“Contact,” Tara Dugger
In her first solo exhibition, mixed-media artist Tara Dugger operates at the punk intersection of forging and foraging. The result, Angel’s Echo, is an intimate collection of DIY collage art and fashion.
Showing through May 18 at Random Sample in West Nashville, Angel’s Echo includes 17 prints and collages, as well as a collection of altered and painted garments and accessories. In the center of the gallery, a pillar acts as a kind of altar, with several objects stacked atop — a heavy silver chain, a large black pyramidal candle, a small plastic cube that contains a coil of plastic mesh and printed transparency film, like a trapped bit of sloughed snakeskin.
Dugger’s varied processes include printmaking and painting, but she also works with sunlight photo transfers and exposure lamps. She says her list of materials is “anything I can get my hands on,” and includes offcuts, magazine cutouts and ephemera found in the streets of the Nations. The effects of these different techniques are left visible, so there are jagged rips of paper, rough edges of plastic, dangling threads and fistfuls of crushed flowers throughout. Dugger has made some of the garments herself with second-hand fabric, but most are thrifted pieces that have been adorned and modified with stitches and slashes of paint. Chains swing from the brims of ballcaps, colors run in long drips, big silver safety pins pierce big silver grommets.
The punk art of the 1970s was all trash and scavenged refuse too — anything accessible was fair game, and it was never cost-prohibitive. The only thing that was truly “new” about punk was the attitude: disruptive, rude, irreverent. And while Dugger’s attitude is definitely new, her revelations are directed inward. Her creative process has led to a level of vulnerability, raw emotion and public self-acceptance that she’s previously never known.
“I struggled a lot in high school because I had [an autoimmune] diagnosis that was really difficult to deal with,” says Dugger, who attended Nashville School of the Arts. “A lot of those years, just being a teenager and having this heavy [burden of] learning to live with autoimmune illness — it felt like survival mode for a long time, and in those times, creating felt harder.”
Dugger is a child of West Nashville. She “grew up poor” in the Nations and found her place in the neighborhood punk scene. Random Sample even occupies the small building where Dugger’s father operated his guitar-repair business for nearly a decade. This is the kind of “full-circle” moment that runs throughout Angel’s Echo. Free-form painted circles appear as a recurring motif on many of the garments, and several of the prints find their way onto T-shirts, such as “Hot Springs,” a haunting black-and-white scene of a crumbling stone staircase.
Along with her diagnosis, Dugger is open about other dark areas in her life, particularly a “breakdown” in 2022.
“It was such a heavy time for me,” she says. “It really made me feel excited to be alive when I started to get better. I was excited to make things and be vulnerable, and that’s always been a challenge. I think that this has been a really good practice for me to just, like, put myself out there.”
“Echo,” Tara Dugger
Dugger’s colors are moody and mottled, with dark blue, black and white occupying most of the space. But bright colors — particularly saturated yellow and traffic-cone orange — erupt from the pieces that showcase expressive, naked female bodies. “Receive” is a powerful yellow sequence of intimate scenes between two women, while the yellow smiley faces of plastic grocery bags suffocate the edges of erotic magazine clippings in “Exact” and “Once More.”
Each piece in Angel’s Echo that contains a woman’s body feels like a safe and trusted experience — there is power and ownership to Dugger’s display of sexuality. The most aggressive image is in “Exact,” in which a woman’s mouth is crammed full of cigars, but even this potential violence is tempered by the presence of the woman’s nipple, a raised little punctuation mark that looks somewhat like a cigar tip — a similarity that softens the aggression and maybe even makes it playful.
“Exact,” Tara Dugger
The March 2 opening reception for Angel’s Echo was also the first fashion show held at Random Sample. Models in Dugger’s designs marched out of the gallery and onto the sidewalk, their faces obscured in bunched fabric veils, a throbbing ambient track playing in the background. To once again bring things full circle, the closing reception on May 18 will coincide with the publication of a book inspired by the show, to be published by Renascence Books. The book, also titled Angel’s Echo, will include collage art and emulsion lifts from Polaroids taken during the fashion show. When it comes to feminist punk art, nothing seems more appropriate than a zine or book that celebrates the human body and subverts their objectification — especially female bodies.
In the act of dismembering and reassembling the discarded pieces of her neighborhood, Dugger has found a way to counteract the violence of losing control over her body. Diagnoses and darkness can stick to a person, and you have no choice in the matter; with fashion, you can choose exactly what you’ll carry with you. Fans of Dugger’s intimate DIY style can follow her this summer to the Red 225 Gallery at The Packing Plant, where she’ll be participating in an ideal show for her work: an all-women exhibition in which the theme is intimacy.
