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| 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.
Mail Art |
Exquiste Corpse |
| |
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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.
Saturday November 12, 2005
– January 7, 2006
Cindy Loehr and Rachel Lowther: Rough Magic
and Dark Lullaby
Curated by Helena Reckitt
Cecelia Kane: Hand-to-Hand,
a Project for the Round Gallery
Artists' Reception Nov 12, 7 - 9 pm
Artists' Talk 6 - 7 pm
Cecelia Kane Artists' Talk &
Performance, Nov 19, 4 pm
VIEW
THE WEB GALLERY
The two-person show by
Cindy Loehr and Rachel
Lowther highlights artists who
are gaining international attention for their
installations and sculptural tableaux. Cecelia
Kane is an Atlanta based visual and performance
artist who easily traverses personal and political
ground in her work. All three artists share an
interest narrative and storytelling, making pieces
that are emotionally resonant and viscerally charged.
Loehr, Lowther, and Kane have also made work in
collaboration with other people, often incorporating
sound into their installations.
Cindy Loehr is
currently based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She recently
completed a two year Core Residency at The Museum
of Fine Arts Houston. Her show will include several
recent pieces, including Bluebird Burden,
a 3-channel audio installation that evokes despair
and loneliness. Loehr wrote the lyrics and vocalist
Carlos Lama composed and sang the melody - three
versions for the three birds. In Pillowheads,
a two-channel audio sculpture that relates to
the piece, towering pillow-head figures sing a
lullaby about the dangers and seduction of comfort.
Rachel Lowther
is based in the Berlin to Brooklyn. Her sculptures
and performances combine apocalyptic visions with
nostalgia for the 1970’s. As curator and
Participant Inc. founder, Lia Gangitano, puts
it, Lowther “mixes elements such as hard
and soft, virility and delicacy, ‘secret
poison [and] out and out carnage’. Recent
works deploy such contradictions to examine masculinity
and related violence. Creating a space that is
poised--neither coming together nor falling apart--her
work reiterates, from the present moment, the
formative impact of Cold War warnings on a generation
now grappling with deja vu.”
Since the beginning of the Iraq
War in March 2003, Cecelia Kane
has been painting a news story almost daily on
white stuffed gloves. These gloves depict the
headline, the date the story appeared and the
relentless violence, daily killings and occasional
positive or human-interest news from Iraq as featured
in the Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper.
She has painted all the characters as clowns whether
they are victims or perpetrators. She makes no
other comment except what the viewer may surmise
from the sheer, accumulating numbers of them.
"I use gloves, because fingers
are used to count and this is a counting, time-based
installation piece of unfolding events. Hands
also act for good or evil, construction or destruction,
help or hurt. Lined up chronologically on a wall,
the stuffed hands with red tips begin to resemble
little bodies each with a story to tell."
Cecelia Kane
Saturday September 10 –
October 29
Red Beans and Rice: Asian Artists in the New
South
Press and patrons’ preview Friday, Sept
9, 5 - 7 pm (by invitation)
Artists' Reception Saturday, Sept 10, 7 - 9 pm
Artists' Talk 6 - 7 pm
Curated by Kóan-Jeff Baysa and Craig Bunting
View
the web gallery
The American South has struggled with
the ideals of equality throughout its controversial
history. The Civil Rights era and desegregation
of the 1960’s began the era of the “New
South”. Yet even today there are pockets
of resistance, places where even though the law
says that all people are equal, some are more
equal than others.
Red Beans and Rice brings
together an under-recognized group of artists
profoundly influenced by their experiences in
the Southern states. The exhibition dissects themes
including cultural engagement, dual citizenship,
Christian, American, and Asian ideals and stereotypes.
Some of these artists were born in the South and
have deep roots in the region. For others it has
become their home through adoption and absorption,
but their sentiments about the South are often
in conflict with the traditions and cultures they
grew up with. As the process of Americanization
begins, these artists reexamine, redefine, and
integrate a new vision of home. For many, the
longing for distant homelands might never pass,
with fantasies of home distorted through the processes
of memory and myth making.
The show will include installation
art, photography, fiber art, digital video &
still imagery, painting, drawing and sculpture.
Artists participating include:
Yun Bai
Ying Kit Chan
J. Jaia Chen
Arthur Liou
Kazuko Matsumoto
ON/Megumi Akiyoshi
Jiha Moon
Osamu James Nakagawa
Lordy Rodriguez
Jan Ru-Wan
Prince Varughese Thomas
Edie Tsong
Bo Zhang
Saturday June 18 –
August 13
Summer Solos 2005
Curated by Helena Reckitt
Katherine Mitchell The Krems Suite, Labyrinths
and Related Works
Caroline Lathan-Stiefel Whorl
Funded
by Creative Capital
Mark Roeder Triangular Solid with Circular
Inserts (Multiple Cracks, Possible Explanations)
Artists' Reception June 18, 7 - 9 pm
Artists' Talk 6 - 7 pm
Wednesday June 29, 6:30 pm
Katherine Mitchell in Conversation
with Maria Artemis, in conjunction
with ACA 100.
Solo projects by three artists –
Katherine Mitchell, an established Atlanta artist,
Caroline Lathan-Stiefel, a former Atlantan who
now lives in Montreal, Canada, and Mark Roeder,
an emerging artist from Los Angeles who has not
exhibited in Atlanta before. All three explore
aspects of the modernist legacy in their work,
and share an interest in architectural and spatial
metaphors.
Katherine Mitchell
is a respected Atlanta-based painter who has exhibited
her work since the early 1970’s. The exhibition
will include a selection of work by Mitchell from
the past decade.
After graduating from the Atlanta
College of Art in the late 60’s Mitchell
studied at the Tyler School of Art in Rome and
earned an MFA from Georgia State in 1977. She
has received many awards, grants and commissions.
Most recently she was invited by the Galerie StadtPark,
Krems, Austria to participate in their 2005-2006
residency program. Her work has been featured
in more than 20 solo and 100 group exhibitions
in museums and galleries including The Brooks
Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, The High Museum, Atlanta,
Georgia, Hunter Museum, Chattanooga Tennessee,
Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and The
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Work by Katherine
Mitchell is in the collection of the Columbus
Museum of Art, Columbus, Georgia, The Georgia
Museum of Art and The Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah
Georgia among others. Her work has been featured
in Art in America, Art Papers and New American
Paintings. Katherine Mitchell teaches drawing
and painting at Emory University. She is represented
in Atlanta by Kiang Gallery.
Caroline Lathan-Stiefel
is originally from Atlanta and currently lives
in Montreal, Canada. Her new work for the Contemporary
is a room-sized installation. Consisting of multiple,
connected forms made of fabric, pipe cleaners,
yarn, pins, thread, and wire, the immersive installation
covers the ceiling, walls, and part of the floor
of the gallery room. The fabric is either sewn
or held together by sewing pins. The environment
combines childlike three-dimensional sketches
of houses and people with more abstract sections
that echo microscopic imagery and aerial photography
of cities.
Integral to the work is the idea
of sprawl, as in the drive to take up space coupled
with makeshift development. Because the systems
of heterogeneous parts making up the piece have
"run amok," the installation aims to
spoof and transform seemingly coherent architectural,
technological, and organic systems. Forms in the
installation vaguely refer to interior and exterior
architecture, domestic objects, plant and cell
structures, plumbing, and marine biology. Lathan-Stiefel’s
sculptural installations are often in dialogue
with her drawings and possess a pictorial quality.
While a pictorial quality is present throughout
the new installation, the viewer cannot take in
the whole piece with one look. Instead, multiple
areas of focus are present with many opportunities
for viewing "hidden" scenes.
Caroline Lathan-Stiefl studied at
Brown University before earning her MFA from the
Maine College of Art. Represented in Atlanta by
Sandler Hudson, she has had solo shows at the
gallery as well as the Westbrook Gallery at the
Georgia Institute of Technology. She has participated
in group shows at FE Gallery, Pittsburg, Islip
Art Museum, East Islip, New York, New Jersey State
Museum, The Morris Museum and the Lamar Dodd School
of Art. In 2003 Lathan-Stiefel received the New
Jersey State Council on the Art’s Sculpture
Fellowship. Her work is in the collection of The
Hunterdon Museum, Morris Museum, Newark Museum,
and the Noyes Museum. Her work will be included
spring 2006 in an exhibition at Galerie Articule
in Montreal entitled "Immersive" in
conjuction with a new show of work by Carolee
Schneemann. Lathan Stiefel was awarded a Creative
Capitol Foundation 2005 grant.
Mark Roeder is
an emerging artist based in Los Angeles. His work
deals with the influences and traces of minimalist
and conceptual art. Roeder's new piece responds
to Dan Graham’s Pavilion Influenced
by Moon Windows which is currently owned
by the Contemporary.
Roeder received his BFA from Otis
College of Art and Design, Los Angeles CA, in
Photography in 2000. In 2001 he had his first
solo show at Low Gallery in LA. Roeder has participated
in a number of national and international group
exhibitions including: Art Needs an Operation,
2004, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York NY, The Last
of Blood and Guts Brigade, 2004, sixteen:one gallery,
Santa Monica CA, Cruel Intentions, 2004, Sandroni
Rey, Venice CA, When the Periphery Turns Center
and the Center Turns Periphery, 1st Prague Biennial,
National Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic, Unreal
Estate Opportunities, 2003, PKM Gallery, Seoul,
Korea, London Is Balling, 2002, The Bart Wells
Institute, London, England, and The Fifth International,
New York NY. In 2001 he curated The Soul Returns
to the Body at Postartum, Long Beach CA. Richard
Hawkins selected Roeder as one of his “Top
Ten” of 2000 for Artforum International,
and Bruce Hainley highlighted him as one of the
“Best of 2001” for the same publication.
His work has been included in several catalogues
and been reviewed in Frieze and the Los Angeles
Times. This will be his first exhibition in the
Southeast.
Saturday April 16 – June 4
2005 Atlanta Biennial
Curated by Helena Reckitt
Artists' Reception April 16, 7 - 9 pm
6 - 7 pm Artist led gallery tour
with Barbara Campbell, Terri Jones, Dona
Lief, Christopher McNulty, Matthew
Weddington and curator Helena
Reckitt
9 - 10 pm Music by the Glasses
Wednesday, June 1, 6:30 - 8 pm Artist led gallery
tour with Benita Carr, Santiago De
Paoli, Cody VanderKaay and curator Helena Reckitt
2005
Atlanta Biennial web gallery
The 2005 Atlanta Biennial features work
by sixteen artists from five southern states.
Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and
Tennessee are represented by the artists Barbara
Campbell (Greensboro, NC), Benita Carr (Atlanta,
GA), Santiago De Paoli (Atlanta, GA), Stephanie
Dotson (Athens, GA ), Jennifer Drummond (Farmington,
GA), Ben Fain (Atlanta, GA), Mirtha Ferrer (Atlanta,
GA), Sally Heller (New Orleans, LA), Terri Jones
(Memphis, TN), Dona Lief (New Orleans, LA), Lester
Julian Merriweather (Memphis, TN), Christopher
McNulty (Auburn, AL), Amy Pleasant )Birmingham,
AL), Jane Timberlake (Birmingham, AL), Cody VanderKaay
(Athens, GA), Matthew Weddington (Lexington, Kentucky)
Curator Helena Reckitt conducted
extensive studio visits in order to identify the
most vital work from among more than 250 regional
artists’ submissions. As Reckitt explains,
“The Contemporary is one of the few venues
in Atlanta committed to presenting innovative
work, if it looked like an artist was working
at a level of formal or conceptual experimentation,
I set up a studio visit.”
In addition to several respected
local figures, the exhibition features emerging
artists - including some still in graduate school
- and those with established reputations who are
not part of the Atlanta visual arts circuit. While
a number of artists mine the potential of traditional
media like painting, sculpture, and photography,
many work across conventional boundaries, incorporating
a wide array of materials and approaches in their
work.
“Of course the show reflects
my tastes,” notes Reckitt. “I’m
interested in conceptually-oriented work, especially
if it has a sense of wit or humor. My background
in feminism makes me sympathetic to work which
explores the broad area of ‘the feminine.’
I am suspicious of grandiose statements in art
and am drawn to a delicate aesthetic. That said,
I also enjoy artwork that provokes a strong, visceral
response.”
Alan Sondheim initiated the Atlanta
Biennial in 1984 as a tongue-in-cheek response
to the Whitney’s influential survey (which,
noticeably, did not include a single artist from
the South in 2004). For 2005, the selection criteria
2005 Atlanta Biennial were broadened
from artists in and around Atlanta to encompass
those working throughout the Southeast. The Biennial
will return to an Atlanta focus in 2007. While
the exhibition makes no claims for, nor attempts
to find a southern aesthetic, it does aim to celebrate
the vitality and sophistication of artists who
call the region home.
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
will take the opportunity of the opening of the
2005 Atlanta Biennial to recognize the Fulton
County Commissioners and Arts Council for the
invaluable support given to the Contemporary and
for the important role they play in the Atlanta
art community.
What Business Are You In?
Saturday January 29 – March 26
Curated by Helena Reckitt
Curatorial Consultant, Sheep
Opening Reception February 4, 7 - 9 pm
(Free to ATLart[05] patrons)
Christian Philipp Müller Artist's Talk (Free)
Monday, January 31, 5 pm
Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University
Carey Young Artist's Talk (Free)
Wednesday, February 16, 7 pm
CAA Reception
Thursday, February 17, 5:30 - 7 pm
(CAA members)
Irene Moon will perform My Queen and I
during the reception
What
Business Are You In? web gallery
Creative
Loafing review
Atlanta
Journal-Constitution review
An exhibition of national and internationally
known artists who insert themselves into institutional
structures and/or mimic the language and practices
of business and academia. Includes video, installation,
photography, and live performance.
Michael Aurbach (Nashville, TN), Alex
Bag (New York, NY), Andrea Fraser (New York, NY),
Jason Irwin (New York, NY), Gunilla Klingberg
(Stockholm, Sweden), Lucy Kimbell (London, England),
Irene Moon (Lexington, KY), Christian Philipp
Müller (New York, NY and Frankfurt, Germany),
Adrian Piper (USA), John Salvest (Jonesboro, AR),
Carey Young (London, England). To
learn more about the artists, visit their websites
Artists’ relationships with the corporate
and academic worlds are complex and often contradictory.
Far from the myth of the romantic outsider, most
artists depend on the support of institutions
and corporations, much as they did on the aristocracy
or church in the past. Artists engage in self-promotion
and branding, produce multiplies and outsource
the production of work.
A number of artists immerse themselves in business
life to revitalize the idea of what art is and
might be. Some artists adopt mimicry and masquerade
in order to explore corporate culture ‘from
within’. Others take an anthropological
approach to the cultures of the university and
the corporation.
For some artists, the frustration with a day
job that kept them out of the studio stimulated
work about office life. For others, the experience
of becoming a professional art teacher prompted
artwork about their ambivalent relationship to
authority.
Unlike earlier conceptual artists, whose tactics
developed in tandem with - and were often absorbed
by - the mass media, many of these artists are
not strictly oppositional. Instead, by highlighting
the co-dependence of individuals and organizations
they explore the moral ambiguities of our ideologically
impure times.
What Business Are You In? presents artists from
Britain, Germany, Sweden and the United States
working with photography, sculpture, video, performance,
and installation. Playful and quizzical, rather
than overtly didactic, they explore the slippery
definitions of art, artist, and entrepreneur.
This exhibit is funded in part
by the College
Art Association, the British
Council, and International
Artists Studio Program in Stockholm.
Artist websites
Michael
Aurbach
- www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/finearts/aurbach
Lucy
Kimbell
- www.lucykimbell.com
Gunilla
Klingberg
- www.gunillaklingberg.com
Irene
Moon -
www.begoniasociety.org
Christian
Philipp Müller -
www.minettabrook.org
Adrian
Piper - www.adrianpiper.com
John
Salvest
- www.johnsalvest.com
Carey
Young -
www.careyyoung.com
Saturday, November 13 - January 8, 2004
Hew Locke House of Cards
Curated by Helena Reckitt
in tandem with Julie Joyce of the Luckman Gallery
Artist's Reception November 13, 7 - 9 pm
Artist's Talk, 6 - 7 pm
Click
here for web gallery
Hew Locke makes magnificent objects from cheap,
unspectacular materials: cake decorations, paper
garlands, crocheted remnants, and plastic toys.
Yet, for all their surface gaiety, there is nothing
easy or easy to swallow about them. Locke was
born in Scotland and spent most of his youth in
Guyana, moving to England as an art student. Growing
up in the ‘colonies’ gave him an ironic
distance from Britain and the colonialist mindset.
His portraits festooned with gaudy baubles parody
the kind of art often sold in airport gift stores,
suggesting that the western imagination both fears
and feasts upon the exotic in its midst. Locke
is critical of the ways in which artists are categorized
according to their presumed ethnic affiliations.
In using cardboard as the basis for many of his
pieces, he comments on the packaging and commoditization
of artists and their work.
The largest of the portraits are five cardboard
cut-outs (2004) that depict Queen Elizabeth, Princess
Diana, and Prince Charles in various officially
represented states of age or emotion. Inspired
by images on travel postcards, the deceptively
detailed likenesses are formed by a lattice of
small serrations into large sheets of cardboard,
each highlighted by white paint and black marker
pen. Thirteen small pastel and charcoal drawings
from the Siren series (1999) are also included
in the exhibition. Resembling facial topographies,
the drawings are painstakingly adorned with minutiae
befitting the royal subject matter.
Included in this exhibit will be Locke’s
recent Passport Culture, which references
the Queen’s Coat of Arms (as depicted on
every British passport). “The piece is constructed
in layers. A pen drawing on my trade-mark brown
packing material is overlaid with an encrustation
of strings of beads, chains of safety pins (a
la Sex Pistols), fabric and butterflies. These
exotic materials form themselves into a chaotic
line drawing. The original Lions, Unicorns and
Harp are almost swamped by drawn and cut patchwork
masks and wild-eyed skulls. The piece reflects
the changing / shifting nature of British cultural
identity and the fear these changes often evoke.”
Hew Locke
For the exhibit at the Contemporary, Locke will
create a site-specific piece directly on the walls
of the Contemporary. Using rope and sequin waste,
he will realize a floor-to-ceiling coat of arms
of his own invention as the central welcoming
piece of the show. This experimental piece continues
in the vein of his current work and speaks to
an idea that “commoners” may also
aspire to the opulence of heraldry.
The satirical impulse runs deep in Locke’s
work. His visual discussions of the contradictions
of royalty are at once affectionate, humorous,
and grotesque. Like the house of cards of the
exhibition’s title, the monarchy is depicted
as precariously balanced in a time of shifting
priorities. Yet there is nothing overtly critical
about the series, hovering as it does between
moral and emotional registers.
Locke’s work questions the complex relationship
between the powerful and the powerless, and the
high and low. Often using base materials as the
primary elements of his works, Locke comments
on the commoditization of his subjects and of
artists themselves. His sources of inspiration
include Rococo, Medieval and Islamic architecture,
Royalty ephemera, Victorian funfairs and carousels.
He draws from everyday sources, especially from
habitual trips to the Brixton Market, discount
fabric shops and thrift stores. Most influential
to his work, however, is Locke’s own colonial
background. Born in Edinburgh in 1959, in 1965
he moved with his English mother and Guyanese
father to Georgetown, Guyana. Locke returned to
Britain at the age of 21 and studied printmaking
at Falmouth College; he currently lives in London.
Regarding his artistic practice, Locke states,
“My work reflects this diversity and various
historical fusions still being played out in these
post-colonial societies. I have had a long involvement
with the idea of ‘invented culture,’
which has developed into a strong interest in
how different cultures evolve and invent themselves,
and select their symbols of nationhood.”
Hew Locke’s King Creole, a large
interpretation of the House of Commons’
Pugin Crest, recently adorned the Millbank Entrance
to Tate Britain, welcoming visitors to British
Art Week.
The exhibition of Hew Locke: House of Cards
represents Atlanta Contemporary Art Center’s
ongoing commitment to bringing the highest quality
contemporary art to Atlanta and the Southeastern
region.
Saturday, November 13 - January 8, 2004
Team Lump - Goodbye says it all
Opening Reception November 13, 7 - 9 pm
Lump gallery/projects is committed to showcasing
local, national and international emerging artists.
With a seven-year history, Lump remains dedicated
to exhibiting the most thought-provoking, contemporary
art available without commercial compromise. Lump
is an artist-run space that does not represent
artists.
Team Lump will present a large-scale group exhibition.
A limited catalog, t-shirt, box set and print
are all in the works. Plus, all new work from
everyone.
