Mail Art	Exquiste Corpse

Friday January 27 - March 25
The Paper Sculpture Show
+ Evidence: Paper Works
Mail Room - Mail art from the collections of Benjamin Jones, Ruth Laxson, and Kathy Yancey
Exquisite Corpse - Collaborative drawings by Melissa Herrington, Benjamin Jones, Alex Kvares, D.E. Johnson, Ruth Laxson, and Kathy Yancey
Paper Garden - an installation comprised of recycled junk mail by Marilee Keys
+ The World of Watermarks - presented in collaboration with the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking at Georgia Tech

Patrons' preview January 26, 5 - 7 pm
Artists' Reception January 27, 7 - 9 pm
     Artists' gallery tour 6 - 7 pm
(Also opening on January 27, The Third National Juried Collegiate Handmade Paper Art Show, at the Robert C. William Museum of Papermaking)
February 7, 6:30 – 8 pm, “Why paper?” A conversation led by Carrie Przybilla
February 18 & March 11 – Paper Saturdays - Free admission to the gallery to create paper sculptures
March 25, 5 – 9 pm – closing party with music and Exquisite Corpse silent auction closing

Special hours -- During the run of The Paper Sculpture Show, the Contemporary will be open each Thursday evening until 9 pm.

Join in the fun of helping to create the exhibit. Use the online form to book your group for a day or night of Paper Sculpture making!

Lively and unconventional, The Paper Sculpture Show explores the nature of the art object and the identity of the artist.

Twenty-nine international artists and artist teams, among them Janine Antoni, E.V. Day, Glenn Ligon, Cildo Meireles, Sarah Sze, and Fred Tomaselli, have each contributed a design for a three-dimensional paper sculpture that is only completed once it has been assembled by visitors to the gallery. The artists’ designs, along with detailed instructions, have been printed on up to four sheets of paper per artist (most are on two sheets), each measuring 10 x 12 3/4 inches. At the onset of the exhibition, 500 copies per sheet of each work will be stacked on work tables in the gallery, along with a limited set of tools - such as scissors, tape and glue - to be used in the “transformation” of the work.

Over the course of the exhibition, the visitors will assemble their favorite pieces into paper sculptures right in the gallery. The creations will remain on display after completion (to be picked up after the show closes), to enable the exhibition to grow and change throughout its presentation. Subsequent visitors will have the opportunity to see multiple versions of the same piece, each made unique by the hand of its fabricator.

To join the fun, register your group using the online form.
CLICK HERE

Groups are encouraged to pre-register, so that we can be sure to accommodate every one!

Special hours -- During the run of The Paper Sculpture Show, the Contemporary will be open each Thursday evening until 9 pm!

(Regular admission fees are waived for groups who book in advance. Donations to the Contemporary are always appreciated)

Artists in the exhibition are: Janine Antoni, The Art Guys, David Brody, Luca Buvoli, Francis Cape and Liza Phillips, Seong Chun, Minerva Cuevas, E.V. Day, Nicole Eisenman, Spencer Finch, Charles Goldman, Rachel Harrison, Stephen Hendee, Patrick Killoran, Glenn Ligon, Cildo Meireles, Helen Mirra, Aric Obrosey, Ester Partegàs, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Akiko Sakaizumi, David Shrigley, Eve Sussman , Sarah Sze, Fred Tomaselli, Pablo Vargas-Lugo, Chris Ware, Olav Westphalen, Allan Wexler.

The Paper Sculpture Show is organized by Cabinet magazine, Independent Curators International (iCI), and Sculpture Center. It is curated by Mary Ceruti, Matt Freedman, and Sina Najafi, and accompanied by the The Paper Sculpture Book, which contains the entire exhibition in unassembled, take-home form. The traveling exhibition is organized and circulated by Independent Curators International. The exhibition and its accompanying publication are made possible, in part, by support from the Peter Norton Family Foundation. www.ici-exhibitions.org

Evidence: Paper Works
In keeping with the theme of "paper", the Contemporary will present Evidence: Paper Works which comprised of three exhibitions, Mail Room, Exquisite Corpse and Recycled Garden.

