Sheila Pree Bright, L.V., 2009. archival inkjet print, 57 x 44 inches. Photo courtesy Sandler Hudson Gallery.

Photographer Sheila Pree Bright’s work is known for nuanced but complex studies of racial identity and her ability to shatter audiences’ assumptions. Bright’s current exhibition, Girls, Grillz, and Guns, currently on display at Sandler Hudson Gallery, ups the ante on Bright’s anthropological insights into facets of black urban culture.

Bright commences her exhibit with a forceful blow. In a saturated life-sized portrait titled L.V., two eyes stares out at us over a Louis Vuitton scarf covering the rest of the model’s face. L.V. boasts all of the stereotypical accoutrements that pop culture has pushed onto young black males: accessories covered in name-brand logos, plenty of bling cascading down the man’s chest, and a pose implying a gun-toting force to be wary of.

After a closer look, however, L.V. appears to be anything but confrontational. His expression is relaxed, and his gun-mimicking hand gestures appear to be playful, perhaps chiding the audience for our initial reaction. The anonymity created by the figure’s scarf allows Bright to create a personification or universal figure for hip-hop culture.

Sheila Pree Bright, Class C, 2010, archival black and white inkjet, 34 x 28 inches each. Photo courtesy Sandler Hudson Gallery.

The photographs of legendary rapper Scarface, a member of Houston’s the Ghetto Boys, are slightly more jarring. The prints collectively titled Class C each present an African American male, blurred in the background, holding a gun captured in sharp clarity in the foreground of the image. The mouth of the gun demands the focus and implied submission of the viewer. Bright has assembled the photos in a tight line to present three almost identical images in a row forming a firing line of sorts. The result is honestly intimidating.

Unlike the portrait of L.V., we are not asked to focus on the actual figures, but rather the guns that they carry. This contrast provides an adept observation of the audience’s probable conception of urban black culture as one defined by violence. Despite being photographed in the ’90s, the image’s intensity still holds fast, as mainstream media continues to project the same archetype of black masculinity, and with that, authority.

Terrence, 2009, chromogenic prints, 30 x 24 inches. Photo courtesy Sandler Hudson Gallery.

In the Grillz series, Bright’s photographs are displayed in a grid and depict an intimate closeup of a man’s face. Each brags a mouthful of gold-encrusted teeth, also known as grillz.

While this series seems more connected to the specific identity of her figures, Bright continues her usual practice of maintaining the anonymity of her subjects by showing the eyes of each figure tightly closed. Bright explained that she realized this form of bodily decoration is in fact much like “they were subconsciously referencing their African heritage and expressing themselves outwardly, just like their ancestors did with the adornment of their dress, hair, colorful garments, scarification, and jewelry.”

Both the gun imagery and these grillz stem from the same series, In High Definition, and seem to offer a recording of the material elements of rap culture. These props, both the gold teeth and guns, emphasize the misplaced focus of popular perceptions.

Sheila Pree Bright, Self Portrait, 2007, chromogenic print, 30 x 24 inches. Photo courtesy Sandler Hudson Gallery.

The final element of Bright’s show is her Plastic Bodies series she began in 2003. For these photographs, Bright uses digital manipulation to create part-human, part-Barbie portraits that describe America’s obsession with obtaining the ideal body. While this does not directly relate to black urban culture in the way that grillz and guns may, the recontextualization of this series in a new exhibition provides additional depth to Plastic Bodies as an independent work.

Bright has said of the series that it “[shows] how the cultural icon of the Barbie has become human and we’ve become plastic.” When this concept is paired with the idea of the artifacts of black stereotypes, though, it further stresses the idea of the commercialized and commodified role of personal identity. The MTVs of the world have in many ways stripped the original potency of rap music and replaced it with hyperbolic stereotypes.

Bright’s work succeeds through the rhetorical depth she achieves in her clean and elegant compositions. The seeming simplicity of her work allows the audience to project their own values, backgrounds, and misconceptions onto the work. In many ways Girls, Grillz, and Guns provides a retrospective of Bright’s work and in doing so elevates the discussion to an entirely new level.

Dayna Thacker, Implied Agreement by Tenant (Higher Still), 2010, collaged paper, graphite, and pastel on panel, 48 x 60 inches. Photo courtesy Barbara Archer Gallery.

This Saturday, July 31, is the closing day for Dayna Thacker’s exhibition, Pivots of Moment and the Structure of Accumulation, at Barbara Archer Gallery.

During her artist talk last month, Dayna Thacker piqued my curiosity when she mentioned that the imagery of her collage titled Implied Agreement by Tenant (Higher Still) was in part inspired by the Slavic legend of the Baba Yaga. Like many other fairytale witches, the Baba Yaga can fly by means of a broom (or a giant mortar and pestle) and likes to spend her time inventing new ways of tormenting small children. She also is a figure of untold wisdom and, in some stories, lives in a cabin with enormous walking chicken legs. The anecdote intrigued me, but it sadly was one of several details I was unable to address in my forthcoming review in print.

Fan wallpaper by Mikas Pile; courtesy Nanoda.com.

The Baba Yaga’s ambulatory home was one of Hayao Miyazaki’s sources behind his designs for the 2004 animated film, Howl’s Moving Castle.

But how significant are such cultural references to our interpretation of Thacker’s exhibition? What do we gain by considering source material that informs contemporary art? What do we miss by concentrating on it too much?

Excerpts from my full review appear in italics underneath the images below.

