You Shouldn't Be Here- A field trip to a RobotsNeverSleep art installation.

You Shouldn’t Be Here

(Nocturnal Hood Studies)

A Field Trip to a RobotsNeverSleep Art Installation

Gravel and broken glass crunch beneath my shoes as I walk down an alley in East Nashville.  Dumpsters, loading docks and security fences line either side of the path, while the barking of a dog guarding an auto body repair lot reinforces the creeping suspicion that I probably shouldn’t be here.  I get to the end where the cross street intersects the rough service road and I realize that I’ve been walking in the wrong direction.  I have a screenshot of a map on my phone that is probably serviceable to anyone familiar with this part of town, but is wonderfully confusing to me right now.   I turn around and head back the way I came, looking for a small alcove, a tiny alley within the alley.  After another few minutes of walking, I arrive at what I believe is the right spot, although at first it’s hard to be certain.  Several double-parked cars partially block the entrance, a casual reminder that this space is intended for utilitarian use, clearly not a location for a subversive art gallery.  You Shouldn’t Be Here, they subtly reinforce. 

 As I weave between the cars and into the recess between two buildings, I am greeted by the entrance to the exhibit: “You Shouldn’t Be Here” (Nocturnal Hood Studies), RB|NV|SP spray-painted in stencil behind a chain-link-and-barbed-wire fence.  The scene is wonderfully surreal.  Standing in trash and empty liquor bottles, staring at a dirty cinderblock wall, I see a painting plastered to the wall with a tag declaring it “Safe Place”, 23x23”, Acrylic on Paper, 2015.  Beside it is “The Drive In”, 15x21”, Acrylic on Paper, 2015, and “Art Crawl”, 15x26.5, Acrylic on Paper, 2015.  

In all, there are eight individual paintings glued to the three cinderblock walls, proudly displayed among the crawling bugs, peeling paint, and aging graffiti.  The paintings are impressive.  They all have a unifying theme and style, yet each one demands your complete and undivided attention.  The pictures drip with a gritty urban flavor, enhanced by the discarded fast food wrappers on the ground and the Virginia Creeper clinging to the walls.  Like all great artwork, you are first pulled into each piece by the visual impression, then held there by the story.  The strong horizontal and vertical lines mixed with the geometric shapes of a bicycle in “Bike in Gutter” is interesting on a surface level, but then you start to wonder about the story behind the painting.  Does this painting recount a night of bike riding ending in a spectacular wreck, or is it just a snapshot of time in a night of shenanigans and revelry?  A stolen bike hastily ditched, or an abandoned bike being discovered?  Each piece is imbibed with this special power, at once depicting a simple and straight-forward image while also hinting at the deeper story just below the surface.  

Two empty beer cans and a cardboard box sitting on a curb in the hands of another artist might just be a half-hearted hipster attempt at a still life, but in “Bed & Breakfast” the image is haunting and poignant.

So what creative genius brought the art museum out of the stuffy marble buildings and into the streets?  Who is the mastermind of this ingenious and unique art installation that transformed a dirty and unused corner behind a parking lot in Nashville into an intimate-yet-edgy art gallery?

Ryan McCauley, an Austin transplant, has been dressing up in cardboard robot costumes, biking around town, and plastering stickers and illustrations all over dumpsters, telephone poles, and walls in the East Nashville area for the past few years.  But with an infectious creativity that traditional graffiti channels can’t seem to contain, he seems poised to explode.  

Back at my home, as I was getting ready for work last week a RobotsNeverSleep post came across my instagram-  Two small robots painted on discarded slabs of cardboard were being strategically dropped in two different locations in downtown Nashville.  I shaved as quickly as I could without injury, and ran out to the car.  By the time I rechecked my phone, one had already been claimed, and I had to decide whether or not to race downtown, easily 45 minutes out of my way in rush hour traffic, to try to find the remaining piece, in hopes that it wouldn’t already be seized as well.  I found a parking meter several blocks away from the general area where I believed the painting to be, grabbed my skateboard, and went flying haphazardly down the tourist-lined brick sidewalk towards the large park facing the Cumberland River.  Hot, sweaty, and frantic, the hunt was on.  The photo could have depicted any one of a number of tiered concrete planters framing the grassy knolls of the park.  Leaping over railings, skateboarding down long inclines to the water’s edge only to run back up the stairs on the other side, I hoped I wasn’t too late.  Eventually, I spotted it.  Hurling myself off of three tall concrete landscaping walls, being careful not to disturb the man sleeping at the bottom of the second one, I laid hands on my prize.  A hand-painted robot of my own to take home!

If Ryan McCauley’s art can transform an overgrown trash-strewn alley into the city’s most extraordinary free art gallery, and can whip a group of followers into a frenzy with an instagram photo of an abandoned cardboard painting resting among the mulch and weeds beside the river, what else can it accomplish?  What other plans does he have to transform our world?

Back in the alley, I’m visiting the exhibition again.  This is my third time back, the second time during the daylight.  Freed of the constraints of the ordinary art museum, You Shouldn’t Be Here is open and accessible all hours, day and night.  And along with the changes in time, weather, and surroundings, the exhibit itself tends to take on a completely different feel and character.  At night, among the lurking shadows and impending feeling of danger, the artwork really comes alive.  But today, as I pull my car easily up to the gate at the entrance, espresso in one hand and cell phone in the other, there’s a lighter, friendlier vibe.  As I stand before each painting in turn, unhurried and able to appreciate each specimen individually, I am really able to enjoy the exhibit.  The green vines clinging to red chipped-paint walls frame each section perfectly.  I watch an ant climbing the wall near the border of one of my favorite of the paintings, and really appreciate this transformative art experience.  I think to myself, “I Really Should Be Here.”