Ekphrasis

With easy access to I-24 and an auto factory covering 5.2 million square feet, Smyrna, Tennessee, is no longer a simple alternative to living in La Vergne. Smyrnica combines Picasso’s 1937 response to the horrors of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War with the Dionysian pleasures of a barn dance at Sam Davis’s historic home in Rutherford County, Tennessee. Are the rampaging farm animals presaging the cultural sea change affecting all who choose not to live in nearby Nashville? Can the chiaroscuro mute the colors of the ongoing sexuality shift within the populace? Who wins in the end? The horse, of course.