Art Review: Dueling exhibits blur reality, fantasy

"Natural Truth" from "Annabelle Meacham: Laughing in the Temple of Art"

"What is reality?" is a question of such mind-boggling implications that perhaps it's best left to philosophers, poets and artists, all of whom might offer radically different interpretations.

Visual artists, of course, have toyed with and teased viewers with notions of what is real since cave painters 50,000 years ago rendered flattened, stylized images of animals and hunters on cavern walls. Not too many steps intervene between those fledgling creative efforts and the exaggerations, interventions and imaginings proposed by Mannerism, Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism and Pop Art. One might profitably ask if anything is real.

"I don't know if I could define reality," said artist Annabelle Meacham, whose exhibition, "Laughing in the Temple of Art" at L Ross Gallery, continues through March 28. "Each of us has his own reality that we carry through the world. Some is metaphorical, and some is imaginative, and some is actually there. It's a matter of effect and perception."

"Kindred Spirits" by Ford Smith; acrylic on canvas

Meacham, 68, has spent her career dealing with images and ideas that tread the blurred borders among dreams, wit and reality. Likewise, Ford Smith, in his exhibition "Escape," on display at T Clifton Art Gallery through April 30, pushes depictions of landscapes dominated by trees and bodies of water to extremes of color, pattern and light that segue into worlds of fantasy. Smith, 60, lives in Atlanta. Meacham lives in Senatobia, Miss.

"Some of the surrealistic painters were trying to find an impossible reality in the subconscious, something to shock," said Meacham. "In my work, I want to turn unconscious thoughts into a possible reality. A dream, something I see out of the corner of my eye that looks one way but turns out to be different: I keep all those things in mind."

In this exhibition, for example, Meacham offers "The Wheel of Fortune," in which a rhinoceros stands in profile in an interior adorned with the formality of a two-toned tile floor, wainscoting and flowered wallpaper; a wind-up key protrudes from the animal's back, implying not just toy-like status but a lack of free will. In "Fate," a jester standing in an even more formal interior -- these are a motif in Meacham's work -- juggles a miniature sun and moon; again, the implication is that we human beings lack true choice in life and that our "fates" (as well as time itself) lie at the whim of a juggling clown.

The piece that strikes closest to Meacham's often mordant wit and that handily illustrates the exhibition title is "Life Imitates Art." Which image in the painting represents Life and which Art? The blue-and-white vase holding a bouquet of flowers could be either, as could the little blue-and-yellow bird that holds a tulip in its beak. And what about the fact that the vase depicts a bird in flight? Or that the pattern on the wallpaper consists of elaborate fleurs-de-lis, themselves stylized versions of an iconic flower? The mind reels in metaphysical stupefaction.

Smith, a former commercial and fashion photographer, returned to painting after 25 years because of "a nagging feeling that this wasn't what I was supposed to be doing, that I should get back to what I had been doing in college, my first love." (He has a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Mississippi.)

Smith focuses on landscape, a genre that allows his imagination and technique full play. He described his style as "between abstraction and surrealism," and he doesn't mind the phrase "fantasy worlds" applied to his portraits of light-infused landscapes with luminous rivers or lakes and trees that seem impossibly tall and slender and fragile, often painted with a strong sense of patterning.

"It's all made up," he said. "I don't work from photographs. I don't know what the piece will look like when I start" -- as opposed to Meacham, who plots an entire painting from the beginning -- "as long as it gives me that kind of super-reality of light and pattern that I'm looking for."

That brilliant, almost unreal light tends to flow from the background.

"It's a spiritual light," said Smith. "It makes the pieces calm and peaceful and contemplative."

--------------------

Ford Smith, "Escape"

T Clifton Art Gallery, 2571 Broad, through April 30. Call 323-2787.

Annabelle Meacham, "Laughing in the Temple of Art"

L Ross Gallery, 5040 Sanderlin, Suite 104, through March 28. Call 767-2200.

--------------------

© 2011 Go Memphis. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.