Dayna Thacker, A Map of Heaven, 2006-2009, collaged blueprints, gold leaf, string, and brass nails, 72 x 72 inches. Photo courtesy DaynaThacker.com.

Asian influences are prominent in one of Thacker’s previous works, A Map of Heaven, 2006-2009. From far away the design resembles a Tibetan mandala, while closer inspection reveals architectural schematics with details all the way down to closets and, yes, even toilets.

Dayna Thacker, John Barleycorn Must Die, 2007, paper, acrylic paint, objects, nails, and string on panel, 8 x 8 inches. Photo courtesy TheConstantGatherer.Blogspot.com.

Then again, putting too much emphasis on an Eastern interpretation would be a mistake. … Another previous work, John Barleycorn Must Die, 2007, shares its name with the 1970 album by the British rock band, Traffic, not to mention the hero of an old English folk song.

Dayna Thacker, Breathing Room, 2009, collaged paper, altered photograph, and graphite, 9 x 14 inches. Photo courtesy Barbara Archer Gallery.

The [current] exhibition contains two related bodies of work. In over a dozen small collages, the artist populates nonsensical landscapes with a cast and crew of paper-cutout figures. Scenes such as Breathing Room, 2009, are light, oftentimes comical, and were obviously a joy to create.

The bulk of Pivots of Moment and the Structure of Accumulation, however, comprises several larger panels depicting houses with walls made of found paper. Thacker simulates the nuances of three-dimensional space by aligning differing shades and crosshatching patterns of text.

Dayna Thacker, At Last, with Actual Delight, 2010, collaged paper, graphite, and pastel on panel, 20 x 32.5 inches. Photo courtesy Barbara Archer Gallery.

We see an imposing building loom into view. Its architecture is vaguely medieval, but its features are shifted out of time, slightly outside the confines of realistic perspective. Some parts are replaced altogether; Thacker uses a photograph of a stone archway instead of making one herself, substituting an unexpected realism for something more fake. Despite its modest proportions, the structure blocks out the horizon with its girth, and its doors and windows are shuttered closed or darkened out, thwarting the viewer’s urge to peer inside. As in all the other works on display, Thacker constructs the walls of this house with collaged pages from old books—anything from Nathaniel Hawthorne to even a passage written in German, printed in Gothic script. [Click here for a closer look. The image may take a moment to load.]

Cultural sources figure prominently in these works. Thacker considers each house to be a kind of psychological portrait of a modern individual; the “structures of accumulation” referenced in her exhibition title are created by the endless streams of information we digest every day.

Exercising our powers of sight helps to remind us why visual art has a role distinct from other forms. Music and film and literature and philosophy: These traditions each have their own vocabularies, their own unique avenues of excellence.

As I maintained the last time I conducted this experiment, analogies make it easier for us enter the artist’s world and begin to find our own way. But what makes a work of art excellent are the myriad ways it synthesizes materials, color, design, and theme and teaches us how to see anew.

Barbara Archer Gallery is open for regular hours Thursdays and Fridays, 11AM-6PM, and Saturdays, 11AM-5PM.

Shana Robbins stands within her installation, Supernatural Conductor, during her performance by the same title. Photo courtesy the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

When I showed up at The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center on a stormy Friday night earlier this month, I found it absolutely crawling with patrons and buzzing with energy. Over 450 people had descended on the gallery, drawn in by the promise of witnessing Shana Robbins’s most recent performance, Supernatural Conductor, scheduled to coincide with the opening of her exhibition by the same name. Amy Myers’s Feminine Space also opened that evening. The place was packed.

A strong turn-out, however, can come at a price: Peaked anticipation eroded into frustration as many found themselves struggling to catch a glimpse of the action across the dense sea of heads and shoulders clogging up the gallery. The long commentary thread under BURNAWAY’s video of Robbins’s performance originally posted here, which I strongly recommend reading, gives a very clear and fair sense of the concerns many visitors were left with.

Click below for Kombo Chapfika’s video documentation of Shana Robbins’s performance, reproduced with this review for your convenience.

For my part, I sympathize with those who were unable to get a clean look at the performance they were so excited to see. Nevertheless I think we, the audience, should be cautious about confusing the kind of intact viewing experience we would expect from a work of theatre with what we can reasonably expect from a work of performance art. Still, all parties would have benefited from a little more planning.

For those of us who were lucky or assertive enough to see most of Supernatural Conductor, the performance was not without its bewildering moments. I was absolutely dumbfounded as Robbins, dressed in the costume of her persona called “Monstrous Feminine,” emerged from behind an enormous, patchwork doily-scrim. She hurled a handful of sparkling dust into the air and, with the help of America’s “You Can Do Magic,” suddenly converted the previous 30 minutes of the performance into an extended introduction to what was now a one-woman, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”-esque music-and-dance routine. What was she doing?! I was so confused I was giddy.

Prior to this moment, the audience saw her buried alive (lying interred in a cutaway coffin that was pressed up against the glass of a gallery window like a terrarium) and exhumed by a concert pianist amidst the building lightning storm outside. Robbins then entered the gallery clad in a moldering, black Victorian dress. Walking and then crawling backwards, she entered her installation where she stood with her face protruding through a hole in the middle of an oversized dreamcatcher. Despite the melodrama of it all, an intense seriousness had taken hold throughout the performance to this point.

