The last two weeks have been a lovely blur with so much to do. But we at least wanted to share the latest wonderful news and let everyone know our watch over this city has only just begun. BURNAWAY is here to stay!

Thanks again to everyone whose efforts propelled us to this milestone. We truly couldn’t have done it without all the donors, mentors, contributors, and local artists who’ve helped shape this publication, its culture, and its future. I love my job, and for that I am profoundly grateful.

And now for the press release with all the official details:

New-media publication BURNAWAY
creates jobs in times of industry uncertainty

Atlanta, Georgia — May 15, 2012 — The Atlanta-based visual arts publication BURNAWAY is proud to announce the hiring of two full-time employees. The online magazine’s cofounders Jeremy Abernathy, Editor-in-Chief, and Susannah Darrow, Executive Director, began transitioning to their new full-time duties beginning May 1, 2012, following their successful winter and spring fundraising campaign for a challenge grant from Possible Futures, an Atlanta-based foundation.

The Possible Futures challenge required BURNAWAY to raise $20,000 during a six-month period that would be matched dollar-for-dollar for a total of $40,000 in operational funds. The publication met the goal a full month early after holding its first annual Art Crush Bash, a Valentine’s Day-themed live auction on Saturday, February 25, 2012.

The fundraiser met with considerable community support not only from donors, but also visual artists who provided in-kind gifts and volunteer service hours. The Art Crush event featured multimedia presentations with interviews and skits by local artists, and auction items ranged from private film screenings to the chance for winners to have their portrait created by a local painter or photographer.

“Artists improve a city’s quality of life, much like having trees lining the streets,” said Jeremy Abernathy, Editor-in-Chief. “They help provide the beauty and strangeness that make life random in stimulating ways. We are thankful to those who’ve helped us reach this milestone and to our Board of Directors and Possible Futures for placing their faith in our mission.”

“We are so thankful and excited to have the support of the community,” said Susannah Darrow, Executive Director. “The grant will enable us to push BURNAWAY to do exciting and innovative programs throughout the next year that will be a huge asset to the arts community and audiences.”

“The Board is extremely proud of the efforts that helped reach our goals early,” said Stephanie Dowda, President of the nonprofit’s Board of Directors. “This great achievement will allow BURNAWAY to grow into new initiatives this year while continuing to provide dynamic dialogue for the arts in our city. Burn on!”

Together with other funds raised over the past two years, including governmental grants and a previous $30,000 award from Possible Futures in 2010, BURNAWAY is carefully investing the challenge grant towards improving the publication’s editorial and public programs. The two cofounders currently are busy revising their annual business plan, which will then become the foundation of a long-term strategic plan.

Fundraising continues, however, to meet several financial goals that include increasing freelance writers’ compensation to higher fair rates, an industry-wide concern after the newspaper crashes of 2009. Ongoing revenue initiatives include advertising, a major annual fundraiser event in September of 2012, a membership program, and new programs such as a Secret Supper Series and tours of private art collections around the city.

BURNAWAY’s creation of full-time positions comes alongside recent announcements of further staffing reductions at Creative Loafing, the local alt-weekly newspaper, as well as leadership change at the Atlanta-based Art Papers magazine. BURNAWAY’s staff regards these publications as esteemed colleagues, and they will use their online presence to help lend stability and continuity as the media industry transitions through the digital revolution.

Full-time employment also coincides with moving into a new office space at the Goat Farm Arts Center, a converted mid-Victorian factory complex located near Atlanta’s Westside Arts District. There, the staff looks forward to being in closer contact with local artists, as well as those traveling for exhibitions in Atlanta from out of state and internationally.

About BURNAWAY
BURNAWAY is an online magazine and 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded by Jeremy Abernathy and Susannah Darrow in 2008, the publication is a proud grassroots movement rallying the creative forces of Atlanta to make it a true destination for the arts.

The publication primarily focuses on visual art, but also includes dance and film. Regular features include critical reviews, a weekly events calendar, video, other multimedia and a radio program broadcast in partnership with AM 1690, a local radio station.

All BURNAWAY contributors are paid with funds raised through advertising, donations and grants. They provide arts dialogue with smarts and soul!

As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions as we move into the next chapter of (y)our publication. And please feel free to drop by and see us at the Goat Farm if you’re in the neighborhood!

Yours truly, gratefully,

Jeremy Abernathy, Editor-in-Chief

Gregor Turk, installation view of Metronesia Series at the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, 2012. Image courtesy MOCA GA.

On my drive to Gregor Turk’s exhibition Terminal Velocity, which reveals the artist’s interpretation of place and place-marking, I got terribly turned around on a road I’ve driven down a hundred times before. I had missed the turn for the Museum of Contemporary Art because the road on the left side of Peachtree is called by one name, and another on the right (with quite a smaller sign, I might add). The infuriating detour seemed almost serendipitous, however, when I arrived at the exhibition only to see Turk’s multiple maps of Atlanta highways laid out on the wall.

The maps identify what most Atlantans will recognize as the anatomical and existential heart of the city: the outline of I-285, subdivided by the ventricles of I-20, I-75, and I-85. The first of these cartographies, Metronesian Tectonics, is made of an impressive array of car plates announcing the ever-ambitious model names of various vehicles. Turk cleverly arranges these tags into categories. One row—I think the vein representing 75 North—reads in succession, “Legend, Mystique, Intrigue, Esteem, Triumph, Acclaim.” The grandeur of these aspirational names, especially coming from an Atlanta native such as Turk, are so clearly devoid of meaning when considering that other than being gathered into Metronesian Tectonics, the only other accumulation of this many model tags would occur during five-o’clock traffic. No one is a legend in that context. The person with the sexy sports car in the next lane loses an awful lot of mystique when you’re stalled next to him long enough to hear he’s listening to a Phil Collins CD. And you sure as hell don’t esteem the asshole in the minivan who just cut you off.

Gregor Turk, installation view of Terminal Velocity at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, 2012. Image courtesy MOCA GA.

