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

Man, you've been busy!

Sounds like that drum playing robot movie didn't make much of an impression. I got that feeling from a lot of the pieces at Spruill - very cool as tech demos, not so great as art pieces.

The more I think about the more I think the artists were somewhat misplaced. So much of that show would have been fantastic in a museum of science and industry, but making it an "art" show in an "art" venue made me long for things I could not get.