blankenship.

The diversity is dazzling.

Crump is a furniture-maker whose pieces elevate craft into art, and his curvaceous desk, fashioned from "various southern woods" and unpolished or varnished, could do a turn as sculpture. Adam Yungbluth turns ceramics into bulbous, blustery cartoons, as in "Cupcakes No More," that project queasy innocence; that confection is about to be blown up by a bomb of the sort anarchists used to conceal under their long black cloaks, at least in popular imagination.

A similar sense of irony, or self-consciousness, does double duty with several of these artists. Blankenship's "Rip Off," acrylic on Masonite and wood panel, is both homage to and parody of the bright colors, jazzy rhythms and cool rigor of Mondrian.

Salvest, who has four pieces in the show, has always worked the permeable boundaries between the sincere and the sinister. "Home Sweet Home," for example, consists of an old cast-iron fireplace surround packed with red and white kitchen matches, in which the white-tipped matches spell the words "Home Sweet Home" within the red field; it looks as if domesticity is about to ignite into a conflagration.

Do these pieces constitute a "Southern" theme? What if you add Walls' precise yet edgy drawing of a zebra losing its stripes in a crisis of identity? Or David Clemons' "eww"-inducing "If I should fall from such a height, collect my pieces"? Or Edge's "Excitation Field," a flattened vortex of purpleheart wood strips lashed together that manages to exude a compelling aura of void and force together?

Many of these works offer a sense of implied narrative, a characteristic that is always tossed around in discussion of "Southernness" in art of the South. Imagine, though, if some risky soul dared to define the "Northernness" of the art of the North.

No, we go back to Butcher's assertion: "I love this area, the people in it and the work they make." What more could we ask for?

“Local Flavors: Seven Regional Artists”

Memphis College of Art, 1930 Poplar in Overton Park. Exhibit open through April 10, with a reception 5-7 p.m. on March 5. Call 272-5100.

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