Turk levels the field in the second work of the Metronesian series, ridding the map of branding and focusing on the politics of Atlanta as a driving city. For this second installment, Turk has wrapped the mimosa wood that forms the outline of the city with inner-tube ribbons punctuated by air valves at each point that an exit would appear on the actual highway. Metronesian Stick Charts references Micronesian stick charts, described in Turk’s artist statement as “handheld wood and seashell constructions that depict nautical routes by indicating wave swells and water currents rather than standard distance.” Micronesians explored the vast oceans with their crude tools, and Atlantans navigate their own city streets with tools that run on crude oil.

Metronesian Replacements, the third and final work in this series, serves somewhat as a commentary on the first two pieces. Found leaves, cut into exes, are tacked into the wall by their frail stems—in this way they appear to be plunging, like miniature skydivers having just reached their own terminal velocity.

The fragility of the leaves and the absurdity of using them as map-making tools emphasizes the coy message of Tectonics and Stick Chart by illuminating that place is filled with personalized connotations. As MOCA GA’s brief on the exhibition reveals, “Since childhood, Gregor Turk has been endlessly fascinated by maps. However, this appeal is less about the actual geographic information communicated in maps and more about what that information tells us about ourselves as individuals and collectively as a culture.” Like the intricate Micronesian ocean charts which are so highly nuanced that only their makers can effectively use them, Turk’s diagrams subvert the concept of a map as universally symbolic and legible (as they are presumed to be); rather, he presents them as a tool to assess one’s personal sense of place—the glowing “You Are Here” sticker carried around in our consciences.

Gregor Turk, installation view of Fetish series at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, 2012. Image courtesy MOCA GA.

Turk’s more personal attitude toward place is revealed through the Fetish series, which is, according to his artist’s statement, “an attempt to understand the burden of place—to reconcile the conflicted sentiments of revered sites.” These collected pieces of wood, bandaged together with inner tube, appear like a smattering of chromosomes or lopsided crucifixes along the rightmost wall of the room. Like the leaves in Metronesian Replacements, their exes mark the spot. But because the exes are made from bound wood gathered at a memorable site for Turk, each signifies a place of importance within the mark itself, instead of suggesting a treasure buried underneath.

Each ex, wrapped in rubber save for one, varies slightly from its neighbor, implying the various weight of each memory. The more foreboding works have nails struck vigorously through them, sometimes clustered entirely in the center where the wood meets; in others the nails neatly line the crossbars. Perhaps these identify more painful recollections, or ones that Turk feels require recollection the most. Or maybe, at a certain point, memories start folding together like a deck of cards being shuffled and therefore need placeholders to separate one from another in the mind. The nails also exemplify the burden of place as a concept we feel indivisibly attached to because it maintains memory by providing it with a setting. As the car plates with the ambitious titles like Explorer and Legacy elucidate, place is often glorified as the position we would like to occupy in the future. Venturing into unknown territories, using a map stamped with familiar landmarks of the memories associated with a place, reveals how where you have already been facilitates and influences where you will go.

Gregor Turk, installation view of Fetish series at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, 2012. Image courtesy MOCA GA.

Solidifying past occurrences by pairing them with the location in which they were made also contrasts with the concern with forging new memories represented by the rubber tubing repeatedly used in Terminal Velocity. Another universal experience of living in a driving city that Turk alludes to with his semiotics is the dreaded nail-in-tire problem. They symbolize the purposeful, mental obstruction that occurs when you reminisce about a place; connecting that spot to a single incident can limit any alternate meanings the destination could hold. Turk’s tubing, on the other hand, is meant to insulate the idealized sense of possibility that accompanies traveling to a new destination. These two constructs of place are bound to clash for the viewer, if where you’ve been—the nail—prevents you from getting somewhere else on your rubber-wrapped map.

Terminal Velocity presents place as inconsistent despite our best attempts to cement locations and the memories associated with them. When we’re stuck on a highway in Atlanta, as Turk’s maps show, place is the destination we are trying to reach, not where we currently find ourselves. The place we mark in our minds as important means more than the place we occupy. But maybe we have only a certain amount of space in our heads to file away these places, and thus their flexibility is a virtue. Selective mark-making forges cultural as well as personal identity, in such a way that I can read Turk’s map of Atlanta but not his memories, though neither represents a less legitimate location for him.

Gregor Turk is one of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia’s recipients of the Working Artist Project award. His exhibition Terminal Velocity will remain up for viewing through Saturday, July 14, 2012. MOCA GA is open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10AM to 5PM.

Superjail inmates at work and play. Still courtesy Adult Swim.

With its animated series Superjail, the often jaw-droppingly inappropriate Adult Swim appears to have perfected the long-form cannibal joke, a breed of humor that unnerves us because, as primates, we all have cannibalism in our ancient past. Longtime friends know I regularly claim that no day is complete without at least one good cannibal joke. My dark(ly humorous) turn of mind comes from parents who exposed me at an early age to satirical ditties including “The Reluctant Cannibal” by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels and their cinematic adaptations also helped; they form a subgenre let’s call the police procedural of manners (wherein rudeness gets people eaten). Superjail, whose second season is now on DVD, puts cannibalism to unparalleled use as a critical tool for assailing a social construct that manages to be immane yet almost invisible: the United States’ prison-industrial complex.

Illicit experiments and organ-harvesting are routine at Superjail. Still courtesy Adult Swim.

Readers may wonder: How can this stuff be funny? Sensory overload helps. So many characters die so fast during an average Superjail episode that the potential for surprise lingers even after repeat viewings. A cartoon sense of mortality helps, too. Recurring characters expire messily in one episode, only to show up whole in the next. Despite a cartoonishness that extends from the cheapness of its characters’ lives to their crude renderings (Superjail revels in repellent physical detail), the ethical universe of the series is one that must be entered roundabout through scientific inquiry and artistic commentary.

The Warden shares a (bloody) good (not really) idea. Still courtesy Adult Swim.

