MC Sparks "Muscle Memory" | Published by Burnaway

MC Sparks: Muscle Memory at Institute 193, Lexington

By Lindsey Cummins

October 11, 2024

"Refresh" Exhibition Statement

“Refresh,” marking the re-opening of Snide Gallery, is an exhibition featuring five artists whose work plays with themes of renewal. Scaling smaller and veering away from strict form, the work allots the viewer room to see and see again. Like scrying into clouds, hazy forms and light-drenched images come into focus and just as we feel we have a grasp, they fall back into something else. Smith’s work “TAPPED,” which places photos in front of a lit panel, hints at a digital layer to “Refresh,” to a constant, quickening deluge of information to be sifted through, to screens that turn fuzzy as we wait for a page to reload. These ambiguous forms find their way also into Stuerer, Thompson, and Hendrickson’s work, emanating a state of transience and lightness that is echoed in the gallery’s whitewashed walls and floors, a stark contrast to Snide’s previous black interior. Themes of subtlety play out not only in visual fog but in a reduction of scale that prompts one to step closer and to look more carefully. Within the static is a shift required for refreshment, one that may lie perpetually tangled in enigma. Symbolism throughout, such as in Price’s work, nods to this mystery. These marks stand as lighthouses that clear away a path of fog. “Refresh” ultimately attempts to remind us that when we lose shapes in the clouds, others may yet appear - that paths toward meaning might lie on the other side of fluidity, reliant on a continuous process of sieving through noise.

"Abide by the answer." Exhibition Statement

Art as artifact of performance

the performance being an intangible, ritualistic commitment to a sustainable, reciprocal relationship with the natural world.

The performance within a process of sourcing and breaking down found organic material an intentional act that requires and prompts reflection

and initiates a reverence toward that which we can harvest, create with, and share without transaction.

"Let's call it a hotel" | Published in Burnaway Art Writing Incubator Chapbook

Nick and Nina have no grand visions of saving the world through a DIY art project in Louisville, Kentucky. Their space Snide Hotel, which includes artist studios, their Late Lounge Recording Studios, and a gallery, is in a downtown neighborhood that has withstood the barrage of breweries, boutique hotels, and loft apartments rumored to be on their way for years. The name, they tell me, is a cheeky nod to this inevitably, saying, “If we’re occupying a space that otherwise would be used for a commercial aspect, and we're obviously non-commercial, let’s call it a hotel. Because this will probably be a hotel one day. The Snide part was just funny.” And while they'll let you know without pause that “the original goal was not altruism by any means,” they are also clear that they refuse to accept profit beyond a studio space to work in. Their hope is just to break even, but say even that can be a challenge.

Walking in through the back door off an alley, I enter into a maze of fiber insulation that Nina tells me Nick is using for soundproofing their recording studio. Snide is typical in the way of studios, unfinished, without AC, and with bare wood floors. The ceilings are tall with large skylights and paneled with what looks like decorative tin squares. Walking in from the back, the studios hug the right side of the building and are demarcated on two sides by 8-foot wood dividers Nick built himself. Facing the main street is the gallery, and above on either end of the building are open rooms that look over the downstairs studios. Nick and Nina are in one and that’s where we’re headed. We pass Peter Price’s studio and he’s there. I wave hello and notice saloon-style doors added since my last visit.

Snide is down the road from what once was a popular music venue Skull Alley, and is now a vacant building. Like many Louisvillians, I spent younger years at venues from Skull Alley to some guy’s basement but hadn’t yet realized that a steady stream of DIY music is somewhat particular to here, a stream that the Louisville Underground Music Archives (LUMA) and book White Glove Test have worked to document through visual artifacts like zines and show posters. Maybe uncoincidentally, zines are how I became connected with Nick and Nina. In 2020 I co-founded Printed, a community zine, and one of the first places we connected with through this project was Snide Hotel. When we met up they were busy putting in a lot of free muscle to get the first version of their gallery up and running, the final result being two open rooms painted back with a large street-facing window. With almost no marketing, openings were packed from the beginning and through 2022 they kept pace, showing artists from Louisville and elsewhere, until they received notice that their building had been sold and they’d be forced to move next door. 

The studios in the new building stay full, currently with ten or more artists working across mediums and they’re on the verge of reopening the gallery. When I ask what their goals are for the fresh start, they say community is at the forefront, as they attempt to balance accessibility with high standards. The current plan includes an open call show and an exhibition of photography by Angie Willcutt, another artist who splits their time between their band, ROD, and their visual practice. We’ve been talking for well over two hours, and more than half of the interview veers off into mutual friends and memories, but it reminds me that in this space it really is about people. 

It’s been a tough few years for independent spaces in Louisville, with almost all of our project venues closing doors (Sheherzade, Carbon Copy, Houseguest). For me, Snide remains a last bastion of hope for an art scene that equally prioritizes critical work with those involved, over sleek floors, white walls, and a revenue scheme. I’m finally on my way out, only because it’s time for their band Plastics to practice and members have started arriving. Nina walks me out. They’re somewhat forced to let people out because the lock on their back door is broken, and I think to myself that there’s something about their shitty lock that’s endearing.

