Limitless at Dalton Gallery
Joe Peragine's diorama installation. Photo courtesy Dalton Gallery.
The first show of 2010 at Agnes Scott College’s Dalton Gallery opened Thursday night. Entitled Limitless, this group show honors the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s invention of the telescope, inviting artists to “‘reveal hidden worlds’ by taking wide-ranging approaches to art making while using an expansive scope to view the universe.” Considering the extraordinary example set by the show’s inventor-of-honor and its promising list of participating artists, I went into the exhibition with high hopes. But I also was mindful that such a broad statement of intent left considerable room for half-baked ideas, trite sentiments, and over-the-top diluting of the purity of spirit I was hoping for. However, my fears were unnecessary. With only a few exceptions, Limitless was earnest, well-balanced, and endlessly interesting.
Didi Dunphy, Seesaw. Photo courtesy Dalton Gallery.
If I had one regret about my viewing experience, it comes to this: I didn’t take a ride on Didi Dunphy’s intensely inviting seesaws. I later saw pictures of groups of friends piled on top of the Crayola-colored, grown-up-sized structures—and, naturally, loving it. After all, isn’t that part of what the title Limitless is meant to imply? A new perception on a common idea, a fresh design for an antiquated purpose, a day-glo playground in the middle of a calm campus gallery?
The handmade sound devices from Atlanta’s favorite bald, bearded, bespectacled theramin master, Klimchak, were spot-on. Ever notice how experimental music components often feel obligatory and forced when included in art shows? Not this time. His endearing Stooge Rack, a work composed of cowbells, whistles, woodblocks, and balloons, was affectionately reminiscent of the “confounded contraption” bemoaned by Belle’s father in Beauty and the Beast. Klimchak’s original instruments were each so adventurous that, even when they missed their mark, they were still intriguing.
Martha Whittington, mixed media. Photo courtesy Dalton Gallery.
Martha Whittington’s kinetic works whirred and cranked quietly in the back of the gallery. If you’ve ever seen her work before, it’s unmistakable whose contribution you’re looking at. Whittington is one of those artists who can inject such life into gears, chalk, and drywall that the mechanisms become surprisingly and distinctly anthropomorphic. While none of her works blew me away like Whittington has in the past, they added greatly to the overall experience.
Continuing in the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci, Lee Kean’s relief works explored spatial patterns, dynamic connections, and attachment between the organic and the manmade. The reliefs ranged in size from quite small to one multi-story, three-dimensional, hurricane-esque installation. As I stood before Kean’s monochromatic works, there was a palpable, pleasant confusion between organic abstraction and architectural design. If an artist can make these two ideas seem not only interchangeable, but also symbiotic, then they score a win.
Joe Paragine’s military diorama, however, was placed in a far recess of the gallery, and felt as disjointed from the show as its location would imply. It’s not that there was anything particularly offensive or unpleasant about the large-scale display. It’s just that there wasn’t anything particularly anything to it. I had to fight the urge to mentally push it away, out from its dark corner of the gallery, and all the way back to the suburban dad’s garage the diorama appears to have come from. Dad is going to be sad if his hobby project is away for too long.
Despite the placement of the show’s most eye-catching components up front, there is a balanced richness throughout the space. Many of the works in Limitless are quiet and unassuming, but lack no degree of substance or adherence to the theme. Even if you came into the show with no pre-existing knowledge of the artists, the sincerity and earnest sense of discovery would tell you all you need to know: Instead of beseeching a group of random artists to force their work to conform to the theme, Dalton Gallery opted to recruit a specific list of creative veterans, such as Klimchak and Martha Whittington, whose approaches and aesthetics already line up with the innovative spirit that does this anniversary proud.
I may have to post the URL for my forthcoming blog post dealing with “Limitless.” Too much to comment on here in terms of audience expectation and artist intent and such like.
please do
http://counterforces.blogspot.com/2010/02/limitless-horizons-or-museum-illusions.html
I hadn’t written the post (or, rather, I had written a draft of it that I later discarded) when I made the remark. I think Joe’s diorama is open to contestation (as they say) because I didn’t quite think the mix of stuff worked, myself. I can talk myself into it in theory, and once I started taking pictures I totally got into the paradox of the museum miniature…but the persuasiveness of the diorama is so much a part of its point (the “cuteness” of representations of horror) that I am not sure that just undermining its claims with cut-cardboard landing craft quite makes it happen. Incidentally, I see I skipped Lee Kean’s models of the architecture of buildings and hurricanes when I wrote my post, because the tour group seemed to understand and like both of them with no problems on any fronts. I wasn’t writing a review, and Jessica Blankenship’s insights on this work are right on target.
personally, I felt very distracted by the goofiness of the whole see-saw installation. . .the title of the show is already, as jess noted, ridiculously broad. . .but then to put a fluorescent playground at it’s center, for me, demeaned the seriousness of some of the better works (and the idea of “limitless” itself).
I loved peregine’s diorama, with it’s spray-painted sunset!
thanks for this jess. glad to see yr around . you write very well and directly about art. i like how this blog presently represents a sort of honesty that is endearing. the exposed process of learning/observing ourselves (and its humility)is inspiring. funny how often art wants to command a certain respect that isn’t necessary.i enjoy how it opens up dialogue from many different phases of experience. this blog inspires me to remember it’s mostly just about hanging out and sharing. keep calling it like you see it burnaway! keep not worrying about repercussions! isnt that art!? i thought art was what was left after an individual relative to an experience,but what do i now. inside n out,i’m still an ignorant scared white kid from the suburbs ofa southeastern state. but im learning.
i know there’s educated established writers out there writing that cld put another angle on things,but they have all ready shown they have no taste or sense of risk-taking fro the sake of change.no will to address whats always been going on beneath what atl artists try to plant on top. so who can you trust….what’s the goal with all this?
and thanks to karen tauches for the Imm report-i may not know anything about art,but i sense a goodness in what Imm is doing.
and oh by the way…..in a mall? okay.sure.
thanks jeff. im around. im glad youre around too. i just read what you wrote and it strangely lines up with something i just emailed to someone, which i dont think they’d mind me sharing:
“There is a perpetual wondering about whether to react and respond to what I perceive as the artist’s intention or what they actually successfully communicated to the common viewer. (and who knows what ‘common’ means or if any of us can ever react to anything as anyone other than just ourselves) And then I wonder, “If I can imagine what they wanted to achieve, can I really say that they did a poor job of doing so?” I don’t know. I guess there’s no right answer. I think the best that any critic can do is see through their own eyes, bring what they have to the experience and go from there. no one involved with any show ought to read any more into any review other than it being the documentation of one person’s experience. at least that’s what I’ve told myself when I’ve curated in the past
With that in mind, I’m always really happy when more than one review comes out for a show. We need more of that…I think we’re all benefited from articulating our own thoughts and then reading other people’s and reacting and rethinking…i like to think that arts criticism should always be a dialogue, not an autonomous mandate.”
anyways. like you said, it’s hanging out. it’s consequence-free response. and that IS art, at least how i like it.
karen, i cant decide if im with you or not on your thoughts about the playground stuff…it’s placement either demeans the seriousness and sometimes subtlety of some of the other works, or else it makes those qualities more pronounced by contrast.
i wrote too much and decided it was pointless and presumptuous.(like art?) so i posted it somewhere else. i think it is all a bunch of braided autonomous mandates. and id like to be an oppositional defiant experiencing a dissociative fugue state. or maybe i just like oil pastels a wiggling trees.