Marina Warner writes persuasively in her essay “Cannibal Tales” that behaviors such as incest become metaphors in art for cannibalism (and vice versa). She connects the myth of Zeus’s sister-shtupping, offspring-gobbling father to J.M.W. Turner’s painting known as The Slave Ship, the latter an eighteenth-century memorial to everything lost in the intentional drowning of enslaved Africans by the crew of the bad ship Zong. Warner concludes that cannibalism “combines so much lawlessness and irrationality that it communicates magical sovereignty.” Her last two words perfectly label Superjail’s master and founder, the Warden, a fey technomancer whose sense of fashion and design comes from Willy Wonka. Mind you, Roald Dahl’s cryptosadist candy man looks beneficent next to the Warden, whose automated “reformatory” ingests prisoners but releases only transplantable body parts and unspeakable meat products.

A typical day at Superjail. Still courtesy Adult Swim.

Of course, in our corner of the multiverse—the one where you’re reading this sentence—we don’t grind prisoners’ bones to make bread, use their flesh in cookery, or “accidentally” kill them to provide material for black-market surgeries. Instead, we strip them (a practice the Supreme Court has given a universal thumbs-up), number them, disenfranchise them, sardine them into facilities that were overcrowded ages ago, at best turn a blind eye to their sexual abuse, and offer pallid apologies alongside mere money upon discovering that—oops—some of them never committed the crimes that led to their imprisonment ages ago. Oh, and a few of them we execute (unless you’re reading this in Texas, where only recently have authorities learned to count as low as a few). Before you mistake me for what I am not, allow me to identify myself as a hard-hearted liberal who believes that some crimes damn well ought to cost you your liberty. I also believe, however, that the way we treat criminals reflects our true values, not the platitudinal ones we simply mouth; that we let prisons wed themselves to the insatiable engine of profit at great risk to our freedoms; and that we empower the state to take the lives of its citizens at our peril.

Although Superjail ingeniously distills so very much from history and culture, the show’s artful and much-deserved mockery of our vast, privatized warehousing of human beings (yes, criminals are still human beings) stands as Karacas and company’s greatest achievement—one I applaud amid something like awe.

Superjail has been renewed for a third season; seasons one and two are available on DVD.

The powers of WonderRoot and Evan "Snake the Body" Fillon combine to bring "TO THE FAIREST", an interactive performance kickball game, to Atlanta Streets Alive this Sunday, May 20. Image courtesy WonderRoot.

See below for arts events through Sunday, May 20.

TUESDAY, MAY 15

Last Day To See: FICTIONS / Andy Bloxham
Hagedorn Foundation Gallery / Regular Hours: 10AM–5PM

Last Day To See: Every single one of these stories is true / Beth Lilly
Hagedorn Foundation Gallery / Regular Hours: 10AM–5PM

Films for the 99% continues at {Poem 88} this week with Robert Mulligan's "To Kill A Mockingbird" on Wednesday, May 16. Screenings are free and open to the public. Image courtesy {Poem 88}.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 16

Screening: To Kill a Mockingbird / Robert Mulligan
{Poem 88} / 8–10PM

THURSDAY, MAY 17

Opening Reception: Botanical Mirabilis / Margriet Smulders and Bryan Whitney
Hagedorn Foundation Gallery / 6–8:30PM

Lecture: Eighteen Inspirations: The Art of Golf Course Architecture / Rand Jerris
Hill Auditorium at The High / 7PM

Pop-up Gallery and Party: Art Official: Revolt
W Midtown / 9PM–1:30AM

"Between Origin and Present", a new body of prints and installation by Teresa Cole, opens at Whitespace Friday, May 18. Image courtesy Whitespace.

FRIDAY, MAY 18

Last Day To See: Duets / Group Show
Gallery Walk at Terminus / 7AM–7PM

Last Day To See: Heaven And Earth / Group Show
Gallery Walk at Terminus / 7AM–7PM

Opening Reception: Exhibitionists / Group Exhibition
Sycamore Place Gallery / 6–9PM

Opening Reception: Self Time[d] / Heidi Lender
Jennifer Schwartz Gallery / 6–9PM

Opening Reception: Object and Experience / Jessica Caldas
The Arts Exchange / 7–10PM

Opening Reception: Between Origin and Present / Teresa Cole
Whitespace / 7–10PM

Opening Reception: Darwin’s Coral / Bernd Haussmann
Emily Amy Gallery / 7–10PM

Opening Reception: Phil Ralston
Mason Murer Fine Art / 7–10PM

Opening Reception: Fresh Blood / Group Exhibition
Mason Murer Fine Art / 7–10PM

Opening Reception: The Fourth Wall / Group Exhibition
Cherrylion Studios / 7–10PM

Opening Reception: Illustrative / Group Exhibition
Kai Lin Art / 7–10PM

The Pancakes & Booze Art Show
Gallery 1526 / 8PM–2AM

Music: Invent Room Pop 13
Beep Beep Gallery / 9:30PM

Heidi Lender will give a talk about her new exhibition at Jennifer Schwartz Gallery on Saturday, May 19. The talk will happen at 2PM and is part of the Westside Arts District 3rd Saturday Art Walk. Image courtesy Jennifer Schwartz Gallery.

Last Day To See: Connecting The Dots / Terri Dilling
Spruill Gallery / 11AM–5PM

Last Day To See: Structures, Texture & Time / Judy Lampert
Barbara Archer Gallery / 11AM–5PM

Last Day To See: American People, Black Light / Faith Ringgold
Spelman Museum of Fine Art / Regular Hours: Noon–4PM

3rd Saturday Art Walk
Westside Arts District / Noon–5PM

Panel Discussion: Painters in Dialogue
ACAC / 11AM–Noon

Talk: William Boling and Michael David Murphy presented by Fall Line Press
Jennifer Schwartz Gallery / 12:30PM

Artist Talk: Darwin’s Coral / Bernd Haussmann
Emily Amy Gallery / 1PM

Artist Talk: Self Time[d] / Heidi Lender
Jennifer Schwartz Gallery / 2PM

Collaborative Drawing Project for Kids and Parents / William Downs
{Poem 88} / 3PM

First Day To See: Kevin Cole Straight from the Soul / Kevin Cole
MOCA GA / Regular Hours: Noon–5PM

Opening Reception: The Tannhauser Gate / P. Seth Thompson
Ontologic (former Solomon Projects) / 6–9PM

Opening Reception: Digital Displacement / K. Meredith Lear
Ibis Gallery / 6–10PM

The 2012 Hambidge Auction
The Goat Farm / 8–11PM

The Pancakes & Booze Art Show
Gallery 1526 / 8PM–2AM

Atlanta Streets Alive takes over a two-mile stretch of North Highland Ave with art and activities on Sunday, May 20. Image courtesy Atlanta Streets Alive.