Artists Benjamin Jones, Ruth Laxson, and Kathy Yancey will display mail art pieces from their personal collections for the exhibition Mail Room. Mail artists like to claim that mail art began when Cleopatra had herself delivered to Julius Caesar in a rolled-up carpet, this may be disputable but the origins of mail art can be reliably traced to the acivities of the Fluxus group of the early 1960s. The artists taking part in the exhbiit have been involved in trading artwork, ephemera, and the like with other artists and this is integral to mail art concept that "senders receive;" one must not expect to recieve mail art unless one is actively actively involved in the process.

For Exquisite Corpse Benjamin Jones, Ruth Laxson, and Kathy Yancey will be joined by artists Melissa Herrington, Alex Kvares, and D.E. Johnson to collaborate on a series of works inspired by the Surrealists’ exquisite corpse game. Each artist will start a drawing, fold the paper to conceal most of the drawing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. The artists are encouraged to approach the game with a figurative outcome in mind. By default these exercises, which celebrate the mystique of accident, lead to unpredictable chimeras. Results cannot be predicted when artists working from different points-of-view attempt to interact with unknown quantities. Each of the collaborative drawings will be on auction during the run of the exhibition. The final night of silent bidding will be held during a closing event on March 25.

Marilee Keys' Paper Garden is a site specific installation using her junk mail collected over the past 9 months. It will be based on a contemporary version of the old technique of paper quilling. "I will be working off the walls and suspending from the ceiling creating a new topography, with paper, shadows, space and volume." Marilee Keys

Quilling is the technique of rolling paper to form coils, which are then assembled to form designs. Dating from the middle ages, quilling was created mainly by cloistered religious orders in Europe who had access to handmade papers.

The World of Watermarks is an exhibition created for the Contemporary by the Robert C. Williams Paper Museum at Georgia Tech. A watermark is a change in the thickness of the paper that can be seen when the paper is held up to the light. Without illumination, the watermarks on display would look and feel just like plain pieces of paper. Examples of the progression of watermarking and educational text will be featured. Running concurrently at the Paper Museum will be an exhibition of The Third National Juried Collegiate Handmade Paper Art Show. The exhibition showcases a wide variety of sculptures, paintings, books, and drawings; Thirty-three works by students representing eleven schools were chosen for inclusion.

Katherine Taylor, Untitled Sketch, 2006	Hilary Wilder, Basin, 2003	Donna Mintz, Untitled (house under water), 2006
Friday April 21 - June 3 Courting Disaster Katherine Taylor, Hilary Wilder, Donna Mintz    Artists' Reception Friday April 21, 7 - 9 pm Hilary Wilder Artist's Talk, April 21, 6 - 7 pm Donna Mintz Artist's Talk, April 26, 6:30 viewing; 7 pm talk Katherine Taylor Artist's Talk, May 17, 6:30 viewing; 7 pm talk “The Human Factor: Influence and Response” a conversation led by        Andrea Weyermann, PhD, May 24, 7 pm

Courting Disaster Katherine Taylor, Hilary Wilder, Donna Mintz, presents the work of three accomplished artists, each delving into the themes related to natural and man-made disaster and catastrophe. Each artist's exquisite technique belies the chilling, haunted and always compelling images of the aftermath of disaster, from hurricane and wildfire ravaged neighborhoods to sunken ships to rubble-strewn avenues.

Katherine Taylor is an artist and educator born in Biloxi, Mississippi. She received her MFA from Georgia State University. Currently, Taylor is an adjunct professor at the Atlanta College of Art where she teaches in the drawing and painting departments. Her work is exhibited and collected nationally and has been included in museum exhibitions in Albany, GA, and Tallahassee, FL. New American Paintings recently featured her work on the back cover of volume #58. Taylor is represented by Marcia Wood Gallery.