But now—as Robbins danced popping-and-locking her way across the gallery floor—all of her carefully cultivated solemnity was suddenly and unapologetically thrown out the window. This was a perplexing move, and one that put a lot of demand on the viewer. To go from somber Gothic drama to the glitter of VH1 with almost no transition was tough.

But if you could hang on, those several moments of emotional free-fall provided a unique kind of ecstatic reward. Contemporary art often espouses a clichéd goal of subverting expectations—but it’s not every day that our expectations are actually subverted. Robbins’s closing act was gutsy.

Still, I was left uncertain as to what kinds of conclusions were meant to be drawn from the work as a whole. I half suspect that what Robbins had secretly hoped for was that her appearance as a grooving green mummy would have been enough to induce the audience into a spontaneous dance party. Perhaps she wanted to whisk everyone away in a wave of blissful rapture? Now that would have really been something!

Amy Myers, Red Giant Between Earth and Sun, 2008, graphite, conté, gouache, and pastel on paper, 132 x 120 inches, courtesy the artist and Byron C. Cohen Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri. Photo courtesy the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

What remains in the gallery after the performance is the residue of a practice that could be categorized as contemporary shamanism (a term Robbins resists). The artist uses performance, video, sculpture, photography, drawing, and painting as a means to invoke the spirits, primeval forces, and consciousnesses of the estranged natural world around us.

For their part, Robbins’s sculptures, drawings, and films are as much artifacts as they are art. Like the costumes and stage props left behind from some bygone opera, they constantly point the viewer back to that instant of performance when these objects must have been charged with power. They’re less awe-inspiring by themselves, but they do make us wonder what that generative moment was like, and what it would have been to experience it.

Despite the artist’s insistence and the insistence of others, notions of the feminine surrounding the work are of exaggerated importance. What we perceive is more a by-product of Robbins’s own distinctly feminine appearance and presence than any intrinsically female aspect of the imagery. One could argue that, rather than emphasizing her femininity, the personas the artist adopts take her further toward the realm of androgyny.

What would happen if Supernatural Conductor was performed again by a male? If we re-tailor the mummy costume and substitute a Victorian top hat, cane, and coattails for the dress, we might find the larger meaning of the work surprisingly unchanged. And this might be true for much of Robbins’s oeuvre. With so much focus on concepts of self, it’s easy to confuse the coincidence of the artist’s gender with the artist’s choice of themes, such as her role as a spiritual medium.

Where Shana Robbins’s work focuses on the role of the artist as spiritual emissary, Amy Myers’s work is about helping us see the spiritual world for ourselves.

Myers’s massive drawings are imposing. As with Robbins’s performance, these images have to be seen in person to be fully understood. They are often discussed in nonrepresentational terms. But in the context of this exhibition, they function almost as portraits: the abstract representation of a fertile infinity, a universal creative force. This makes Myers’s categorization of her drawings as “feminine” all the more profound and exciting.

If they are female, they are female gods. They are the deities toward which Robbins’s rituals and actions make petition. Their vulviform shapes are the pathways through which stars are born. When I approached Myers about my animistic interpretation of her work, she responded that she knows one of her drawing is finished when it “feels like somebody is there in the room” with her.

Sheila Pree Bright, Untitled No. 10. Photo courtesy Sandler Hudson Gallery.

In an unfinished, unpublished draft for an article dated January 4, after stumbling through several false starts attempting to sum up the previous 12 months, I finally concocted an appropriate phrase to describe 2009. I called it The Year of the Ninja.

Last year we saw a steadily rising number of ephemeral performances and rogue one-night exhibitions—shows that strike unexpectedly before vanishing without a trace. From Lauri Stallings’s production of Rapt at the Woodruff Arts Center, to AXIOM’s Showtime at Edgewood and Boulevard, to John Otte’s weekend curation of Summer Falls at Whitespace, nontraditional projects were becoming so popular that the practice of showing normal exhibitions in normal galleries seemed to be going out of style.

My perspective has changed since January, however. The evidence I found during the Westside Art Walk this weekend at Kiang and Sandler Hudson and Get This! galleries, specifically, supports my suspicion that our galleries aren’t dead, but are as relevant as ever.

Pandra Williams, Radicis, 2010, installation view. Photo courtesy Kiang Gallery.

Rewards for visiting in person

Pandra Williams’s installation at Kiang Gallery is fresh, conceptual, and physically beautiful. Its scale is proportioned to fill the entire room. The piece is titled Radicis and is meant to resemble an impossibly large microorganism. During her talk on Saturday, Williams referred to it as a plant, but explaining it as the neuron cells of a cosmic giant would seem just a plausible. Its synapses fire in syncopated rhythm, like tiny controlled electrical storms.

Of course, we could have surmised that much by attending the opening reception, or by reading Jerry Cullum’s review or his essay on the work. But attending the talk reemphasized the fact that Williams’s sculpture is connected to solar panels installed on the gallery’s roof—this is art powered by the sun and nothing else. The sun!

Williams allowed us to peer inside the sculpture’s exoskeleton to see how its paper “skin” is bonded together, how the lighting and wiring is fixed inside, and how the work is hinged to the wall. Artwork should never be touched by strangers; this was an opportunity only the artist could provide.

Williams’s talk succeeded in demystifying her work in a way that was healthy and didn’t compromise its magic. We see that artists are human beings much like ourselves and, further, are professionals who are doing relevant work in the community.