SUNDAY, MAY 20

Last Day To See: Embodied Seeing: Modernist Works on Paper
Emory Michael C. Carlos Museum / Regular Hours: 10AM–5PM

Atlanta Streets Alive
North Highland Ave. / 2–6PM

Symposium: Dreaming it Out of the Waste Stream
ATHICA / 4–6PM

Click above for the trailer of The Room, or click here to watch it at YouTube. Or watch it in Atlanta with a live, in-person appearance by Tommy Wiseau at the Plaza Theatre this Friday-Sunday, May 11-13, 2012.

By now a great number of readers might already know about the cult phenomenon of Tommy Wiseau’s quixotic attempt at movie making, 2003’s The Room. It has been made into a video game; model and actor Greg Sistero is writing a book about his experience acting in the film; and it thrives to this day in theaters across the country, often accompanied by its creator, who has played along with its viral success by claiming to have intentionally crafted his film as a “black comedy.” No one believes him, but that doesn’t prevent throngs of eager attendees from forking over a slice of their income to see and re-see The Room in actual for-real theaters.

The experience the film offers is a unique one, as it has garnered a following akin to cultural heavyweights such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Big Lebowski. Unlike those films, however, The Room is in no way a competent work of craftsmanship, and indeed excels at being quite the opposite.

The film’s focus is the relationship between Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) and Lisa (Juliette Danielle). Johnny is set up as a noble, loving character, and Lisa is a fickle femme fatale, who personally creates the plot’s main turbulence with her shallow equivocations.

The whole formulation feels like Wiseau has a chauvanist’s grudge toward women, which is only palatable to the audience because of the characters’ disingenuous delivery. One of the film’s best moments is when Johnny, upon confronting Lisa about her spurious claims of abuse, cries, “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” It is at this point when the farce reveals itself completely, allowing everyone present in the theater to guffaw in unison and release the angst of so many affronts to their movie-watching acumen.

At a glance, the film appears to conform to a broad, recently formed pattern of moving-image consumption that feeds upon the experience of schadenfreude. The public’s neurosis to this end is most evident in reality TV and YouTube, where passive voyeuristic audiences addict themselves to observing how awful other people are. But, significantly, you can’t digest the whole film in this way.

While it’s true that the most apparent feature of The Room is its creator’s cavalier ineptitude, there’s a good deal more to the film’s experience than a revelry of mass hatred at a bad movie. Why, then, would audiences leave their homes and pay money when they can despise so many things from the comfort of their own homes?

There is a sort of depth to The Room: riddled with mysteriously insane little moments that are so odd and alien, they become captivating. The film follows a narrative skeleton that Wiseau must have gleaned with his dilettante’s eye for cinema. It contains all the basic abstract elements of a successful commercial film, such as gratuitous sex scenes, deteriorating relationships, and a climactic ending. However, these dots are connected by a train wreck of dialog and scene-building that persistently confounds the viewer with its failures and strangeness.

Here, all attempts at maintaining the cinematic illusion are grossly self-defeating. The following are just a few examples: The story frequently creates poor excuses for characters to speak to each other, such as the motif of actors talking as they play sad games of catch in confined spaces. Characters’ emotions wax and wane as if they had severe cases of manic-depressive disorder. Simple interchanges such as the buying of flowers become surreal moments: basic pleasantries rendered as if the writer has never had a casual conversation in his life. Moments of high drama occur in a vacuum deprived of emotional foundation. And the exact same sex scene recurs as if the audience were expected to be horny amnesiacs.

Intuitively, Wiseau has included in his film all the tropes viewers expect to see in any popcorn-munching flick, but placed in an environment that exposes them to the hot tropical sun of naked ridicule. While this assuredly results from an amateur with great personal wealth attempting to make a film—by some accounts Wiseau filmed each scene with both digital and 35mm cameras, most likely because he didn’t comprehend the difference between the formats—the film’s endemic absurdity is undeniably alluring.

Absurdity needs flavor to garner any sort of purchase with audiences. The Room has hidden qualities that maintain flow and cling throughout the film’s narrative motion, resulting in a surprisingly coherent experience. Witnessing tried-and-true narrative form laid bare, in such a consistent style, is a resonant way of collapsing the fourth wall in a heap before the audience, forcing it to become aware of itself and what it typically expects from a film. The Room perhaps could be a rubric for examining the veracity of the cinematic cultural commodities all around us.

At the end of the day, though, The Room earned its audience by being absolutely bizarre. Its auteur/protagonist’s heavily accented lines have proven to be joyously quotable, and its theatrical presentation comes with its own variety of rituals, such as when audience members bring plastic spoons to throw at the screen in reference to a framed portrait of a spoon that occupies part of the mise-en-scene in Johnny’s house.

The formation of a vaudevillian experience around this film belies all of the accompanying ridicule, and acts as a roundabout form of respect for Tommy Wiseau and his creation. The implicit respect is warranted. The film is a feature-length gold mine of situational nuggets that contain tangible, if discreet, comedic value.

There must be an intrinsic power in The Room for it to have elicited such a drawn-out reaction from the people. It arouses severe consternation while liberating its audience from the strictures of a formal experience. Though it’s confusing and painful throughout, it’s simultaneously fun to watch, creating a mirth that isn’t sourced from the insecure regions of our collective id that delights in the failures of others.

After all, at a Nashville screening, a young man proposed successfully to his lady friend on the anniversary of their first date—the day they went to see The Room in the same theater. It may be bad at being a film in the classical sense, but it has become a cultural nexus that miraculously keeps getting young people, whose lives are saturated by small screens, to get up and inhabit good ol’ theaters. That’s nothing to scoff at.

Lola helps Natalie and Adrian pick out colors for their coloring books.

