| The Old City area of Knoxville, TN recently welcomed a new art gallery—The Basement Gallery—to its eclectic entertainment scene. The gallery’s exhibition schedule includes group, solo and two-person exhibitions within its main gallery space, as well as having a small project room to house site-specific installations and new media works. The Basement “seeks to display innovative works in all mediums/genres and is uninhibited by preconceived notions.” The space also hosts a couple of juried, call-for-entries type shows each year, enabling the gallery to expand on the artists represented and to stimulate national interest in the gallery. | 
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The Old City area of Knoxville, TN recently welcomed a new art gallery—The Basement Gallery—to its eclectic entertainment scene. The gallery’s exhibition schedule includes group, solo and two-person exhibitions within its main gallery space, as well as having a small project room to house site-specific installations and new media works. The Basement “seeks to display innovative works in all mediums/genres and is uninhibited by preconceived notions.” The space also hosts a couple of juried, call-for-entries type shows each year, enabling the gallery to expand on the artists represented and to stimulate national interest in the gallery.
Only a block from what the city has coined “Gallery Row,” The Basement Gallery is holding an opening reception for the exhibition entitled “Kaleidoscope,” a group exhibition including eight national artists and one local artist selected by gallery director/curator T. Michael Martin. “Kaleidoscope” is a fitting title for the summer group show at The Basement. The exhibition title conjures up a spectrum of colorful images that captivate the viewer with a palette of optically vibrant hues and a variety of provocative concepts. “This show features a variety of artists,” Martin states, “Depicting aspects of current attitudes in contemporary art from a wide variety of viewpoints.”New York based artist D. Dominick Lombardi exhibits a sampling of works from his ongoing series entitled “The Post-Apocalyptic Tattoo.” Lombardi describes these stimulating works by explaining that they are “rooted in a sort of comix-centric/tattoo look, while the hideousness of my subject’s forms are countered by formal compositions, bold colors and sinuous lines.” This imaginative world may look into the future, but it also seems to mirror growing conflicts very much within our reach today.
Emily Hall, who holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, exhibits two small, three-dimensional, mixed media works that call to mind architectural models and minimalist geometric painting, yet in no specific or direct way. The works are installed nontraditionally. One piece, For a Long Time, hovers slightly to the left and above the other. For Even Longer simultaneously links the two as a small wall installation. A nonspecific narrative is implied here, but it is also open-ended enough for the viewer to project numerous readings into the works.
This exhibition holds strong with a selection of bold pieces that seem to have been chosen by T. Michael Martin for their variation in mediums and execution. “Kaleidoscope” includes artists Judith Baumann, Martin Bromirski, Roy Brooks, Jason Coates, Emily Hall, D. Dominick Lombardi, Bruce New, Brandon Rogers and Bruce Thompson. Upcoming exhibitions will involve Hedwig Brouckaert from Belgium, Chicago based Deborah Adams Doering, new media artist Peter Baldes with performance artist Ryan Mulligan and Richmond based painter Ron Johnson.
