An art crawl through an entire district of galleries, such as... oh I don't know... let's say Castleberry Hill, is a dangerous thing to judge. It's like trying to get a read on a group show; the enterprise succeeds or fails as a unit. The individual artists have no control. Worse, good art can be made to look quite bad by association or bad art can escape detection altogether as the good art picks up the slack. That's why I'm trying not to hold the individual Castleberry Hill galleries responsible for the lackluster art stroll on the 28th, even though it yielded mostly a mix of half-baked ideas and slick, yet sadly vacant gestures. (above Kate Javens, Named for Derrick Bell; right, hanging out with Fahamu and Mike before the stroll )

Things started off decently at Marcia Wood with Kate Javens's large-scale oils of mythical chimeras and other animals that seemed to hold some operatic sense of portentous danger. Starting here was like walking in on an action movie 15 minutes late; there is some sense that you've missed the big explosion in the opening scene, but what follows is interesting enough. Many of Javens's works might better be called drawings made in oil paint or perhaps a series of grisailles, the monochromatic underpainting that props up most western art made before the mid-19th century. The big works seemed calculated to fill grand foyers without offending the society ladies, but that was ok. The breathy brushstrokes and the erie compositions still made them seem infused with light, or possibly even a little magic.

Things took a downturn at Gallery Stokes, or GaFKATS (the Gallery Formerly Known as Ty Stokes). Scott Griffin had encased medium-scale collage work and iridescent oil pigments in thick blocks of resin, creating a kind of is-it-or-isn't-it optical illusion of three dimensionality. The images are of otherworldly plant life that seem to be simultaneously underwater and floating in space. They are very slickly produced; the fabrication is impeccable, and conceptually, they are boring, boring, boring; fit for decorating the hallways of waiting rooms, middlebrow hotels, or any other location where people need to be given a sense of "wonder" while being reassured that everything really is okay. The unsettling subject matter is ironically tamed and undercut by the very slickness of the finish and the modesty of scale. We're just not asked for much here. (left, Lifescape No.29)

I should have counted my blessings at Stokes, because 3 minutes at Krause Gallery had me longing for Scott Griffin's depth. Zac Freeman's photos of light particles made pretty rainbows and unfortunately not much else. According to the artist, the work somehow relates to Einstein's theory of relativity, though he never quite spelled out how. In another strand of work, Freeman uses bits of junk--bottle caps, broken keyboards, buttons, glass fragments--that when accumulated and seen from a distance create portraits. There's a little bit of the ooh factor here. And if we ignore the entire oeuvre of Vik Muniz this might be enough. But Vik Muniz does in fact exist and is dealing with the same issues of representation in the same way only more profoundly and with many more layers. (above, Zac Freeman, installation view of light particles; Courtney; Courtney detail)

I don't want to say too much about Wyatt Graff, the other half of the two-man show at Krause. The work is very slickly produced (are you picking up a theme here?), and makes fairly modest claims for itself. It's decorative and pretty and looks good on a wall. It doesn't rewrite art history or engage deep contemplation, but I'm guessing in the right home it catches the light nicely. I'm not sure it's trying to do anything else. In any case, I counted at least $40,000 worth of art sold at Krause by the time I left. And it was still early. (right, work by Graff; detail)

Maybe I should stop here. It's too depressing. What happened, Castleberry Hill? I know it's been some months, but geez, you've really let yourself go.