Lola Scott: Photographer
Adrian—2 years
Natalie—4 years
“It’s fun when the kids join in, although I have lost a few rolls of film to play time. A few months ago, my daughter told me that when she grows up, she wants to ‘be an artist just like mommy.’”

With Mother’s Day fast approaching, I started thinking about all the moms I know who are involved in the arts in one way or another. From gallery owners to artists, photographers to painters, regardless of the art career, moms are all over the Atlanta art scene. I had a simple question I wanted to answer, what’s it like being an “Art Mom”? The following portraits are a glimpse into the worlds of different creative moms. Talking with most of them, I found that most felt that it was challenging and rewarding at the same time. The challenge was in balancing, an act that most commented was really no different than any other job, only the rewards were far more meaningful and heart-warming.

Rest and relaxation are in order for Carla, who is in her third trimester.

Carla Aaron-Lopez: Photographer/Artist
Adafa Javier—Due July 2012
“I’ve had to slow down a bit for the time being, but I’m really ready to go ahead and have this guy.”

Anne and Miles review a video of him riding down their drive way, while Abby prepares for another run.

Anne Lambert Tracht: Art Consultant
Miles—7
Abby—5
“Because I work from home, being an art mom has been a perfect situation, very family friendly.”

Jimmy, a lover of planes, and Allison search the skies for one, while Suellen tries to coax the word "airplane" out of Jimmy.

Suellen Parker: Sculptor/Artist
and
Allison Shockley: Painter
Jimmy—2
“We’ve probably made less work in the past two years, but it has been an adjustment period. He loves looking at our art and we love watching him grow, so we know eventually things will level out.”

Jiha patiently attends to Oliver who is full of energy in Saltworks Gallery.

Jiha Moon: Painter/Printmaker
Oliver—3
“A few years ago someone told me I wanted it all because I had a baby and still wanted to be an artist. Well, why not?! Life is much bigger than art. I love being a mother.”

Whitney and Ezra look out their window towards the railroad as a train passes by.

Whitney Stansell: Painter
Ezra—2 years
“I’ve probably stepped back a little bit from making work, but being with him has influenced what comes out in my work for the better.”

Lila (left) tries to calm the littlest one, Sabine (middle), by making silly noises causing Jennifer and Jonah(right) to laugh.

Jennifer Schwartz: Gallery Owner
Jonah—7
Lila—6
Sabine—2
“I love that my kids are growing up around art and artists. They pay attention to art, and I hope it informs the way they move through the world.”

For this project, I shot both film and digital. I essentially used the digital camera (Nikon D7000) as a light meter to help judge the exposure value for the film camera (Mamiya C330). I shot at a relatively large aperture (f2.8) for the shots and used the available light. I wanted to make the photos look as natural as possible, trying to capture moms and their children playing, having fun, and just being together. I felt a flash would be too intrusive for thwse situations. Most children already are wary of me (I think it’s the beard), so introducing big flashing lights into the situation seemed like a bad idea.

Dodge & Burn is a series of photo essays documenting local culture with a focus on artful imagery, movement, and light.

Check BURNAWAY’s homepage for new photography every week, and watch our Flickr account for regular updates!

Installation view of William Christenberry's Working From Memory. Image courtesy Jackson Fine Art.

Photography has the capacity to store history. The current exhibition at Jackson Fine Art, featuring Mona Kuhn’s Bordeaux and William Christenberry’s Working From Memory, showcases two photographers who work to store and create history. Kuhn’s focus is on portraits of friends who spend the summer with her at her retreat home in Bordeaux, while Christenberry photographs the changing landscape and features of his home over time. Although their subjects are worlds apart, both in content and style, each photographer creates a personal history by documenting either surroundings or close acquaintances that have impacted their memories. These homages to people and place exploit the power of photography to “capture” and freeze those moments which would normally pass us by or are too fleeting to grasp with the naked eye.

Installation view of Mona Kuhn's Bordeaux. Image courtesy Jackson Fine Art.

Whether digital or chemical (film), photography is imbued with a special power no other medium has; it freezes time, taking individual slices of what is otherwise experienced as a constant stream of light and opening them up to investigation and scrutiny. During the dawn of photography, time played a crucial role in the photographic process, taking hours to make an exposure. Early portrait photographers would construct apparatuses to constrict the movement of the subject, so much that sometimes her or his head would be bolted in place to prevent any motion or blur in the face. As technology progressed, the capacity to freeze motion became a major obsession for some photographers. Eadweard Muybridge studied motion intensely; his most famous study, The Horse in Motion, 1878, was a technical marvel of the time. It clearly depicted a horse at full gallop with its four feet off the ground, an idea that had been discussed and debated but never settled until Muybridge photographed the phenomenon.

This obsession with motion and time has since faded as newer technologies have become capable of many more spectacular feats dealing with motion. Consequently, the novelty has worn off, but the implications continue within contemporary photography, no matter what the subject. Photojournalism exploits this former novelty by freezing an intense moment where a gesture or facial expression participates in telling a larger story that writing alone could not relate; consider Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, 1936, Robert Capa’s photographs of World War II, or Eddie Adams’s Murder of a Vietcong by Saigon Police Chief, 1968. Some photographers have used this idea of time to amazing effects, such as Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters, where he compresses the time and light of one movie into a single photograph. Kuhn and Christenberry both confront time and memory in ways that may seem obscure at first, but which come alive with the curation of the exhibition.

William Christenberry, Green Warehouse, Newbern, Alabama, 1973-2004. Image courtesy the artist and Jackson Fine Art.

Christenberry is featured in the front half of the gallery, while Kuhn’s work is located in Jackson’s much more secluded backroom. This differentiation of space within the gallery helps impact how the viewer ultimately receives the work. As the viewer walks into Jackson Fine Art, they are met with Chrstenberry’s work, which comprises selections from his book Working From Memory. While there are a number of large, beautifully printed images from the book, what I believe stood out more, were the grids of photographs comprising decades of individual shots of the same landscape: 5 Cent Sign, Demopolis, Green Warehouse, and Red Building in Forest. These plainly titled series depict not only the passage of time, but also how a photographer can impact the place they are trying to capture. Placed next to these grids are anecdotes that can be found in the book. The stories explain how Christenberry’s photographs have altered the landscape he has been trying to preserve: the 5 cent sign will never be painted over because there is a famous photograph of it (Christenberry’s own); after his death, the owner of the green warehouse left specific instructions that the building, if repainted, remain that shade of green. Finally in Red Building in the Forest, an unsightly storage shed was placed in front of Christenberry’s subject, which was moved at the behest of locals to preserve the picturesque view Christenberry had codified in their minds.

