The folksy and fantastical group exhibition Fable at David Lusk Gallery in Nashville gathers a roster of artists offering varied interpretations of the lessons found in a thrift store copy of Aesop’s Famous Tales. While we think of them as children’s stories in the twenty-first century, these ancient tales were originally aimed at adults. Aesop’s stories are packed with animal characters, and Fable is similarly populated by a magical menagerie of cats, birds, lions, and snakes. Terry Lynn’s Brer responds to Aesop’s lessons with a reference to the more modern—and strikingly more Southern—trickster tales attributed to Uncle Remus. Lynn’s large painted collage pictures a man in a rabbit head mask surrounded by a bunch of bunnies. In Leslie Holt’s paintings Slow and Steady and Fast and Foolish, “The Tortoise and the Hare” is illustrated in a diptych. Like shadow puppets, embroidered details give shape to gesturing hands that appear to cast the black-threaded shadows of the titular racers against overlapping fields of color.

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Huger Foote — son of legendary Civil War historian Shelby Foote — took inspiration from the tendency for fables to be told from an animal’s point of view, and made photographs with that perspective in mind. In his three untitled photographs — each of which echoes the artist’s time spent under the tutelage of William Eggleston — details like a scrap of snack-cake cellophane share space with power lines, which share space with ragged strips of asphalt and bundles of pansies. There is no hierarchy of visual information in these shots — it’s all just blocks of light and color.

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Splitting his time between New York and Memphis, Herbert is inspired and activated by place. The exploration and movement between two drastically different environments has shaped the core of his practice for over thirty years. His dynamic process employs mark-making and layering to integrate digital prints, graffiti-like gestures and bold color into dynamic compositions.

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