I used to think the watercolor medium was unavoidably anarchic, full of what David Cohen calls "reckless fluidity." I could never control it adequately. Then I saw an Albrecht Durer painting. So much for unavoidable anarchy.

~73%, which opened and closed last Friday at an unnamed space between Eyedrum and Mattress Factory Lofts. The show's title refers to the fact that the human body is about 73% water at birth, and the show attempted to dislodge the favorite medium of weekend plein air painters from its mooring in the pastoral landscape tradition, at least as construed in the popular imagination.


Mt. Fuji at Sunrise, May 1968, Ann-Marie Manker, watercolor, ink, wood, magic garden, 2008



"Popular imagination" turns out to be important, as that is really the only place where nature-obsessed painters like Gainsborough, Turner, and Winslow Homer still rule the watercolor roost. The art world itself actually broke the pastoral noose decades ago as folks like Robert Bechtle, Chuck Close, Tim Gardner, Elizabeth Peyton, Till Friewald, and David Remfry do their respective watercolor thangs. I suspect most of the artists in this show already know this. But it was nice to see a medium reconsidered as such.


Twin Speak 1 and Twin Speak 2, watercolor and thread on arches paper, 2008



The show may even be on to something curatorially important: in most of the examples I named before, the shift from pastoral themes to other things (mostly photography-derived portraiture) arguably has more to do with changes in the notion of what "nature" is than with a rejection of the notion that it should be closely observed. Many of the works in this show, however, leave observation behind entirely in favor of pure abstraction,


Untitled, Ben McGehee, watercolor and ink on arches paper, 2008




Crystal Clouds, Katie Stockton, watercolor and gouache on clayboard, 2008

or actually make artificial things in order to observe and paint them, as is the case with Kelly Cloninger's works, which are paintings of female genitalia that she made with various fabrics, not the actual things (personal favorite),


Untitled (both), Kelly Cloninger, watercolor, acrylic, paper, lace, fabric, wood, 2008



or various fanciful blends of observation and fantasy.


Untitled (Chainsaw), Sean Abrahams, watercolor and mixed media, 2008


artist unknown

What's unclear is if any of this mens that the new watercolor is ready for prime time. Does it make a difference, for example, that this is rendered in watercolor, instead of, say, acrylic, other than simply the way it looks?

Would this have some different meaning or historical import rendered in acrylic, oil, or I don't know... egg tempera?


Portaits [sic], Amiynah Hanna, watercolor on arches paper, 2008



Or have we reached a time when all media have become one? When there is only the medium of representation, not various "media"?


Burned, Pam Rogers, watercolor, ink and wax on paper, 2008



Interesting questions from an unassuming, yet thought-provoking show.


Untitled, Monica Ellis, watercolor and ink, 2008

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Day 3, Kathryn Refi, oil on canvas, 61" x 100"

My review of Spruill Gallery's Breaking New Ground in today's Loaf is mostly what I intended, though with caveats: First, "Georgia Tech graduates" should read "Georgia Tech faculty"; an error that seems to have crept in somewhere in copyediting. [UPDATE: this has been fixed in the online version/] More importantly, I regret the use of the word "dated" in the last sentence of the review. The word is a holdover from an earlier draft that I had argued against, but on which I was overruled. "Dated" implies that the work in the show is somehow old fashioned, which it isn't. "Dated" suggests a retread of a worn out notion. I argued for "removed," though even that is not sufficiently precise. More accurate would have been a word that somehow says, "not cutting edge even though a claim has been made to the contrary." I'm still searching for that word.


Day 3, (detail)

Anyway, a few other observations that my 400-word limit forced out:


Nest, Carla Diana

I liked Carla Diana's sound making sculpture, "Nest." Each ball inserted into a recess in the pedestal creates a different sound ranging from low hums, to percussive rhythms, to 3- and 4-note melodic loops. Like much of the work in the show, however, it's cool and neat and fun, but doesn't necessarily provide a window to any experience outside of itself. Intellectually, it is entirely self-contained. This is the danger when what is essentially an aestheticized technology product is placed in an art gallery context. The gallery necessarily brings with it the expectations of a transformative experience that the technology can't hope to deliver on.


Nest, (detail)

Likewise, Philip Galanter's lightbox drawings are well-meaning, even pretty, but ultimately unremarkable as art, even given the neat-o factor of having been created by computer algorithms essentially without human intervention.


Philip Galanter

Technology is meeting art on art's playing field and appears here mostly underequipped for the confrontation.