Team Lump is: Stewart Sineath, Lump Lipshitz,
Tory Wright, Jeremy Taylor, Laura Sharp Wilson,
Dale Flattum, Gary Smith, Allyson Mellberg,
Charles Parker Boggs, Tyler Wolf, Herbie Abernathy,
Bob Schatte, Josh Rickards, Michael Salter.
http://www.lumpgallery.com/
Saturday September 11 - October 23, 2004
Chris Verene: From Galesburg to Atlanta, 1986
– 2004
Curated by Helena Reckitt
Artist's Reception September 11, 7 - 9 pm
Chris
Verene: From Galesburg to Atlanta Web Gallery
Curated by Helena Reckitt
This survey of former Atlantan Chris Verene shows
the artist to be equally at ease on either side
of the camera. The exhibition combines new work
from the Galesburg and Self-Esteem Salon series
with documentary photography from the 1980’s
and highlights from the Camera Club, Cheri Nevers,
and Vereni projects. Listening stations feature
music that influenced Verene as a teenager, including
Easturn Stars, Freedom Puff, and DQE – a
band that Verene eventually joined – and
other acts regularly featured in Atlanta’s
Destroy All Music festivals.
In the spirit of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark,
Verene makes work about people close to him: friends
from artistic and sexual subcultures, and three
generations of his extended family in Galesburg,
Illinois. Sharing William Eggleston’s interest
on life in out of the way places, Verene focuses
on everyday people and scenes. Yet whereas Eggleston’s
gaze is neutral, Verene brings a storyteller’s
empathy for the poetry, pathos, and offbeat glamour
of his subjects. His work also displays an earnest,
and perhaps unexpectedly old-fashioned, belief
in art’s ability to affirm and ennoble people’s
experiences.
Verene is well aware of photography’s potential
for voyeurism. In his Camera Club (1995 –
1997) series Verene shot amateur photographers
‘from behind’ while they photographed
inexperienced, scantily clad female models. In
work made since, Verene’s models have played
an active role in the way they are presented and
collaboration has become central to his working
process.
One example of creative cooperation– both
with another artist and with random participants
– is The Baptism Series (2002), made in
collaboration with Christian Holstad. The artists
baptize participants at the Cleansing Center fountain,
made during a residency at the Kohler Company,
in an “all-denominational, positive, non-threatening
safe space”. The series is represented here
by photographs, sculpture, and a trailer for the
forthcoming video work, The Baptism Series –
The Movie. The Baptism Series is part of the ongoing
Self-Esteem Salon (1998 - present) created by
Cheri Nevers, Chris Verene’s female alter
ego whose name is an anagram of his. Heartfelt
and campy at once, the Self-Esteem Salon aims
to raise visitor’s self-confidence and morale,
much as an appointment with a glamour photographer
or a trip to the spa would. Vereni The Great (2000
– 2002), another artistic alter ego, was
born out of a life-long love and study of Harry
Houdini, the small town Midwestern Jewish escape
artist. Video footage from 2000 shows a marathon
performance in Times Square. In the culminating
scene audience members nail Vereni into a crate
which is displayed all day on the sidewalk before
Vereni’s dramatic two-minute escape. After
sustaining injuries during a performance, Vereni
was retired in 2002.
Selections from the Galesburg series (1987 -
present) include new material from My Twin Cousin
and Crystal and Amber. The project documents Verene’s
extended family in this blue collar town through
vivid color photography and hand-written captions.
Organized into chapters, it follows key individuals
as their lives overlap over the years.
Galesburg speaks eloquently about American life
close to the poverty line. The mental hospital
closed, due to lack of funding, releasing residents
for “care in the community”. Verene
is drawn to people on the margins of society –
children, teens, old folk, and those with mental
and physical disabilities. He is conscious of
the responsibility involved in depicting people
whose lives usually go unnoticed: “I have
learned to manage the huge burden created when
simple, normally unseen human stories are pulled
up onto the stage for the rest of the curious
world to see.” Through careful listening
and looking Verene makes portraits with emotional
depth. Seeing Galesburg as “my life’s
work”, Verene visits the town frequently,
and for extended periods, to ensure that he is
part of the world he depicts.
Chris Verene grew up in Atlanta, GA and studied
at Emory University and Georgia State University.
In 2002 he moved to New York. A photographer,
performance artist, sculptor, and musician, Verene
is a member of the band, Cordero. He has been
exhibited at numerous institutions including the
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College,
Chicago, Thread Waxing Space, New York, Cheekwood
Museum, Nashville, and the High Museum of Art,
Atlanta. His work has been covered in ArtForum,
Art Papers, Parkett, ArtNews, Art in America,
and The New York Times Magazine. Prairie Jews
will be included in Common Ground at the Jewish
Museum of Art in New York in 2005. The monograph
Chris Verene is published by Twin Palms (New Mexico,
2000).
We would like to thank the following for their
invaluable support with this exhibition: Fay Gold
Gallery, Atlanta, GA, Wendy Cooper Gallery, Chicago,
Ill, Artifacts Framers, Atlanta, GA, and John
Dean. We are very grateful to individuals who
have loaned work for the show: Matthew Miller,
Erik Schneider, and Molly Verene.
June 19 – August 7, 2004
Summer Solos: Michael Oliveri Fast Food, Hydrocarbons
and Waves in Outer Space & Prema Murthy
Space Invaders, Curated by Helena Reckitt
Summer
Solos web gallery
Press and Patron's Preview: Friday June
18, by invitation
Artists' talk: Saturday June 19, 6 - 7 pm
Artists' reception: Saturday June 19, 7 - 9 pm
Michael Oliveri Fast Food, Hydrocarbons
and Waves in Outer Space
Michael Oliver’s solo show is inspired by
several related scientific discoveries and new
theories of a finite universe. The exhibition
fuses the aesthetics of experimental video, sculpture,
and science. In one gallery, the soil-free fast-growing
food facility “NASA Nourishment” is
accompanied by NASA exploration video footage.
Another installation incorporates glass sculptures
of hydrocarbon models on Styrofoam surfaces that
suggest the surface of Mars. Images of waves and
surfing in two installations evoke the influence
of surfing and sailing on Oliveri’s development
as an artist growing up in Southern California.
From specific scientific observations about Fullerenes,
Hydroponics, and Sonic Growth, Oliveri makes the
broader point that innovation often occurs not
as a result of structured research, but of accidental
discoveries.
Biography
Michael Oliveri lives in Athens, Georgia and is
a Chair of the Digital Media program at the University
of Georgia. Oliveri received his BFA in sculpture
from San Francisco Art Institute and MFA in New
Genres from the University of California, Los
Angeles. His works have been shown throughout
the U.S. at venues including Lump Gallery, Raleigh,
NC: Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art,
Palm Beach, FL; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens,
GA; Florida State University Museum, Tallahassee,
FL; Plan B, Santa Fe, NM; Brea Municipal Gallery,
Brea, CA; Frumkin Gallery, Santa Monica, Ca; and
Anderson Gallery, Buffalo, NY. Reviews have been
published in Art Issues and the Los Angeles Times.
http://www.michaeloliveri.com
Prema Murthy Space Invaders
Prema Murthy's digital prints and animations explore
the dynamics of conflict, transformation and change
in our lives. Her iconographic landscapes are
appropriated from early vector-based arcade games
that she played in her youth. Murthy sees gamespaces
as modern day arenas where dramas of suffering
and justice are played out. Working against the
military origins of video games, she mines their
expressive potential, exploring how fantasy and
role play enable us to think beyond our physical
and mental boundaries.
Inspired by aesthetic traditions as diverse as
Baroque architecture and Indo-Tibetan tangka paintings,
these delicate and playful works are, as Murthy
describes them, "located in a place somewhere
between collective memory and personal history".
Murthy is a Fellow at the Wesley Center for New
Media at Georgia Tech
http://premamurthy.net/
.
April 3 - May 29
So Atlanta: Artists Respond to the Contemporary
City
Organized by Felicia Feaster and Helena Reckitt
Artists' reception: Saturday April 3, 7 pm
Artists: Bobby Abrahamson , Karen Rich Beall,
Teresa Bramlette Reeves, Russell Carnes, Oraien
Catledge, Jeff Conefry, Sarah Dougherty, Roe Ethridge,
Sam Hill, Kim Hoeckele, J Ivcevich, Ron Jude,
Anya Liftig, Hormuz Minina, Charles Nelson, Laura
Noel, Ohm Phanphiroj, Julie Stuart, Thomas Tulis,
Sheila Turner, Alex White, Martha Whittington,
Ron Witherspoon, and Meshakai Wolf.
Click
here for the So Atlanta web gallery
Saturday April 3, 6 pm
Panel Discussion: What Is It That Makes Atlanta
So Different, So Appealing?
So Atlanta offers artists working in a variety
of media the opportunity to express their feelings
and observations about Atlanta specifically and,
by extension, about the experiences of contemporary
urban and exurban dwellers throughout the US and
globally.
Dubbed “the city too busy to hate”
and “the city of trees”; Atlanta,
the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement,
is defined by a host of images and fantasies.
Struggling since before the days of Sherman’s
“March to the Sea” to re-make and
re-envision itself, the City has sought to project
a convincing public image.
Relaxed zoning laws, generous tax incentives,
and a steady supply of college graduates have
enabled Atlanta to attract businesses and their
corporate headquarters. As the economy and population
have developed the city has experienced rapid
suburban growth, earning a reputation as “the
poster child of sprawl.” Accompanying problems
of pollution, traffic, water management, violent
crime, and low-ranked public schools contradict
the city’s rose-tinted picture of itself.
Atlanta is in many ways a thoroughly modern city
with the same problems and challenges that have
come to vex contemporary America. But to think
of Atlanta in terms of homogeneity alone –
of business parks, gated communities, edge cities,
and shopping malls without end - misses what is
distinctive about the city. Partly as a result
of disposable income afforded by a strong economy,
and also in defiance of consumer culture, Atlanta
has nurtured a subculture of musicians, artists,
strippers, cross-dressers, graffiti artists, and
activists. Artists occupy a complex and often
ambivalent position in Atlanta. Frequently at
odds with the corporate values that provide the
city’s raison d’être they nevertheless
depend upon the support of moneyed patrons.
Atlanta has also become the hub of a national
pattern of reverse migration making it home to
one of the largest black populations in the country,
including a prominent black middle and upper middle
class. New waves of immigrants and refugees continually
shape and redefine the city and its suburbs. Atlanta
is a magnet for lesbians, gay men, and sexual
adventurers of all persuasions who frequently
flee small Southern towns for “Hotlanta.”
The alternative weekly, Creative Loafing, recently
voted “gays” as the best reason for
living in the city. While good ole boys still
occupy most positions of power there’s evidence
that “girl power” is on the rise not
least in the figures of recently-elected lesbian,
City Council President Cathy Woolard, and the
city’s first black female Mayor, Shirley
Franklin.
