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The Arts Beat is a weekly deep-dive into Memphis arts, music, dance, theater, fashion, film and events. Keep scrolling for a roundup of the best arts and culture stories from the week. Have a story idea? Send it to eperry@dailymemphian.com.
Sean Nash’s show at Tops Gallery at Madison Avenue Park in Downtown Memphis has origins in the Kansas City International Airport.
The airport’s new terminal was completed in 2023. The airport commissioned artists to have permanent works in each of the new terminal’s concourses.
Nash, a Kansas City, Kansas-based artist, was commissioned to create a piece called “Kansas City Reciprocity.”
Nash wanted to make something both static and visual, interactive, and something that honored those in the city, as well as the city’s relationship to land.
He chose six minority and/or LGBTQ farmers in the Kansas metropolitan area and met with them for a documentary-like project that can be viewed from a QR code at the airport.
The piece features cast produce: each features the farmer’s favorite fruits or vegetables to grow.
“And each one has all these great stories,” Nash said. “So I put it in this like panoramic piece that’s both like a flat painting with these relief vegetables.”
Afterwards, Nash had leftover vegetable molds that he continued to work with.
Nash said he wanted to take the molds and contextualize them with things people normally think of as very small or inconsequential.
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Marine life became a focus as Nash began to think of climate change and the effects of land on the sea.
“And how monocropping (growing the same crop repeatedly on the same land) and a lot of things we’re doing to the land are — even in a far inland place like Kansas City (or) a place like Memphis,” Nash said. “All that agricultural runoff is affecting the ocean. So, trying to think about really big systems and … how can I make work that envisioned some of those really big systems in both a fun and playful way and also in a way that would make people think about what those relationships are.”
 Sean Nash’s “Cosmic Produce” is up at Tops at Madison Avenue Park through mid-September. (Credit: Matt Ducklo/Tops Gallery)
Two pieces created in that vein are in Nash’s “Cosmic Produce” exhibition now on view in the Tops’ Madison Avenue space. “Cosmic Produce” is on view through Sept. 14.
The works are called “Poring over weird beings (ammonite)” and “The asterisk in trans* and a salty recipe for transmutation (larval lionfish).”
“I’m transgender, so a lot of pieces have, for me, what I would call a trans-ecology,” he said. “Thinking about our relationships with other species, not necessarily in terms of gender, but like cross-species boundaries and cross-species relationships.
“There becomes that, ‘Why are these vegetables on these big pieces that have aquatic themes?’ One of them looks like a big spiral (‘ammonite’).”
Nash said the two sculptural paintings are about change, transformation, scale, and how we perceive things that are far outside of our grasp.
“I’m very involved in science and science studies and things like that, so that’s one thing we know,” Nash said. “But there’s always the limit of our knowledge and always things on the limit of our imagination. So I think the works are about those things, like reaching into the limits and thinking about really long spans of time and the human relationship to Earth.”
In addition to the vegetable molds, the pieces also use single-use plastic containers to create waves and markings on the works.
Food fermentation is a frequent theme of Nash’s art practice, which includes painting, sculpture, writing and community engagement.
Nash, a Memphis native, graduated from Overton High School, then the University of Tennessee - Knoxville with a bachelor’s degree in painting and Yale University with a Master of Fine Arts in painting and printmaking. Nash moved to Kansas City from New York in 2016.
This is Nash’s first Memphis solo exhibition. Before this exhibition, Nash hadn’t been back to the city in about a decade. He left Memphis in 1998 for college.
Matt Ducklo is a photographer and owner of the Tops Gallery, which has the Madison Avenue space, which opened in 2017, and the Front Avenue space, which opened in 2012.
Coincidentally, Ducklo is also a Memphian who graduated from UT and Yale. (Nash and Ducklo attended the institutions at different times.)
They met through a mutual friend.
Ducklo said he thought Nash’s works would be perfect for Tops’ park space.
“My main space is actually pretty small,” Ducklo said. “I can’t fit too many large works (there) and these works are huge. … I liked how (Tops’ at Madison Avenue Park is) an unusual space because it’s both a private space and a public space at the same time.”
Ducklo said that people could “get” the works in the “Cosmic Produce” show on a surface level as being beautifully shaped canvases that are very colorful, but that other people could get the works as huge, “technically-amazingly-shaped” canvases that are based on microscopic organisms, and then dig deeper into Nash’s art.
“I think the unusual thing about the park space is that a lot of people are going to encounter the art who have had no intention of going to see an art show.”
Tops at Madison Avenue Park is located at 151 Madison Ave. and is on view 24 hours a day. “Cosmic Produce” will on view there through Sept. 14.
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