PEYTON DOLLAR | FORGOTTEN LANDSCAPES
DECEMBER 11, 2025 | MAIN STREET GALLERY | NASHVILLE, TN
Peyton Dollar’s debut solo exhibition, FORGOTTEN LANDSCAPES, transformed Main Street Gallery into a dense, dreamlike world of forests, castles, and seething crowds of creatures. Across 14 paintings of varying scale, Dollar mixed whimsical woodland characters with abstracted flesh and infernal, almost carnivalesque architectures to create landscapes that feel both magical and menacing. Large canvases anchored the show with teeming scenes of animal masks, bones, and hybrid bodies, while more intimate works offered quieter but equally charged glimpses into this storybook underworld. Throughout, a lush, gestural handling of paint and saturated color carried a psychological weight of desire, fear, and instinct surface as cartoonish figures that melt, merge, and stare back at the viewer. The exhibition marked Dollar’s emergence as a painter willing to lean fully into darkness and fantasy, using surreal narrative imagery to establish himself within the Nashville art scene.
SELECTED WORKS
A NIGHT IN THE FOREST
84x60in.
Oil on canvas
LET’S SAVE TONY ORLANDO’S HOUSE
30X40IN.
Oil on canvas
FOLLOW THE LEADER
84x60in.
Oil on canvas
COZY WOODLAND WINTER
40X30IN.
Oil on canvas
24x18in.
GATHERING
Oil on canvas
FOREST HILLS
24X30IN.
Oil on canvas
FANTASTICAL FABLES
24X36IN.
Oil on canvas
LABYRINTH
24X30IN.
Oil on canvas
SMITTY JENSEN
78X84IN.
acrylic on canvas
INFERNO
48X48IN.
OIL ON canvaS
36X24IN.
MOM, THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE BASEMENT
OIL ON canvaS
FLOWERS FOR BARB
96X78IN.
acrylic ON CANVAS
JODIE
60X84IN.
acrylic ON CANVAS
FRANKIE
30X40IN.
acrylic ON CANVAS
“Peyton Dollar's first solo exhibition, FORGOTTEN LANDSCAPES, includes 14 paintings of different sizes. The exhibition creates a magical yet unsettling mood by mixing whimsical, erotic, and bizarre elements in its fleshy, psychologically charged landscapes and surreal storybook scenes.
Artist shows a range of technique, boasting abstracted compositions exploding with color— masterfully controlled, gestural, chaotic but with discernment. Other compositions depict whimsical woodland characters whose form melt, bend and overlap. Some imagery is unapologetically suggestive, almost legitimizing instinctual desire. One could interpret the subjects representing natural desires unhinged by social policing, or a rejection of western moral hegemony? Or darker maniacal forces are at play.
The PIECE DE RESISTANCE is a large-scale carnal expression of nocturnal desires; bewitched animal-like figures intertwined, mystical and dark, somewhere between erotic and grotesque.
Dollar’s ability to transport and subvert reality is revealed as he probes the boundary between primal instinct, pleasure and unease.”