Three Artists / Small Works

In an age when artists are encouraged by dominant trends to produce work as large as they can fit through their studio doors and transport, it is refreshing to see an exhibit by artists working successfully on a very small scale. Three local artists featured at the Unitarian-Universalist Church Gallery at 2931 Kingston Pike, currently and through Aug. 31, are already accomplishing this.

Shinara Taylor describes her small, unframed, figurative oil paintings as narratives. The titles of the paintings are as important to the work as the images themselves. She paints her friends in the context of their everyday life, intensifying the simple presence of their image by introducing conflicts and issues. In a painting titled “Glory, Glory,” only a mouth appears, widely engaged in conversation, surrounded by muted green felt. The young woman in “It Became Hard to See” has milky blue eyes, devoid of pupils, reminiscent of someone with advanced cataracts.

Taylor’s use of paint is fluid and sensuous, depending on expressive coloration rather than unnecessary detail. In “Parisian Anemia, Swollen Feet, Tattered Shoes,” the subject’s face and lips are as pale as the lightly saturated background.

Shirley Brown is a painter who became interested in found object assemblage after exposure to a 1998 exhibit, “Trashformations,” at the Knoxville Museum of Art, where she also works as the director of administration. Through the years, she has produced numerous witty two- and three-dimensional pieces, incorporating all kinds of metallic and organic objects, ranging from machine parts to oddly shaped wood. Several of the works have the dynamic power and style of sub-Saharan African ethnic art. Headdress shapes appear over facial constructions with the round, blank eyes found in the masks of the Bobo and Pende ethnic groups. The bodies are handled as a set of geometric shapes, utilizing silverware, can openers and tools as limbs.

There is a great deal of thought and meaning employed in Brown’s work. One of the larger works, “Western Civ,” employs a multitude of the symbols that describe the societal structures that propelled European history. There is an ominous feel to the impeccably crafted and sparely designed plaque that holds nails, a cross, a bullet, a metal fish skeleton and a rather oversized, rusted metal drill bit. An ornately twisted branch appears to take the shape of a deformed human.

The remainder of Brown’s work on display incorporates her poetry, the inked calligraphy elegantly applied. 

Lara Periuts’ paintings are inspired by her ordinary surroundings and family life. The birds she believes are watching her family members as they sit on their front porch are depicted in silhouette along power lines, the sky a blur of colors behind them. Though her paintings are tiny, the frames that surround them can be huge or ornate. The contrast makes the simple paintings contained all the more riveting.

Peruit and her husband own the two Knoxville Frameworks stores. The proximity to an amazing variety of frames has inspired her to make them an important element of her finished ideas; indeed, they often trigger an idea for what will eventually go inside them. The hours she spends working in the stores also forced her to start working in acrylic. Though she graduated from the University of Tennessee with a concentration in oil and watercolor painting, the fast-drying acrylic medium has been ideal for producing paintings while being surrounded by the constant distractions of running a business.

Periut’s latest work incorporates an updated method for working with the popular 19th century discipline of silhouette portraiture. In the earlier century, a portrait was drawn, then cut out from matte black paper and applied to a richly detailed ground that would emphasize the portrait’s simplicity. Peruit uses snapshot compositions as the background for silhouettes that are painted as glowing edges. In “Home,” the composition appears to appropriate a child’s classic elementary school drawing of the outlines of a parent and children encompassed by a simple house shape, with clouds and grass being the surrounding elements. The colors are primary-rich and the shapes rendered with the finesse of an adept draftsman. For this work, she chose a huge, beveled black leather frame with embossed snakeskin pattern. Instead of overwhelming the painting, it helps to project the image.

The Unitarian-Universalist Gallery space is located through the last set of doors as you enter the church parking area from Kingston Pike. It hosts six, two-month long juried exhibits per year, with most of its opening receptions occurring on the second Friday of the first month of the show. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.- 5 p.m., Sunday, 9 a.m.- noon.