Presented as Part of OZ Arts’ Local Spotlight Series, TNT (Thursday Night Things), Show Invites Audiences of All Ages to Spin, Swing and Smash Large-Scale Sculptures Made from Discarded Consumer Products and Packaging
Alex Lockwood has garnered widespread acclaim for his singular sculptures, which are rich with color and often made from discarded, repurposed materials: bottle caps, shotgun shells, losing lottery tickets. OZ Arts Nashville will exhibit a career-spanning range of Lockwood’s creations in Shake, the most expansive exhibition to date of his work. OZ Arts and Lockwood invite audience members of all ages to spin, swing and smash the works in the show. Presented as part of the contemporary arts center’s local spotlight series, TNT (Thursday Night Things), Shake will fill OZ Arts’ vast, 10,000 square-foot warehouse venue, opening on Thursday, February 19, 6:30pm, and remaining on view through Saturday, February 28.
Tickets for the opening event on February 19 can be purchased in advance at www.oznashville.com for $10, or at the door for $12. While at the venue, guests are welcome to enjoy OZ Arts’ lounge and outdoor sculpture garden, eats from Electric Sliders, and a cash bar. OZ Arts Nashville is located at 6172 Cockrill Bend Circle in Nashville, TN.
Shake will encompass over 40 Lockwood works that together represent his most ambitiously realized vision to date. The centerpiece of the exhibition will be twelve large-scale kinetic sculptures installed in OZ Arts’ main performance space, including eight hanging structures made from recycled plastic bottle caps; one hanging tapestry made from shotgun shells; one floor tapestry made from bread bag tabs; and two large, wheeled objects with aluminum sheeting canisters as their cores and recycled material affixed to their outer shells. Audiences are welcome to touch and interact with these virtually indestructible sculptures, producing thunderous tones and storms of sound that contrast with the grace, vibrant color and formal beauty of Lockwood’s work. To be sure, the complexity of each work is not fully actualized until a visitor interacts with it.
Other Lockwood sculptures, including sea forms and garden flora made of discarded lottery tickets, will also be on display throughout the entrance hallway and Escaparate at OZ Arts. Upon entering the venue, audiences will encounter Dot Story (2015), the latest in a series of works in Lockwood’s earliest—and longest-running—format. These pictograms, which date back to the beginning of Lockwood’s art-making career, in 2005, tell stories of magnetism and repulsion that chronicle some pivotal transformation through contact. In all cases the subject is changed by experience. With their clarity and accessibility, these pieces seek to lay bare the uncertainty and promise of interaction between people.
All of the works comprising Shake—and, indeed, Shake as its own composite creation—represent the artist’s conception of the continuum of the personal and the public, as told through three distinct viewpoints: the interior of the individual self, the surface of the individual body, and the relationship between distinct bodies.
About Alex Lockwood
Alex Lockwood is a self-taught artist from Seattle, WA. He is based in Nashville, TN, where he moved from Brooklyn, NY, in 2011. He has exhibited in various group shows across the U.S., and had his first solo show at Curtis Steiner Gallery in Seattle in 2013.
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OZ Media Contacts
Nashville press, please contact Amy A. Atkinson at Amy Atkinson Communications, 615.305.8118, Twitter at www.Twitter.com/AmyAComm or amy@amyacommunications.com.
National press, please contact Blake Zidell at Blake Zidell & Associates,
718.643.9052 or blake@blakezidell.com.