Philip Galanter (detail)

Danielle Roney's "Fluid Architecture," on the other hand, uses the home court advantage in an elegant site-specific installation. Roney uses digital technology to warp and melt components of the room and the Spruill Gallery grounds. I thought of chocolate, excessive heat, sexual bodies, Salvador Dali, and the impermanence of space.


Fluid Architecture, Daniel Roney, digital projections, installation view

This video was made using the artist's footage from Beijing.


Daniel Roney

Although Tristan Al-Hadid's transparent polymer sci-fi pod installation wasn't perfect, he accomplishes something none of the other Tech faculty represented in the show do: he injects the ineffable. That is by leaving some things illogical and unexplained, he introduces the quality that makes art art.


iCAVE, Tristan Al-Hadad (installation detail)


iCAVE, (installation detail)

Jason Freeman's "Graph Theory" is fun to play with. Using pre-recorded sound loops, you can construct your own (slightly dysfunctional sounding) violin solo on the fly.


Graph Theory, Jason Freeman, interactive digital media

Dick Robinson is a fixture in Atlanta's underground electronic art music community. His music is on an iPod in a new side room curator Hope Cohn had built specifically for the show. A series of drawings round out the display of Robinson's work. These are Robinson's actual notes and musical sketches made as he works out various musical ideas. But instead of the actual drawing, we have to settle for blow-up reproductions.


Display of drawings/notes by Dick Robinson

Cohn maintains that the choice was based on not wanting to show small, crinkly, aged pages with ragged edges, but the choice seems vaguely insulting when they are in fact being displayed as art, not as information. Plenty of Rembrandt sketches are drawn on small, crinkly, aging pages and they are beautiful to look at.

A video showing Gil Weinberg's drum-playing robot and other sound producing technologies rounded out the show.



Sarah Emerson's new mural is perhaps the most important work in this, Hope Cohn's first show in the gallery. Not actually a part of Breaking New Ground per se, it replaces an old, faded Kojo Griffin mural that apparently was never meant to be permanent. With Julia Fenton's departure and the imminent start of construction on the new 35,000 square foot facility, Spruill is in the midst of big changes. Waves of change.


Sarah Emerson mural

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Brother Boko, untitled work

Been doing more gawkin' and seeing. This time it looks like this.

Brother Boko is best known as an activist and artist whose mural work in L.A. has garnered a lot of respect. In Atlanta, he is indulging his trippier side as evidenced by The Mystery and Magic of the Circle Makers at Fulton County's Southwest Arts Center. What the Center has assembled here is more a multimedia pedagogical exhibition on crop circles that includes art, rather than an exhibition of art, per se. Being mainly interested in art, this means I leave out the video documentaries (not made by Boko); the descriptive, illustrated wall texts explaining how crop circles are made; and the bibliography and website list made available to patrons. All interesting, but not what I was there for. The other half of the show comprises the paintings: 3- and 4-foot circular canvases made with fluorescent paint and displayed under black light in a room with some sort of spooky music.

Based on actual crop circle patterns, these paintings are mostly concerned with two things: design and an entirely earnest, but vague and open-ended reference to magic. On the former they succeed surprisingly well; I've seen a number of attempts at crisp, flat, graphic renderings lately, none of which have been crisp, flat, or graphic enough as these are here. On the latter point they mostly stop before they start, as I found myself thinking more about optical tricks than about transcendent magic of any kind. And I would have preferred to think about magic. And aliens. As a whole installation, the work is fun, but don't expect the stupefying grandeur of the crop circles. Instead, see these as a strictly-for-fun component in a show meant as much for education as for art. Show runs through June 20.

I'm used to an overflow crowd at Rabbit-Hole Gallery, a crowd laden with tattoos, stiletto heels, crimson lipstick, Betty Page hairdos, cuffed jeans, cat-eye glasses, sideburns, and an idolatrous relationship with Pabst Blue Ribbon. But thankfully the crowd at the opening for Rod Whigham's solo Zombie Romance was thinner and a little easier to navigate. Zombie Romance consists of medium size acrylic paintings, each of which is executed in exactly 3 colors--black, white, and red--and features a disappointingly predictable set of monsters and the babes who love them.


Plan 9 From Planet Aros, acrylic on canvas

Whigham has actually made blown-up drawings here, rather than paintings. Too many of the concerns of painting are overlooked to consider them something other than enlarged cartoon panels: the texture of the canvas in many of them is distractingly course, line is often rendered in the flat and emotionless dialect of a ball-point pen rather than in the expressive vocabulary of a brush, and the graphic design color sensibility comes across as unnecessarily limited rather than as terse. Color is repeated mechanically with the logic of a printing press rather than being used in a musical or intuitive painterly way as, for example, Jacob Lawrence would have done, or in a way that analyzes the printing press as Roy Liechtenstein would have done. On a page, printed 3 inches high, these images would no doubt have a certain cool factor, but at 2, 3, and 4 feet across, they've been stretched past a breaking point. Through June 22.


