March 8th, 2010
Hellams’ Nashville
The art scene in Nashville has been picking up steam over the past few years, and although it’s very much still dominated by the music scene, there are some very welcome signs of life. Not that the music scene is anything to turn one’s nose up at, because the history here is pretty exquisite, and some of the landmark names in music have origins or experiences here. It continues to be a thriving place for musicians and music lovers, and there are hotels right here to help make any visit here more than nice, and often you’ll want to come visit twice.
It’s difficult to avoid the fantastic choices available in live music here, and there’s no real good reason to avoid it. People exploring all genres are finding niches here in Nashville, and there’s something exciting to listen to every night of the year. But there is an interesting performance scene here as well, and the visual art scene is awfully interesting, and in the case of people like David Hellams , performance art and visual art come together to make fascinating and confounding works that interrogate how we structure our realities. His body of work has elusive and disparate elements that all come together in an uneasy part of the consciousness, and this seems to be precisely the point.
Or perhaps it’s one point among many. There are detailed sketches of Richard Simmons and other pop iconographies, and performance works where he goes through the streets at night holding a chair as if he’s just about to sit down or stand up. It’s a brink point, or an edge, a moment before something is about to happen. He bases his ideas on the symbolists, remixing them with a more contemporary definition of symbol to move it into the realm of representational art. The notion that the work is representational might be doubly confounding for some, and reassuring for others, but at the very root it’s extraordinarily interesting, and it will be even more interesting to see how his work develops in a city that is open enough to make room for new ideas.
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