Wednesday April 21, 7 pm
Panel discussion: Mass Transit and Sustainable
Development
in conjunction with So Atlanta
Moderator: Michael Dobbins, Visiting Faculty
Member, Georgia Institute of Technology; former
Planning Commissioner, City of Atlanta
Architects Carlie Bullock and Ryan Gravel
will discuss sustainable evelopment and mass transit
as they relate to Atlanta's growth.
Click
here for more
Friday May 7, 9 pm
Sam Patton: Hollywood Self Destructs
Sixties Hollywood attempts to make hip, swinging
cinema - and spectacularly fails. Patton introduces
clip from discarded classics.
April 2 - May 29
KOL/MAC STUDIO New York, New York
Opening April 2, 7 - 9 pm
Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald founded KOL/MAC
Studio, in New York City in 1988.
Kolatan received her Dipl. Ing. from the Technische
Hochschule Aachen Universitat in 1982 and her
Master of Science in Architecture and Building
Design from Columbia University in 1983. William
Mac Donald received his Bachelor of Architecture
from Syracuse in 1979, studied at the Architectural
Association (London) in 1978 and received his
Master of Science in Architecture and Building
Design from Columbia University in 1982. Between
both of them, they have taught Architecture as
Visiting Professors at Barnard College, Ohio State
University, The University of Pennsylvania, Parsons
School of Design, University of Virginia, The
Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies in
Basel, Switzerland and Venice, Italy and Columbia
University. In addition to their practice, since
1990, they both have held Adjunct Associate Professorships
at Columbia University.
The firm’s projects are produced entirely
on the computer from the early conceptual phase,
through schematic design, design development and
working drawings. This affords a smooth interface
with the consultants and the subcontractors with
whom the digital information is shared, and who
work directly off of the architectural drawings
not only to generate their own set of drawings,
but “in the case of the subcontractors”
to actually make the various building parts. KOL/MAC
Studio examines these and other groundbreaking
changes in the relation between design and actual
construction.
Visit KOL/MAC Studio’s website at www.kolatanmacdonaldstudio.com
for more information about the firm.
UNDER
DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES:
Installations by Atlanta's Gallery Artists
January
15 - March 18, 2004
Panel Discussion: “The Boundaries of Installation
Art” with artists, Imi Hwangbo and Greely
Myatt, and curator, Lisa Kurzner; the panel will
be moderated by Helena Reckitt, Director of Exhibitions
& Education at the Contemporary.
Saturday January 17th, 6 pm
Artist Reception: Saturday January 17, 7 - 9 pm
Atlanta
Contemporary Art Center and the Atlanta Gallery
Association present Under Different Circumstances.
This exhibition will feature installations by
artists represented by eight different members
of the newly formed Atlanta Galleries Association
(AGA). Conceived jointly by The Contemporary and
the AGA as a project to free artists from the
confines of their gallery schedule, the exhibition
aims to present work in a new light by focusing
on the experimental mandate of the host institution
and on the artists’ fulfillment of a manifest
destiny. The title refers to the fact that the
artists selected have established careers in the
gallery system, but in this instance are exhibiting
work they have chosen or made for a particular
viewing space. It poses the question, “what
happens when the inception and reception circumstances
of a work change?”
Artists and galleries represented in
Under Different Circumstances are:
Stewart
HELM (London, UK) contact - Galerie
Timothy Tew
Patrizia Guerresi (Verona, ITALY) contact - Momus
Gallery
Imi HWANGBO (Athens, GA) contact - Kiang
Gallery
Greely MYATT (Memphis, TN) contact - Sandler
Hudson Gallery
Sheila SWIFT (Los Angeles, CA) contact - Jackson
Fine Art
Julia VENSKE and Gregor SPÄENLE
(New York NY and Munich GERMANY) contact - Marcia
Wood Gallery
J. Daniel WALSH (New York, NY) contact - Solomon
Projects
Mike WSOL (Bloomington, IN) contact - Saltworks
Gallery
Lisa Kurzner is a freelance curator and
writer based in Atlanta, GA. She received her
BA in Art History from Wellesley College and did
graduate work at New York University, with a concentration
in photographic history. A former Research Assistant
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art/Institute of
Fine Arts, Kurzner was the Beaumont and Nancy
Newhall Curatorial Fellow in the Department of
Photography at MOMA between 1987 and 1990. While
living in Europe in the 1990’s, she worked
at the British Council in Brussels, the Contemporary
Art Society in London, and in the Department of
Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum,
London. Kurzner currently advises the King Baudoin
Foundation in Atlanta, an organization that offers
study grants in Belgium to artists.
Under Different Circumstances is part of ATLart(04),
a city-wide event that will bring area art museums,
non-profit visual arts organizations and commercial
galleries together in a unique collaboration.
ATLart (04) has been organized by the Atlanta
Gallery Association, a consortium consisting of
29 of the city’s foremost commercial art
galleries representing the highest standards of
fine art. The AGA is dedicated to promoting visual
arts and increasing the public awareness of Atlanta
as a major international art center ATLart (04)
is sponsored by Delta Air Lines and The Coca-Cola
Company.
Under
Different Circumstances Web
Gallery
Sponsored
in part by ![ATLart[04]](../../images/ATL.ART.04.gif)
###
OBJECT[S]
OF ARCHITECTURE:
Works by Georgia Tech Architecture Faculty Exhibition
February 6 - March 18
Opening reception - February 6, 7 - 9 pm
Curated by Tina Simonton and Frances Hsu
Object[s] of Architecture is an exhibit of current
work by Georgia Tech Architecture Faculty. The
show is curated by exhibition co-chairs Tina Simonton
and Frances Hsu. The exhibition’s intentions
are described in their curatorial statement below:
“The show’s intention is to exhibit
the irreducible, irreplaceable, transcendent object[s]
of architecture. It seeks to foreground the ideal
forms of process, [re]presentation and material,
whether drawing, model, rendering, image, competition
board, film/video, sketch/book, construction/fabrication
document, etc; in order to circumvent the typical,
often retrospective-like exhibition of architecture
which dislocates the object in favor of direct
experience. It is in this spirit that ‘Object[s]
of Architecture’ is not mere ‘documentations’
of something, but the ‘things’ themselves.
A catalog will be published in conjunction with
the exhibit.“
Tina Simonton, Exhibition Co-Chair
Tina Simonton is an Assistant Professor in Architecture
at Georgia Tech. She completed her undergraduate
studies in Architecture at Auburn University.
She then received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in
Furniture Design and Painting from California
College of Arts and Crafts [CCAC, San Francisco],
and her Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Massachusetts
College of Arts. She has been exhibited widely
and has taught at numerous institutions before
joining the College of Architecture in 1998. She,
along Wanda Dye, helped implement and develop
courses for the Common First Year program. She
continues to teach design studios in the CFY program
and a seminar titled “Material Potential
and Fabrication Strategies”. Presently her
research interests and teaching are interdisciplinary
in nature and attempt to translate the processes
of the painter into variable object production
through traditional means and use of the College’s
Advanced Wood Products Laboratory.
Frances
Hsu, Ph.D. Exhibition Co-Chair
Frances Hsu is a Visiting Assistant Professor
in Architecture at Georgia Tech. She completed
her undergraduate studies in Architecture at the
University of Virginia. She then received her
Master of Architecture from Harvard University
and her PhD from ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. Her
dissertation was based on the projects and texts
of Rem Koolhaas. She has worked in the offices
of Rem Koolhaas - OMA [Office of Metropolitan
Architecture], Peter Eisenman and Ben van Berkle.
Presently she teaches graduate and undergraduate
design studios and two seminars titled “Instruments
of Urbanism” and “Rem Koolhaas: or
The Ends of Modernism”.
Opening
November 14th. Show runs from November 15th –
January 3rd 2004
Free to Members/ $5.00 Non-Members/ $3.00 Seniors
& Student Non-Members
Terrain
Vague web gallery
Intended to challenge widespread perceptions of
the post-industrial city, Terrain Vague includes
the work of such prominent urban contemporary
landscape photographers as Andy Anderson, Lewis
Baltz, Edward Burtynsky, David Deutsch, Philip-Lorca
di Corcia, Todd Hido, Doug Muir, Catherine Opie,
Bill Owens, and Martha Rosler. “Terrain Vague”
was the title of a talk by Ignasi de Sola-Morales
Rubio, architect, critic and professor at the
Escola Technica Superior d’Architectura in
Barcelona. Rubio was curious about how photographers
and architects have such divergent approaches
to marginalized or “unresolved” urban
spaces.
He writes, “Architecture's destiny has always
been colonization, the imposing of limits, order
and form, the introduction into strange space
of the elements of identity necessary to make
it recognizable, identical, universal. Architecture
is an instrument of organization, rationalization,
and of productive efficiency.”
In comparison, Rubio points to the photographer
of urban landscapes who uses the photographic
medium to capture the nuances of terrain vague.
Photographs portray these spaces just as they
are -- unresolved, unintentional, idiosyncratic,
complex and textured. He writes, “Art’s
reaction is to preserve these alternative, strange
spaces… and their uncontaminated magic.”
As a reflection of the imprecise fluctuations
of nature, they are a source of fascination.
Today, urban landscapes are places of flux. The
city's core, once perceived as undesirable and
problematic, is being re-inhabited in unexpected
ways. As a result, cities are experiencing massive
change. Inner city development is on the rise
but space is limited and new (formerly occupied)
sites are being explored. Vast amounts of in-town
abandoned industrial buildings and empty spaces
are being exposed. Amidst this shifting ground
lie connections to history and memory. With a
high degree of unpredictability, some places are
fought for while others are torn down.
The curators of Terrain Vague – one a photographer
the other an architect-- have drawn from the core
of Rubio’s comments to select a collection
of photographs that provide a catalyst for discussion
and contemplation. When the architecture and photography
are compared, questions arise. What is being built?
What qualities of place will we experience or
remember? Can looking at photographs inform a
new critique of current trends in design?
The curators are both members of Georgia Tech’s
College of Architecture. Ruth Dusseault is Artist-in-Residence
and Chris Jarrett is a Professor of Architecture.
Terrain
Vague will be exhibited at the Carnegie Museum
of Art in Pittsburgh March 20 -June 20. 2004 as
a program of the Heinz Architectural Center.
Contributing
support for this organization is provided by the
National
Endowment for the Arts, the Fulton County Commission
under the guidance of
the Fulton County Arts Council, the City of Atlanta
Bureau of Cultural
Affairs, Accenture, and the Massey Charitable
Trust.
Generous support for Terrain Vague has been provided
by John Portman
Review
AJC
RELATED
LECTURES
N.B. All lectures will be held at the School
of Architecture’s Auditorium at 245 4th Street
and will take place at 5:30 P.M.
