Fresh Loaf

LINE BACKER: Glexis Novoa's 'Refurbish, 2007'

At least one historian has described the Peruvian song form called cumanana as “descuidado,” or careless. He meant that in the best way, referring to the form’s random, haphazard meter. Likewise, the group exhibition Cumanana currently on view at Saltworks showcases art that feels casual, thrown together and improvisational.

The 13 artists assembled by curator William Cordova all have long histories of collaboration — many of the same shows from the last half decade pop up over and over in their CVs. In Cumanana, the artists use mostly trash, found objects and low-grade materials to channel the experience of making something from nothing. This should sound familiar — the trend of making art whose list of materials reads like the inventory of a homeless lady’s shopping cart is well-established.

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HEART OF GOLD: A still from Julie Puttgen's 'Voidvideo: Voidthrobber, 2007'

Honey, I shrunk the art.

When it came to art in the 20th century, bigger was better. All Small Redux at Agnes Scott College’s Dalton Gallery, however, reconsiders the conundrum of scale by looking through the other end of the telescope. Nothing in All Small exceeds 6 inches in any dimension, or about a minute in length for video works. The hundreds of works by 47 artists range from itty bitty paintings to teeny tiny sculptures, from quickie videos to mini installations. All in all, the collected works demonstrate that big ideas can be packed into small spaces.

In Tom Zarrilli’s “Spectacles for Tourists,” the artist covers the lenses of four pairs of glasses with idealized images of exotic locations. The critique may be simple — that tourists see mostly what their brochures tell them to see, not what’s actually there — but the small scale and elegant execution fit the bill precisely.

Small works require a different way of looking. They invite close approaches, leaning in, squinting — exactly how such works are often made. The transfer of intimacy from the art maker to the art viewer is direct and powerful.

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WAITING ROOM: "Stella"

Kristen Ashburn doesn’t flinch. Training her lens on some of the hardest to look at sights in Iraq, Gaza and New Orleans, she’s become versed in the art of not looking away. The photographer’s most recent excursion found her in sub-Saharan Africa documenting AIDS-ravaged communities and families. The result, Bloodline: AIDS and Family, runs through runs through March 6 at the Atlanta Photography Group Gallery and March 15 at Composition Gallery.

What first drew you to this topic?
Millions of people are sick and dying because they lack medicine that we as Americans take for granted. As a journalist, this pandemic is something that I could not ignore.

What countries did you visit?
I documented the AIDS crisis throughout Botswana, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Malawi.

Which was the hardest to document?
As I began making visits to communities, hospitals, and homes, I quickly realized that Zimbabwe was in bad shape. Not only was the country going through political and economic turmoil, but the basic social fiber of society was being torn apart by this disease. I spent most of my time in Zimbabwe, but it became too dangerous for me to work there without the official press credentials. Journalists are not allowed to work in the country without government-issued press credentials, which are rarely given out. If caught working without these papers I faced up to a two-year jail sentence.

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OUT OF CONTEXT: Meg Aubrey's "Trash Day," 2008

Meg Aubrey’s MFA thesis show, I Just Live Here, at Gallery Stokes is like a debutante ball: Both serve up white, southern womanhood with a saccharine aftertaste to feed mythologies of place and time.

Aubrey’s 10 medium-size oil paintings pursue a cast of female characters through prosperity-era, suburban America. In “New Tree,” two women sit facing each other in spindly patio chairs at a stiff little cafe table. The painting is keyed-up so that the light has an overexposed, sun-drenched quality. We might imagine a shopping center parking lot or mini-mall courtyard behind them, but such context has been removed. Instead, a flat wash of solid sky blue fills the background and middle distance. Just off to the right in the midst of this arid environment, an impossible little tree grows, artificially tied down in an artificial circle of artificially manicured grass.

All the women in Aubrey’s paintings inhabit similar deserts of suburban precision. (more…)

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THE MAN WITH THE PLAN: Sketch of garden at Henrietta Egleston Hospital for Children, designed by Edward L. Daugherty, FASLA. From the Cherokee Garden Library Collection, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center

Next time you’re at the corner of North Avenue and West Peachtree Street, notice the sunlight shining on All Saints Episcopal Church. It’s the red stone edifice on the northwest corner across from the MARTA station. The light isn’t an accident. Landscape architect Edward L. Daugherty put it there in 1977.

Daugherty may not have physically moved photons through space, but his efforts that year kept the church’s neighboring skyscrapers far enough back on their lots to ensure that All Saints would always get sufficient natural light. Both the church and its enclosed gardens reaped the benefits: an island of humanity in a concrete wilderness.

Daugherty occupies a revered position in Atlanta’s architectural ecology. His resume reads like a who’s who, or rather a where’s where of Atlanta institutions: Agnes Scott College, the Governor’s mansion, Clark Atlanta University, the Botanical Gardens, Georgia Tech. An intimate retrospective of his work at the Atlanta History Center details the breadth of Daugherty’s more than 50-year career here. On view through Oct. 10, Edward L. Daugherty, a Southern Landscape Architect: Exploring New Forms provides glimpses of the man and his work through 50 sketches, plans and photographs. (more…)

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GLUE GUN: "Evereman Wheatpaste" by Evereman

On Tues., Jan. 20, the nation will swear in the president with the catchiest catch phrase since Eisenhower’s “I like Ike.” If ever there was a time for art to explore political language, it’s now.

Beep Beep Gallery’s Popaganda attempts to tackle the visual language of politics without all the messiness of actual politics. Organizers Mark Basehore and James McConnell have brought together work designed to promote itself, promote nothing, or promote promotion with no ties to real campaigns or parties. Unfortunately, this group show is long on promise and short on delivery.

