Art Review: Abstract beauty lies below surface in Holly Cole's '(Re:)claimed,' Cara Tomlinson's 'One to Other'

Cara Tomlinson, "User Illusion," 2011, oil on linen

Holly Cole, "Contingency," 2011, reclaimed wood, spray paint

Abstraction thrives in Memphis. Five exhibitions currently feature works by painters who toil in the tradition of American abstraction as it has traveled from Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove in the 1910s and '20s through Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline and other artists in the 1940s and '50, to later practitioners like Sean Scully, Elizabeth Murray and Phillip Taafe.

In Memphis, such artists and teachers as Pinkney Herbert, Hamlett Dobbins and the late Richard Knowles have exerted tremendous influence on their students and the tenor of local art.

I'm going to cover all five of the exhibitions I mentioned in the next few weeks, beginning today with two curated by Dobbins: "(Re:)claimed," a small show by Holly Cole at Material, Dobbins' storefront gallery on Broad, and "One to Other: Paintings, Objects & Drawing" by Cara Tomlinson at Rhodes College's Clough-Hanson Gallery, where Dobbins is director.

Cole, a bachelor of fine arts candidate at the University of Memphis, offers five works, one of which is a painting, and four sculptures, three wood, one bronze. The painting, "WTF?!OMG!," actually is not abstract and does not convey the design sense and wit of the sculptures. As all good art should do, these pieces, especially the three wood constructions, make a claim — to borrow from the exhibition title — on the viewers' attention and imagination.

The somewhat awkwardly constructed exhibition title refers to the fact that the artist employs used materials in her work. The three wood pieces — "Trace," "Vestige" and "Contingency" — are made of reclaimed slats and narrow boards that retain evidence of their lives, in the form of a few scars and gouges, a chip out here, a split in the grain there, all elements that Cole allows a part in the composition. While we assume that the bronze piece, "Gleaming Pine," is not fashioned from used materials, the piece itself could function as a reclamation of sorts of the visual motif of juts and angles and mazelike Chutes and Ladders.

These three wall constructions hang in place — one reaches down and delicately touches the floor — and occupy space with complete confidence and aplomb. Even the two unpainted ones look elegant, sort of warm and brittle at the same time, while the painted one exerts its own dynamic of multiple stripes and colors. Here's the trick, though. "Trace" and "Vestige," the unpainted pieces, include the term "gouache" on the label description. Where would that gouache — a sort of thick watercolor — be?

It takes a patient eye to discern that the array of shadows cast by the lights shining through the struts and angles are false; they're gently and softly painted on the walls under the pieces, a device that deepens the implication of the ideas of "trace" and "vestige" while sneakily tricking our perceptions. I, for one, was happy to be hoodwinked in such an eloquent fashion.

At Clough-Hanson Gallery, Cara Tomlinson establishes a sense of quiet calm and meditative poise that is positively immersing. These are in the 12 oil on canvas board paintings, which vary in size from almost tiny (and, I have to say, sort of cute) to as large as 60-by-72 inches.

On the floor, however, reside 10 "Supplements," as they are referred to, garish, lumpy constructions riding on small wooden platforms on wheels; these considerably raise the temperature in the gallery, at least at ankle-level. At first I thought that the "Supplements" didn't fit with the mysteriously layered and enigmatic tranquility of the paintings, but after spending a few minutes walking around, I realized that they were necessary to provoke the raw rudeness and riot that necessarily balance the solemnity of our thoughtful occasions.

Not that a few of the paintings don't include playful touches, but primarily these works succeed in creating geographies where none existed and in conjuring visual materials that no one else could have imagined. Look at them from far away, from middle distance and, particularly, close up, because they are surpassingly beautiful, in strange and memorable form, in pale, muted colors and in the myriad technical feats that Tomlinson uses to vary the texture and the penetration of the surface.

'(Re:)claimed,' by Holly Cole

At Material, 2553 Broad, through Nov. 11. Call (901) 219-1943

'One to Other: Paintings, Objects, and Drawings,' by Cara Tomlinson

At Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, through Dec. 7. Call (901) 843-3442.

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