Wednesday
November 5th, 5.30pm ULF MEYER
Wednesday November 12. 5.30pm MARK ROBBINS
Thursday, November 13, 6:00-8:00 pm MARTHA ROSLER
MARK
ROBBINS
Reflecting
his training as an architect, the work of Mark
Robbins bridges the fields of art and architecture.
In photography, installation and site-specific
projects, Robbins explores the complex social
and political forces that contribute to the built
environment. His series of multi-panel photographic
collages, Households, relates domestic interiors
with their inhabitants. Robbins documented over
40 households in New York, Boston, Washington,
Nashville, and Columbus, Ohio, photographing individuals
and couples of different ages and lifestyles –
from a 200-square foot apartment in New York City
to a series of log cabins in Nashville. The series
seeks to reveal domestic life beyond its commercial
and political representations, and to provide
a counterpoint to images in mainstream design,
fitness, and fashion magazines.
Robbins’ work has been exhibited at such
venues as the Adelaide Festival, Australia, the
Museum of Modern Art in Saitama Japan, the Queens
Museum in New York, Clocktower Gallery of the
ICA in New York, the Miami Art Project, and the
Wexner Center for the Arts. A monograph focusing
on his work, Angles of Incidence, was published
by Princeton Architectural Press. Robbins has
served as Director of Design at the National Endowment
for the Arts as well as a fellow in the visual
arts at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
at Harvard. Currently he is the TVS Distinguished
Critic at Georgia
MARTHA ROSLER
Since the 1970s, Martha Rosler has worked with
photography, video,
criticism, performance, and in various other combinations
of image and text.
Her point of view has been consistently critical
and social, focusing on how
the use of image-forms such as photography, television
and language is
conditioned by specific historical, economic,
and political frameworks.
Her clinical photographs of airline terminals,
which she has been
documenting since 1983, form a pictorial survey
of international transit
centers. She confronts us with the bare bones
of commercial facilities by
putting their anonymity in sharp focus. A selection
of these photographs
are included in Terrain Vague.
As guest discussant, she will engage in a multi-discipline
dialog about herwork, about critical photography
and about the architectural issues that
this exhibition addresses.
MAIN
GALLERY
NEW
WAVES:
Selections from the Centre Georges Pompidou's
New Media Collection
SEPTEMBER 6-OCTOBER 25, 2003
Jean-Luc Godard
Chris Marker
Claude Closky
Pierre Huyghe
Matthieu Laurette
Majida Khattari
This survey of groundbreaking video and new media
work, selected by the Center Georges Pompidou’s
New Media Curator, Christine van Assche, showcases
film/video pioneers, Jean-Luc Godard and Chris
Marker, in tandem with a younger generation of
artists in France working with film and new media
that includes Claude Closky, Pierre Huyghe, Matthieu
Laurette, and Majida Khattari. The exhibition
features work in video, DVD, and CD-Rom, as well
as artists’ books.
Since 1976, Paris’s Center Pompidou has stood
out amongst European museums for its forward-thinking
policies of acquiring and exhibiting artists’
video tapes, video installations, CD Rom’s
and CD’s. This longstanding interest in the
discipline led to the creation, in 1991, of a
New Media collection with the Musée national
d'art moderne of the Center which includes 65
installations and 1.000 video and sound tapes,
CD Roms and websites.
The
exhibition features work in video, DVD, CD-ROM
and artists ’ books.
ADJUNCT PROGRAMMING
LEGACIES: Introductions to the work and impact
of two of France ’s most complex and influential
film makers,Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker.
VIRGINIA BONNER on CHRIS MARKER
Wednesday,September 24 @ 7 PM
Free to members and with Gallery Admission of
$5.00, $3.00 for students and seniors
Virginia
Bonner offers an introduction to the innovative,
highly poetic editing techniques and expressive
use of intertextuality in the work of Chris Marker.
Illustrated with video clips from such key works
as Sans soleil (1982), Level 5 (1995),
Le joli mai (1962) and La Jetée
(1962), Bonner explores how Marker ’s
distinctive style helped to redefine the documentary
genre and create a new language for filmmaking
in general. This introduction serves as a valuable
complement to Marker ’s exploration of hypertext
in the CD-ROM Immemory, presented as part of the
current exhibition, New Waves.
VIRGINIA BONNER is Assistant Professor
of Humanities and Media Studies at Clayton College
& State University. Her research focuses on
intersections among avant-garde, feminist,and
documentary cinemas,and particularly investigates
these modes of filmmaking as they converge in
the work of Left Bank filmmakers Chris Marker,
Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda.
RICHARD NEUPERT , “Jean-Luc Godard: 50 Years
of Renewing the Cinema”
Wednesday,October 8 @ 7 PM
Free to members and with Gallery Admission of
$5.00, $3.00 for students and seniors
Jean-Luc Godard published his first review in
1951, shot his first
documentary in 1954, and his first feature, Breathless,
in 1960. Since
those first bold steps in forging the French New
Wave, Godard has continued to rethink and renew
the cinema. His projects, whether feature films
or video works, confront art, sexual politics,
and contemporary culture.
This presentation outlines several recurring motifs
and strategies from Godard’s amazing career.
Unlike his New Wave colleagues, Godard never stuck
with any single approach to the cinema and never
settled into the industry. He is a collage filmmaker,
often mixing documentary, history, and fiction
into new syntheses never before seen. Moreover,
Godard remains one of the world’s most important
visual artists, as can be seen from this overview
of his most stunning work.
Neupert
will be showing short clips from such movies as
À bout de souffle (Breathless),
Une Femme est une Femme (A Woman is A Woman)
, Le Mépris (Contempt), Pierrot
Le Fou, Passion and the autobiographical
JLG by JLG
RICHARD NEUPERT is Professor of
Film Studies at the University of Georgia. His
most recent books include A History of the
French New Wave Cinema (2002), and the translation
of Michel Marie’s The French New Wave:
An Artistic School (2002).
Situations Françaises is made possible
by generous grants from the Department of Cultural
Services of the French Embassy and Étant
Donnés: The French American Fund for Contemporary
Art, and is sponsored by Delta Air Lines.
NEW
WAVES, NEW MEDIA, NEW APPROACHES TO THE ARCHIVE
AND MUSEUM
HELENA
RECKITT
Director of Education and Exhibitions, Atlanta
Contemporary Art Center
The archival impulse propels much of the work
in this exhibition. For some artists this takes
the form of the insatiable desire for knowledge
and information associated with the work of the
collector or lexicographer. For others the project
takes a more ironic turn, where the absurdity
at the core of all systems of organization becomes
evident.
The desire to gather and catalogue emerges strongly
in projects here by Jean-Luc Godard and Chris
Marker. New Waves is organized along generational
lines, with Godard and Marker presented as the
pioneers who overhauled and reimagined cinematic
conventions in their work of the 1960’s and
who continue to break new ground, albeit to less
public fanfare these days. Works in the exhibition
by both artists have a self-reflexive and retrospective
quality to them. There’s a sense of reviewing
a lifetime of images and attempting to put them
in order, a form of scrapbook making or memoir.
Although both figures have the status of founding
fathers of the avant-garde, here they present
themselves in the guise as eternal students, collectors,
and spectators, reflecting upon and paying homage
to the images, sounds, and sights that have made
them – and by extension us – who they
are.
Jean-Luc Godard was, of course, one of the central
figures of the influential Nouvelle Vague (New
Wave) in the 1960’s. Together with filmmakers
Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Resnais,
Godard revolutionized film making through his
stark aesthetic juxtapositions of image and sound
together and switches between political and personal,
poetic and philosophical themes. Pursuing the
theory that anyone can make a movie, Godard epitomized
what film critic Jonathan Romney calls “an
ideal of a demanding, militant, hyper-serious
yet hyper-playful” film maker, at once solipsistic
and self-reflexive while also lyrical and punning.
Histoire(s) du Cinéma (Toutes les histoires)
and Histoire(s) du Cinéma (Une histoire
seule), 1989, are the first in Godard’s six-part
history of cinema. Taking the form of an extended
visual essay, with no narrative drive, they show
Godard in his library, puffing like a Hollywood
producer on a cigar, making pronouncements that
are by turns profound, poetic, and polemical.
Between clips from early and classic cinema footage
we see and hear the typewriter and the edit machine,
evoking Godard’s combined careers as critic
and filmmaker.
Technically sophisticated, Histoire(s) du Cinéma
incorporates double and triple exposures, freeze
frames, jump cuts, stark juxtapositions, experiments
and distortions in sound. Histoire(s) du Cinéma
is a reverie on art, film, society and, above
all, cinema. It touches on themes of war, sex,
the relationship between images and memory, and
where – and to whom – the history of
cinema belongs.
Chris Marker shares with Godard a utopian urge
to accumulate, acknowledge, and organize visual
and aural inspirations. His CD-Rom Immemory, which
critic Raymond Bellour describes as “‘stalking
both the book and the film” pays tribute
to Proust and his concept of the madeleine –
the small, shell-shaped cake that the writer dipped
into his tea each afternoon – as a trigger
for memory. Like Godard, Marker’s meditation
on the twentieth century raises questions about
the collective consciousness and how subjectivity
is formed in our encounter with images. The CD-Rom
is organized around spatial metaphors. The viewer
is invited to make his or her own selections and
is led through “zones” of travel, war,
cinema, poetry, fiction, and philosophy. Just
as Marker’s poetic film, La Jetée,
was made up almost entirely of photographic stills
(with voiceover) so Immemory offers an imaginary
gallery of images glimpsed and recalled. Travel
and family pictures lead into literary and philosophical
quotations. The work has a rhythmic, musical quality,
and indeed sound and music feature strongly. Although
Marker’s vision of interactivity is perhaps
rather too idealistic for the inevitable limitations
of the technology at his disposal, his impulse
towards inclusiveness and expansion – what
Deleuze characterized as “arboresence”
– emerges clearly in this generous and thought
provoking project.
Pierre Huyghe is one of the best-known of the
younger generation of artists working in France
today. He became known, in part, for his collaborations
with other prominent Paris-based artists, Philippe
Parenno and Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, who together
trademarked the Manga character, Ann Lee, and
made a series of animations based around her.
In 2002 Huyghe won the Hugo Boss Prize for his
installation, The Third Memory. Of the younger
figures featured in New Waves Huyghe is the one
with the strongest formal and philosophical links
to Godard and co, as well as a strong sense of
social activism.
Huyghe’s first projects involved billboards
and posters that documented changes to the urban
environment in Paris. In the 1990’s he helped
to organize mobile local TV network that ran self-produced
pirate programs. His work has explored themes
of interpretation and agency in cinematic representation,
following the avant-garde precept that “one
has to know how to stop images, to fix them, in
order to question them and keep them from being
swept away by the wave of the discourse of the
media” (Jean-Francois Chevrier and Catherine
David, Passages de l’image, Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris, and Centre Cultural de la Fundació
Caixa de Pensions, Barcelona, 1991, p.44).