Things were a little better at Romo. The Boys Are Back in Town featured a group of 10 Brooklyn artists with a distinctly messy, DIY, fuck-it-all approach to painting. These probably looked good in a trashed out Williamsburg loft; here they just looked trashed out. This seems to be a generation that's been looking at artists like Dana Schutz, Kai Althoff, Peter Doig, and Carroll Dunham; but--it would seem--substituting compositional strategies drawn from pop culture references that don't always hit the mark. In any case, the stylistic similarities between the ten young men made it nearly impossible to judge the success or failure of each one independently. Which perhaps is they way they would have wanted it. (left, Paul Brainerd, The President of the United States of America)



Sister Louisa came to the rescue a few doors down. Sister Louisa is Grant Henry, and his/her irreverent glosses on thrift store finds and cheap-y paint-by-number pictures came in as a breath of fresh air. They were direct, simple, unpretentious, and hilarious. Still, the underlying paintings are inescapably earnest, painfully earnest, and that made the jarring distortions of the overlaid painted phrases somehow weirdly moving. Maybe they were too easy. I didn't care; after Krause, I was just thankful that they didn't seem cynically calculated to be featured in a 4-page feature on interior design in The Atlantan. The work was priced to go and the party atmosphere made a person want to hang out for a while. (above and right, some dude with work by Sister Louisa)



The party continued at Garage Projects with Anita Arliss and a couple of pizzas cut into bite-sized pieces. The show stayed afloat. But only barely. The paintings themselves--renderings of personal shots from a Japanese social networking site, digitally manipulated and then rendered in ink jet and paint--were clean, focused, and conceptually interesting (amen!). I just couldn't figure out why they should be at Garage Projects, which normally excels in unconventional production presented in unconventional ways. This made it among the worst places Arliss could be shown. The venue did nothing for the paintings and the paintings did nothing for the venue. The show proved that you can't just pick up paintings and throw them anywhere. Place matters. Romo, yes. Get This!, sure. But Garage Projects? That one was a headscratcher. Maybe this was just a symptom of the city's lack of exhibition spaces. (above, Anita Arliss, installation view; right, Shop Here Dream)

Meanwhile, across the street Jason Wertz showed 3 paintings by Kevin Archer that mostly failed to fill the space they were given. Did a painting or two get lost in shipping? Did the artist flake out? The place didn't even look like it was really open, and I kept waiting for someone to come in and tell me to leave. That didn't happen. Kevin Archer does thickly painted, melty abstracts that... oh, what's the point? You've seen them a million times before, always with the same tired justification in the artist's statement: something about questioning the true nature of painting or what's really legitimate painting or some such rote repetition. We might have bought that explanation in 1944, but it is not 1944. It's 2008 and using pure abstraction on a wall-hung canvas to question the nature of painting just isn't an interesting strategy anymore. (left, Kevin Archer, Painting One)



I was glad I ended the evening at Get This!, far and away the bright spot of the entire art stroll. Bill Daniel's Sunset Scavenger juxtaposed large scale silver prints of houseboats and landscapes ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. The images were beautifully made markers of loneliness and ruin. Rounding out the exhibition was a ton of stuff; postcards, placards, posters, letters, photos--the artifacts of wandering, the detritus of homelessness. Even though this was not a "Katrina show," the gravitas of that paradigm shift hung heavy over everything. It was compelling stuff installed in a compelling way. (above and right, Bill Daniel, installation views)

At the end of the night, I was left with an overall feeling of littleness; little ideas, little executions, little scope. So much of it felt like student thesis projects, trial balloons floated before the art making begins in earnest. With the exception of Get This! and possibly Marcia Wood, there was no sense of big risk taken and invested in a big idea.



At a recent Contemporary panel discussion on art fairs and biennials, talk turned to thoughts of Atlanta as a biennial city. Can it support a true biennial of the type that are popping up all over? Someone on the panel said, "Well, then you run into the problem of scale; no one is going to fly from all over the world just to see 13 little things." That is probably true. And yet. And yet, I maintain this hope based on the slimmest of evidence that a critical mass of the big gestures is out there, cooking, gestating, coalescing, waiting for an opening to be coaxed out into the sun. (above Bill Daniel at Get This!; right, artist Jacob Dwight cleverly disguised in "homeless guy hoodie")

I was pretty impressed with Sunset Scavenger - I'll post my review tomorrow afternoon.

Right on. yes, it was a standout. i'll check out the review.