Popaganda squeezes 15 artists’ works into Beep Beep’s intimate, studiously lo-fi space off Ponce. The exhibit consists mostly of small paintings, drawings and mixed-media works by a young stable of gallery regulars including Ben Goldman and Sat Kirpal Khalsa. Themes depicted range from Goldman’s hyperpatriotic portrait of the gallery’s founders to Evereman’s early Soviet-style print of a worker mounting a poster by, who else?, Evereman. The spirit of Shepard Fairey hangs low over all.

What should have been a provocative look at how art shades into marketing shades into manipulation, instead too often degenerates into a series of easy jokes. But irony eats its young. And the down-at-the-heels, hipster aesthetic of snarky irony evinced by most of the show’s works is already starting to feel dated.

A missed opportunity is forgivable, but Popaganda takes a step down from there. (more…)

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SPACING OUT: "Boundary Issues," 2008 by Brian Bell and David Yocum

Painters of a certain stripe know that their best work is sometimes their fastest work; pictures that emerge in a sudden rush with no time for second guesses or backward glances.

Mergers & Acquisitions, a wide-ranging group exhibition currently on view at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, benefits from a similar sense of urgency and shortness of time. Due to a last-minute cancellation, curator Stuart Horodner was forced to fill the Contemporary with an entirely new show in a matter of weeks. A show of this scope would normally take several months or even years to plan. Fortunately, Mergers & Acquisitions takes risky leaps of curatorial intuition that pay off in surprising and dramatic ways.

Mr. Horodner, speed becomes you.

Mergers & Acquisitions is built around a number of artistic calls and responses. (more…)

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BODY OF WORK: "El Bicho" by Tomás Esson

In El Bicho: 2008/2009, Cuban painter Tomás Esson takes a detour around the well-behaved superego and  instead drives straight for the pulsing flesh of the id. The Hammonds House Museum exhibition comprises 60 of the artist’s sexiest, nastiest, most sublime works in an orgiastic feast surveying Esson’s creative output over the last 20 years.

A personal menagerie of half-human beasts and beings with confused and confusing bodies populate Esson’s large oil paintings. Rear ends substitute for breasts and a phallicized finger spits something aggressive and poisonous. (more…)

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NEW WORLD ORDER: "Judge Knot" by KRK Ryden

Rabbit Hole Gallery’s 2006 opening for Tyson McAdoo featured go-go dancers, a live DJ and half of the nation’s PBR reserves. The festivities were a fitting launch for the underground space, which has featured a consistent set of pop surrealist, low brow and comics-influenced work by artists from Atlanta and elsewhere. Proprietor Bethany Marchman and business manager Joe Cruz will be closing  the space at the end of the year. Marchman took the opportunity to look back at both the agony and the ecstasy.

Tell us about the current work that you have at the gallery right now.
Right now at the gallery, we have the KRK Ryden solo show. It’s called Globoid Fun, and that’s original paintings by KRK Ryden. Got a few prints available, too. They’re pretty colorful, kind of pop. He’s from California.

Why did you originally open the gallery?
I just wanted a venue for some of this underground art. At the time there weren’t too many options; there seem to be a lot more now, though, which is a great thing. (more…)

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CUTTING IT CLOSE: “Michael”

Given the sheer volume of stuff bursting Flickr’s virtual seams and tumbling out of studios belonging to everyone from fine artists to part-timers at Sears, is there anything new to discover about the overexposed, early 21st-century human form? Self-taught photographer Thomas Dozol wades into this glut of human images in a new solo exhibition at Opal Gallery. And with some aplomb he manages to peel back yet another layer of the onion that is our shared humanity. (more…)

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Relocated in fresh digs, Saltworks Gallery opened its new Westside space last month with Perfect Distortions, a solo installation show by Atlanta art world fixture Avantika Bawa. Bawa mines the territories of architecture and abstract sculpture. The current exhibit takes on a pair of Atlanta’s Midtown icons: Ikea and Home Depot. Bawa is a professor in SCAD’s School of Fine Arts and is based in both Atlanta and New Delhi, India.

Describe the work that’s at Saltworks right now.

What we have at Saltworks is a combination of installations, drawings [and] sculptures that seem functional but push the boundary of functionality. A lot of this comes from my previous work, which was kind of interested in modular structures, minimalism, and the intersection of architecture, furniture, sculpture and dysfunction. And, being that this new gallery is very close to Ikea . . . I thought it would be interesting to bite the bullet and address Ikea as fodder. And that’s what I did. Ikea and Home Depot play a major role in this. (more…)

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DEATH BECOMES THEM: A skeletal death works in the world of pathogenic microbes in “Memento Mori” (translation: “Remember that you are mortal”).

Did the bubonic plague extinguish Europe’s feudal caste system and trigger the rise of the middle-class bourgeoisie? Did yellow fever end the trafficking of African slaves to the New World? Did the Spanish flu halt World War I? According to Outbreak: Plagues that Changed History currently on view at the CDC’s Global Health Odyssey Museum, the answers are maybe, maybe and maybe. And although it’s assuredly an oversimplification to attribute some of history’s biggest events to any single cause, Outbreak puts forth the intriguing notion that many of the defining currents of human social and cultural history around the globe have at least been influenced by some of the planet’s smallest inhabitants.

Outbreak is the artistic brainchild of painter and illustrator Bryn Barnard. Barnard’s 2005 book of the same name targets middle school children with lush gouache and oil paintings that bring to life key moments in world history. It shows how a slew of unimaginably destructive epidemiological disasters gave us the world we live in now. The current CDC exhibit comprises Barnard’s original paintings along with maps and text borrowed from the book. It’s the first collected public showing of the work, and as is typical for CDC exhibitions, Outbreak aims to make explicit connections between broad health issues and daily life. (more…)

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