This April, OZ Arts Nashville is proud to present Muddle, Nashville-based artist Tess Erlenborn’s first solo show.

In this new series, Erlenborn specifically addresses shared human reactionary tendencies. She muddles, confuses, or disarranges order with scattered fragments of biologically inspired patterns and textures, while also hinting at the way in which we compartmentalize and apply order and structure to our days, despite life’s inevitabilities. The act of painting repeated patterns correlates to the specific way in which we handle and respond to inevitable traumatic or emotional occurrences in life. Drawing on patterns found in diseases, cell growth, and natural phenomena, Erlenborn then applies bright, playful, often considered feminine colors, creating compositions that mask and make light of these darker components, similar to the way we suppress and mask our true feelings and fears. These compositions therefore become an escape for her – a literal representation of shared coping mechanisms. Expanding the compositions off the confinements of the canvases subtly indicates the ways in which our emotions have a way of revealing themselves in unexpected and often unwanted ways, breaking our attempts to compartmentalize and contain them. Erlenborn blurs the lines by allowing these pieces to escape their prescribed boundaries, questioning what is considered as socially acceptable, how we find a sane way to cope and what is considered insane.

BIOGRAPHY: Tess Erlenborn is an artist from Nashville, TN. She graduated cum laude from Sewanee: The University of the South with a B.F.A. under the honors program in 2014. Her studio practices include acrylic and oil painting and murals. She is currently represented by Gallery 1930 in Birmingham and the Nashville Artist Collective. She is a member of the Nashville Walls Project, contributed to the Off The Walls Mural on Charlotte Pike, and is working with Metro Arts as part of their artist grant for the Envision Nolensville Pike Project. Follow her @tesserlenbornart