These stories are insightful, and show at once the power of the photograph to capture and preserve a historical document while at the same time providing evidence that once a photograph of an object has been made, it forever burns an imprint in one’s mind of what that thing should look like. As Susan Sontag remarks in her book On Photography, “All photographs are memnto mori.” In each of these grids of photographs, the progression of time is plain to see: things fade or come to be overgrown; there are clear marks of decay, signaling death’s inevitable encroachment on the object.

Mona Kuhn, Maison #1, from the Bordeaux Series, 2011.Image courtesy the artist and Jackson Fine Art. Image copyright Mona Kuhn.

But in Christenberry’s work, there seems to be an active participation in death and memory. His photographs have created a vision of particular landscapes in the South and now communities—those that have been photographed by Christenberry—actively work to reproduce and preserve the memory that Christenberry’s photographs have captured. In order to ensure that things remain the way they look in the photograph, the community removes features that interfere with Christenberry’s idyllic images, or simply preserve the scene or landscape so that it forever reflects in real life what it does in the photograph. These unintentional consequences of Christenberry’s decades-long photographic project reveals photography’s connection to memory and history. In this case, Christenberry originally sought to preserve the changing landscape of the South and by doing so, created a “nostalgic” image of himself: his story becomes the story as his photographs act on the collective image of the South. Christenberry has remarked that he thinks “oftentimes art can make an outsider look back on something he has never been a part of and make him feel like he has always been a part of it.”

After passing through the Christenberry portion of the exhibition, you come to Mona Kuhn’s Bordeauxseries. This collection is mainly composed of portraits, but a few black and white landscapes have been added in as well. Although largely known for her portraits, the inclusion of the landscapes help add a certain intimate atmosphere to the gallery space. Whereas Christenberry’s project documents the changes within a region of geography (the South), Kuhn sets out to preserve her memory of a special place and time associated with her summer retreat.

Mona Kuhn, Portrait #2, from the Bordeaux Series, 2011. Image courtesy the artist and Jackson Fine Art. Image copyright Mona Kuhn.

Bordeaux is as much about the people as it is about the place. According to Kuhn, “the photographs are similar to bread crumbs that I throw on the path to help me memorize a way back to this place and these emotions.” The installation of the portraits with the landscapes in the smaller space helps the viewer feel included within that place and its corresponding emotions.

The portraits are nudes, but the fact that they are nude seems beside the point. These photographs do not appear to be about the human form, but about a vulnerability that Kuhn’s summer house evokes in the subject. This vulnerability is not just in the form of nudity, but in the expressions, the carefree posing, and the beautiful quality of the light. Additionally, Kuhn’s portraits are all taken in one location, a sparse room with a reddish old cloth curtain for a backdrop with the occasional chair as a prop, nothing else. The limited details force the viewer to focus on the subject: on the eyes, the nose, the hair, to almost see past their nudity. They are by no means “naked.” Kuhn’s subjects show an almost hyper awareness of the camera by appearing to disregard it completely. There is a level of comfort in her subjects that can only be achieved if the subject is a close friend of the photographer.

These are not just portraits that celebrate the carefree and beautiful days of youth à la Ryan McGinley; nor are they about the human form as in Edward Weston’s nude of Tina Modotti. It is about how that place, which Kuhn returns to summer after summer, creates a bond between photographer and subject. For Kuhn, the best way to preserve that memory is to photograph it.

Hung next to Kuhn’s color portraits are her black and white photographs of Bordeaux’s landscape. These images are not as stunning as the former, but when standing amidst both within the smaller space of Jackson Fine Art’s back gallery, the story, the time, and the place all seem to meld together. In that room, the viewer is transported to a summer where storms roll in and drench the landscape, in a house with no power and very few modern conveniences—a place where you could let your apprehensions fade.

Both of these bodies of work use photography to play with memory and history. Christenberry acts to record history with his camera but in turn affects that which he is documenting by creating a narrative for the place itself. Kuhn’s work, on the other hand, attempts to capture a sense of time and place through portraits, hoping to preserve the impact that her friends have had on her. Both are personal projects exposing a little about the photographer, sometimes more so than what is actually photographed. Regardless of how you view the work, Jackson Fine Art should be applauded for pulling off an installation like this. With prior knowledge of these two photographers, I was unsure of a connecting thread or how they would play out in the space together. Upon walking into the gallery, however, it immediately becomes apparent; you have not only walked into a gallery, but into the stories of each photographer.

Mona Kuhn’s Bordeaux and William Christenberry’s Working From Memory will be up at Jackson Fine Art through Friday, June 8, 2012.

George Long, Flipping Translations, 2012, oil on paper, 24 x 40 inches. Image courtesy Marcia Wood Gallery.

George Long’s show Mimic opened on a perfect spring evening, the kind of warm night where twilight lasts for ages and the breeze smells like the ocean. As I entered Marcia Wood Gallery, I was met with paper renditions of woodpiles pasted on the wall below Ramparts, a work on wood panel. The faggots of sticks were as inviting as a campfire of imaginary friends in a clearing, and reminiscent of cabin trips with my family that never happened. If I seem overly wistful or nostalgic for an imaginary past, it’s because that’s what these works encouraged.

Long’s new work features the outlines of children in various states of play or interaction. These uniform depictions of children, all boys, have the soft features and coiffed blonde hair reminiscent of an illustration from the 1950s. The drawings seem to be tapping into that same idealized Americana, where all the major characters are white, and engage in ‘normal,’ idyllic past-times. The scenes are a substitute for the viewer’s memories of childhood, evoking wistful contemplation.

