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.

I think it is important to note that the imagery here in question also provokes one to question the origin of imagery and co-opting as well as reclaiming and empowerment of transcendental imagery. It's strength and its collapsing by pop culture. "The mystery and majic" can also be understood to exist in the Naska lines of Latin America, the Bimini Road in the Bahamas. Native Americans in the North have in the past also participated in this concept of ritual. What Brother Bokos work seems to be responding to is the redistribution of that majic, mystery and concept!