Gojira-King of Monsters (detail), acrylic on canvas

Rose Barron's Teenage Kicks at Sycamore Place examines adolescence in terms both generous and slightly provocative. The photographs threatened at every turn to go for the jugular, but in the end pulled a few too many punches to truly score a knock-out. The photos depict a cast of teenage characters (hinted in the artist statement to include her own children though not confirmed elsewhere) whose every lived moment seems to be pregnant with disaster and longing. The photographs have a breezy, documentary sensibility, but the saturated colors and crisp, pristine detail also give them an undercurrent of formal delicacy.


Red Top Mountain, Fine Art Chromira Print, 16 x 16

The scale seems wrong for these photos, however. At 16x16, they are neither small enough to be called intimate, nor are they large enough to match the monumentality of a teenager's sense of being larger-than-life. Meatier content might have obviated the question of scale, but the photography here actually appears surprisingly squeamish around these kids. How stunning it might have been to see those kids staring back at me, life size, all defiant and insecure. At their current size they were sort of small and manageable, which made their dramas feel small and manageable, which any adolescent knows is not how teenage dramas feel.


Ft Lauderdale, Fine Art Chromira Print, 16 x 16

Barron cites three contemporary touchstones: Lauren Greenfield, Katy Grannan, and Tina Barney. Of these three, Tina Barney is the least misleading comparison. Greenfield and Grannan both swim in the Diane Arbus gene pool of full on freaktography. Barron is actually a good deal less cynical than Greenfield or Grannan. Tina Barney's social studies approach seems an apt comparison, but I actually see more affinity here to the work of Sally Mann's brittle sexuality or the ambivalent documentary practices of Angela West and Sheila Pree Bright (by way of Helen Levitt) in what will someday be called their early work, but now constitutes their middle periods. Also, I can't stop seeing the painter Delia Brown, who coincidentally has also turned to the theme of motherhood.

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I never realized how good we had it. The Altadena Library is a beautiful building sitting in the middle of an even more beautiful garden that itself sits in a kind of edenic refuge in the middle of Atladena, California.



Boyd Georgi's mid-century modern design is not necessarily the paragon of its style, but the combination of the building and the grounds is charming and an invitation to sustained reflection.







Nubby bronze sculpture always reminds me of Pasadena. But then again, so does very, very smooth bronze.



Not all of Altadena is so architecturally sensitive. But it is all so California.

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L. A. Times business page, describing a common activity from my childhood

I'm back from a west coast trip now. Los Angeles is beautiful, but I'm glad to be back. Atlanta is so, so real.

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Untitled, Time of Change (Damn the Defiant), Silver Print, 16" x 20", 1963

I've been a-gawkin' lately, and here's what's been gawked.

In his current solo show at Jackson Fine Art Bruce Davidson has made new prints of 2 distinct bodies of work: Time of Change comprises photos from the Civil Rights era of the early 60s, and East 100th Street is documentation of precisely that piece of Manhattan real estate in the mid- to late 60s. The trouble with shows of well-documented eras--particularly the Civil Rights era--is that every viewer will come to it with a narrative already in place. Every photo will be matched against a mental schema of known points of reference: the march, the boycott, the waterhose, the dogs. Moments of fresh insight will be limited, even in the hands of a living institution in documentary photography, which Davidson is.

Still, smart curating at Jackson gives us a show with perhaps more than its fair share of genuine revelations. By focusing on small, forgotten, accidental moments in a time fraught with grand incivilities, Davidson plays against the tendency to resolve an historical era down to a series of spectacular moments. Instead, we are treated to the fabric of life out of which these moments arose, sometimes with startling violence, sometimes with a sly subversion.

I particularly liked Martin Luther King Jr, Montgomery, Alabama, 1965. The latest battle over the MLK memorial statue in Washington, DC is that it looks too much like Lenin. So while the King heirs do battle with the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, there goes the man again, almost entirely unrelated to the fracas that surrounds him. Show runs through July 5.

I lucked into Bobb Lovett's photography at Octane because I thought something was happening at Sandler Hudson when it was actually going down at Solomon Projects. (The letter S confuses me.) Ok, so you think you've seen these before--more Southern rot art, right? Well, yes and no. Lovett's mostly small, mounted, unframed digital prints turn out to be fairly spectacular. Printed on metallic photo paper, they are glassy and pristine, and have a kind of internal glow that transcends the subject matter without overshadowing it. I don't know if Lovett is a one-trick pony with the printing method, but from what I can find out about him, he's early in his career with plenty of time to develop more tricks along the way.


