July 11 - August 31, 2008
Main Gallery - Daniel Duford, The Naked Boy
Left Gallery - Dave McKenzie, Present Tense
Gallery Four - Selections from The Studio Program, Craig Dongoski, Tim Hunter, Eric Mack
Round Gallery - Susan Silton, The Five W's

Duford is fascinated by comic book traditions and Native American mythology, and his training in ceramics gives him a unique sense of forming and fragility. He has contributed poetry and cultural writing to several Oregon-based publications, and The Naked Boy allows him a space where bold drawing and storytelling styles combine in elaborately staged sequences of establishing shots, midrange scene development, and dynamic close-ups of figurative fragments, dialogue, and emotional utterances.

The Naked Boy examines the history of America and its various social and political developments during the past 100 years. It is a complex mythological story that combines several historical periods simultaneously. Witch trials and robber barons, crows and evangelical preachers mix it up while the protagonist matures and follows his destiny to understand the circumstances of his birth and his role in the world.

At the Contemporary, the artist will develop a setting for the entire sequence of The Naked Boy drawings to date, including wall works, comic books, and  several low-fired ceramic sculptures that personify figures in the narrative, including Walt Whitman in a flood, and Hester Prynne from The Scarlett Letter. The installation will present Duford’s cautionary tale of manifest destiny, democracy, and self-invention in a shifting space between looking, reading, fact, and fantasy.

New York-based artist Dave McKenzie works in a variety of media—sculpture, video, painting, and performance, playfully or provocatively examining conditions of race, masculinity, time, and place. His own image and body often take center stage in various combinations of public hiding or intimate access.

In While Supplies Last (2003), he donned a giant papier-mâché mask of himself and gave away miniature ‘Dave’ bobble-head dolls to passers-by. In Self-Portrait Piñata (2002), a performance and video, a hanging ‘Dave’ piñata is bashed to smithereens by numerous competing children. Recent performances of I’ll Be There, (2007) feature McKenzie meeting the public at various locales which are pre-printed in a day planner that indicates where he will be and when.

Present Tense (2007) is a video projection that features the artist in various representational and psychological states. In a stop-time animation, a McKenzie ‘doll’ sits on a park bench and encounters an Andy Warhol action figure. The two consider the possibilities of self-transformation in a dialog that is both awkward and tender. Inspired by Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), and the 1964 children’s film, The Incredible Mr. Limpet, starring Don Knotts, Present Tense is an extended meditation on the male body and creative process, a kind of metaphysical therapy session where McKenzie comes to terms with anxiety, influence, and his own expectations about making art. The video presents him in modes of contemplation and exhilaration, occupying urban and domestic space in static and dynamic ways while he examines several of his past sculptures and projects. It is a self-survey of an emerging oeuvre, one that has had its share of accolades; given the work’s title, it establishes concern as well as contentment.

Dave McKenzie lives and works in New York. He has held residencies at the P.S.1 National Studio Program and the Studio Museum in Harlem, both in New York; and solo exhibitions at galleries including Small A Projects, Portland, Oregon; 40,000 Gallery, Chicago; and Susanne Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles. He was awarded the 2005 William H. Johnson Prize for outstanding achievement by an African-American artist, and was the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2006.

Los Angeles-based artist Susan Silton uses various forms of public address to examine conditions of authority, architecture, and interruption. Her recent projects have included elaborate tenting of museums in brightly colored striped fabric, which adds a carnivalesque gaiety to usually sober institutional structures. She has also produced and disseminated  postcards with disturbing texts borrowed from the American and British militarys’ leaflet bombings over Iraq between 2003–04. One card contains the phrase, “Your Future Is The Sunlight That Will Scatter Them Like Cockroaches Into The Darkness Of The Past,” printed in black on hot pink with a decorative border. Translated into English from the original Arabic, this text is a troubling assertion, and one can only imagine how thousands of such statements would affect a citizenry if dropped from the air, a practice pf psychological operations used since World War II.

In the Round Gallery, she will create a site specific installation called The Five W’s, referencing the key journalistic conditions that should be present in the relating of any story: who, what, where, when, and why. Silton complicates and challenges the existence of these ideal questions by embedding the words within an intensely optical pattern of black and white. Printed on postcards ‘endlessly’ stacked for the viewer to take, they suggest unlimited bounty as well as obfuscation and hidden agenda. The cards are positioned within similarly painted enclosures in the gallery, further problematizing the relationships between message and messenger, and individual and institution.

This exhibition focuses on three artists who are currently part of our unique Studio Artists Program.

Craig Dongoski’s drawings and prints utilize fields of repeated gestures that establish unique rhythms and manipulations of space. Simultaneous with these works, are various investigations using recorded sound and voice. The interconnectivity of these interests provides Dongoski’s work with a lively exchange between the handmade and the technological. He has lived and worked in Atlanta since June 1999, teaching painting and drawing at Georgia State University.

Tim Hunter’s work focuses on bird species whose populations are in decline because of loss of habitat. That he utilizes materials including asphalt and cement to depict these birds is a wry updating of Audubon’s classic renderings and a not unsubtle suggestion that the rise of cities is responsible for this problem. His work has been shown at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama; the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science, Tallahasse, Florida; and featured in the publication New American Paintings.

Eric Mack makes vibrant paintings and collages that incorporate various magazine and newspaper fragments of color and text, mixed with materials applied by brush and aerosol. His canvases make reference to traditions including Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and graffiti. His work has been shown at galleries including Tilford Art Group, Los Angeles; Brecht Forum Gallery, New York; and Wertz Contemporary and Fay Gold Gallery, both in Atlanta. He recently completed a project at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Jackson Airport.

Anissa Mack,
99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall (Atlanta, Georgia October 2007), 2007

Main Gallery
Anissa Mack To Be Sung As A Round

Anissa Mack’s recent works examine the complexities of memory, place, and tradition. Using cast and fabricated metals in combination with store-bought or collected items, Mack creates straightforward sculptures that pack an emotional punch.

Untitled, 2006, includes a painted bronze pumpkin (based on a childhood paper mâché original), that sits on top of a pile of vintage Playboy magazines. Located on the gallery floor, these evocative objects bring to mind the physical and psychological conditions of youth including creative freedom and sexual awareness. The crude and comic face of the Jack-O-Lantern and the unseen pages featuring wholesome nudes combine to create a short totem that unites public and private fantasies.

The text sculpture, 11th Anniversary: Philadelphia, 2007, features several commemorative notions at once. Our culture tends to honor whole numbers and mid-way points, marking milestones like a 25th wedding anniversary or 40th birthday with protocols of pleasure. To make a work in celebration of the 11th year of something is to focus on the less than momentous times, the everyday business of living. Mack slyly uses the material (steel) that is traditionally given as a gift on this particular anniversary, making the viewer aware of enforced expectations and ideas of correctness.

The photo series, 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall (begun in 1996 and continuing), shows the artist holding a small bucket in front of various hotel ice-making machines. Taken while traveling solo or with friends and family across the United States, the images speak of the loneliness, romance, indulgence, and escape that can accompany such actions. If Mack’s various haircuts and outfits do not indicate a self in transition, then the ice itself might evoke a constant state of flux. The most recent photo in the series was taken at the Days Inn in Atlanta at a time when citizens struggle with a severe drought, providing another layer of meaning to the moment.

Judy Linn, Untitled, 2005

Judy Linn, Untitled, 2003

Left Gallery
Judy Linn Early Recent Late Photographs 1970 - 2007

Judy Linn’s photography captures spontaneous encounters with people, animals, culture, and nature. Shooting mostly in black and white with occasional forays into color, she is attuned to the surreal juxtapositions that can be found in bustling cities, in small towns, and on country roads.

For almost forty years, Linn’s camera has functioned as a hyper-sensitive antenna, picking up curious data as opposed to searching for it. In Untitled, 2003, a white cow with several black markings takes center stage in a quiet landscape. Her body is reflected in water at the bottom of the picture’s edge, and the twist of her powerful head to the left charges the image with a shocking asymmetry. Linn records this moment as it reverberates through the countryside.  

In her 2005 artist statement, Linn wrote, “I want a photograph that makes me aware of what is physically in front of me, a photograph that gives me the pleasure of getting lost.” Her delicate upside down portrait of her art dealer Hudson (Untitled, 2005) is a perfect case in point, as one can spend a long time examining the bald and beatific head that looks up at us with clear eyes and a slight smile. His wide-striped shirt seems to give birth to his face while contrasting with the textured concrete he is laying on.

Linn’s work operates in the photographic tradition of artists such as Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Helen Levitt. She consistently finds the poetry and pathos in contemporary life, bringing an accuracy and openness to the act of looking.

Round Gallery & Pavilion, and remote site
Russell Maltz In The Process of Becoming: Painted/Stacked (For Sol LeWitt)

Russell Maltz’s sculptural projects often utilize stacked and painted commercial building materials to establish formal and physical relationships with existing architectures including college campuses, shopping centers, museums and galleries. His studio-based and site specific works continue to expand the legacies of conceptual and minimalist art, focusing on issues of scale, density, documentation, and systemic progressions. Large outdoor works allow Maltz to establish a dialogue with real estate developers and suppliers, as he borrows or buys quantities of materials for temporary use during the run of an exhibition. Afterwards, these materials (which have been altered with Day-Glo orange or yellow paint) are returned to their source, often used in local retail and home construction. The consideration of events from concept to installation to dispersal is what most interests him.

At the Contemporary’s outdoor pavilion and entrance area, Maltz has located palettes of concrete block and bundles of PVC plumbing pipe. He has painted particular zones of Day Glo yellow on the top and sides of the stacks, forcing the viewer’s eyes to concentrate on details of height and direction. Looking at the color on each discreet accumulation of materials makes connections between Maltz’s altered raw materials and the built environment. For example, notice the connections between the horizontal bands of color and the rusted metal structure of the pavilion, and the white PVC pipe in relationship to the exterior surface of the Contemporary.

At a construction site at the corner of Decatur Street and Hill Street, Maltz will present similarly painted concrete blocks, in dialogue with workers moving earth and laying the foundation for a residential building project. These works will likely be seen by Atlanta motorists or riders of the elevated MARTA line passing by this area. They will get a quick glimpse of carefully placed color that interrupts the familiarity of the landscape but whose purpose is unknown.

In the Round Gallery, Maltz has installed 54 for Sol, a stack of framed ink jet photographs that show the same section of concrete block, each printed with subtle variations of tone and color. This work is a tribute to artist Sol Lewitt (1928-2007), whose sculptures and wall paintings utilizing modular structures and variations of shape, color, and line have had a profound influence on generations of artists. Maltz was aware of the presence of LeWitt’s 1999 public work 54 Columns in Atlanta, and his photographs and outdoor installations were developed to open a dialogue about the legacy of Minimalism and ideas of process and site specificity.

Special thanks to Tim Schrager and Perennial Properties for donation of materials and location used in this project.

This exhibition focuses on artists who are currently part of our unique Studio Artists Program. Curated by Kay Kallos, Executive Director of the Contemporary in dialogue with Stuart Horodner.

David Knox is a photographer who has traveled the back roads of the American South for more than 15 years, documenting the region’s architectural ruins, landscapes, and people. His work combines 19th, 20th and 21st century processes in single image and collage and he exhibits his work in galleries in Atlanta and New Orleans. Knox has taught photography for the past 12 years and completed his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005.

Laura Noel is an Atlanta native and photographer. Some of her recent subjects include portraits of smokers and the spaces they inhabit since being barred from smoking in public, playgrounds in Cuba, and a series of visual short stories about the imagined lives of strangers. After working as an artist for many years, Noel is finishing a MFA in Photography at the University of Georgia.

Mary O'Horo's work is based on her interest in scientific principles and their relationship to metaphysical concepts. Her recent investigations have begun to consider the cosmological as an extension of the individual. O’Horo has been a working artist for more than ten years; she has a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts as well as a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of South Florida.