In the video projection, L’ellipse (Jump
Cut), 1998, each of three screens played a scene
from or related to Wim Wenders’ The American
Friend. In the first, the character played by
Bruno Ganz speaks on the phone, setting up an
appointment. In the next, we see the older, contemporary
Ganz picking up where the scene left off, en route
to a meeting in Paris. The third screen returns
to the original movie. In The Third Memory, 2000,
Huyghe retells the story of the bank robbery that
provided the plot for the movie, Dog Day Afternoon,
through the words and direction of the original
protagonist, John Wojtowicz. Huyghe restages the
events of the robbery – which was, apparently,
planned in order to raise funds for Wojtowicz’s
male lover’s sex change operation –
in a set that duplicates the original bank. He
presents the new footage along with clips from
both the movie and news reports of the time. Provoking
questions about the gap between reality and fiction,
Dog Day Afternoon gives Wojtowicz a chance to
retell and recuperate his own version of a sensationalized
event.
Dubbing, 1996 – 7, depicts fifteen voiceover
actors congregated like an orchestra, interpreting
the soundtrack for the movie, Poltergeist (no
coincidence, perhaps, that Spielberg is Godard’s
self-declared cinematic nemesis?). Huyghe has
always been interested in questions of time –
the time of making a work of art, the time of
viewing it, and what happens to and between viewers
as they watch. In an interview for New Art Examiner,
July/August, 2000, with Jan Estep, he spoke of
his hope not for ”consumable time but something
that is more reflexive time.” Dubbing prizes
open the mechanics of movie making. Employing
a Brechtian – or Godardian - distancing,
Dubbing frustrates audience expectations to “see”
the movie. At the same time it reveals an aspect
of film production that is usually hidden, and
an intimacy between voiceover actors who normally
work alone but who have been brought together
for this collective exercise in translation.
In contrast to the expansive meditations of the
older generation of Godard and Marker, Claude
Closky’s attitude is of radical tautology,
bereft of grand illusions or expectations. In
websites, videos, projections, and artists’
books, Closky considers the random nature of systems
of classification – alphabetical, chronological,
numerical. Closky’s Mes vingts minutes préférées
(My 20 favorite minutes), of 1993, literally presents
a series of ‘favorite’ minutes provoking
a kind of involuntary chuckle in the viewer who
is forced to watch (pun intended?) time pass.
The artists’ book, 100 Photographs which
are not photographs of horses – they are,
in fact, of hens – brings to mind Magritte’s
tautological Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Throwing
sand in the face of grown-up systems of organization,
the piece charms and irritates in equal measure.
In a recent internet project for the Dia Museum
of Art, Do You Want Love or Lust?, Closky presented
a seemingly endless list of binary questions.
As Lynne Cooke notes, Closky “savors the
pleasures of flirtation, the titillations of desire
and libidinal excess without finally succumbing,
without being wholly seduced.”
Matthieu Laurette is another artist who is interested
in systems and their internal logic and rules.
His form of social critique takes the guise of
an immersion in a particular corporate, consumer,
or institutional culture. By entering into a system
and following its rules to the point of absurdity,
Laurette turns social conventions inside out.
In the early nineties he launched an online ‘Citizenship
Project’ in an attempt to gain citizenship
in as many countries as possible. Borrowing the
hyperbolic performance styles of DADA, Fluxus,
Situationism, and Happenings, Laurette’s
work has a campy edge that verges on hysteria.
In the piece presented here, Apparition, Je passe
à la télé (I am on TV), of
1996, Laurette appears on a French daytime talk
show to discuss his three-year project during
which he lived off and washed with entirely free
‘refundable if unsatisfactory’ products.
His televisual debut, it is the result of Laurette’s
exhaustive campaign to be invited to appear on
TV. Posing a link between pointless shopping and
the value (or lack of value) placed on the artist
and the artist’s work, the piece suggests
how identity is constructed via our encounters
with consumer products.
Also riffing on the idea of the collection, in
this case the fashion collection, is Majida Khattari’s
Défilé / Performance, (Fashion Show
/ Performance) performed at L’Ecole nationale
supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris in 1998.
Ordinary women perform a runway show in outfits
that parody and exaggerate Muslim restrictions
on female dress and behavior. A Moroccan who has
lived in Paris for fifteen years, Khattari is
a Muslim who is alarmed by the repressive excesses
of Islamic fundamentalism. She designed these
outfits after public discussion about veiling
in France came to a head when the parents of Muslim
girls insisted that they wear the veil to school.
The exaggerated chadors and robes of Khattari’s
models show a debt to the Surrealistic fabrications
of Meret Oppenheim and the fantastical performances
of early Rebecca Horn. Women push against these
constricting outfits with varied degrees of success.
At times the garments become womb or cocoon-like,
suggesting that they are places from which women
will emerge into new-found liberation. At others,
the attempt to resist the clothes’ constraints
proves too much, and imagery of self-mutilation
emerges. A gown fashioned from the tricoleur wittily
suggests that French cultural identity has been
changed as a result of its growing Muslim population.
Whereas woman as the desired, glimpsed, never-to-be-possessed
fantasy figure is prevalent in the work of Godard
and Marker, here Khattari turns a critical eye
on the fetishisation of the female body. Khattari
suggests that this hysterical male response to
female sexuality expresses a sadistic and fetishistic
drive. As fetishism depends on male fear of castration,
the desire to constrain women is not only a futile
attempt to keep them down, but an unconscious
admission of male fears of impotence.
The Pompidou Center is one of the most influential
cultural institutions in the world. The Museum
is visited by huge numbers of people (although
how many go inside the museum, and how many come
to play on Rogers and Piano’s funky external
elevators and escalators is a moot point). Beyond
this, the Pompidou is remarkable for its interdisciplinary
policies of programming and collecting contemporary
art. The New Media Collection contains hundreds
of artists’ films, tapes, DVD’s, CD-Roms,
and installations. It is fitting that an exhibition
such as New Waves, which examines the impulse
to collect and organize the products of high art
as well as vernacular culture, emerged from the
Pompidou, itself a living archive and inspiration
for museums, collections, and art centers internationally.
The Pompidou Center
The Center Pompidou, National Center of Art and
Culture, was established in 1977 by the former
French President, Georges Pompidou, who served
in office from 1969 to 1974. Pompidou’s vision
was for a public center for the arts that would
focus on all forms of modern and contemporary
creativity in such fields as sculpture, painting,
literature, cinema, and music. Located in the
heart of Paris, in a pioneering building designed
by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, the Center
Pompidou receives approximately six million visitors
a year. One of the most important cultural institutions
in the world, the Center Pompidou was the first
museum in Europe to focus entirely on modern and
contemporary art. It also comprises a public reference
library and archive on twentieth century art,
a cinema and screening rooms, a center for music
and acoustic research, spaces for education programs,
bookshops and several cafés.
An interdisciplinary institution, the Center Pompidou
organizes and presents approximately thirty exhibitions
a year in addition to numerous performances, film
screenings, symposia, and concerts with international
artists and intellectuals. These programs travel
throughout France and the rest of the world.
Since 1977, the Center Pompidou has presented
video and multimedia installations. This commitment
to the field led in 1991 to the creation
of a New Media Collection, a selection of which
is presented as part of the Contemporary’s
exhibition, New Waves. The Center Pompidou’s
Curator of New Media, Christine van Assche, has
chosen to present film/video pioneers, Jean-Luc
Godard and Chris Marker, in tandem with a younger
artists from a younger generation working in France:
Claude Closky, Pierre Huyghe, Matthieu Laurette
and Majida Khattari.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
New Waves is part of Situations Françaises:
Atlanta Presents Contemporary Art From France,
a city-wide series of exhibitions mounted by three
venues, that was launched earlier in 2003 at the
Atlanta College of Art Gallery and Georgia State
University School of Art and Design Galleries.
Situations
Françaises is made possible by generous
grants from the department of Cultural Services
of the French Embassy and Étant Donnés:
The French American Fund for Contemporary Art,
and is sponsored by Delta Air Lines.
The Contemporary would like to thank the curatorial
staff at the Center Georges Pompidou and Cécile
Peyronnet and Nathalie Bonnin t the French Consul
in Atlanta for their extraordinarily hard work
on behalf of the exhibition.
We are also indebted to our fabulous Gallery Interns
Drew Conrad, Bernadette Donegan, Kelly Naher,
and Stephanie Marshall for their hard work and
good humor. Thanks are also due to Jeff Conefrey
for exhibition installation and to Robert Natowitz
for technical onsultation.
Situations Françaises is made possible
by generous grants from the department of Cultural
Services of the French Embassy and Étant
Donnés: The French American Fund for Contemporary
Art, and is sponsored by Delta Air Lines. We are
grateful to the Alliance Francaise for sponsoring
the Patrons Reception.
EAST
GALLERY
EXHIBITIONS from GEORGIA TECH’s
GRADUATE SCHOOL of ARCHITECTURE
SHoP (GREGG PASQUARELLI)
September 6 -October 5,2003
Exhibition opening Friday, September 5, 7-9 pm
SHoP | Sharples Holden Pasquarelli is an emerging
design firm with five partners whose education
and experience encompass architecture, fine arts,
structural engineering, finance, and business
management. Founded in 1996, SHoP was awarded
the 2001 Emerging Voices Award by the Architectural
League of New York and the 2001 Academy Award
in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, as well as a Progressive Architecture
[P/A Award] Citation in 1999. In 2000, SHoP was
the winner of the annual Museum of Modern Art
and P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center Young Architect's
Awards Program. Most recently, SHoP was one of
three finalists for the 2002 Architecture Design
Award of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards
Program. In addition to being widely published
and exhibited, work produced by SHoP is in the
permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
SHoP's broad range of work includes a university
academic building, a pedestrian bridge, a civic
park, public art installations, a museum, retail
shops, and mixed used housing, [most of which
have been built or under construction.] The work
of SHoP searches for a vertical integration of
the design process using technology to gain access
to new territories of extraction through execution
rather than through a technophilic obsession with
digital form. Between the five partners they have
taught or hold teaching positions at Columbia
University, Parsons School of Design, Yale University,
and City University of New York. Bill Sharples,
Chris Sharples, Coren Sharples, Kimberly Holden
and Gregg Pasquarelli all received their Master
of Architecture from Columbia University. Gregg
Pasquarelli from SHoP will be giving a lecture
on their work at the Georgia Tech College of
Architecture
auditorium Wednesday September 10 at 5:30 pm.