Mystery special guests

When Sandler Hudson Gallery announced its programming last week, all we knew was that photographer Sheila Pree Bright would lead a panel discussion featuring “special guests.”

Would these individuals be fellow artists who would comment on Bright’s work? Or would they be sociology professors who could explain the cultural underpinnings behind gold teeth?

The suggestion called to mind the various guest speakers assembled by Fahamu Pecou for installments of his 15 Project at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and for his one-night show at Get This! Gallery earlier this year. Those each included guests as far-ranging as poets, hip-hop artists, journalists, critics, and even social workers and community organizers.

But Bright surprised us this Saturday by turning the discussion over to three students, two currently in high school and one precocious young lady from Harlem who recently graduated from Clark Atlanta University. They were kids—yes—but they had sophisticated things to say about the communities where they grew up. The talk was primarily about guns.

Conversations inspired by artwork should never supersede or replace the aesthetic value of the art itself. Still, the discussion added human value to the experience and situated Bright’s photography within a properly activist worldview.

Gyun Hur's performance included nearly seven continuous hours of standing, sitting, and walking while cutting fabric with scissors. Photo courtesy Get This! Gallery.

Gallery space as a garden of ideas

Many performance artists excel through sheer audacity. During Shana Robbins’s talk at the Contemporary (another event on Saturday’s art-stroll agenda), powerful personalities such as Carolee Schneemann and Matthew Barney were cited as pioneers in the field.

Gyun Hur’s performance of Thousand Kisses, In My Living Room at Get This! Gallery, however, is refreshingly low on drama. Instead of confrontation, Hur treats us to a quiet moment that is touching, even a little sweet, pushing the envelope of public-versus-private to the point of turning the envelope inside-out. The gallery environment simulates an evening the artist spent with her parents at their home.

This performance could easily have been done at night, or possibly outdoors. However, hosting it during the day removes the experience from that all-too-familiar party scene. Does artwork always have to be so epic? We don’t expect Hollywood-scale pyrotechnics when we visit the botanical gardens, do we? Hur’s exhibition is calculated for atmospheric reflection, like a garden of ideas.

Lisa Tuttle, Front Porch, Bowling Green, Virginia, c. 1914. Photo courtesy the artist and the Georgia State University Ernest G. Welch Gallery.

24 years ago this month, at Alan Sondheim’s suggestion, Xenia Zed and I published an artist pages issue of Art Papers devoted to “Love and Death in the Old South.” It featured memorable contributions from any number of since-legendary and not-so-legendary Southern artists.

I was one of the not-so-legendary artists; my contribution was a quotation from Margaret Mitchell collaged onto an appropriated photo of martin gourd birdhouses (plus columnist Celestine Sibley’s reflection on ads for martin gourds as a sign of spring). Mitchell wrote in a letter, “Being … one of those short-haired, short-skirted, hard-boiled young women who preachers said would go to hell or be hanged before they were 30, I am naturally a little embarrassed at finding myself the incarnate spirit of the Old South.”

In the mid 1980s, the topic of the postmodern South was a big thing. I wrote several essays on the topic that unfortunately are not available online. (Bibliography upon request.)

Then the very idea of “the postmodern” went away, and now we live in nameless times.

But the question of Southern art has heaved into view again, courtesy of esteemed ex-Nexus curator Teresa Bramlette Reeves and current Kibbee Gallery curator Ben Goldman, in an exhibition titled Southern Art? at Georgia State University’s Ernest G. Welch Gallery that runs through July 29.

I want to approach the topic, however, by way of another artwork, in Goldman’s other current off-site curatorial effort, America at MINT Gallery.

Jim O’Donnell has produced a conceptual send-up of the South’s reactionary side with a series of documentary photos of the relationship between Confederate General John B. Gordon and his pet bunny rabbit, which appears under the general’s arm in a formal photograph, and on the plinth of the statue of the general mounted on horseback on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol.

O’Donnell’s sculpture of the rabbit actually did repose on the statue for two days with an appropriate subsidiary plaque identifying it as General Gordon’s pet. Then it was discovered and removed, but not before appropriate documentary photographs had been taken.

A letter was then written to Governor Perdue, from a historical restorationist society headed by one R. Mutt, complaining about the removal of the rabbit from General Gordon’s statue and demanding its replacement in the name of maintaining the General’s honor.

Stephanie Dowda and John Paul Floyd, Family Ties, 2010. Photo courtesy the artists.

The Duchampian prank at MINT treads on toes belonging to persons not noted for their sense of humor. But it raises the issue of regionally specific conceptual art—which is not the same thing as regional art. The whole tangled heritage of Southern conceptualism can be summed up by the question mark in the exhibition title Southern Art? The work at GSU is both Southern contemporary art and contemporary art about the South—two more things that are not identical.

Bethany Joy Collins declares that her allegories of the The Traceable Amount (of African American blood determining racial identity) reflect her interest in “multiple meanings, dual perception, and limitlessness in the seemingly binary.” This could be taken as the motif of the whole exhibition.

Joey Orr records himself attempting “the impossible task of reinstating my Southern accent … auditory evidence of my historically situated surroundings,” discarded in the years since 1974 as an embarrassment, “a geographic repository of material failure.” The rolling rhetoric is itself exceptionally Southern, whether Orr manages to drop his terminal “g”s again or not.

John Tindel, Relics, 2010, mixed media. Photo courtesy the artist.

