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Johnson Lowe Gallery Summer Exhibits (saturdays)
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Through Sat., Jun. 28
CRITIC’S PICK: Jodi Hays: To Harden and Heal, Johnson Lowe Gallery: Nashville-based multidisciplinary artist Jodi Hays works with painting, reclaimed materials, rural crafts, and poetry. This exhibition contains art she created in the last five years and shows pieces that are dyed, sewn, and weathered. Many of these materials begin as submerged cardboard that is extricated, then dried, pressed, and collaged into larger compositions. “My paintings serve as locative devices, like a map to a pocket,” Hays told Art Spiel in 2022. “Akin to a map’s purposes, the works are also aspirational and pointing to a place that isn’t on a map, so maybe I’d like people to get a sense of their own conditions, and perhaps catch a grand quest.” — Kevin C. Madigan Phuong Nguyen: She is an Object of Beauty, Johnson Lowe Gallery: “Sometimes we never heal from our pain, and we never return to the version of ourselves that had existed before trauma… We only change.” That’s according to Toronto-based Vietnamese artist Phuong Nguyen, who is rolling out her first exhibition at Johnson Lowe. Her mixed-media compositions are intricately assembled oil paintings populated by seemingly disconnected objects like woven twine and ribbon, porcelain figurines, candles, fruit and drapery “that are at once animated and emptied, adorned and dismembered, ghostly but never fully gone.” With these pieces, Nguyen constructs a disjointed scenario that is both frail and acute. — Kevin C. Madigan
From the venue:
To Harden and Heal Jodi Hays
9 May - 28 June 2025
Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present To Harden and Heal, our first solo exhibition of works by Jodi Hays, an Arkansas-born, Nashville-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice mines painting, poetry, reclaimed materials, and rural crafts. Opening Friday, May 9, the exhibition focuses on the last five years of Hays’s work—a period marked by a deepened transformation of everyday materials, especially cardboard and textiles. Her process is tactile and slow: surfaces are dyed, sewn, collaged, and weathered. The labor shows. These aren’t paintings in the traditional sense, but dense, built objects—at once tender and exacting.
Many of these materials begin submerged—literally. Cardboard is sunk into dye baths, pulled out, dried, pressed, and then collaged into larger compositions. The dye brings out the corrugation and structure of the cardboard itself—its ribs and flutes, the hidden skeleton of packaging—while the artist’s hand imposes rhythm and order through stitching and layering. The results are neither flat nor entirely sculptural. They hold a skin-like tension: rigid but yielding, patched but complete. These hybrid forms—what she calls constructions—evoke the visual language of quilt-making, printmaking, and weather itself.
Though the works are grounded in Southern material culture, they push outward, refusing nostalgia or regional cliché. The detritus is specific—drawn from the South—but the gesture is broader, more American. These are the leftovers of a place and a people, reformed and re-seen through the lens of abstraction. Hays doesn’t illustrate the South; she distills it, making room for contradiction and nuance, irony and affection.
To Harden and Heal points to a dual movement in the work: a hardening of soft materials through time, labor, and process, and a healing – a marriage of histories through transformation. These pieces speak a global language of abstraction, but with an unmistakable accent—drawling, inventive, and unshy about color or surface. Somewhere between Gee’s Bend and Ruscha, Bradford and Johns—inflected by Southern poetics and a restless experimentation, Hays carves out a space that is distinctly her own.
She is an Object of Beauty Phuong Nguyen
9 May - 28 June 2025
Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present She is an Object of Beauty, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptural works by Toronto-based artist Phuong Nguyen (b. 1992, Toronto, Canada). In her first exhibition with the gallery, Nguyen draws from the visual languages of Orientalism and Ornamentalism to examine how the racialized, feminine body is aestheticized, archived, and abstracted—both within Western art history and her own lived experience as a Vietnamese diasporic artist.
Across oil paintings, hand-carved wood frames, and suspended mixed-media assemblages, Nguyen brings together aesthetic fragments—plastic twine, porcelain vessels, lotus candles, dragonfruit, brocade—into densely symbolic compositions that consider how beauty and violence often occupy the same form. Referencing Edward Said and Anne Anlin Cheng, Nguyen’s work contends with the “peri-human”: figures and objects that are at once animated and emptied, adorned and dismembered, ghostly but never fully gone.
The exhibition’s title, She is an Object of Beauty, speaks to Nguyen’s desire to give shape to that which has been flattened by the colonial gaze. Porcelain vases, cork miniatures, and blue-and-white ceramic birds reappear throughout the work—familiar, decorative, and strange. Some are broken and reassembled with bright pink twine. Others hover within netted structures or behind translucent screens. In Taxonomy of a Living Thing (2024), a ceramic jar is treated like an anatomical subject—its painted body dissected and suspended as if in a lab – a subject to be proded and inspected. In Skin Thick (2024), a durian-inspired frame surrounds a miniature diorama of Asia-as-fantasy, critiquing both the fetishization of the East and the impossibility of return.
Materiality plays a central role in Nguyen’s work. Plastic twine—ubiquitous in Vietnamese domestic life—is used to bind, hang, and weave. Oil paint, long associated with Western portraiture, becomes a medium of tension when paired with found objects coded as “Asian.” Carved frames reference colonial illustrations from L’Art à Hue, a 1920’s French volume on the art of Vietnam during the Nguyen Dynasty, while beadwork and ribbon decoration evoke domestic ritual, spiritual offering, and girlhood labor. In Two Moons (2025), recycled pearls and lotus lamps point to ancestral connection across geographies—Vietnam, Mexico, the American South.
Through these works, Nguyen constructs a world that is disjointed and haunted—where objects function as bodies and bodies, at times, feel like memories. She is an Object of Beauty is a richly textured offering: tender, strange, and sharp-edged. It expands Nguyen’s ongoing visual inquiry into ornament, erasure, and the quiet defiance of putting broken things back together.
Johnson Lowe Gallery Summer Exhibits (saturda... | 05/31/2025 11:00 AM