HOMEGROWN: An Exhibit of Regionally Influenced Designs in Nashville, TN
HOMEGROWN is a special exhibition of regionally influenced, culturally significant, contemporary design, bringing the designs to an underexposed market outside of the major design centers. The exhibit will take place from place from June 1 through June 30 at Track 13 Gallery, 209 10th Avenue South in Nashville, TN. Instead of transplanting “Brooklyn Design” or “West Coast Design” to the Southeastern United States, HOMEGROWN promotes design that is influenced by the rural culture of the region. (photo of pallet aiderondack chair by Repurposed Goods)
Gallery hours are by appointment; however, an opening reception featuring the artists/designers will be held at Gallery 13 on Saturday, June 4 from 6 PM - 10 PM. The reception will be a part of Nashville’s First Saturday Art Crawl Bus Tour. This reception is a fabulous opportunity to meet the artists and get a first hand look at what is going on in Southern design.
Curators of the exhibit are Brian Jobe and HollerDesign, and exhibitors include Abigail Newbold, Borough Furnace, Brown and Green, Cheryl Baxter, Christopher Stuart, Gabriel Hargrove, HollerDesign, Mark Moskovitz, Repurposed Goods, TLAAG, Travis Ekmark, and Urban Land Scouts.
HollerDesign is a collaboration of husband and wife team Matt and Melissa Alexander, two southerners who left home and returned with an imperative of what it means to be southern, and a desire to share that view with others. (photo of Matt and Melissa courtesy of Wilson LIving magazine)
Their office and workshop are located on Matt’s family farm in rural Tennessee. Here they focus on creating objects and spaces that are regionally influenced and culturally significant. Their work embodies a core of southern values, including resourcefulness, self-reliance, and just plain old ingenuity. They are inspired by the late demographer Calvin Beale’s view of the south: not “barefooted hillbillies given to moon shining and quite disinclined to work for a living,” but that we southerners are “inclined to self-sufficiency and simple living, [with a] widespread interest in environmentalism, conservation, alternative fuel sources, rural aesthetic values, home food production, and local self-government.”
The work of HollerDesign is inspired by rural forms and textures, yet is augmented by a lens of contemporary manufacturing. Their work is not simply a romanticized view of southern objects, but a reinterpretation and recreation based on both our unique design sensibilities, and the economies of contemporary manufacturing. Their objects exhibit a “love of making,” retain a subsequent intrinsic value, and utilize a production process that is inherently sustainable, but which is grounded more in the tradition of craft than in the ‘green-washing’ of current systems of manufacturing. (photo of farmbench by HollerDesign)
HollerDesign is featured in the March/April Issue of Wilson Living Magazine. For additional information on the HOMEGROWN exhibit or to learn more about HollerDesigns, call Melissa Alexander. at 248.797.5547 or go to www.homegrownshow.org.
------Penne J. Laubenthal
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Tennessee,
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Discourse,
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