Planet of Love — Bad Water

Jackson Markovic, They Don’t Love You Like I Love You, 2026
C-print, price sticker

Jan Lynch,Sable Chanel, 1992
Silver gelatin print

Jan Lynch, “Polymorphous Perverse” exhibit, vandalized, 1992
Silver gelatin print

Earthen Clay, Rapture, 1988, 2025
cardboard, acrylic, newspaper, ricepaper, clay, plaster, objects, fabric, photographs, wood

Earthen Clay, Rapture, 1988, 2025
cardboard, acrylic, newspaper, ricepaper, clay, plaster, objects, fabric, photographs, wood

Planet of Love, installation view

Earthen Clay, Slow Strip, 2023
Italian leather purse, marble dust, photographs, golf balls, lantern fly in paper box with resin, wooden spool, bay laurel leaf, goldenrod dyed cotton string, gold earring, chalk pastel, acrylic, silicone

Jackson Markovic, Sweetie, 2026
Silver gelatin prints, artist's tape, lenticular screen magnifier, chalk, acrylic turntable cover, fluorescent bulbs, lighting gels, miscellaneous hardware

Jackson Markovic, Sweetie, 2026
Silver gelatin prints, artist's tape, lenticular screen magnifier, chalk, acrylic turntable cover, fluorescent bulbs, lighting gels, miscellaneous hardware

Planet of Love, installation view

Jackson Markovic, GARBAGE HOLE, 2026
Silver gelatin print

Earthen Clay, very real and very compelling flesh and bone Fantasy, 2026
Wood, clay, acrylic, gouache, chalk, canvas, ribbon

Earthen Clay, very real and very compelling flesh and bone Fantasy, 2026 (detail)

Earthen Clay, very real and very compelling flesh and bone Fantasy, 2026 (detail)

Jan Lynch, Jamie, 1994
Silver gelatin print

Planet of Love, installation view

Earthen Clay, Alliance of Perverts, 2025
Fabric, steel pins, sequins, acrylic, wax, pastel, chalk pastel

Earthen Clay, Alliance of Perverts, 2025 (detail)

Jan Lynch, Hate Crimes, 1992
Silver gelatin print

Planet of Love
Earthen Clay, Jan Lynch & Jackson Markovic
Co-curated with Maxwell Maxwell
May 15 - June 26, 2026

There are certain kinds of language that make you aware of your own mouth. Language with texture. Weight on the tongue, a catch in the throat, something closer to touch than thought. You feel it moving through you before your mind catches up and starts making sense of it. Before understanding there is only wanting: to be near the thing, to hold it in the body, to not yet know what it means.

Planet of Love borrows its title from a poem by Richard Siken. The first time I read it, I wanted it physically—the words in my mouth, the sentences somewhere deeper in me. In the afterword of the 20th anniversary edition, Siken writes about how meaning changes over time, how a text is altered by distance and by the person who returns to it. Images and objects change this way too, passed between hands, returned to, kept circulating a little longer so they might not disappear.

Jackson Markovic works with what remains after euphoria burns off. His practice moves through archival material and the unstable chemistry of darkroom photography, where expired paper and fluorescent light become part of the image’s atmosphere. Surfaces carry time visibly, degrading and discoloring through repeated contact: a car steering wheel worn smooth by touch; bodies dissolve into streaks of color or partial impressions. In some works, Markovic presses his own body directly into the image, folding himself into the surface without settling into figuration, more an index of touch than an image of the body itself. Working with found and secondhand materials, he reuses objects once made to attract and display, inverting light-up signage and c-prints into personal assemblage. Images appear and dissolve in the same gesture, caught between contact and loss, the speed of a night and its afterimage.

Earthen Clay gathers and tends to their work, working with found and gifted objects to let forms develop through care rather than control. Fabric is knotted and stretched around armatures; a leather bag is pinned open into a soft cavity; tape, wire, and string hold everything in provisional balance, as if each piece is still in the middle of becoming itself. These objects arrive already carrying several prior lives before entering the work. Jeans are folded, painted, and folded again. Brushstrokes are both the surface and the trace of a hand. There is a refusal of containment here. Not mess for its own sake, but an insistence that things can remain unresolved and still hold together. To refuse to throw something away, to keep finding it another form, is its own kind of love.

Jan Lynch photographed like a priest. That is how his archivist and friend Ed White once described him: every person offered a kind of sainthood, each moment held with holiness inside the frame. Jan was a Byzantine Catholic priest and photographer from Knoxville who spent the 1980s and early 1990s documenting queer life in Southern Appalachia with intimacy, humor, and ease. His photographs move from erotica to abandoned industrial landscapes to portraits of artists and community members—an exhaustive social world, exuberant and precarious, insisting on visibility. We lost Jan to HIV/AIDS in 1996. Here, he remains fully alive.

A few weeks ago, Maxwell and I were sorting through the work in the show, trying to articulate how you hold generations together without flattening one into a reference point for the other. Asking each other: how do you create context without turning the past into a shrine? How do you let desire and grief coexist without over-explaining what connects them? This is a group show, but also a way of being with one another across temporal bounds, slipping past whatever separates the living from the dead.