Lisa Tuttle’s repurposed family photographs are mutely eloquent revelations of historically situated surroundings, whether showing two African Americans seated solemnly next to her grandmother’s family in Bowling Green, Virginia, circa 1914, or presenting University of Virginia medical students posing bizarrely with a dissected African American corpse in about the same time period.

Stephanie Dowda and John Paul Floyd’s Family Ties seems to be a more innocuous recollection of the South of the 1940s and 1950s via such things as a message on a vintage postcard and cyanotypes reproducing family photos. There may well be a darker agenda than the typewritten motto, “We are propelled forward by the past,” but at first glance that’s the sole message. [Disclosure: Stephanie Dowda is a member of this publication's Board of Directors.]

And that may be the totality of C. Vann Woodward’s “burden of Southern history” for a younger generation. However, the duo of TindelMichi present Prospero’s line from The Tempest, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” as an allegory of Southern Relics. John Tindel’s solo work declares, “They wanted us to whistle Dixie—we just didn’t know the tune.” Michi Meko presents the less baleful quintessence of the rural South in the uses of collards and—yes, indeed—martin gourds.

Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier’s The Awakening: A Tree Remembers has been exhibited previously, like Tuttle’s two works and one or two other pieces in the show. However, it adds crucially to the topic of the return of the repressed—in this case linking clear-cutting today to lynching in an earlier era.

Ben Venom, Venom Dip Collection. Photo courtesy the artist and the Georgia State University Ernest G. Welch Gallery.

Ben Venom’s heavy-handed but brilliantly executed Venom Dip Collection of snuff tins offers the sort of generation-bridging social satire that one would expect from a self-proclaimed son of the dirty South who also earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. “Georgia Snake Handlers” and “Northern Aggressor March to the Sea” are among the brands of Southern venom offered here.

The mix of generations in this show makes for a look at the Southern condition that is richer and more multidimensional than it otherwise would have been. Reeves and Goldman have gotten work from esteemed veterans such as Katherine Taylor and Radcliffe Bailey and from artists whose work is unknown to most audiences in Atlanta. The curators ought to consider expanding their show (which was originally planned in complement to an international conference on Southern literature) and taking it on the road.

Terry Hardy, Remember the Alamo, 2010, mixed-media installation. Photo courtesy Archetype Gallery.

The recent passage of Arizona’s anti-immigration law inspired the current group exhibition at Archetype Gallery. Each artist voices their perspective on the issue in a variety of media.

Two works struck me as I entered the gallery. The first was a clear satire of the UPS slogan: a brown person wearing a brown uniform printed on brown paper (“What can brown do for you?”). The second was a series of five framed photographs by Ivan Riascos installed at a perpendicular angle to the first work. Each photo depicts the same woman wearing different garments stereotypically associated with one culture or another. Her wardrobe sends a humorous jab at white America’s perspective of the other: caricatures of a Latino, Arab, Indian, Native American, and (perhaps?) African American.

M. Ryan Nabulsi, Bertillion Card, 2010, Poloroid photographs and mixed media. Photo courtesy Archetype Gallery.

M. Ryan Nabulsi’s set of mug shots on Polaroid include profiling information above and below and a line identifying the race as “unknown.” The man pictured could have passed as Eastern European, Greek, Arab, Italian, and so on. Even so, we can surmise that he “ain’t from ’round these parts.” To add to the ambiguity, his name is left blank.

A large collage on wood shows multi-colored lines painted over layers of carbon-printed images on paper, styrofoam, and plastic. Names printed on slips of paper appear in spots along this chaotic work. An immigration story is printed beneath each name. The chaos represents a mixture of cultures and crossing paths.

A pair of tennis shoes tucked in a cubby hole hang by their laces on telephone wire; red, white, and blue yarn tangle and drape into a pile on the floor. The scene recalls an urban neighborhood with an estranged shoe dangling from above.

In the main room, several red, white, and blue flags accompany text that slams immigrants. Of course, nobody said the artists in the show had to agree on the issue. Perhaps this artist has a different take? The exhibition becomes a conversation, perhaps even an argument including expletives and a racial slur or two.

Brian Steele, Uncle Sam Cam, 2010. Photo courtesy Archetype Gallery.

Nearby is a work by Brian Steele that appears to be the rear lights of a ’50s Chevy Bel Air. After looking closer, and with a little insight from curator Chris Hutchinson, I realized I was looking at a set of surveillance lights with a camera between them. Beneath the image, Uncle Sam writes a message saying “miss you” to Elian Gonzalez.

An installation depicts a scene at an airport customs station, a map with the logos of fast food restaurants that employ illegals across America, a book-cover remake of the Chicken Soup for the Soul with a foreign twist, and a cock-fighting print with messages in mixed English and Spanish.

The show’s eleven artists settle into Archetype Gallery’s relatively small space with room to spare. The venue is dedicated to encouraging dialogue on issues of race and ethnicity; with a group of artists from such a diverse set of backgrounds, Archetype succeeds in giving voice to the other. And considering the outrage demonstrated by the mainstream during this debate, perhaps these others have some expletives of their own?

Anya Liftig, The Anxiety of Influence, 2010, an intervention during Marina Abromović's performance, The Artist is Present, at MOMA in March. Photo courtesy The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

Perhaps it’s a practical maneuver in an uncertain economy, or perhaps a sea change in how we understand materialism today, but emptiness in galleries has become a theme in 2010. The culminating example, of course, comes from America’s art capital: Tino Sehgal’s show at the Guggenheim this March allowed visitors to experience performative works without the clutter of objects. Atlanta is beginning to follow suit by experimenting with this theme. From May 16 to July 9, the elegant space at The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center has remained empty—or, rather, exhibition free—enabling audiences to inhabit the space in transition.

