Exhibitions
MEGAN BICKEL AND ADAM EDDY: HOLLOW GRAPHICS
The Browsing Room Gallery (Downtown Presbyterian Church) / 154 Rep. John Lewis Way N. January 4, 2025 - February 20, 2025 (Reception: January 4 5:00pm - 8:00pm)
Megal Bickel, Adam Eddy
Resting within the hallowed halls of The Met Cloisters is the Portal from the Church of San Leonardo al Frigido, a Byzantine door which marks the main entrance of a small church dedicated to Saint Leonard that is located on the Frigido River. The door was carved to show scenes of the Annunciation and the Visitation on the left and a large figure of Saint Leonard of Noblat, patron saint of prisoners, on the right. On the lintel above is the Jesus figure’s Entry into Jerusalem, a scene particularly appropriate for the location of the church, on a main road that pilgrims followed through Italy en route to the Holy Land. While the style of the scene recalls Early Christian tomb reliefs, the same subject was famously carved over the door of the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in the Crusader era. The doorway was created in the workshop of Biduinus, a sculptor whose name is known from his signature on several monuments preserved in the Pisa-Lucca area. The imagery within the Portal was designed to call to mind a place of safety and transference into a better realm–one free of the hardships of imprisonment, and the exhaustion of travel by foot. One where safety wasn’t a lofty pursuit, but a guaranteed reality.
Thousands of years later, the English usage of ‘portal’ appears most commonly within science and speculative fiction. It often appears as a doorway, much like the Portal from the Church of San Leonardo al Frigido mentioned above, but functions as a gateway between two places–leaving one and entering another instantaneously through a suggested or alluded to teleportation. They are the proposed, and perhaps porous, spaces between reality and imagination–where we have the opportunity to rebuild our worlds–both internally and socially.
It’s at the crux of this permeable space where Megan Bickel and Adam Eddy use painting to investigate visual perception and speculative futures. They repurpose the long histories of landscape and still life as experimental spaces for imagining an expanded self in the digital era. A diverse range of influences from Dutch golden age painting to science fiction blur together to create new ways of seeing and building memory. Bickel makes objects, paintings, performs data analysis, and writes about subjects that oscillate between announcing and concealing meaning. The paintings cultivate mysterious and unserious fields of imagery that interrogate what it means to be visually critical now and in the future. Eddy uses traditional oil painting techniques in conjunction with digital tools to imagine non-human intelligence and interdimensional communication. Together their work explores the picture plane as a space for new realities, ways of seeing, and theories of mind.
Bickel and Eddy are both members of the Tiger Strikes Asteroid collective, which is active in cities such as Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Greenville, SC. Nashville curator Mauro Barreto has arranged this and February’s exhibit, which will feature another member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Joseph Smolin.
Image: Megal Bickel Toolmaking is of little consequence unless it is coupled with great cooperation from others., 2024, 10 x 13 x 2”, Acrylic and Oil paint, hydraulic cement, on inkjet print on canvas.