Hilary Wilder was born in 1973 in North Conway, New Hampshire and currently lives and works in Houston, Texas. In 2004, she completed a two-year fellowship as both a Visual Artist resident and a Critical Studies resident in the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. She has recently exhibited work at the Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston, and the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art. Her videos have been screened at the Chicago International Film Festival, the Art in Motion II festival at the University of Southern California, and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. In addition, she has written catalogue essays for exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Rice University Art Gallery. Wilder received an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 2001.

Donna Mintz was born in Gainesville, GA in 1956. Her evocative paintings are recognized for their contemplative,atmospheric study of anonymous spaces. She is influenced by her naturalist studies and by the convergence of art with poetry, history, and science. Her work is exhibited nationally and is widely collected in private and corporate collections. She lives and works in Atlanta, GA and is represented here by Sandler Hudson Gallery.

The Human Factor: Influence and Response a conversation with Andrea Weyermann, PhD, Patricia McIntosh, (Vice President, Coast, Georgia Conservancy), and artist Katherine Taylor
Wednesday, May 24, 7:00 pm

Andrea Weyermann, PhD has explored psychology in a clinical, academic, and private practice context cultivating an extensive and diverse knowledge of her field. Weyermann received her Ph. D. in Clinical Psychology from Georgia State University in 1993 with a dissertation examining comorbidity and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Vietnam Veterans. Prior to receiving her degree, Weyermann was an assistant professor at Augusta State University and served as a consultant to Augusta Veterans Administration Hospital in Augusta, GA.

After receiving her Ph.D. Weyermann became an associate professor at Augusta State University. Subsequently she worked as a therapist at Emory University in Atlanta studying the effectiveness of certain therapies in treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

In 1998 Weyermann chose to stop working in the psychology profession and start a family with her husband in Atlanta. Until the year 2000 she lectured at Georgia State University and taught undergraduate courses in Abnormal Psychology and Personality Theory. Weyermann has continued to lecture on the subject of psychology while directing most of her energies to her children’s activities, serving on school boards, chairing committees, as well as teaching within their schools. In this time Weyermann has also taken interest in the arts and become extremely involved in the visual art scene in Atlanta; she joined the Board of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in 2005.

Patricia McIntosh is Vice President for Coastal Programs at the Georgia Conservancy. Serving in that capacity since 1998, she manages the Conservancy’s coastal office in Savannah and oversees the organization’s program activities related to coastal growth management and the protection of coastal resources.

Prior to joining the Georgia Conservancy, McIntosh managed local government planning, environmental management and technical assistance programs for the Georgia Department of Community Affairs and was closely involved in policy and program development under Georgia's Growth Strategies Program. She also served as a policy analyst with the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget, transportation planner with the Georgia Department of Transportation, and a local government land use and environmental planner.

McIntosh Chairs the Chatham Environmental Forum and serves on the boards of the Institute for Georgia Environmental Leadership and Skidaway Marine Science Foundation. She also serves on the Department of Natural Resources Coastal Advisory Council, Department of Community Affairs Coastal Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee and Regional 12 Advisory Council, the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve Advisory Committee, and the Georgia SeaGrant Advisory Committee.

McIntosh has a Master of City Planning degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology and an undergraduate degree in Urban and Regional Planning from East Carolina University.

Bring it on! A summer series of eight solo positions
June 17 - September 16, 2006
Four one-week exhibition periods. Artist's receptions are on opening nights from 7 - 9 pm.

Didi Dunphy Web photo gallery	Tom Zarrilli Web photo gallery

June 17 - 24
Recess Playscape | Didi Dunphy - Dunphy is interested in the intersection of art, performance, and design. The Recess objects include the See Saw, the Swing, and the Inside Skateboards and are designed for play. The hope is that through play, cooperation, and collaboration good ideas will be born. Didi Dunphy lives and works in Athens, Georgia. www.modernconvenience.com
Didi Dunphy will present an artist's talk on June 17 at 6 pm.

