Exhibitions
THE CRAPPY MAGIC EXPERIENCE
Track One Silo Room / 1201 4th Ave. S., Suite 128 November 30, 2018 - December 1, 2018
David Hellams
Friday, November 30: 7pm-10pm exhibition opening
Saturday, December 1: 3pm-9:30pm exhibition closing (Art Crawl) • 9:30pm benefit auction
The two-night interactive event will feature a retail-style exhibition of objects and videos contributed by numerous artists and powered by a system of barcode-scanning computer kiosks. There will also be bins full of post-consumer artifacts that viewers can dig around in and use as building blocks to create their own “crappy” photographs. And at 9:30pm Saturday, December 1st, the event culminates in an entertaining benefit auction supporting Nashville's Turnip Green Creative Reuse.
The Crappy Magic Experience has been a popular fixture at the Nashville Art Crawl since 2016's inaugural exhibition at Seed Space. Both this show and its 2017 sequel at abrasiveMedia earned "Best of Nashville" honors in the Nashville Scene. Artist David Hellams launched this oddly named project in 2015 with a photo publication called Crappy Magic Magazine, which portrays used or discarded household goods in a variety of ways: as dense collages of junk, haunted-feeling still lifes, alien landscapes, or promotional-style stagings for products exiting the economy. The interactive events of the Crappy Magic Experience series grew out of Hellams’ desire to share with audiences the pleasure and relative ease of making this type of image, as well as a desire to help artists market video art works. Hellams partnered with artist David King to develop and realize these visions in the first two Experience shows. One aspiration of Crappy Magic is to find creative new uses for old things, and Saturday night’s benefit auction for Turnip Green Creative Reuse will celebrate that organization’s work to make this process of “material renewal” a daily reality in Nashville’s creative community through their donation-driven storefront, exhibitions, and educational programming.