Burned

Speaking of Solomon Projects, I did finally make it over there for Janet Biggs's Tracking Up. The show consists of 6 new single-channel videos arranged before six svelte little Eero Saarinen stools that I'm sure I will never be able to afford. Ever. New York-based Biggs typically explores the construction of gender and power in her videos and installation work. These videos however seemed to be more interested in the idea of performance in various aspects, but all in all the work failed to deliver on its potential.

The most interesting were the synchronized swimmers shot underwater and then rotated 180 degrees such that they appeared upright, as demonstrated in Airs Above the Ground and Performance of Desire. It was an interesting conceit, and the work revealed beneath a facade of prettiness was telling. I also enjoyed the opening shots of Enemy of the Good, which costarred Santiago Calatrava's stunning and optimistic Valencia architecture.

Unfortunately, it more or less ended there. All the concerns about femininity and masculinity were put on display, but not excavated. Regimented synchronized swimmers were juxtaposed against regimented cadets running through drill routines. But didn't we already know those were kind of the same? The coups de grace were the original soundtracks accompanying the videos, which consisted too often of cloying instrumentals that instead of augmenting the visual element, flattened it into what felt like a PBS interstitial. Watch these perhaps, but leave the headphones off.

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Clearly, the current breakneck pace of lavishly illustrated blog posts cannot continue indefinitely, though I do feel some pressure to post a pic or two from the Marcus Kenney show. My review of it appears in the Loaf today and already I pit my print self against my digital self by placing here a few supplementary images. Whether this entrains supplementary insights is up to you.




Detail of the image that appeared in the paper.

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Last weekend I went up to a little blue barn in the middle of the country... okay in Alpharetta, and saw Elizabeth Latta's suite of new paintings. I remember the first time I saw them at her studio, expecting decent paintings, but actually finding myself bowled over by a few. It was a pleasant surprise.


Me as an Angel Showing Luna Rossa Where to Get the Golden Fleece, oil on linen, 2007


Me as an Angel Showing Luna Rossa Where to Get the Golden Fleece (detail)


Elizabeth explains her Superbowl 42 painting; Luna Rossa and the Syndicate Rush to Spain, oil on linen, 2007


Luna Rossa detail; High Museum curator Carol Thompson liked the work.

Sometimes the figure is overworked:


The Mediterranean as a Merman and Bach as a Butterfly Help Luna Rossa Beat BMW Oracle, oil on linen, 2007

But sometimes she pulls off a compelling and confident gesture that conveys the movement of an entire body:


Birth of James Spithill (detail), oil on linen, 2007


Untitled work and detail


Louise Shaw and Stan Woodard both made the trek out; Birth of James Spithill


Young Icarus Practicing During Luna Rossa Team Trials, oil on linen, 2007; Untitled work

Plus there was good southern food. I mean, red velvet cake, c'mon...



Later that night I swung by the opening at Young Blood Gallery.



Their new space looks fantastic.



Independent, DIY efforts like these will keep the home fires burning in Atlanta, as they do in any community, whether the gubmint is on board or not.

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installation view of work by Maria Campos-Pons

The last time I was at Gallery Stokes, I told Heidi Aishman to check out Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970 Part II at Spelman Museum of Fine Art because it was--and this phrase actually came out of my mouth--"an important show." Jesus. What does that even mean? It's an unfortunate phrase because it makes the show sound like something you study, not something you enjoy.


Big Gurl, (video still), Lauren Kelly, 2006

This is critical, because so much video work that got attention in the late 90s and early 2000s was the arid, anti-formalist stuff by the likes of Aida Ruilova and Shinique Smith that drove me up a wall. In contrast, Remixed curators, Andrea Barnwell Brownlee and Valerie Cassel Oliver favor bold, and sometimes aggressive, immersions into the media's visuality and tactility.

Remixed rewards looking, and I was glad for that. Lorna Simpson's "Easy to Remember," which debuted at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, comprised 2 and a half minutes of a grid of humming lips of varying genders and ages. This is the best kind of video work--the sort of artifact that releases a chain of associations that unfold discursively so that the first 30 seconds give you no clue as to where your psyche will alight at the end of 150 seconds of essentially the same image. My mind went to choirs and funerals and the comforts of home and the eroticism of everyday life.


