Exhibitions

TRANSLATIONS

The Packing Plant / 507 Hagan St. December 11, 2023 - January 12, 2024

Peyton Byrd, Anna Harris, Halle Harris,Yadial Ketema, Calista Kweon, Zoe Nichols, Laurie Pannell, Olivia Pulliam, Addie Ryder

Translations explores the metamorphosis that occurs when an artist takes their original source of inspiration and moves it into a visual language. In poetry, the best translations are rarely literal. The translator is tasked with interpreting the piece, operating at the crossroads of past and present, figurative and literal, intangible and tangible, organic and synthetic. In every translation, the final product can ultimately serve as a mirror, reflecting back what lens and filters the translators used. A part of the translator is woven into the piece, discoverable to those who look for it. Featuring the work of nine different emerging artists working in Nashville, Tennessee, Translations looks at how these artists attempt to process and translate both the internal and external worlds into a visual language.

This exhibition joins photography, painting, and sculpture, showcasing the shifts, changes, and relationships that occur in the works when placed next to one another. Like different words in a translation, the order and emphasis bring to light alternative meanings in the works. Translations provides a framework through which one can think about both artwork and artmaking by presenting how different emerging artists reconceptualize the external world.

This reconceptualization can manifest in completely different ways depending on the artist. For instance, Spinal Spirits by Zoe Nichols combines a cyanotype with sculpture to investigate the relationship between the tangible and intangible as she translates one form into another. The two different mediums playfully call back and respond to each other as Nichols stations herself in the intersection of the literal and poetic. Conversely, artist Halle Harris takes an ordinary glass bottle and translates it into a monument through a study of line, form, and color in her painting, Topo Chico. Yet, when the works by Nichols and Harris are taken in together, the pieces are translated once again. Their meanings, unfixed and alive, join together to tell another story. Here, in this space, where the artists have transcribed their worldview into a visual language, the works seem to breathe and shapeshift, refusing to be tied down.