A year in the yards of clutter and the driveways of divestment | Tom Zarrilli - Since 2004 Tom Zarrilli has kept an online journal documenting what he has encountered at yard sales in Atlanta neighborhoods. For the Contemporary, Zarrilli will install a staged yard sale featuring some of the objects most often found in his research. Video, digital media and photographs will be embedded in the installation and visitors are invited to root through the installation to uncover the embedded media. The appearance of the piece will change as viewers move things about. Tom Zarrilli lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. www.yardsaleaddict.blogspot.com
Tom Zarrilli will present an artist's talk on June 22 at 6 pm. A closing sale of the installation elements will be on June 24 from 11 am - 5 pm.

Rashida Ferdinand Web photo gallery	Allison Rentz Web photo gallery

July 15 - 22
March of the Tapetum Lucidum | Rashida Ferdinand - Tapetum lucidum is a reflective coating on the choroids of non-human vertebrae eyes. It is a Latin term for "bright carpet" and allows animals to see at night. Ferdinand will suspend hundreds of eye forms from the ceiling of the main gallery to suggest a number of symbolic touch points. The eye forms represent protective talismans and the metaphysical concept of the third eye, an aid to creativity. The piece is also inspired by bottle trees, where the hanging of bottles from trees is used to ward off evil spirits. Rashida Ferdinand is a native of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Rashida Ferdinand will present an artist's talk on July 15 at 6 pm.

c o n t a i n i n g = h a t e | Allison Rentz - In an effort to remove hate from the world; Rentz has devised a container for hate. Her installation includes sound, video, and performance. She will crawl through the gallery space burdened by the "container for hate".
"This piece is about hate. Hate is like nuclear waste -- We bury it. Is it really gone? What will happen to that which is buried in the future? Can we transform the energy that is hate into positive change?" Allison Rentz www.allisonrentz.com
Daily performances are at Tuesday - Saturday, 11:30 am and 2 pm.
Allison Rentz will perform and present an artist's talk on July 20 at 6 pm.

Jennifer Burkley	Avantika Bawa Web photo gallery

August 5 - 12
Entitlement: The Past is Never Dead and Buried | Jennifer Burkley - For Bring it on! Burkley will install a pathway of aspirin strung garlands to create an immersive experience for visitors. When walking through the path visitors will touch the roping of pills, which will feel like pearls. The effect will be of a tactile journey -- light and airy in places, multi-layered in others. Jennifer Burkley is from Placitas, New Mexico.
Jennifer Burkley will present an artist's talk on August 5 at 6 pm.

Navigating Space/s - Pt. 2 | Avantika Bawa - Bawa's installation will explore the interior and exterior nuances of the Contemporary’s site. Using sculptural collage and audio she intends to question the relationship between real and abstract space. Navigating Space/s Pt. 1 was installed at Gallery Nature Morte in New Delhi, India. Avantika lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia and is co-founder of drainmag - Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture. www.drainmag.com
Avantika Bawa will present an artist's talk on August 10 at 6 pm.

Danielle Roney	Elizabeth Johnston

September 9 - 16
Genesis Trial | Danielle Roney - While considering globalization to be at the forefront of artistic convergence, Roney will tap into her recent experiences in China to address the contradictions between modernization and tradition. Using sculpture, video, and sound her installation will encompass much of the gallery space to create an immersive experience for visitors. Danielle Roney lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. www.danielleroney.com
Danielle Roney will present an artist's talk on September 9 at 6 pm.

Emily's Gift | Elizabeth Johnston - Through the use of photography and video, Johnston will present work that is inspired by her mentally disabled older sister. The photographs will give prominence to her sister's peers and the video will focus on the inner workings of familial relations. She hopes "that viewers can see that working with people who have mental disabilities is not an exploitative act but an issue that is very close to her heart." Elizabeth Johnston lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.
Elizabeth Johnston will present an artist's talk on September 14 at 6 pm.