Chance encounters: Grassroots spirituality, art, and politics

Images of children from Andrew Imm's trafficking awareness installation. Photo by k.tauches.

Andrew Imm collects photos of missing people, and also the thin plastic innards from keyboards that look like Star Trek consoles. Held at Eyedrum last year, Systems of Chance was the artist and mathematics teacher’s first show. In classic “clusterfuck” style, Imm overlaid them with network-like graphics and piles of other cosmic junk. Anne Chance, a volunteer with an organization that helps fight sex trade trafficking in Atlanta, came to that opening merely because of the title. By synchronicity, the work accurately represented her cause. She contacted Imm to do a similar installation in a most adventurous found location. The result was a rather odd outsider event that combined art, politics, and energy. It moved me totally by surprise.

Curiously, the invitation distributed “globally” through Facebook merely announced Imm’s art show as a “Trafficking Awareness Event Art Installation” that would be open to the public for a single day–Thursday, January 28, 2010. Art is a great excuse to visit foreign or otherwise out of reach environments, and Imm’s remote art show at Rice Memorial Presbyterian Church in Southwest Atlanta (Capital View Neighborhood) was a magical field trip.

Parking in an empty lot adjacent to the church, a strange bearded man, most probably a young pastor, greeted my friend and me. The air smelled like cookies. (There’s a Nabisco plant on Murphy Avenue). When we walked into the Church’s community building, non-art people were sitting in folded chairs. Through the first door on the right, Imm’s funky work—hundreds and hundreds of tiny repeated faces chopped up and framed maniacally—was squeezed awkwardly inside a small office-like room. In the next beige cement-block room,  a video was displayed unceremoniously. My friend and I sat down, feeling a little closed-off by all the bad aesthetics and overall weirdness. But my heart began to open when I learned that between 15,000 and 17,000 children are victims of a bizarre black market that flows through Atlanta annually. Most of them are penniless runaways, picked up by pimps within 48 hours of arriving by bus to city centers. They are marketed on Craigslist. Wow.

A woman operates a prayer in Anne Chance's installation. Photo by k.tauches.

When we walk  out, Imm’s visual cacophony has more context. Anne Chance herself instructs us go upstairs and see her “prayer installation.” This is the tipping point. The sun setting, we go upstairs to a warm, luminous room with west-facing crescent windows that  overlook an urban forest. New Age music fills a room that contains simulated wood tables and folding chairs. A keyboard and mic are set up in the corner. Creative prayer instructions decorated with clip art lay on each table: some offer a bowl of lemons to imagine bitterness or honey for sweet compassion. Two well-dressed middle-aged women  enter and begin to operate the prayers, lifting their hands in the air and swaying quietly in the diminishing sunlight.

Offerings of salt and lemons to help visitors feel the bitterness of sex trafficking. Photo by k.tauches.

This is the sort of thing an emerging artist at the Whitney Biennial could recreate to the last vernacular detail with acclaim. But Chance’s self-proclaimed “installation” was accidentally real and raw. It hit spiritual chords because of an odd ingredient of sincerity, so often missing in the gallery world. Cajoled by the room’s buzzing good energy, we were transported past the banal cliché of Jesus graphics and religion to feel its authentic compassion, its disregard for success other than praying for the suffering of others.

Imm's installation included 3-D glasses visitors could wear. They created nice faux holographic rainbow effects, though the lighting needs to be perfected. Photo by Andrew Imm.

I don’t think a lot of art people made it  to this event. Perhaps that’s a good thing, as the local art-goers might misunderstand. Imm’s onto something here, and it happened by chance. Artist Christian Boltanski conducted similarly political art installations well outside the gallery context starting in the 1970s. The way he displayed and lighted the faces of Holocaust victims is world-renowned. Personally, I hope Imm pushes himself further toward the overload of a Jason Rhoades installation. I hope he investigates blowing up single portraits, especially those that have been sliced and otherwise layered with circuitous imagery. Next, Imm and Chance should propose a project at the airport, where some of the trafficking of children occurs.

Tags: Andrew Imm