Archetypos: A two artist show featuring carved sculpture by Dan Mandelbaum and works on paper by Lindsey Rome.

Critics Pick by Laura Hutson Hunter

We think we disagree with Dr. Jung's idea of archetypes as a "gathering place of forgotten... unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived" primarily because nothing is forgotten, it's just not yet remembered. Secondly, it's impossible that such a meaty word hasn't drastically changed its definition in the 67 years between the good Doctor's publication of The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and this two-person exhibition we’ve put together in Nashville. Now, we're not psychologists, or historians, or even etymologists, but if an archetype's birth is its perception, it is also a stand-in for the work of art, which has just one true purpose: to be perceived. Everything else is gravy as the sailors used to say. Since we can literally no longer trust anything, we can at least still find succor, if not belief in admiring a stone form in space and a vibrant, hard-won mark on paper.

Dan Mandelbaum's carving and Lindsey Rome's drawing directly represent what Jung insists is a "hypothetical and irrepresentable model." With singular focus, each has broken through to spin the archetypal color wheel: simultaneously innocent and sage, creator and explorer, jester and magician, their work defies categorization. 

Rome's industrious studio practice, rooted in labor intensive draftsmanship, continually rewards in-depth looking. In previous abstract bodies of work, buoyant colorful lines of consciousness created amorphous shape-scapes. That same tactic continues in her new series MIL MILAGROS (“thousand miracles”) with an added level of human interference: enervated figures and faces are built atop each other, in a world-building exercise where each invented citizen stands in as the artist. At base these are figures in space: heads sprout on heads, each character informing the next, combining the elemental with the cross-cultural like a Bosch cartoon gone delightfully awry, without perspective, now drawn as if from thin air and motivated by the miraculous.

Carving in limestone, marble, granite, and wood, Mandelbaum’s recent sculpture reflects his literal and metaphorical grappling, an attempt to make his mark in the continuum of art historical iconography, and occasionally addressing topical concerns (we would say current, but that's another word whose definition changes upon use). Such wrestling, and such concern, as much jester as it is sage, presents Mandelbaum as more magician than ruler (there is curiously no archetype for the warrior). That his source material could be a contemporary anime character or a fragmentary 9th century Laotian urn-form hardly matters when an artist travels in archetypal time. His career began a decade ago sculpting primordial clay in New York, then moving to Spanish coastal stone carving for several year in Mallorca, before we lured him to Tennessee to scavenge limestone and river rocks from the Memphis and Arkansas mud. Thus, Mandelbalm continues his recent deep dive into direct carving from an industrial studio in Memphis, quietly and ambitiously covered in dust like a latter day Brancusi on the Mississippi. 

Born in Columbus, Ohio, Lindsey Rome received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Following a recent autism diagnosis, she now understands her bodies of work to be as therapeutic as they are creative. She currently lives and works in Nashville, TN. Originally  from New Jersey, Dan Mandelbaum received his BFA from Pratt Institute, New York where he worked in wood, concrete, ceramic, drawing and fabric. With his shift to labor-intensive stonework, his oeuvre has become indelibly entrenched within most ancient art traditions. He now lives and works in Memphis, TN.

Contact the gallery for more information.