Tools, plinths, and detritus from the previous exhibit are scattered about. Instead of curating a formal show, the institution has programmed small, tasty nuggets of arts programming and provided these events free to the public on Thursdays. Here we will discuss two of those programs: Alphabet Species/Low Ghosts on June 3 and Performance: Anya Liftig Highlights on June 10.

Atlanta Poets Group and David D'Agostino, Alphabet Species/Low Ghosts, 2010, performance. Photo courtesy Atlanta Poets Group.

On the evening of June 3, beyond the glass door taped over with a “closed” sign, Atlanta Poets Group performed in collaboration with David D’Agostino, a studio artist at The Contemporary, in the back corner of the gallery. An audience of maybe 30 people sat in white chairs spread in an askew pattern. Random scraps of paper were on the floor, and a few paintings hung crookedly on the wall. A group of plain-clothes men, “poets,” moved about. Their words created a layering of live and pre-recorded phrases churning in the chaotic air. Alphabet Species/Low Ghosts was an environment of disorder and plurality.

Atlanta Poets Group invited cell phone users to call into a conference line that was broadcasting the sounds live. Photo courtesy Atlanta Poets Group.

The Atlanta Poets Group performs regularly at Eyedrum’s dark, Dionysian space. But this well-lit, more upscale alternative gave their act a refreshing perspective. Mystical, yet also humorous, they showed off the practice they have honed over the course of 13 years.

For about an hour the poets performed various “polyphons” (many voices at once), using a wide variety of techniques. They read from little scraps of paper, broke bottles, projected improvisational texts from a computer, invited cell phone users to call into a conference line that was broadcasting the sounds live, and howled together in a good-’ole-fashioned explosion of abstract vocals.

Most striking was their level of comfort with each other and also with words. They held the blank moments between focal points with an air of avant-garde confidence, letting everyone experience the space together. Words were at play, ridiculously, and yet achieved clarity in fragments.

Anya Liftig, video still. Photo courtesy The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

On June 10, creative director Stuart Horodner explained that, when The Contemporary learned that performance artist Anya Liftig was headed through town, they capitalized on the opportunity for an impromptu artist talk in the empty gallery.

Liftig earned her bachelor’s degree from Yale and her MFA in Atlanta at Georgia State University, and is now based in Brooklyn. She explained that performance offered her the opportunity to fail. After leaving the high-pressure environment of Yale, she extolled Atlanta and Georgia State as places where there was “a lot of space to destroy and make stuff.” She shared documentation from many earlier works, most of which engage ideas about movement and limitation.

While it is the humble opinion of these writers that “guerrilla performance art” might not be the most accurate moniker for The Anxiety of Influence—her recent public face off with role model and performance forerunner Marina Abramović during The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art—Liftig’s earnest description of chronic success as failure was certainly bared out by her own proclivities toward taking risks.

And this played well within the frame of The Contemporary’s willingness to allow its space to be occupied in a less choreographed manner. Although the talk seemed a bit banished from the galleries proper, especially in comparison with the space-engaging performance by Atlanta Poets Group the previous Thursday, eight weeks without an exhibition did not mean vacation for The Contemporary’s mission.

Over the course of these Thursday programs, the exhibition space became the exhibition—pliable, changeable, and open to the public. Art institutions are by nature at odds with the sense of freedom, democracy, and stylish boundary-pushing artists can bring to a gallery.

When artists go along with the formulaic use of white boxes, are they complicit in perpetuating the status quo (as many have suggested)? By continuing to participate in more traditional exhibitions, are we compromising too much to the demands of market culture instead of upholding the creative primacy of artists?

We applaud The Contemporary for enabling artists as well as the public to inhabit its space differently, with a greater sense of play. After all, a thought-provoking art experience sometimes makes you reconsider the world.

And what about the digital spaces where conversations about art take place? How do they shape the reception of art criticism?

We leave you here at the end of this essay to follow us into the nooks and crannies of BURNAWAY’s comments section below.

Hormuz Minina's performance begins at twilight and concludes at midnight. Photo courtesy Minina.org.

A concluding performance of Hormuz Minina’s Promontory is scheduled this Sunday, June 27, 7:30PM-12Midnight.

The Art on the BeltLine program is an attempt to use art to celebrate the space in which our new public transportation system will flow. It’s a noble sentiment for a noble cause, seeking to engage general audiences in Atlanta for a political buy-in. But for art curmudgeons like me (KT), who adore the refinement of fine art culture, it’s a bit of a misnomer to call this a “curation.”

Community inclusiveness may be a goal for the BeltLine’s public art projects, but perhaps this inclusiveness is misplaced? For the program’s temporary artworks, the BeltLine opened the gates to practically every citizen who calls him/herself an artist. When it comes down to the actual redevelopment design, however, will the BeltLine committees listen to locals who are sensitive to what is already brilliant about our landscape? In this case, as with most urban planning initiatives, it’s easy to overlook what’s already there if you don’t call it home.

In this gargantuan, yet low-budget, public group show, the good and the bad coexist, democratically, and things begin to dumb down. Obviously, community inclusiveness and quantity are the goals. Fair enough. But many artists have missed the chance to make well-considered, and perhaps even political, statements about this oncoming change to our shared environment. Happily, local artist Hormuz Minina is the exception.