Easy to Remember, (video still), Lorna Simpson, 2002

A similar thing happened in front of Berni Searle's "A Matter of Time," (2003) in which the artist attempts to walk up a slippery slope coated with olive oil only to fail, slip down, and have to begin again--an elegant meditation on culture and the confining definitions of skin color (olive) in a South African context.

I wish I could say the same for Zoe Charlton's "Dead White Men," which is unfortunately as unidimensional as its title. It features the artist taking on the poses of iconic nudes from throughout western art history. By leaving the background as blank and white as possible, the viewer is confronted with the starkest chiaroscuro of body against ground. This serves to emphasize the darkness of the figure, its leaden position in history as well as in the imagination, but I found myself asking, "to what end?" For a work made in 2006, its strategies of appropriation and recasting felt awfully 1980s.


Dead White Men, (video still), Zoe Charlton, 2006

Appropriation and reinterpretation were common themes, however, but most often put to richer uses. Ina Archer's "1/16th of 100%!?" (1993-1996) took a kind of archaeological tour through early film history, cutting together scenes from Babes on Broadway, Whoopee, Imitation of Life (the Douglas Sirk version), Busby Berkeley musicals, Josephine Baker, and a half dozen other sources to meditate on miscegenation and the disturbingly consistent chain of images that form our shared cultural legacy of how we view race.


Imitation of Life, (film still), 1959

Tracy Moffat and Gary Hillberg similarly mine the collective archival imagination in "Lip," (1999), a compilation of Hollywood's black maids and servants enacting the "sassy," scene. You know the one: where the likes of Vivien Leigh, Lana Turner, or Barbra Streisand get told off by their uppity servants, who at the end of the day still remain servants.

As if those weren't enough references to Imitation of Life, in "American Classics" (2005) Elizabeth Axtman lip synchs to scenes from both versions of Imitation among other "tragic mulatto rants" throughout Hollywood history, adding another layer to the troubled history of racial imaginings.


American Classics, (video still), Elizabeth Axtman, 2005

I also like Axtman's small jewel of a video "Expletives Owed," (2007) that features Rita Isbell, sister of one of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims basically going ape-shit at Dahmer's trial. Each expletive is deleted and replaced with the same expletive uttered by Richard Pryor, Bernie Mac, or Eddie Murphy. The tragic and the comic become one.


Expletives Owed, (video still), Elizabeth Axtman, 2007

Other works I liked: Senga Nengudi's hypnotic video about an invisible economy undertaken by (socially) invisible people


The Threader, (video stills), Senga Nengudi, 2007

and Marguerite Harris's experimental animated short, although with less gusto than many of the other works.


Flowers & Leaves 2, (video still), Marguerite Harris

Colette Gaiter contributed an elegant conclusion of years of research into the work of Emory Douglas in the form of a CD ROM with educational overtones. And Yvette Mattern's "Zanzibar Project" (1997) had some nice passages of freighted and indecidable interactions between people encountered on the island of Zanzibar.

The current installment at Spelman is part 2 of a 2-part exhibition. The first installment ran through last fall and included work by, among others, Jessica Ann Peavy, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Tracey Rose, Carrie Mae Weems, Paula Wilson, and Lauren Woods. It also included work by 2 artists whose Atlanta debut was in a show curated by yours truly the year before: Cauleen Smith and Ogechi Chieke.


Thee Creation Theory, (installation view), Ogechi Chieke

Okay, so yes, this is an "important show." But here's what I really meant by that: Cinema Remixed is an exhibition that not only shows something, it does something; it acts back upon the world in a direct way by creating a category of art and artists--black women in film and video--for whom there was no canon and for whom no space existed in the public imagination. It's the kind of show that--like Sensation, Freestyle, and Freeze--reorganizes internal conceptual relationships within the art world. With all the recent murmurs of disaffection with curating in Atlanta, Spelman exemplifies what smart and meaningful curating looks like. Shows about monsters are all fine and dandy, but such confections only make sense in the context of a good meal.

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Forget everything I said before about littleness. Well, not everything, but add the following: when the ideas an artist explores inhabit the territory of quiet, fraught, personal moments, when the idea requires holding the breath and leaning in to examine the trace of a stolen encounter, then littleness is right. Littleness is good. Audrey Ward's Kissed & Bitten at Henley Studios is an example of this.

Kissed & Bitten is Ward's SCAD MFA thesis show, and in it she takes two very intimate acts--kissing and biting--and ruminates on them in seemingly endless ways in a variety of media.


Zipper, porcelain, glaze, thread, 10" x 21", 2007

Most of the works in the show are appropriately small. They take place on the intimate scale of the mouth and in the temporal span of a second; the amount of time it takes to bite down or pucker up.


