Apples, bananas and eggs abound in the work of David Anderson. Featuring block colours, sliced up segments and geometric interpretations of a classic piece of fruit, the Tennessee-born painter has created scenes that are equally familiar as they are of the surreal.

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A banana already exists as something to you — it’s the basis of a pratfall, it’s phallic, it’s breakfast. The same goes for an egg — it’s a thing to throw at someone’s house, it’s a life-bearing vessel, it’s breakfast. And then, of course, there is the apple, a hieroglyph for love that appears in so many poems and songs. William Butler Yeats counted the passing of happy, love-filled days as “the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.” In the Bible’s Song of Solomon, one lover begs another, “Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples.”

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This section also features a pair of works by Nashville-based painter David Onri Anderson. Anderson’s abstract still lifes of oriental lanterns, bananas, and apples have made him one of Nashville’s break-out young artists. Working prolifically, Anderson has already found a recognizable style, but some viewers may struggle to see beyond the repetitiveness in his work. Thankfully, curator Emily Weiner recognized the spiritual undercurrents in Anderson’s paintings and rightly included them here. (A solo exhibition of Anderson’s paintings is also on view at David Lusk Gallery in Nashville through October 26, when he will be joined by Weiner for a public conversation at the gallery.) Snail E.S.P. and Super Ripe Nana Spiral both depict naturally occurring spiral forms found throughout nature and art history. The “E.S.P.” reference in one title recalls a nineteenth-century theory that snails became telepathically linked after mating. Sex, nature, art and spirit—these patterns all come together through Anderson’s muted palette and charmingly offhand renderings.

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The psychologist Carl Jung posited the existence of the collective unconscious, a deep layer of the psyche that is shared by all humanity across time. The dynamics of the collective unconscious, which he called archetypes, find narrative expression in myths and visual expression in symbols.

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When I was about 4 years old, I remember seeing a puddle and imagining a little world in that puddle with these little green floating creatures that have purple crafts that help them float around. I made little drawings of this idea with markers.

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David Onri Anderson is an emerging Nashville artist who’s been ticking a lot of boxes this year: His September 2018 display at Elephant Gallery was reviewed in Art in America by Scene arts editor Laura Hutson Hunter, and shortly after, he made his Los Angeles gallery debut at Patrick Painter.

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If you look up the 25 highest-grossing movies worldwide, you’ll quickly learn what archetypal character dominates the global consciousness these days: the hero.

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There is nothing whitewashed about Ashley Doggett’s depictions of the slave experience. Provocative, haunting, and at times surreal, the black Nashville artist doggedly defies the sanitized revisionism to which the long history of African American trauma has been subjected. The result is a form of what she calls “aesthetic protest” against the myths that litter American history.

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