PARABLE BODIES featuring work by Esteban Ocampo Giraldo, Moses Williams and Mike Womack. The show will have a preview reception on Wednesday July 1st and be open by appointment until July 15th.

Invoked by a decades-old memory of the single glimpse of a photograph his mother showed him of his estranged grandfather, Mike Womack regenerates a mostly lost mental image with flesh and blood turned to ash and parchment. Harvesting his own skin, he compresses his body as the substrate for redrawing the vague outline of a featureless human form with charcoal made from his mother’s cremains. No longer remotely figurative, this is literal ancestor worship; ancestor worship as alchemy. Prompted by a photograph, Womack works between drawing’s dimensions, with material, sculptural form, housed here in a wooden architectural structure, a Gesamptkunstwerk from his own human forge.

Esteban Ocampo Giraldo, working from his native Manizales, Colombia, South America draws on the figurative history of his country in a series of monumentally scaled paintings. For Ocampo Giraldo the human figure and landscape have by now become one. If the human hasn’t made its indelible mark on nature, we have tried our damndest (Napoleon), leaving our patriotic, mythological skeletons behind, crying in a river of tears for our ignorance, our disrespect for nature, and neglect of family (La Llorona), our presidents posing with their poodles, the collective weight of history ballooning like an ego or a virus (Retrato Presidencial), or fraught with the conceptual hubris of any homeland standing in for the earmark of arch-modernism (Colombia Descending a Staircase) writ 20 times larger than the original

Nashville native Moses Williams’ sculpture and video evoke his time in western American landscape, summoning his native past, the viscera of his artistic practice and the innate artistic impulses of an artist confronting nature head on. In the free-standing sculpture Oracle, nature confronts the viewer back– a surprising periwinkle and pink rictus; an unblinking, unresponsive divinity. In the forthcoming monograph Parable Bodies Rina Arya succinctly outlines Williams’ process and context as “grounded in the resistant density of material existence… where making and unmaking cannot easily be separated.” Couched between photographs of the ancestral and contemporary homelands of several Indigenous peoples, including the Ute, Paiute, Navajo (Diné), Hopi, and Zuni and Williams’ own sculpture, the reader directly understands how “suppressed histories return through acts of recognition.” With Vessels, wall works that suggest a climbing wall, perhaps the viewer’s chance to ascend from our self-imposed Purgatory, where “what emerges is not the recovery of belief but the persistence of ritualised behaviour after belief has receded.”

Contact the gallery for more information.