"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.

Sanchez's line work is great, yes indeed,

yes, indeed-y do.