George Long, Threadbare, 2011, oil, plaster, and graphite on panel, 12 1/2 x 38 inches. Image courtesy Marcia Wood Gallery.

Yet there’s something unsettling about these drawings. This is in part due to incongruous images scattered among the children. In Threadbare, children play innocently on a woodpile, but a man in the foreground diverts our attention; he stands facing the viewer, leaning on a cane. He is bald and plump, seemingly middle-aged. His presence is disconcerting—why is he there among the children, yet separate from them? Is he watching them? Is he watching us? In these idyllic settings, anything that seems out of place becomes ominous. Even the faint bowl of fruit in Mimic seems foreboding (or maybe I’ve just watched this spoof on Werner Herzog too many times).

Long’s process also adds an element of discomfort to these artworks. The artist took original drawings and transferred them through stamping, tracing, and repeated copying onto paper and panel. The repetition blurs the original images; each print is less clear than the previous. In works like Stifler, images of young boys are layered, some fainter than others, making it difficult to tell if they are actually different children or if it’s a single boy moving across time, like a long-shutter photograph. Several figures are almost unintelligible; attempts to make sense of the scene are as frustrating as trying to recall a memory. Indeed, the faint layering of the images coupled with the nostalgic renderings makes these drawings like memories—malleable and incomplete, and subject to reordering and filling holes with false patches. Long’s process of transferring blurs and erases elements of the original image, continuing to change and distort it like an old memory, faded and manipulated over time.

George Long, Stifler, 2011, oil, graphite, ink, and plaster on paper, 30 x 22 inches. Image courtesy Marcia Wood Gallery.

When read as memories, a sense of unease permeates the works. The ambiguous space left by the blurred and incomprehensible elements of these scenes is foreboding. These images seem like memories purposefully tampered with, rather than merely forgotten. When confronted with this realization, the viewer must question why these memories have been distorted and partially lost. Are these fragmented scenes violent memories that were suppressed long-ago? If these works are a stand-in for our own childhood memories, was there something terrible that we ourselves tried to forget?

A chill sets in; the idyllic scenes of our supposed pasts have become forcibly forgotten traumatic events, haunting us with hints of violence. We want to know what happened, but fear what we might find. Perhaps it’s best not to know.

George Long’s Mimic will remain up at Marcia Wood Gallery through June 9, 2012. The gallery is open Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays from 11AM to 6PM, and Wednesdays and Fridays from 1 to 6PM.

Beth Lilly, The Story is Trying to Tell the Story, 2010, archival pigment print, 17 x 22 inches. Image courtesy Hagedorn Foundation Gallery.

In Beth Lilly’s photograph The story is trying to tell the story, someone holds a scribbled note up to the camera. As the fractured thought of a past epiphany, the note reveals that—for Lilly—stories are autonomous, and similar to time, they operate beyond our control by continuously evolving. Together the image and the handwritten footnote provide a glimpse into her thought process and the personal archives of letters and journals that she holds dear. At Hagedorn Foundation Gallery, Lilly’s solo exhibition, Every single one of these stories is true, pivots around the centrality and power of language.

Grouped to construct narrative themes, 30 photographs weave together stories from her childhood and family history, dreams, and exploration. Together they recount the baggage, magic, and naiveté of growing up, as well as the indistinct boundary between objective reality and the fictional qualities of the subjective perspective. In this gray area Lilly explores the occult, relishing in her ability to gain the audience’s confidence and exercising her artistic freedom to play with the distinction between trust and truth. Lilly depicts a world with family ghosts and skeletons, where dreams and visions with varying degrees of whimsy and terror have manifested in real life. Within this landscape, the artist shares how the inescapable murkiness can look when stories of the past continue to inform one’s self.

Beth Lilly, Prison Visit, 2011, archival pigment print 17 x 22 inches. Image courtesy Hagedorn Foundation Gallery.

The images stage, reenact, and rehearse memories dredged from Lilly’s imagination, confronting the viewer with the extent of their authenticity. Each photograph challenges the limitation of time, jumbling the historical nature of the story with the contemporary image. Disrupting the conventional narrative, Lilly visualizes the same characters in her stories with different models. Despite the discrepancies, viewers are encouraged to trust that the stories are true, even if the documentation is not real. The inextricable connection between the image and text bounds the artist and audience in a relationship that more closely approximates the intimacy created between narrator and reader. Based on the camera’s placement to capture each scene, a viewer can oscillate between being inside and outside of Lilly’s immersive yet fabricated fish bowl, moving between first- and third-person accounts.

While the work in the show is unafraid to move freely through time and perspective, the organization of the exhibition perhaps adheres too much to logic. By applying the title above the “beginning” of each series, the gallery text attempts too much control over how visitors should move through the space, instead of reveling in the freedom to swim around in the artist’s psyche.

Beth Lilly, Escaped Convicts, 2011, archival pigment print, 17 x 22 inches. Image courtesy Hagedorn Foundation Gallery.

The series Escaped Convicts exemplifies the unique interpretations afforded with hindsight, and its ability to jump through time. In the series, the artist describes her brother’s crime and imprisonment as well as a later encounter with escaped convicts posing as hitchhikers. The orange boots at center of the narrative generate complex yet distinct emotions when reversing or fast-forwarding through her memories. Demonstrating more accurately the way we sift through the past, the same series opens to endless interpretations depending on how a story unfolds. It is here that we find the hand-scribbled note mentioned at the beginning of this article, reminding us that stories are not static but malleable forms.

Throughout the exhibition, Lilly asks to be considered a reliable narrator. With her title’s assertion that “every single one of these stories is true,” the accounts collectively reflect the beauty, mystery, and messiness of life. By mining various components of her past, the exhibition also encourages us as viewers to reflect upon the construction of our own narratives.

gloATL premiers their new public work "the search for the exceptional" on Friday, May 11 at the Historic Old 4th Ward Skatepark. Image courtesy gloATL.

See below for arts events through Monday, May 14.