Nesting Kiss, brass wire, porcelain, 1" x 1", 2008

Many of the works featured idiosyncratic little shapes derived from either kissing or biting down on wet porcelain (or on some intermediate material whose shape was then cast in porcelain). Dentition, like a fingerprint, is unique, making at least the "bite" pieces unique records of the artist's touch.


Voodoo Kiss, porcelain, straight pins, 3" x 3", 2008

By bringing kisses and bites together, Ward explores the porous boundary between the two actions, and therefore the anxious slippage between affection and cruelty, pleasure and pain. I started to write about eroticism when I looked at Deborah McClary's work last week, but couldn't shoehorn it in. It's just as well; Audrey Ward's work is sexy all over the gallery even as it refuses the final climax and denies the final ejaculation behind a veil of pristine colorlessness.


Kiss and Bite Jars, glass jars, porcelain, 48" x 6" x 6", 2008


Kiss and Bite Jars (details),

The lone video in the show made the pain/pleasure slippage most explicit. A pair of cameras trained on 2 faces, both of which appear to be Ward herself, show us the two women interacting in split screen. They bite each others fingers, slap each other, and generally appear to test the limits of each other's pain, which mostly causes them to giggle and show a great amount of pleasure sitting at the nexus of painful acts.


video still

The video reminded me of White Flag's "Provincial Gallery Simulator" (St. Louis) in which visitors are given the opportunity to be slapped by a White Flag gallery attendant and then sold a print of the moment the hand made contact with the face. Mostly this prompts the slapped to giggle and feel like part of the art making act. Ward is a little less sadistic and mocking.


video still

It was nice to see a young artist flexing some conceptual muscle while working out her ideas in ways that reserved retinal and tactile pleasure in her aesthetic formulas.


Light Blue, porcelain, gold leaf, thread, 10" x 10", 2008

Ward was served well by her sense of eccentric and improvisational composition--a random gold leaf here, the contrapuntal visual snap of a piece of string there--which was echoed even in the flower arrangement beneath the show's vinyl lettered title.



Sometimes the work veered toward the conceptually cutesy, e.g., "Dog Bite" consisted of a postcard for the show bitten and chewed up by a dog, which may have been meant as a joke, but if so it's cheap against everything else in the show.


Dog Bite, Bitten by The Duke, the dog, 2008

And sometimes an idea looked good, but worked only because of the buoying context of the other works around it.


One Kiss and 1000 Kisses, paint on paper, 60" x 6" x 28" (each), 2008


1000 Kisses (detail)

But these are forgivable lapses in a thesis show in which an artist is very visibly working out her ideas.


Hello, Good Bye, FREE Kisses

Henley Studios is in the newly revamped 280 Elizabeth Street in Inman Park, sitting on prime real estate among no shortage of hipster bars and eateries. Henley describes itself as "a creative solutions company that engages diverse audiences in the powerful experience of artistic invention and serves as a catalyst for the creation of new work that inspires and challenges." I don't know what that means. All I know is it says "creative solutions company" which sends a chill up my spine, a chill that came from 1998.


studio spaces at 280 Elizabeth Street

The choice of Audrey Ward as an opening act, however, tells me their vision is much better than their writing. Recommended if you're in the area. But move fast. The show ends May 17. If you sneeze, you'll miss this one.

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Maureen Gallace at 303 Gallery (The Armory Show 2006)

The photos accompanying this post have caused controversy. Not the art depicted in the photos, the photos themselves. After being posted as part of blogger Mark Barry's Flickr set, Mr. Barry received the following email (via Bloggy):

hello mark -

this is s***** at 303 gallery. i noticed you had an image of Maureen
Gallace's work up on your flickr page - please be aware that 303 Gallery
owns the copyright to the work and all public display of images, including
web content. if you could kindly remove this image from your page, it would
be most appreciated.
best
s*****

It is undeniable that bloggers can be self-righteous in our demands to see all and record all with no credentials whatsoever, but that doesn't mean we're wrong. What bloggers do is a form of vernacular journalism. We are covering the artifacts and actions of our culture that the print-based media cannot do given the bluntness of their instruments. The indiscriminate paranoia of the "303 Policies" do nothing more than deny the general public an opportunity to be more involved in and better informed about art. When someone asks to take photos in a public art space, the answer should always be yes, yes, and yes.


Maureen Gallace at 303 Gallery (The Armory Show 2006)

On a related note, Brooklyn Rail critic James Kalm's pirate videos of The Whitney Biennial have been in heavy rotation on my internets.

Meanwhile, on an unrelated note, check out the recent discussion at ThoughtMarker on Atlanta's spate of themed group shows and the implied crisis of weak-ass curating. I grind my usual axe...

