A whimsical glimpse into another world
J.W. Butts bills himself as a southern artist, and if by some reason you’ve conflated Southern with realism, think again. Butts, a painter with a bold, colorful style, shines the light fantastic on everything he touches.
Now, J.W. Butts is coming to Hamilton Place, where his new installation, InsideOut Land, is on display on the second floor near Bar Louie through September 15.
InsideOut Land, Butts’ first 3D work, is a landscape of whimsy rooted in reality.
“I had been doing landscape paintings for a while,” he says. “I love trail running. A lot of my inspiration came from nature.”
Inspired may be the right word. Butts doesn’t just represent his subjects, he breaths his own kind of life into them.
Under Butts’ brush, flowers sprout eyes. A piece of fruit grows legs and takes a walk. A bucolic scene may be possessed by The Lover, a Wookie-like character who beams rainbows of love from his third eye, causing unicorn fish to rise happily from a pond. Blades of grass squirm energetically, and the sun seems to pulse in the sky.
It was Butts’ fusion of nature and fantasy, in fact, that drew Taylor Bostwick, marketing director for Hamilton Place and Northgate Malls, to reach out to him about creating an installation in an empty storefront. Butts’ work is visible around town in murals from the Riverwalk to the Choo Choo.
“I wanted to do something cool and different, to attract a different crowd,” she says. “I also wanted to create something with a local flare, to speak to the ‘scenic city.’”
Butts had never done a 3D installation, but “I said yes,” he recalls, “and figured then I’d figure it out.”
Between the two of them, they conceived of InsideOut Land, a fantasy brought indoors, where Butts’ anthropomorphic concepts create a self-contained world for mall guests. After an initial moment of panic, Butts says, he took to the project like a duck to water.
Assisted by Mont Overton, a coppersmith and mixed-media artist with experience in installations such as Wayne-o-Rama, Butts turned his heady plants and animals into a world you can walk right into.
Media for InsideOut Land is highly touchable, ranging from felt to pool noodles to long, wispy faux fur.
“I look at common house-hold objects and say, ‘I can make that into something, a skeleton or a sculpture,’” says Butts, who in his early days painted on found treasures from dumpster dives. For InsideOut Land, he combines those objects into animals and plants, wildly colored—everything from grass-green to blood red to cotton-candy pink—that seem to watch the viewer and beg to be spoken to.
The end result, while definitely curious, is not ad-hoc: it’s a coherent, created world that the audience steps into for a few minutes and then returns as if from a visit to Wonderland. It’s funny, wacky even, but with a compelling undertone of mythopoeia.
“InsideOut Land should be attractive to people who attend events like Passageways, as well as incidental shoppers,” Bostwick says. “Hamilton Place and our area have a lot to offer.
“I want to continue to do new, exciting things. We are trying to get more local stuff in the mall, to provide space for local vendors who could benefit from our high traffic and high sales volume. We are becoming a suburban town center—finding new ways to connect with people. InsideOut Land is part of that momentum.”
“The attraction is the cross-pollination,” Butts adds. “People who follow art, people who know nothing about art. People who love nature, people who know nothing about nature. Mall traffic with people who normally don’t go to the mall. Hopefully this will inspire people to be more curious about the city and what it has to offer.”
To visit InsideOut Land, you’ll need to buy a ticket through Eventbrite. Guests are admitted in small groups, so the exhibit is never crowded. It’s just $10 per person, and the installation is open Monday–Saturday, noon–8 p.m. and Sunday, noon–5 p.m. For a sneak peak, check out insideoutland.com.
Find J. W. on Instagram at mute0n. But maybe lock your credit card up first—his work is affordable, and it’s great.