From white cubed commercial galleries to experimental project spaces, from closely packed artist studios to pop-up celebrations out in the dark, Nashville’s first Saturdays are bustling, vibrant, overbrimming with activity. Moving between openings at the beginning of October, I repeatedly heard the mock-lament that there was too much to do, too many places to be for any single night. The looming feeling of always-more fueled movement – walking and driving between galleries, negotiating crowded rooms, navigating shifting frames of mind and sight. Virginia Griswold’s pop-up exhibition Equal Parts at The Packing Plant, however, stopped me in my tracks.
Virginia Griswold, Equal Parts (all images courtesy of Virginia Griswold)
The walls in the gallery were unfinished, construction frozen before sheetrock hung. The crowd gathered around the small sawhorse table, bending low over the ceramic and resin objects, slowed the momentum of entering from other exhibitions. Joining the circumnavigating stream, I slowly observed the objects on the table. The stasis of the room lengthened my gaze, extended my ability to consider the work.
As I moved, the textures, lines, and colors of the objects reflected around and across the table – an osage orange, mushroom gills, vessels containing one another – the visual equivalent of musical themes shifting, shimmering in different forms, reappearing across time and space. This echoing revealed the ways in Griswold views the “table as site for transformation.” The table had always been in motion. Its initial stasis was an illusion of my eyes used to the outside world. My time spent within the work transformed singular, static objects into relationship with one another, enlivened the location, proximity, and contact of objects into conversations.
Griswold’s objects are lived with, accruing meaning in the moments of making and across days and weeks of time spent living through the same spaces. On initial viewing, they carry a weight that we cannot feel. They ghost objects we cannot know, recall memories we cannot imagine. The table transforms these long-known objects for Griswold, and the table begins the transformation of just-seen objects for the viewers.
In the weeks since viewing it, I have lived with the exhibition, sorting and filing the images and echoes, the feeling of the resin, the reflections of the objects I see in my coming and going. The transformation is no longer just within the objects and their relationships; the transformations live within the way I have slowed to watch for the “questionable state” Griswold strives for in her objects and accomplishes in Equal Parts. Her work lives on in that state, neither movement nor stasis, embodying the complexity and reality of our daily lives. As with all living objects, her work enters our lives, transforming the futures we find as we rejoin the movement of the exterior world, the ever-rushing into the night.
- From the Road: Present Absence - June 21, 2016
- The Realism of Our Time - April 19, 2016
- All Hands - February 16, 2016