By the way, I am displaying the photos above in order to make political commentary on them (with a soupcon of satire). That use is what we call Fair.

UPDATE: used color corrected versions of photos from Chris Ashley

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Hover, oil on canvas, 56" x 117", 2007

After last month's surprisingly tepid show, Gallery Stokes unleashes the terror with Deborah McClary's Nothing Seen. Knoxville-based McClary takes a page from the classic surrealist play book, using the language of traditional, representational painting to exorcise demons of the irrational subconscious. It's a terse and decent show that doesn't overreach, but instead faithfully delivers on the promise of a small-scale flash of insight.


Move, oil on canvas, 56" x 117", 2007

I was impressed by McClary's ability to capture a sense of absolute psychological terror and her willingness to come unhinged for a moment and let the terrifying irrationality that burbles underneath the surface of civilized society emerge into the half light of the gallery space.


Move (detail)

The artist's cast of characters included these grotesque dust-babies that seem to be mad and insatiable even in the face of exaggerated abundance.


untitled, oil on canvas, 60" x 72", 2008

They reappear here, fully grown, obese, engaged in a battle of id against id. Their bodies are fat while the spiritual beasts are hungry and emaciated.


untitled, oil on canvas, 60" x 72", 2008


untitled (detail)

I was reminded of Salvador Dali's take on the perversity of desire--how desire can deform and how too much is never enough for the endlessly needing psyche.


untitled, wood and paint, 32" x 62" x 38", 2008

McClary has said that part of her effort was to get past people's conditioned, intellectualized response to art, to provoke instead a strong visceral reaction. Similar examples of unrepentant terror art are rare in Atlanta. The quasi-terrifying stuff that sometimes shows up in the neo-pop world at places like Rabbit Hole Gallery has usually been adulterated by heavy doses of irony and/or pre-digested tropes from the worlds of pulp cinema, tattoo art, and graphic novels. In those cases, it's not so much naked psychological terror we're confronted with as a winking acknowledgment of our shared cultural glee over expressions of terror. Genuine terror does pop up occasionally in the work of Joe Tsambiras, and Kojo Griffin was trying to get at it for a while, though I don't think he ever did.


untitled

McClary, however, gets there. Show runs through 17 May.

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Marcus Kenney, An Untitled Girl, (detail), mixed media on canvas, 24" x 18", 2008

I suppose I can now out myself as having gone to the dark side, as I have inherited the vis. arts beat for Creative Loafing. My first article--a brief on the Marcus Kenney show at Marcia Wood--is due to appear May 14, if I've got the calendar right, so I'll be anxious to get feedback from any and all about what folks are looking for in arts coverage.

Being enmeshed as I already am in the Atlanta art world, my editor is looking over my range of prior art world obligations as we speak, combing the list for potential conflicts of interest (and maybe opportunities?). Can't be too careful given the current arts journalism climate. Still, I've been watching certain other blogger / artist / critic types, trying to get a sense of where the pot holes are.

One thing's for certain, and that's that as far as ethics goes people agree on pretty much nothing. The NAJP released its report The Visual Art Critic in 2002, and although it is neither evaluative nor prescriptive it does at least give a decent overview of what people who write about art are actually doing. (It should be noted that the report only deals with printed media since the art blogosphere in 2001-2002 was basically a cultural backwater populated by a few obsessive cranks in major coastal cities--oh wait a minute, it still is.)

I was surprised to find out that I am in the 1 or 2 percent minority that thinks it's okay for critics to talk to artists about their art in an advisory sort of way--a practice roundly condemned by pretty much everyone. I'm obviously odd man out here, but who else is going to have a broader view of art making in the current moment than those paid (barely) to look at an awful lot of it, think about it, and figure out why it does or doesn't work (yet not be motivated by the narrow concerns of sales, attendance figures, or career advancement)? I'm guessing this reluctance has to do with the idea, promulgated by critics themselves, that they are so all powerful that lowly artists don't stand a chance against the weight of their opinions. Who knows? Clement Greenberg was known to be a tyrant in just this way and it may be no one wants to be seen going around clemming the art world into submission.

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"Olympia," mixed media on wood, 36" x 45"

Lately, any time I speak in public about art in Atlanta, I include at least one allusion to my belief that we don't have an art scene here, but rather various scenes, plural. This pluralism is not inherently bad; in fact it's to be expected in a city of any size. Only provincial burgs can be expected to have a single art scene, and we're not that, right? Right?