Minina’s Promontory, one of the few projects to challenge the BeltLine’s concept of changing landscapes, is site specific and is inspired by the natural community of its location. For Minina, the site is an urban sanctuary; the old tree standing here is important, and the area surrounding it is sacred. He has cultivated a spiritual connection with the place, mentally charted the paths squirrels take across limbs, and watched the trail emerge where his dog walks each day. Over the years at this spot, children played, birds hatched, and Minina spent a lot of time thinking. The artist set out to put everyone on notice: This is hallowed ground.

Minina’s project for the Art on the BeltLine is so serious and so well-produced, it melted away the larger, goofier context that often accompanies popular local art. What a nice surprise! Above the tract of land where the train will head north to City Hall East is an embankment overgrown with kudzu, behind which the artist hid for a duration of about 10 hours, from sunset to sunrise. Inside the chaotic natural geography, Minina’s breathing body, naked and painted gold, lies buried in a crevice of red clay beneath the trees. Hot lighting focused on the subject, and shadows overlapped the projection at times. It all seems very high fashion, like Fellini, but doesn’t detract from the personal and sensitive nature of the performance. The spectacle is spiritually charged. Even after the performance ends, a signature of emotional intensity marks this place.

The entrance to the installation is subtle: a dirt hiking path winding up a hill. At the top, through the greenery, a large projected image confronts the viewer; we see a pastoral scene like a Hudson River School landscape painting on a large vertical billboard. When I (KT) saw it, the sky was lusciously pink against the dark green foliage. It’s easy to assume that this is a projection still. But then if we wait patiently, it moves.

"Minina’s breathing body, naked and painted gold, lies buried in a crevice of red clay beneath the trees." Photo courtesy Minina.org.

And that is the epiphany: A live performance is being recorded and projected. Beneath the viewers’ feet, the art opens up into reality. At times Minina’s hand reaches up or stretches. The gesturing figure seems liminal, perhaps in distress, or perhaps resting, waiting, enduring. Minina becomes the dying bee on our autumn window sill. Or conversely, he becomes the lazy pupa of spring. The abstract suggestion makes the audience’s compassion either rise up or totally turn off. Some visitors sat with him, and some carried on socializing throughout the night.

Was this an allegory of the hillside, instead of the allegory of the cave? A subtle jab at Urban Planning and its academic naiveté? Or was it just a personal rite and commentary on sacred spaces, the earth, and how we’re using it?

Minina’s Promontory elegantly reminds us of the possibilities of inclusiveness, a concept he pulls up from the ground and from the spiritual, from a place not found in a textbook.

Minina is a professional engineer, who makes art occasionally. But when he does, he goes for it. He admits that planning for this performance began four days out, but the idea was born years ago. He believes that time is necessary for it to be significant and, in this case, monumental.

Promontory is reminiscent of Minina’s first performance/installation produced for Joey Orr’s Shedspace in 2003. The artist tied himself to a rotating platform for hours, suffering like a sadhu, while guests drank cocktails next to a projection of a straw trick in a fast food restaurant. Promontory marks a graduation of aesthetics for Minina. What he presents in 2010 looks more classical and steps way outside the gallery, farther than ever before.

Hormuz Minina will conduct the final performance of Promontory this Sunday, June 27th, 7:30PM-12Midnight, followed by an artist talk at 8PM. Minina will open up the performance space and equipment for collaboration and use by other artists. Contact the artist for the date and more information at www.minina.org.

Philippe Starck, Bedside Gun Lamp, 2005, gold-plated Beretta pistol and paper, 16-5/8 x 6-3/8 inches (lampshade diameter 9-1/2 inches), produced by FLOS S.P.A., no. 16 of 20; collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, gift of FLOS USA. Photo by Ramak Fazel; courtesy the High Museum of Art.

Whimsy started creeping into design a few years prior to the 1985 terminus a quo of the survey exhibition European Design Since 1985: Shaping the New Century, which R. Craig Miller curated for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, and Kingston University, London. Contemporary design’s playful side, amply illustrated by the works currently spread throughout three floors of the High Museum of Art, almost inverts the hallowed principles of the Bauhaus. The unserious tone of this trend, often combined with Day-Glo color, disgusts many modernists—a predictably sober reaction to works in which form does everything except follow function. It is only one aspect of contemporary design, but it is a distinguishing and widespread one.

For those of us who get confused about design in the years between the 1988 demise of the proto-whimsical Memphis group and Philippe Starck’s neo-whimsical 2002 merchandise for Target stores, or for those of us whose design knowledge begins and ends with Target and Ikea, this is the exhibition to bet on. It straightens out the categories and gives us the history of almost a quarter-century of design forces and counterforces. Note that the exhibition is restricted to European design; thus you’ll find no Michael Graves toilet brush here, even if Virginia Postrel elevated it to icon status in her 2003 The Substance of Style.

The exhibition divides the post-1985 European design world into eight distinct schools, more or less chronologically. For the sake of brevity, I’ll do no more than list some of these design reactions and counter-reactions here, and cite only a few illustrative examples from the others.

The legacy of the Memphis group and its chief founder Ettore Sottsass included the schools of what this exhibition terms Decorative Design and Expressive Design: The Decorative school poses a significant update of the possibilities of pattern and ornament, and the Expressive school includes some of the exhibition’s chairs-as-sculptural-objects that can be sat in, but only the adventurous would want to try.