For more information on SHoP visit www.shoparc.com.
For more information on the Georgia Tech architecture
program lecture series visit www.coa.gatech.edu/arch/.
June
14-August 9, 2003
Summer
Solos: Jim Barsness, David Eisenhour, and Jeff
Sonhouse
James
Barsness: Paintings
James
Barsness’s large, scroll-like paintings
evoke hybrid worlds in which fantasy, reality,
and mythology collide. Characters inspired by
folk and fairy tales rub shoulders with those
drawn from girly magazines and comic books. We
are just as likely to recognize ball point pen
as we are gold leaf. Frequently painted from a
bird’s eye perspective, reminiscent of
mediaeval maps, these scenes teem with half-told
stories and point to the drives and desires the
polite society represses. Like Barsness’s
characters figures who attempt to navigate their
maze-like environments, the viewer is absorbed
in process of unraveling these works.
David
Isenhour: Resplendent Probe
Immersed
in the iconography of cartoons, science fiction,
genetic engineering, and religion, David Isenhour
mutates these sources into objects that feel at
once man made, organic, and post-human. There
is something polymorphously perverse, bordering
on the ecstatic, about his works. In Resplendent
Probe Isenhour delves into his religious past
and spiritual present, exploring where they intersect
with popular culture. Evoking luminescence and
wetness, as though pulled from a vat brimming
with the ooze of the subconscious, the homogeneity
of the works’ reflective surfaces provokes
self-inspection on behalf of the viewer.
Jeff
Sonhouse: Probable Cause
Jeff
Sonhouse explores the collision of appearance
and disguise in these new paintings. Working with
and against the idea of the mask, which simultaneously
projects a public image and cloaks the face beneath,
Sonhouse incorporates a dizzying assortment of
signifiers of identity and style. Sonhouse collages
his canvases with materials ranging from glitter
and beads to matches (which he then sometimes
lights in situ). Playful, ornamental, and disturbing,
these portraits suggest that the performance of
self is as much about survival and camouflage
as it is the thrill of self-adornment.
East
Gallery
Secrets
and Lies: Work from Yun Bai and Ohm Phanphiroj
Sensual
Exotic Femme vs. Sick Public Slut,
2002 Oil
and Clipping from Pornographic magazines on masonite,
2'x2'
Viewed
from afar, Yun Bai's collages appear to depict
luscious hybrid flowers-orchids perhaps-against
the black laquered background familiar to traditional
Chinese art. On drawing closer, the viewer discovers
that these petals and buds have been from photographs
of body parts taken from pornographic magazines.
Alongside these collages, Yun Bai adds quotations
from the same publications that convey contradictory
fantasies of the Asain woman as flower/whore.
These alternately alluring and repellent works
capture and convey sexual fantasies that are so
easily projected onto the 'exotic' female other.
The
First Conversation Between Frank and I,2002,
video still
This
short but intense video plays off the recent phenomenon
of reality TV, calling the practice into question
while at the same time reveling in the morally
ambiguous nature of the genre. Ohm captures the
push-pull-push again erotic interplay between
two men. One – the subject of the film –
is visible, caught and filmed off guard. The other
– the cameraman/artist – remains hidden.
Although we do not see the artist, we hear him,
as he alternately cajoles, seduces, and taunts
the increasingly reluctant subject of his film.
In a reversal of familiar sexual politics, in
which Western men ‘send for’ Asian
brides, the now predatory Asian man has, it seems,
‘sent for’ his all-American male
mate. The raw, roughly edited footage is intended
to provoke visceral reactions in the viewer and
open up questions about sex as commodity and the
often unsavory politics of desire. Also
on view, photographs from Seeing American:Seeing
Landscape which record scenes of roadside
America from an outsider's perspective.
2003
Atlanta Biennial
March
22 - June 7, 2003
Opening
reception will be held on March 21, 7-9pm
 
‘I
come to Atlanta with some preconceptions to ignore...
I want to celebrate the city through its dynamic
artists’ - curator Franklin Sirmans
Alejandro
Aguilera, Calvert Brown, Jason Cochrane, Emily
Diehl, Debra Fritts, Michael Gibson, Donte Hayes,
Hope Hilton, Loretta Mae Hirsch, Sara Hornbacher,
Scott Ingram, Alexander Kvares, Lance Lamont,
Donald Locke, Eric Mack, James Hiram Malone, Traci
Molloy, Prema Murthy, Lourdes Perdomo, Julie Püttgen,
Kathryn Refi, John Roberts, Omar Thompson, Larry
Walker, Rusty Wallace.
More
than 500 artists, working within 100 miles of
Atlanta, responded to our Call for Submissions
for the 2003 Atlanta Biennial. Curator, Franklin
Sirmans, visited studios over the course of four
days and refined his search to twenty-five artists.
Among his selections are several recent graduates
and students, as well as prominent figures that
have had a profound effect on the Atlanta artistic
community through their work as artists and teachers.
Sirmans also identified a few 'hot' artists who
have been working below contemporary art's usual
radar, as well as outstanding figures that are
simply new to Atlanta and thus have not yet established
a local presence.
The
2003 Atlanta Biennial reflects the varied formats
and materials of the work submitted. We received
few submissions from the field of video and the
show includes just one video artist. The lack
of video and new media encouraged Sirmans to develop
a particular emphasis on painting and sculpture,
what he calls 'the basis of art practice'. The
work in the Biennial invites viewers to invest
time in the process of looking. It also reflects
an element of time, of craft and attention to
material, in the artistic process itself.
Franklin
Sirmans, is a New York-based critic and curator.
Sirmans co-curated One Planet Under a Groove at
the Bronx Museum, 2001, Americas Remixed for the
Comune di Milano, Milan and Mass Appeal at Galerie
101, Ottawa, and throughout eastern Canada in
2002, and New Wave at Kravets/Wehby Gallery, New
York, 2003. A former editor of Flash Art Magazine,
Sirmans has written for The New York Times, Newsweek,
Essence Magazine, and Art in America.
A
Shot In The Dark:
Three
Curators;Three Installations; Three Weekends in
February Find
out what three curators and artists will do with
one weekend, an empty space, and full curatorial
freedom.
February
14 Michael Oliveri
February
21 Susan Bridges
This
Friday, The Contemporary presents the second
installation in a series of weekend installation,
A Shot in the Dark. 'The Hovering' is a
mixed media installation by Benita Carr, Evan
Levy and Susan Bridges which explores the
suspension and anxiety of these times.
Materials such as textiles, metal, wood, animal
skins, and video projection will be used in the
piece. The
artists had this to say about their project, "We
are collectively waiting for the other shoe to
drop and wondering if the powers that be are aiming
at their feet."
February
28 Alex Kvares
The
Final Installment of Shot in the Dark:
An
exhibition of gratuitous single channel pathos
by former delinquents of discourse, presently
older and more contemplative towards their previous
wayward practices. They have abandoned their toy
weapons and ambitions, given up on anarchy, devil
worshipping and illicit drugs, all in exchange
for the trance-inducing flicker of light on the
screen.
The
following people have put aside their accordians,
remote controls and whiskey bottles, and picked
up their camera in order to project their frustrations
onto you, the viewer:
J.Butcher
C.Dongoski M.Hosford Z.Khalemsky M.Krueger A.
Liftig P.Logobardi H.Mcgraw G.Ornay J.Peragine
Interactive,
performative and sound generating actions are
carried out by a collective of Georgia State University
students under the direction of C.Dongoski and
R.Thompson.
All
materials were hastily selected by Alexander Kvares.
Nancy
Floyd
Weathering
Time
November
15, 2002 -
Weathering
Time is a mixed-media room installation that includes
a series of videos, back lit photographs, and
50,000 Popsicle sticks. reception will
The
subtle changes that occur over time are recorded
through images of Nancy Floyd’s body and
home. The straight forward style of the images
makes a powerful statement by relating the personal
to a more universal concept of the inevitability
of change. Weathering Time engages the viewer,
allowing individuals to make connections with
their own lives and their own mortality.
Sara
Hornbacher
A
Thousand Plateaus
January
12- March 10, 2001
Atlanta-based
artist Sara Hornbacher creates a video installation
comprised of three large projections and interactive
components that merge viewer, images and sound.
She draws on a dense archive of imagery collected
over a twenty-year period to create this piece.
As spectators move through the space they trigger
sensing devices that create shifts and changes
in the environment.
The
piece was inspired by a text by philosophers Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guatarri. In their writings,
a plateau is reached when circumstances combine
to bring an activity to such an intense pitch
that it is not automatically dissipated in climax.
The heightened energy level is sustained long
enough to leave a kind of “afterimage”
of its dynamism that can be reactivated or injected
into other activities. The projected images in
Hornbacher’s work are layered and fade
in and out of view, thus offering a visual interpretation
of ideas in the Deleuze and Guatarri text.
This
exhibition marks the first large-scale interactive
DVD environment by an individual artist both at
the Contemporary and in Atlanta. It is significant
in this respect and is a major event in the artist’s
twenty-five year career. Hornbacher started working
in video in 1975 and built a strong career in
New York City. In 1994 she relocated to Atlanta
to assume the Chair of the Video Department at
the Atlanta College of Art. In 2000, Hornbacher
received the Mayor’s Fellowship in the
Arts (Media) and she was short-listed for an important
public art commission for a hi-tech permanent
installation at Hartsfield International Airport.
A
color catalogue accompanies the exhibition featuring
an essay by John Johnston, widely published professor
of Comparative Literature at Emory University.
Support for A Thousand Plateaus is being provided
by Pioneer Media Technologies, USA, Southern Business
Communications Group, Atlanta, the Fulton County
Arts Council, The City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural
Affairs, the Atlanta College of Art and Experimental
Television Center, Oswego, NY. Hornbacher is represented
by Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta.
Sara
Hornbacher from Meta Mapping
Gretchen
Hupfel
Horizontal
Stabilizer
Presentation by Georgia Institute for Technology,
College of Architecture
November 3 - December 30, 2000
East Gallery
Travel Writing, an installation by Mark Cottle,
explores problems of representation that
arise in constructing narratives of the remote.
Ongoing formal concerns include:
• The atomization (pixelization) of the
image.
• The interaction of figure and field.
• And the role craft and the decorative arts
may play in artistic inquiry.
Cottle was educated at Clemson, Rice, and Harvard
Universities. In 1991 he was a Dinkeloo Fellow
at the American Academy in Rome. He won the Steedman
in 1996, the result of a biannual international
competition, and spent a year in India, Italy,
and France. He has taught at Georgia Tech, RISD,
and the University of Hawai'i.