I dropped into another orbit last Friday night for Cooper Sanchez's Flagship Mark at Function, a Decatur PR firm whose fairly spacious lobby had been cleared out for the one-night event. Sanchez is a graduate of SVA and has been living in Clarkston (Dekalb County) since 1999. I was told that his audience comprised a mix of indie crafters, gardening aficionados, and personal friends, which was a nice change of pace from the usual Atlanta gallery cabals.



The work was mostly small-to-medium scale mixed media work on wood, drawing from a suite of art historical vocabularies of abstract expressionism's emotive marks, pop appropriations, and high modern gridded planar surfaces, all in a potent cocktail of postmodern pseudocollage.

The unifying motif was that of the flag, which appeared throughout the work, either as literal banners:


"Weathervane Swallow," mixed media on wood, 72" x 60"

or as abject little strips of remnant fabric stitched together in a way that pointed to, without necessarily constituting, improvisation.


"Rabbit Flag 2," mixed media on wood, 30" x 22"


"Rabbit Flag 2" (detail)

Few male artists have the balls to work with textiles, and fewer still with the gauzy, sheer, white bridal-looking stuff that Sanchez often favors. Though, to be sure, the fabric was being used in a nervously masculine way with intentionally shoddy stitching and willful rough edges that referenced carpentry as much as fiber arts.

A large accumulation of flags that were the result of a "project among friends" was displayed on one wall. These I presume were the flags sewn by what the artist called the "awesome sewing circle" of the Betsy Ross Society. They were being sold for $100 a pop to benefit the National Association for Down Syndrome.


"Betsy Ross Society Flags," fabric remnants, variable dimensions

"Betsy Ross Society Flags" (detail)

Flags mark territory, but are also always mythmaking instruments. They are the symbols by which a certain place (a fiction of geography) comes to belong to a certain set of people (a fiction of social organization). They are almost always planted as the result of violence, and carry with them an inexhaustible emotional charge of bloodshed, struggle, and death.


"Betsy Ross Society Flags" (detail)

Sanchez's images referenced struggle throughout the work, appropriating the Nike of Samothrace (the Hellenistic sculpture most likely in honor of Rhodes kicking Syria's ass at sea in the early 2nd century B.C.) and pictures of the artist himself sporting a black eye, but having recovered enough to enjoy a drink.


"Black Eye," mixed media on wood, 39" x 46"


"Black Eye" (detail)

In the final calculation, though, the bits and pieces--the swatches of paint, the passages of thick gel medium, the sorta pop repeated images quoting Manet and the Nike--often fell just short of a convincing whole. The works all had a somewhat careful feel; a heavy splotch of paint, which might reasonably be expected to drip, doesn't, and for all their claims of looseness and abandon, the ragged fabric swatches are actually fairly well behaved and defer to the four edges of the support. Radcliffe Bailey circa mid-90s used a similar vocabulary of marks though with much greater audacity and layered historical resonance. And Sigmar Polke's paintings of any era sort of takes these paintings to school (I mean, the man used arsenic in his paintings--arsenic for crying out loud!)


"Winged Victory II," mixed media on wood, 34" x 46"

I liked it best when Sanchez abandoned the glib pop strivings and instead let his own hand tell the story: he uses charcoal (or maybe conte crayon) to render plant life and sacred hearts as febrile little icons. He makes a skeleton dance mechanically--and convincingly. The birds are beautiful.


"Battle Worn," mixed media on wood, 34" x 46"


"Battle Worn" (detail)

This is Sanchez's strength: he's good at manipulating symbols of mythic importance, and when the artist's hand is most obvious, the struggle he alludes to is most believable.

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Jerry Cullum has posted a shout out and modest proposal to Atlanta art bloggers over at Counterforces, buried at the bottom of his somewhat belated Canogar musings. What say we? Having no passport to the Blogspot-o-verse, I can't leave comments there, so I'll react here.

Cullum is essentially proposing a collective art re-blog since "few outside the blogging community have the time to read ALL those blogs on all those different blog host sites." Although I'd argue that even within the blogging community few have that kind of time, I do like the idea of compilation as a sort of community service.

I believe Portland has a collective art blog similar to the one Cullum describes. If I'm not mistaken Port started out as a blog of re-posted posts cobbled together by folks who were otherwise blogging elsewhere. So a similar model has proven at least provisionally successful.

I'm not clear on why a blogger could not contribute his or her own posts, as long as it's a closed group we're talking about here. And if we're talking about an open group, then I'm not sure what the value of that is; Atlanta already has one open network blog, which serves the democratic purpose it was designed to serve. A closed blog system looks undemocratic perhaps. And that's because... well, it is. But blogs are free, which means if you don't like someone else's rules you are free to start your own.

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