“Crawl Space: Playful Displays Top Fall’s First First Saturday: A multimedia exhibition at Tinney and a movie-themed”
By: Joe Nolan
Khara Woods’ painting “Champagne Supernova” is perfectly titled for this pop-culture moment, when all things vintage Oasis have been made new again with the announcement of the band’s reunion tour. The work is hanging at Red 225 in The Packing Plant through November. It’s part of Woods’ exhibition of geometric abstract paintings Square Biz, which finds the Memphis-based artist offering multiple interpretations and numerous iterations of squares, triangles and rectangles to create a surprisingly varied selection of multimedia works. She produces op-art effects, restrained palettes and clean, hard-edged surfaces that speak to graphic design aesthetics. Woods is a professional graphic designer, but these works are admirably painterly due to her embracing of street-art materials like wood and spray paint. In another life, Woods’ work might have looked like the kind of hip-hop- and graffiti-inspired paintings we see from a generation of emerging artists who discovered Jean-Michel Basquiat and never looked back. Refreshingly, she goes in a completely different direction, creating formalist abstracts elevated by modernist constraint. Woods paints on wooden panels, and the whole display feels a little bit like a set of children’s wooden play blocks, brightly painted in contrasting colors and repetitive patterns. The work conveys a sense of serious fun — contemporary nonrepresentational painting, but unpretentious and accessible. Some of Woods’ most striking pieces — like “Champagne Supernova” — are painted on panels cut into shapes. It’s a natural choice to make in a show about shapes, and it brings a lot of variety to a display that might have otherwise looked too … square. Opening reception 5-8 p.m. Saturday at Red 225, 507 Hagan St.
“Champagne Supernova” featured above.