The artist-run gallery is pushing artistic boundaries
It’s almost too obvious a wordplay: the St. Elmo art gallery picks up on the chime with a series of events that “are LIT.” But in the case of LIT on Tennessee Avenue, the connection is merited.
The gallery, focusing on tactile, installation, and performance art, constantly hosts project and events that glow with energy and offer an almost partylike invitation to participate. You may first come to LIT to see art, but you stay to interact with art one way or another.
Right now, the gallery is hosting artist-in-residence Laura McMillan, whose work focuses on costume and includes performance, site-specific, and installation art. McMillan, who hosted a mask-making workshop at LIT in March, is working on a Chattanooga-inspired installation that will draw on Appalachian folk and fairy tales, as well as other influences. McMillan’s work—avant-garde, mixed-media, and often neon-bright—is characteristic of the playful yet intellectually penetrating sensibility of LIT.
The gallery’s founders and owners, Leah Dalton and Adam Kirby, come from backgrounds that blend applied and fine arts. Dalton, with a BFA in fashion/textile design from Savannah College of Art and Design, spent four years working in fashion before starting her career as a painter and then art teacher and gallery owner.
Kirby, who has a BFA in sculpture and ceramics from the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, currently partners with the Hunter Museum of American Art as part of their Artists Series. In fact, the need for the space LIT provides came in part from Kirby’s work with the Artist Residency Challenge. In order to host an artist, Dalton tells, me, they needed a “dependable space.”
Not all galleries are run by artists, Dalton explains, but those that are have a special quality. In Dalton and Kirby’s travels, they encountered several artist-runs spaces they wanted to emulate.
“The type of work is more exciting,” Dalton says. “When an artist or group of artists forms a gallery, they’re excited about it. We’re not bound by a board. If we want to show a crazy installation piece, we can. It’s exciting to work with artists who get it—who are interested in people really experiencing their work.”
She illustrates with the Senses show, held at LIT in October 2017. Combining performance art, installation art, and fine art, the exhibition was intended to speak to all the senses. In fact, given LIT’s small footprint and the three-dimensional scope of the work it hosts, you can’t not reckon with the art there (or you’ll run into it).
Entering the space for the Senses exhibition, you found bundles of rope like the vines in Aughra’s cavern interrupting your path; you could take a break in a cylindrical resting pod like a cozy cross-section of a water main. The gallery’s long back exhibition hall also invites close examination of the works; you literally can’t step too far back from them.
LIT aims to grow, Dalton tells me.
“We’re a for-profit with a five-year business plan, and we’re looking to be bigger,” she says. “Maybe we’ll offer a fellowship program, a more in-depth time where we can ofer developmental feedback to the artist.”
Should you go to LIT? You should definitely go to LIT. There are a few obstacles. If you don’t live in Alton Park or St. Elmo, it’s going to be a bit of a drive. Especially if you’re on a Friday night gallery crawl, you might want to include LIT first, before you’ve taken in too much complimentary wine to make it out there and find the wonky parking lot.
Also, LIT is cozy. You can’t not reckon with the art—good; you also can’t not reckon with everyone else in the space interacting with art, discussing art, creating art. Unless you’re literally the only patron, you’ll be up in someone’s bubble. The way most LIT events work, this is a feature, not a bug. Just come prepared to participate.
“You get to see something you haven’t already seen,” Dalton says. “Our last show featured artists doing internationally known, exciting work. When you see good work, you want to share it. That’s the joy of us. We’ve put work and money into it—we want people to see and experience it!”
Get LIT in April
- Poetry Is LIT. Biweekly on Thursdays at 7 p.m.; April 19 is the next event. Create, share, and critique poetry.
- Laura McMillan: Pounding Branch. April 13 at 6 p.m. Opening reception for Artist Residency Challenge’s spring resident artist.