A revived modernist backlash to such ornamentation was inevitable, and the Geometric Minimal school gave us chairs with clean lines that serve equally well as seating or as sculpture.

By contrast to the new modernism’s revival of linearity, Biomorphic Design (the design version of what is sometimes called “blobitecture”) revisited the biomorphic movement of a half-century earlier, updated by contemporary materials and the possibilities brought by CAD technology. Think sensuous and playful at the same time. Also think Marc Newson, the legendary designer with origins in Australian surfing. (One or two of his most memorable seating designs are in this show.)

Tejo Remy, Milk Bottle Lamp, 1991, existing glass milk bottle and steel, 10-5/8 x 3-3/4 inches (single bottle), produced by Droog Design, no. 14 of 20, collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Ballard Fund. Photo courtesy Droog Design.

Neo-Pop, on the other hand, was just plain playful. The school blurred distinctions between “high” and “low,” creating mass-produced forms with a great deal of good humor in addition to the occasional one-off. It was the first of the successive Neo’s of the past decade, of which Neo-Decorative revisits the original Decorative movement, often sending the decorative off into realms of luscious fantasy.

Conceptual Design is almost the opposite, suggesting austere practicality in its frequent use of recycled and re-purposed materials to serve a specific function, as in Jurgen Bey’s pair of already existing chairs given a new identity by being united in a single skin of PVC plastic. Yet Bey’s double chair is both beautiful and—let’s face it—whimsical. The movements meld into one another in spite of themselves.

Tejo Remy’s lamp for Droog made from milk bottles seems distinguished from Neo-Dada/Surreal impulses only by the use of humble materials—and by the fact that Droog calls itself a conceptual-design firm.

Luscious fantasy redux seems to be the distinguishing feature (and not even a consistent one) of what the exhibition terms the Neo-Dada/Surreal Design school. These anything-but-anxious objects manage to be the sort of thing we have always wished Surrealist subversions would be but almost never were.

The Wieki Somers High Tea Pot appears to be a functional updating of Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup, since it consists of a bone-china teapot in the shape of an animal skull that can be covered with a fur tea cozy. In spite of this, it’s presented as an example of Conceptual Design. Less ambiguously, Philippe Starck’s luxury-item Bedside Gun Lamp offers an alternate take on Surrealism’s radical social commentary: a gold-plated Beretta pistol turned into a lamp stand.

It’s tempting to describe a huge number of works, but most of them need to be experienced in person, where they can be perused from a number of angles, like sculpture.

To take only one example, Maarten Baas’ Smoke Armchair, a burnt but still stable chair coated with black epoxy, sounds like a grim memento mori when described with those words. It is anything but. It feels like a more sumptuous cousin to Bey’s similarly coated chairs, but it’s shown here as an example of Neo-Dada/Surreal, indicating again the difficulty of identifying family lineages.

Holly Coulis, Mandarins and Paintings, 2010, oil on linen, 11.75 x 15.75 inches. Photo courtesy Solomon Projects.

Solomon Projects is currently exhibiting two new bodies of work by New York artists Holly Coulis and David Humphrey.

I asked Nancy Solomon, the gallery’s curator and owner, about her decision to exhibit the two artists’ work together. She explained that in addition to their formal similarities (a shared style that Solomon playfully referred to as “wacky representational painting”), both bodies of work were completed during and after recent prolonged stays in Italy. I was skeptical of that logic at first, but after spending some time in the gallery, I was pleased to discover that—whether by some latent Italian-ness or some discreetly shared formal style—there was something about the two series that allowed them to compliment each other in subtle and unexpected ways.

As we enter the gallery we see Coulis’s work, a series of small oil paintings of floral arrangements and traditional still lifes in a style that simultaneously brings to mind Cezanne, Matisse, and Alex Katz. They have an immediate beauty but don’t fully come to life until we get up close and really look. What stands out most is the use of color: Tiny hints of vibrant reds and blues peek out from the gaps in the wallpaper pattern in works like Oranges. And the subtle, perfectly measured tonal shifts in the shadows and turned edges of objects in Mandarins and Paintings are worth spending some time with. For Coulis, a good painting isn’t something that just happens, it’s something that’s built.

David Humphrey, Amped, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches. Photo courtesy Solomon Projects.

Humphrey, for his part, combines gestural mark making with a distinctive brand of cartoon-esque figuration to produce strange and colorful depictions of human fantasy, mortality, and desire.

Horace Walpole famously said that life “is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel.” If that categorization holds true, then Humphrey is undoubtedly a thinking man (as his ties to Yale might suggest).

Despite the bizarre, mischievous, and dreamlike nature of Humphrey’s imagery, the works exude a kind of wry coolness. He’s like a psychiatrist with a sense of humor who renders in paint the absurdities and perversions of a vast, inane, and endlessly amusing human subconscious. In keeping with this assumed role, the execution of the paintings is absolutely clinical, flawless. Even in his expressive, gestural flourishes, Humphrey gives the impression of being in total control. Like Coulis, Humphrey’s work demonstrates that good painting does not happen spontaneously. Each step is as carefully calculated as it is executed.

In a town like Atlanta, where so much of the art scene is driven by an exciting, but all too often sloppy, youthful energy, it was refreshing to walk into Solomon Projects and realize that here the artists are in total control.

The two artists’ exhibitions continue at Solomon Projects through July 31.