Art Review: Time running out to view two provocative exhibits

"Dark Matter" by Suzanne Broughel is a dense configuration of band-aids on a clear plastic sheet.

The two shows discussed today actually close today, so time is limited. I encourage readers, though, to make an effort to see at least one of these because they are powerful and strangely moving displays.

The most public and provocative is Suzanne Broughel's "Lied, Tied & Dyed," at the Jones Gallery of the Department of Art at the University of Memphis. Using everyday materials like bed sheets, basketballs, hoops and nets, file folders and Band-aids, the New York artist explores notions of skin color and racial identity in social and cultural contexts. The inspiration for part of the work in "Lied, Tied & Dyed" is the African Burial Ground National Monument, on the site where an extensive slave cemetery was discovered in Lower Manhattan in 1991. Four hundred bodies remained at the burial ground, though it has been estimated that 15,000 to 20,000 black people were buried there between the late 17th century and 1812.

Utilizing gouache on heavy paper, Melba Price connects her untitled works with a thread of vulnerability in her subjects.

As part of her project, Broughel went to all the drug stores in a 40-acre area around the burial ground and bought band-aids in every skin color and shade available. Using these band-aids, the artist created two of the major works in the exhibition, "Dark Matter" and "Forty Acres of Bandaids" (both from 2003), each a mosaic of sorts that celebrates the diversity of skin color yet deplores the politicization and commercialization of racial attitudes.

The eight-sided "Forty Acres of Bandaids" looks, from a distance, like a decorative device set into the mosaic floor of an ancient Roman villa. Closer, its myriad parts resolve into obsessively arranged gradations of beige and brownish hues surrounding a deep black octagon, a black hole, like the burial ground itself, at the center. Even more striking is "Dark Matter," the title taken from the concept that such dark matter, which may account for 80 percent of the universe, is undetectable by scientific instruments and measurements but inferred to exist by its gravitational effects on other cosmic objects. (Got that?)

The dark matter in this monumental piece -- 7-by-5 feet -- consists of black band-aids, on a clear plastic sheet, that cluster in more and more dense configuration until at the center they form a black shape like a dark star; the irony is that the gauze pad on the inside of each band-aid is pure white. Black and white seem inescapable from each other. Like the character in Ralph Ellison's novel "Invisible Man," the dark matter here is an unknown, undetectable force that nevertheless exercises immense psychological power.

At Rhodes College's Clough-Hanson gallery, Melba Price's "I Will Take Care of You" is a very different exhibition: quiet, personal and utterly convincing. The artist, based in Minneapolis-St. Paul, worked with images of young people -- that is, teens and 20s -- from free photography web sites with the intention of producing 50 small-scale portraits, executed with gouache on heavy paper. Nineteen of these unframed pieces hang at Clough-Hanson in a spare setting devoid of commentary.

You feel as if you know these young people, with their questioning looks, frank glances, shy tucks of the head, their inchoate expressions of tentative hope or fleeting hopelessness, gazing at the future with, already it seems, some aspect of regret and wearing their casual clothes like robes of a state of awkward grace. Price's technique is painterly, brushy, and her virtuosity somehow achieves a sense of detachment -- after all, she does not know these kids -- and yet personalizes them too. There is no narrative; each piece exists on its own. Yet a thread of vulnerability, at times almost overwhelming, connects each image to the others.

Broughel's work at the Jones Gallery is ingenious and thoughtful, though I am less convinced by the basketball pieces, from 2006 to 2010, than the more coherent band-aid works. Price's exhibition, on the other hand, feels seamless. Each is worth a look before they close today and leave town.

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Melba Price, "I Will Take Care of You"

At Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College. The exhibit closes today; gallery hours are 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. Call 843-3442.

Suzanne Broughel, "Lied, Tied & Dyed"

At Jones Gallery, University of Memphis; closing today. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. Call 678-2216

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