One-Night Stands

The pristine white walls and gray floor of Fluorescent, a year-and-a-half-old gallery on N. Central St., are no longer recognizable late on a recent Friday night. The gallery, tucked between the Fourth and Gill neighborhood and the Old City, has been transformed into a strange and decadent night scene from the imagination of Aliya Edoo, a graduate student in fine arts at the University of Tennessee. Edoo’s installation has been painstakingly constructed: Even the spread of reception-night food has been under her direction. Kegs of beer sit in the corners, and art is everywhere: painted and drawn in magic marker on the walls, floor and ceiling, individual figure drawings in pen on large sheets of mounted cardboard. One wall holds a collection of photos, arranged in a grid, showing Edoo dumpster-diving, wearing a pair of platform boots. Everything—the food displays, the drawings, the photos—is illuminated by a few bright spotlights and what seem like hundreds of tiny, battery-powered, multicolor lights. A series of performers—a belly dancer, a drag queen—emerge from a cardboard dressing room where normally the gallery’s reception desk stands.

By the next morning, the gallery’s walls and floor are on their way back to their pristine white and gray. By the next Friday, all traces of Edoo’s show are gone, and the gallery walls hold the spare, minimalist work of Brenna Board.

The white walls and pale gray painted floor inspired abstract painter David Wolff to transform this side of his large studio space into a gallery. Tired of the mess and work clutter around him, he renovated one end of the space in the spring of 2005. A friend told him it could be a gallery and suggested that maybe she could have an exhibit there.

Having lived in San Francisco and spent a lot of time in New York, Wolff structured the gallery like the ones he admired in those cities. The lighting went in, cards and notices went out, and the first Fluorescent exhibit was held in July 2005. Since then, they’ve scheduled events for nearly every First Friday, and on many Fridays in between, with steadily growing crowds and attention.

Wolff says he no longer has to seek out exhibitors—they find him, sometimes aggressively. Students, UT faculty, recent graduates, and even visiting professors have hung exhibits there. In less than 18 months, Fluorescent has become a backbone of Knoxville’s art scene. The interaction between Wolff and the university arts community has been mutually beneficial. Students have the chance to show their work, and Wolff has learned from their impulsiveness. When he exhibited his own work recently, he bypassed the usual large canvases he paints and worked in a mural style, directly on the gallery walls. The temporary nature of the paintings was part of their appeal; Wolff says he didn’t even mind painting over his works a week after he put them up.

Upcoming Friday night exhibitions at Fluorescent include Julian Rogers on Nov. 17, Amanda Wiles and Rachel Dove on Dec. 1, Stephanie Mustric on Dec. 8, and a possible group drawing show on Dec. 15. Rogers’ exhibit promises to be a vibrant and unconventional experience—his work consists primarily of painted animal cutouts and is loosely related to photorealism, but with obvious stylistic and historical digressions. The animals are painted directly onto MDF board and cut out—removed from their photographic grounding—and, depending on size, cropped to meet the edges of a wall, a move meant to denote the confines of a zoo. The scale of Rogers’ animals ranges from a three-foot-long hippopotamus to a 20-foot-long dog. Rogers, a local artist, has exhibited in Nashville and at Knoxville’s Three Flights Up. He’s currently investigating graduate programs in New York.

Wiles, a graduate student at UT, says one-night exhibits are a dynamic feature of Fluorescent. They provide more opportunity for more people to show their work, she says, and the excitement and sense of community are heightened when people know they only have one evening to see an event.

Among the steady stream of scheduled solo and duo exhibits, Wolff is considering is a curated group exhibit for the spring. The ample parking and relaxed party atmosphere that go along with these inventive exhibits will continue to enhance Flourescent’s growing impact on the arts scene in Knoxville.