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Earthen Clay is a Brooklyn-based artist working in sculpture and installation. Clay earned his BFA from Watkins College of Art and his MFA from Yale University. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018 and was a resident of the Yale x Pasanella Program in Camaiore, Italy, and the Chinkapin Art Residency in Woodbury, TN, as well as a visiting artist presenting his solo exhibition As The Apple Disappears Into Water And Sweetness In Our Bodies at Montserrat College of Art in 2025.

Jackson Markovic is an artist & writer in Atlanta, GA. Recent exhibitions include Raw Through A Straw (Atlanta, GA, 2026), Supernature (Lexington, KY, 2025), and the public project Baroque Sunburst (Atlanta, GA, ongoing). He is a contributing writer for Burnaway magazine. Markovic recently concluded a two-year teaching artist fellowship at the Atlanta Center for Photography.

Jan Lynch: By the time Jan Lynch graduated from West High School in Knoxville, two events had already set the course his life. His parents had given him his first 35mm camera, and he immediately began producing works that were later recognized nationally and internationally. Jan had also converted - hard - to Catholicism in high school. By the late 1970s, he received a degree in Philosophy and History from the Vatican’s University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, and was ordained a priest in the Ruthenian Rite, a Byzantine Catholic Rite with historical roots in what is now Eastern Ukraine.

Throughout the 1980’s, Jan's reputation as a fine arts photographer grew steadily locally, and by the 1990s had spread as far away as Denmark, the Netherlands, and Italy. He also worked as a photographer for Knox County’s McClung Historical Collection, his copy work featured in the book “Two Centuries of Knox County Tennessee, A Celebration in Photographs.” Jan's subject matter had always been quite broad, claiming Imogen Cunningham as his primary influence. But most of his later commercial success came from the flowering of gay communities everywhere in response to the AIDS crisis, and his work increasingly reflected that.

As an out gay man, Jan contributed his work to a wide range of pro-LGBT and AIDS causes locally. His work was featured for nearly a decade on the front pages of Query, TN’s statewide LGBT newsweekly at the time. He was also regularly featured in RFD, the Radical Faerie quarterly published out of Short Mountain Sanctuary in TN for decades, and he was a darling of the James White Review. The Leslie-Lohman Museum in NYC, and the Tom of Finland Foundation in L.A., both have collections of his work.

Jan Lynch was diagnosed with AIDS in 1995, just as his photography career was taking off, and by the end of 1996 he was gone. He was among the last of a generation of People With AIDS who died before the effective new therapies became widely used. He left his photography to a best friend in Nashville, where it has remained archived to this day. But now efforts are underway to resurrect Jan, as it were, opening the archives for new exhibits and publishing projects, and bringing his work to new generations. A book of his work is being developed now, due out within the next couple of years, with a biography to follow.

Earthen Clay, Jan Lynch & Jackson Markovic
Planet of Love
May 15 - June 26, 2026

Justine A. Chambers, Kyle Alden Martens & Kern Samuel
Bag, curated by Elly Reitman
September 19 - October 26, 2025

Ellie Rae Hunter
Heel
August 1 - September 10, 2025

Adi Blaustein Rejto
The Possibilites of Apples
April 12 - May 28, 2025

Adrienne Herr
4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry

March 14- April 5, 2025

Audrey Gair
Rind

November 22, 2024 - January 4, 2025

Phyllis Baldino, Max Guy & Ellie Rae Hunter
Outliners
October 4 - November 10, 2024

Elly Reitman
energy
August 16 - September 20, 2024

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie
The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica Pinteric
July 12 - July 29, 2024

Tiziana La Melia
Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
June 7 - July 6, 2024

Jacob Jackmauh, Caitlin McCann & Benjamin Stallings
As for me, I’m just passing through this planet
March 8 - April 14, 2024

Irina Jasnowski Pascual
Wipers
September 15 - October 29, 2023

Coco Klockner
honesty
July 8 - August 6, 2023

Morgan Canavan, Ben Estes, Marisa Takal
More Coming Back & More Returning
May 5 - June 11, 2023

Sylvie Hayes-Wallace
Center of the Universe
August 5 - September 18, 2022

Amanda Horowitz
Bad Water, True West or Between Myself the Crickets and the Coyote
performed by Sophia Cleary and Ada Friedman
July 14 & July 15, 2022

Suzanna Zak
Coming Home to the Ice Age
opening May 13 - June 24, 2022

★

About
Instagram

★

open by appointment

located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee

Adrienne Herr 4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry March 14- April 5, 2025

November 22, 2024 - January 4, 2025

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica PintericJuly 12 - July 29, 2024 Tiziana La Melia Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster June 7 - July 6, 2024

★ About Instagram ★open by appointment located beside320 E. Churchwell Ave Knoxville, Tennessee

Adrienne Herr
4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry

March 14- April 5, 2025

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie
The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica Pinteric
July 12 - July 29, 2024

Tiziana La Melia
Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
June 7 - July 6, 2024

★

About
Instagram

★

open by appointment

located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee