Coming up at the Contemporary

Main Gallery
Jennie C. Jones: Red, Bird, Blue

Jennie C. Jones states that her installation is an “improbable love letter to Ellsworth Kelly and an homage to the influence of his formal aesthetic filtered through issues of ethnicity.” Her exhibition takes its cue from the fact that Kelly referrers to a childhood illness that left him house bound and sparked his study of birds and their colors. His paintings offer a rigorous examination of deep space, geometric shape, and color as weight (fine examples of his work are permanently on view at the High Museum of Art). Jones’s work is a complex investigation of the visual and the aural, connecting to Kelly’s “hard edge” abstract paintings and their potential relationships to the history of jazz music, classic Blue Note LP cover designs, and the forms of contemporary listening devices.

In Red, Bird, Blue, sound and space will be articulated through a presentation of wall paintings, works on paper, audio and design objects. The Color of Birds utilizes the sound of bird wings and moving air emanating from a directional speaker; it is inaudible to the viewer/listener until they pass through the soundscape area. Presented on the opposite side of the gallery is Slow Birds. This audio is comprised of four Charlie Parker notes (whose nickname was ‘bird’) slowed tempo and mixed with a reconstructed Max Roach drum solo.

Gallery Four
Alexi Brown-Schmidt and Rose Marcus: Cavepainting

Cavepainting is an exhibition by two emerging  New York painters currently residing in Atlanta. Brown-Schmidt and Marcus each use a palette of bold and moody color, applied to paper or canvas with exuberant and speedy gestures. Their works reference classic motifs of portraiture and landscape, flirting with issues of high/low culture and good/bad taste.  Dogs, grotesque faces, births, and various catastrophes are some of the subjects that animate their recent paintings, used to mine true feelings mixed with a healthy dose of irony and awkwardness.

Round Gallery
Charles Huntley Nelson: Alphaville

Atlanta-based artist Charles Huntley Nelson is developing a film installation based on Alphaville, the infamous science fiction/noir/gangster film by Jean Luc Godard. This work re-imagines the film’s Lemy Caution, the gruff Dick Tracy-like secret agent, and the triumph of human creativity over the restrictive logic of technology. Nelson will shoot footage in a variety of settings as he conceptualizes Alphaville as a composite of North American cities. Secret societies and rituals are a key element in the artist’s project, and he has written, “As a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity myself, I have a unique understanding of these rituals and the dual meaning of the word Alphaville. Alpha Phi Alpha, founded in 1906, is the oldest Greek letter college fraternity for African Americans.”

Nelson’s installation in the Round Gallery is a preview of his Alphaville which will be presented in the fall of 2010. It brings together a range of source material, video clips, and works on paper that provide access to the ideas, locations, and collaborators that are essential to the development of his ambitious work-in-progress.