November 3 - December 30, 2000 (two exhibitions)
James Herbert; Paintings, Film, Videos and
Stills
November 3 - December 30, 2000
Organized by Teresa Bramlette
link
to press release
James Herbert from Paintings, Film, Videos
and Stills
Mix Tape
Mixed by Jeremy Helton
November 3 - December 30, 2000
link
to current events
link to press release
www.fasciamedia.com
www.scannerdot.com
www.dfuse.com
www.sulphurrecords.com
www.atrecordings.com
Q-bert- Syd & Eric from Mix Tape
Film Screenings
November 3 - December 30, 2000
Saturday, November 4, 8 p.m.
The Celluloid Canvas
Presented by the Contemporary and IMAGE Film
and Video Center
www.imagefv.org
Celluloid Canvas: Speedy Boys by James Herbert
Cinefest--Georgia State University
James
Herbert from The Celluloid Canvas
Wednesday, November 8, 8 p.m.
Celluloid Canvas: Orpheus by Jean Cocteau
Cinefest--Georgia State University
Friday, November 17, 9 p.m. - 1 a.m.
Mixer
A multimedia event with a film series by IMAGE
Film and Video Center & The Contemporary,
performances by musician/artists Scanner and DJ
Gnosis and a screening with a live musical score
of an experimental short by fascia.
eleven50-1150-B Peachtree Street in midtown
www.imagefv.org
www.eleven50.com
September 9 - October 21 (four exhibitions)
The Boat of My Life, an installation by Ilya
Kabakov
September 9 – October 21, 2000
Organized by Jonathan Fineberg
Ilya Kabakov from The Boat of My Life
Drawings by Corrine Colarusso
September 9 - October 21, 2000
Organized by Teresa Bramlette
Corrine Colarusso from Drawings by Corrine
Colarusso
James Castle
September 9 - October 21, 2000
Organized by Teresa Bramlette
College of Architecture, Georgia Institute
of Technology Exhibition
September 9 - October 21, 2000
The East Gallery
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (the Contemporary)
presents four separate exhibitions, in its Main
and East Galleries , September 9 – October
21, 2000. An Opening Reception will be held during
ArtParty 2000, on Saturday, September 9 from 8
PM – 1 AM. Admission for ArtParty is $35
in advance and $45 at the gate. Gallery Admission
during regular hours is Free for members if The
Contemporary, $3 General and $1 Students/Seniors/Children.
The
featured exhibtions include Ilya Kabakov's The
Boat of My Life, Corrine Colarusso's Drawings,
James Castle's mixed-media work and Monumental
Presence by architect Wellington Reiter.
Ilya
Kabakov emerged from the tight-knit underground
community of dissident artists in Moscow in the
1980s into one of the most celebrated international
artists of the 1990s. Expatriated from Russia,
Kabakov lives primarily in New York and creates
installations (often involving extensive narrative
texts written by him) in museums and exhibitions.
Kabakov has shown at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York City (The Bridge, 1995) and in the
Venice Biennale (The Red Pavilion, 1993 and We
Were in Kyoto, 1997). He focuses on the tiniest
scraps that one encounters in the ordinary course
of a day—a crumpled gum wrapper, a bent nail,
a snapshot or a common postcard. His paintings,
stories and installations are fantastic tales,
provoked in this way by the trivialities of daily
experience.
Kabakov’s installation The Boat of My Life,
addresses his flight from the Nazis to Samarkand
at the age of 9 with his parents as well as his
internal exile. It also speaks to the persecutions
of a "Jewish national" within postwar
Russia, and his emigration to New York in the
spring of 1988 at the beginning of the Cold War
thaw. The show was organized by Jonathan Fineberg,
Professor of Art History at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is accompanied
by a catalogue.
Atlanta-based artist Corrine Colarusso, represented
by Fay Gold Gallery debuts her most recent drawings.
Bird calls, bioluminescence, optimistic shapes,
things that glow, dark of the day, free wandering,
pattern language—these are some of the words
pinned as titles to the group of drawings that
will be shown for the first time in this exhibition.
These extremely detailed renderings are variations
on images and ideas found in her larger paintings
and accumulations of bits and pieces made over
several years.
James Castle was born deaf in 1900 in rural Garden
Valley, Idaho, and though he briefly attended
a school devoted to teaching deaf and blind students,
Castle never learned to sign, speak or read. Never
venturing more than 150 miles from his birthplace,
Castle made thousands of meticulously illustrated
books and drawings. He worked on butcher paper,
matchbook covers, cardboard, and mail order catalogues
(his parents’ home served as the local post
office. His subject matter was his environment.
Castle died in 1977 at the age of 77, and has
remained relatively unknown to the contemporary
art world until a recent show at The Drawing Center
in New York City (March 4 – May 4, 2000).
His work is represented by J. Crist Gallery in
Boise, Idaho.
Monumental Presence by Wellington Reiter, AIA
is meditation on the abstractness of the cemetery
both in form and conception. The drawings and
models that accompany the exhibition. also concern
the collapsing of layers of history to reveal
unanticipated juxtapositions in the lives of those
who are now interned together. Mr. Reiter is the
author of the recently published, Vessels and
Fields, which details similar investigations into
the intersection between public art, architecture,
and urban design.
Between Space & Time: Contemporary Norwegian
Sculpture and Installation
July 7 – August 19, 2000
Organized by Louise E. Shaw
This show is a compendium of some of the strongest
and most innovative work by Norwegian artists.
Deep interest in the spiritual, in Eastern religions
and a focus upon archetypal forms – drawn
from such diverse sources as Norwegian folklore
and folkways, or aboriginal cultures – characterize
much of the work. The great care given to the
use of material and craft, even if the content
is highly conceptual, is consistent with this
sense of introspection and interiority. Artists
include Per Barclay, Per Inge Bjorlo, Bard
Breivik, Bente Stokke, Gunnar Torvund, and
Kristin Ytreberg. Supported by the Norwegian
Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Per Barclay from Between Space & Time:
Contemporary Norwegian Sculpture and Installation
Lupus
Viator Atlanta by Darya von Berner
July 7 – August 19, 2000
The East Gallery
Lupus Viator Atlanta created by Darya von
Berner and published by Nexus Press during the
1996 Centennial Olympics will transcend its traditional
codex structure of the artist book and be presented
as a 14 x 60 foot image bearing wall installation
in the Contemporary’s East Gallery. Lupus
Viator, Latin for wolf walking is the
basis for this ephemeral, traveling wolf image,
which is created by placing 100 books in a ten
by ten book grid. This American gray wolf has
traveled to Lima, Peru’s Centro Cultural
de Espana, The High Museum of Art in Atlanta and
The Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University
of Georgia in Athens. With the edition of 1000
artists books, the wolf can travel to 1000 new
destinations.
Darya von Berner from Lupus Viator Atlanta
by Darya von Berner
Precious:
The Pathos and Pleasure of Kitsch
May 5 – June 17, 2000
Organized by Felicia Feaster
Precious will unite a variety of
artwork in photography, film, collage, and painting
to address how kitsch can be seen as a language
our memories are trapped within. Relegated to
the realm of "bad taste" and lower-middle
class pursuits, clown art, knit afghans, and decorative
handicraft are considered devoid of meaning, when
in fact they often express a sense of limited
options, inexpressible emotions and economic marginality.
Artists include Mark Bennett (Los Angeles),
Boym Design Studio (New York), Jody Fausett
(New York), Mike Cockrill (New York), Amy
Hill (New York), Catherine Howe (New
York), Bimey Imes (Mississippi), David
Levinthal (New York), Guy Maddin (Winnipeg,
Canada), Lisa Petrucci (Seattle), J.
John Priola (San Francisco), and Robert
Sherer (Atlanta).
Catherine Howe from Precious: The Pathos and
Pleasure of Kitsch
A Selection of work by Atlanta Artists in
the 2000 Whitney Museum Biennial
May 5 – June 17, 2000
Organized by Teresa Bramlette
The East Gallery
Robin Bernat (video artist), Kojo Griffin
(painter), Ruth Leitman (filmmaker) and
Chris Verene (photographer) will exhibit
their work in The Contemporary’s East Gallery.
All four artists have previously shown at the
Contemporary.
Chris Verene from A Selection of work by Atlanta
Artists in the 2000 Whitney Museum BiennialBrad
Freeman: Lite Interventions Into the Symbols of
Power
May 5 – June 17, 2000
Organized by Teresa Bramlette
Brad Freeman, Director of Production for
Nexus Press and Editor of the Journal of Artist
Books (JAB) will exhibit his work in spanning
over 20 years of artmaking from silver gelatin
prints to highly wrought digital prints and complex
artists books. Freeman explores the shifting interface
of private zones and the surrounding public sphere
through visual and textual narratives. His concerns
range from leftover people whose stories demand
to be told to wry interventions within the symbols
of power.
Found
Wanting
March 10 – April 22, 2000
Organized by Helena Reckitt
This exhibition explores the awkward, the in-between,
and the search for beauty in unexpected places
in the work of contemporary artists from Britain,
Canada, Japan, Sweden and the USA. Found
Wanting pursues the possibilities of the
uncertain, the unlovely and the out of place.
Artists include Laura Aguilar (Los Angeles),
Lucy Gunning (London), Genevieve Cadieux
(Montreal), Adam Chodzko (London),
Tomoko Takahashi (London), Annika Von
Hauswolff (Stockholm) and John Zeppetelli
(Montreal) as well as books from The Atlanta College
of Art’s collection.
Adam Chodzko from Found Wanting
Here
Kitty, Kitty
January
14 – February 26, 2000
Organized by Teresa Bramlette
The beginning of widespread pet ownership coincided
with a philosophical conceit to tame the natural
world – to shape and control behavior. Today,
pets figure prominently in our complex lives,
often filling the role of a child, a friend or
a mate. A great deal of our time, energy and money
is now devoted to meeting the needs (physical
and otherwise) of our pets. Here Kitty,
Kitty is an exhibition that looks
lovingly at he contemporary phenomenon of pet
obsession. The show is intended to be playful
and accessible, but not without bite. Here
Kitty, Kitty features Janet Biggs
(New York), Patricia Cronin (New York),
Nicole Eisenman (New York), Vincent
Fecteau (California), Katharina Fritsch
(Germany), A.B. Frost (Collection of the
Wren’s Nest, Atlanta), Pam Longobardi
(Atlanta), Joe Peragine (Atlanta), Carolee
Schneemann (New York), Katja Seltmann
(Athens, GA), Sons of Caviar, V. Elizabeth
Turk (Atlanta) and William Wegman (New
York).
Pam Longobardi from Here Kitty, Kitty |
