Metro Pulse/Artbeat/Karlyn Stribling

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What:
Karlyn Stribling

Where:
Eleventh Street Expresso House, 1016 Laurel Avenue

When:
Through Sept. 30. Call 546-3003 for hours

Artist Karlyn Stribling's work reveals faith in instinct

by Heather Joyner

The term "folk art" once referred primarily to work by an untrained or "naïve" artist. Now the phrase identifies everything from styles referencing particular communities to skilled art with a certain unfettered spirit. Although the genre generally involves people outside the accepted art establishment, it can include others—even makers of "faux folk," a phenomenon I find perplexing and often pretentious.

Speaking of pretension, if critics are not compelled to label various works, such distinctions hardly matter; yet definitions and distinctions make up the critic's palette even when something as nonverbal as art is addressed. What, then, do folk art categorizations have to do with Karlyn Stribling's paintings and other pieces currently on view at the Eleventh Street Expresso House?

By no means an untrained artist, at 21 Stribling is nevertheless just beginning her career. She creates images of Knoxville reflecting both connection to place and a sense of belonging, and her work is nothing if not individualistic and spirited. Whether her range of approaches results from indecisiveness or an all-encompassing imagination is hard to say. What can be said is this: it's downright refreshing to look at art that is experimental in the most basic sense—openly questioning yet unflinching. In the folk art vein, Stribling's assemblages incorporate bold color and readily available or discarded materials, and sometimes their craftsmanship could be better. But they connect with folk art in other ways. They present personal narrative without being elusive or overly self-conscious; they intend to express and communicate. Now there's a concept in these jaded times.

One of Stribling's more arresting pieces is a cast-off medicine cabinet transformed into a diorama of sorts. Featuring tied-together twigs, a child's pair of hiking boots, cutout pictures of fish and leaves, a cracked mirror, and roughly penciled phrases like "just remember—you are still an animal," it challenges the notion of nostalgia. On one hand, it alludes to the emotional containment of childhood, necessary provisions, and faith that wounds can be healed. But its references to injury and our inability to control nature lend it an unsettling undertone. Along with a mixed-media piece titled "Caught (Between a Woman and a Child)," "Medicine" allows itself layers of meaning less apparent in other work exhibited.

In "Caught," a vertical grouping of standard envelopes anchors the thick outline of a seated female figure. The outline relates that something's missing, and like the sealed envelopes, its use to convey uncertainty or mystery could be terribly cliché. Somehow the immediacy and brashness of red paint and the piece's title strung across it give it a directness that transcends predictability. The envelopes in "Caught," all treated in the same manner, could have more metaphorical impact; sealed as they are, they imply chastity and innocence but seem poised to mean more.

In her artist's statement, Stribling remarks that she relies heavily on her own artistic gifts "to calm and sober the mind and to lose everything else at once." Indeed, letting go is what she has going for her. Still a student, she works in a variety of mediums and appears to give each her all. Her large-scale charcoal on paper drawing titled "New Knox" juxtaposes landmarks like the Eleventh Street Expresso House itself, signs for Laurel High School, Harold's Deli, and the Underground, and Patrick Sullivan's—all in a dynamic urban montage reminiscent of work by Knoxville-born artist Joseph Delaney. Like the town they inhabit, the images are slightly off-kilter and a little crude in places.

"Hyla and the Nymphs" and "Homage to Home," two smaller pieces employing sections of what looks like paper soaked in tinted gel medium then patched together, are less effective. Here, surface and technique appear to struggle with—rather than augment—content. "Hyla"'s graceful forms are fractured by their treatment, and it's hard to say why. A mostly obscured cutout embedded in the male figure, imprinted with the words "the story of Mr. World," seems out of place and nonsensical. "Homage"'s image of a lily linking maps of Tennessee and Kentucky is intriguing, but its slathered surface texture fights the sweep of sensuous curves. Although "Henley and Clinch"—a jaunty street scene painted on an old door—fits its substrate in a literal sense, Stribling's choice of materials is herein less original than in "Medicine."

In other instances, Stribling transforms materials with apparent ease. For example, her "Triptych" (made of rice paper attached to three wooden frames) comes about as close to capturing the spirit of stained glass as is possible without the use of glass itself. Its Buddha and angel of Christendom injected with light—the element of sacred presence—are striking within a large window of the coffeehouse. Speaking of which, despite that environment's laissez-faire milieu as a space for art, I see no reason why Stribling's work couldn't be more coherently and respectfully presented. Having a dusty portrait of a collie—however adorably kitsch—hanging amidst pieces in an artist's show tends to skew its effect.

As straightforward and traditional as Stribling's "Self Portrait" is, it is nevertheless quite a painting. The eyes are intense—almost hypnotic. Crosshatched strokes in luminous colors define a figure that fills its frame without blowing it apart. Like the art it accompanies, it is alive and engaging, and it suggests some terrific work in Stribling's future.