"Household" Exhibition Statement

Written collaboratively with El Bruner

“Household” is an exhibition of work by Kentucky artist Levi River House, shown (maybe not so) coincidentally in our house. In his paintings, Levi reflects on relationship to place, how it shapes us and how we shape it. Most especially, his work considers the places we are asked to, want to, should, or do call Home. Playing with the tension of “Home” as both a material object as well as an ever-shifting idea, his paintings create a dialogue with the places in his life that have become, for him, monumental sites of reflection. In his work, flatness true to a folk-art style and depth vary, allowing structures to fluctuate, to become embodied and hollowed out. His scenes creep beyond the traditional four walls, including other residential forms like telephone poles, electrical wires, lawns, and front porches. House writes of the electrical poles connected to each other as “Communal and necessary,” interlinking place to place and person to person so tightly that they begin to “fold in on themselves.” In the work, we never ex- tend too far beyond the facade of the House, but its variances act like tricky book covers, bearing hints at what might lie within the Home. Levi conjures the phrases he scribes along the edges of the paintings just as he writes poetry - guided by intuition, led on by remembrances, and intentionally void of editing. As they flow through him they flow to us, small moments of being and learning at the forefront of his work.

Kith & Kin: Things Well Known

Wave Pool May 2024 Curatorial Residency
https://www.wavepoolgallery.org/kith-kin

Kith and Kin: Things Well Known is an exploration into the collective significance of interpersonal relationships and their connection to place within the Ohio River Valley region. In the works of artists Rachael Banks and Kacey Slone, concerns surrounding family, home, folklore, and the passage of time find resonance in ephemeral and ordinary moments. “Kith & Kin” calls attention to the interdependence between person and place and within communal structures. Familiar domestic moments are tenderly memorialized such as in Slone’s “A Friend for the Unsent” and Bank’s “I only fear God.” The artists’ work calls to mind the overwhelming and often under-acknowledged impact of closeness and all that is so close to home, it lies almost unseen. Reflections surrounding immediacy in all its forms become stories through which the two artists imagine and reimagine states of belonging. Grappling with who they are through where they are and who they’re with, Slone and Banks traverse close quarters with a soft touch - neither surrendering to sentimentality nor indifference.

In Banks' work, tight-knit relationships are depicted through family subjects and a web of symbolism which emphasizes the allegorical role of animal life, most especially the deer. Capturing simple moments among friends and family as they unfold, Bank’s lens neither heroicizes nor condemns. Subjects positioned to face the viewer do not confront but present themselves without restraint. The photographs are achieved through a carefully nurtured comfortability, both with human and animal subjects. Spending time and care, Banks work reflects the slow indispensable labor of relationship-building. 

Rachael Banks, Bev, 2022, Archival Pigment Print, 32” x 24”

Slone’s sculptural objects lay flat, tower over, and block pathways, repositioning invaluable childhood possessions as more than items of nostalgia. In “Now Forever”, a well-loved blanket lies forever cemented above our heads, spilling over a wooden beam that is now a permanent resting place. “This Feeling Is a Place” reflects on a farm gate from Slone's childhood home, placing it in solitude, divorced from its fence and lodged between two concrete slabs. Slone’s sculptures consider the consequences of space, taking on the Sisyphean task of lassoing a time, place, and personhood in constant flux.

Kacey Slone, Now Forever, 2021, Childhood blanket, concrete, wood

In both artists’ work there is an ode to the region, one that spans further than the big cities and the Appalchian mountains. Slone was born in rural Indiana, and has spent time outside the state before returning home. Banks was born and raised in Louisville but primarily photographs her family on their Bagdad, KY property. This exhibition attempts to challenge stereotypes that have been set and negotiated amongst artists' who work within the Ohio River Valley. While place and the communities who come to inhabit it remain integral, “Kith & Kin’” challenges the way artists and their work have been narrowly situated within discourse on the region, constricting them down to exemplars of a greater American Western mythology that is fascinated with the iconography of rural life.

"Slump" Exhibition Statement

“You lie down with snakes, you get up with the urge to bite back.”

― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

The works of artists and friends, Nick Netherton, Nina Kersey, and Scott T. Anderson are a collective meditation on joy and suffering, play and grief. The artists grapple with these highs and lows by creating amidst, and despite, an existential sense of decline and despair. Raw, frenetic brushstrokes create dark corners, slump canvas over frame, and produce sidelong glances by menacing cowboys. Anderson’s landscapes and their hovering wranglers appear formidable and barren. His cowboys snarl, recess, and bear down beneath wide-brimmed hats that unmistakably mark Western origins. Working through enduring icons of contemporary American life, Anderson plots out the difficult terrain and opponents that leave it in shadow. Within these cast shadows, Kersey and Netherton create unpolished material gestures that reflect on suppressed and unrealized forms of existence. Sometimes getting up and biting back and sometimes lying down, both Kersey and Netherton attempt to reconcile collective and internal forces that work to shape perceptions of self. Reveling in the desire to peer down into darkness, to lean and to break, “Slump” is an ode to the chaos, hope, and catharsis of total collapse.