MONDAY, MAY 7

First Day To See: Kelly O’Brien and Maryam Alainati
GSU Welch School Galleries / Regular Hours: 10AM–6PM

WEDNESDAY, MAY 9

Artist Talk: OFFStage / New Choreographic Voices (NCV)
Whitespace / 6:30–9PM

Lecture: Christian Singer
SCAD Digital Media Center / 8PM

The inaugural Atlanta Fringe Festival kicks off on Thursday, May 10 and runs through Sunday, May 13. Image courtesy Atlanta Fringe Festival.

THURSDAY, MAY 10

Theatre: Atlanta Fringe Festival
Various Locations / Various Times

Reception: Kelly O’Brien and Maryam Alainati
GSU Welch School Galleries / Regular Hours: 5–8PM

FRIDAY, MAY 11

Theatre: Atlanta Fringe Festival
Various Locations / Various Times

Artist Talk: Amiee Suzara / Presented by Faces of Feminism
GSU Troy Moore Library / 6–8PM

Opening Reception: Mary Stanley Selects: ExLucis 2012 / Group Exhibiton
Jennifer Schwartz Gallery / 6–9PM

Book Release: Little Red Riding Hood / Anna Trodglen
Young Blood Gallery / 6–9PM

Oglethorpe University’s Senior Art Show
The Defoor Centre / 7–9PM

Castleberry Hill Art Stroll
Various Locations / 7–10PM

Closing Reception: Michael Peterson
James K. Holder Studio and Gallery / 7–10PM

Opening Reception: GREYSCALE / Group Exhibition
ABV Gallery / 7–11PM

Opening Reception: Brute Fidelity / Anita Arliss
Eyedrum (364 Nelson St SW) / 7–11PM

The Cube’s Official Launch Art Show & Party
The Cube Gallery (662 Memorial Dr SE) / 7PM–Midnight

Performance: The Search for the Exceptional / gloATL and Micah Stansell
Old Fourth Ward Skatepark (830 Willoughby Way) / 8:30PM

"As the City Sleeps" will open at MINT Gallery on Saturday, May 12. It feature the work of five emerging Atlanta artists themed around "night". Image courtesy MINT Gallery.

SATURDAY, MAY 12

Theatre: Atlanta Fringe Festival
Various Locations / Various Times

Lecture: Race and Public Space in Atlanta / Kevin M. Kruse
ACAC / 11AM–Noon

Last Day To See: Spring Salon / Group Exhibition
Emily Amy Gallery / Regular Hours: 11AM–5PM

Last Day To See: Lust / Group Show
Jennifer Schwartz Gallery / Regular Hours: 11AM–5PM

Last Day To See: Underland / Sarah Emerson
Whitespace / Regular Hours: 11AM–5PM

Opening Reception: Substantial in Every Detail / Nate Kamp
Cherrylion Studios (889 Morris St NW) / 7–10PM

Reception and Auction: The Orly Tragedy Through the Eyes of Artists / Group Exhibition
Millennium Gate Georgia History Museum / 7–10PM

Opening Reception: As the City Sleeps / Group Show
MINT Gallery / 7–11PM

Performance: The Search for the Exceptional / gloATL and Micah Stansell
Old Fourth Ward Skatepark (830 Willoughby Way) / 8:30PM

SUNDAY, MAY 13

Theatre: Atlanta Fringe Festival
Various Locations / Various Times

Performance: The Search for the Exceptional / gloATL and Micah Stansell
Old Fourth Ward Skatepark (830 Willoughby Way) / 8:30PM

Cinque Hicks brings intelligence and warmth to a rocky transition for the 35-year-old institution. Photo: Taken by John E. Ramspott during a public talk at the 2011 Decatur Book Festival.

Eventually evolving into the magazine that it is today, Art Papers began in 1976, the year of America’s Bicentennial, as a single-page, photocopied handout, printed by the then newly-formed Atlanta Art Workers Coalition (AAWC). The flyer was filled with classified ads for artists seeking studio space or equipment.

Shortly after these humble beginnings, the AAWC began to expand, gaining pages and content as the months went passed. By the spring of 1980, Art Papers had grown into a full-fledged magazine and split with the AAWC in order to gain editorial independence. By 1981, the magazine had dropped the word Atlanta from its title and became simply Art Papers, which has been published continuously for the past 31 years. Art Papers exists today as a nonprofit, spreading the gospel of contemporary art not only here in the Southeast, but also nationally and abroad. (Click here for Jerry Cullum’s extensive 25-year history of the publication.)

Recently though, there has been a stir in the stoic facade of the magazine as Sylvie Fortin, who served as the organization’s editor-in-chief since 2004 and also as its executive director since 2007, suddenly decided to vacate her positions. The decision came as a surprise to many, including members of Art Papers‘ board of directors, and left the organization without definitive leadership. While the board lauded Fortin for her exceptional management throughout her tenure with the magazine, it became immediately clear that new blood was going to prove vital for the vacated positions and that an exhaustive, nationwide search would be needed to fill those roles.

Luckily, former board member and former Creative Loafing critic Cinque Hicks has stepped up to handle the reins while this unexpected transitional period unfolds. Curious as to the interim editor-in-chief’s thoughts on this capricious period in the magazine’s extensive history, I contacted Hicks, who, despite this overwhelming workload facing him, graciously took the time to give our readers an inside look as to the goings-on at the organization.

Winston Ward (WW): So, you’ve been named the interim editor-in-chief at Art Papers. Does this come as a surprise to you?

Cinque Hicks (CH): I think what matters is that the stars aligned for this shift to happen at this particular time. And certainly, yes, from a public standpoint it did happen fairly quickly: Sylvie’s weighing of new directions and the organization taking the time to reassess what the leadership structure might look like. My role will be to hold things together as the board makes its decisions.

Having said that, I also view part of my role as creating spaces in the organization in which a new editor can come in and try creative new ideas, reach new audiences, and continually refine the organization’s mission.

Standing in the gulf between the old regime and the next, Hicks looks to the future with pragmatism. Photo: Taken at the 2011 Atlanta Art Now black-tie launch party by John E. Ramspott.

WW: You are also creative director for Atlanta Art Now. How do you plan to balance the two positions?

CH: With a lot of help. I’m excited once again to be working with Oronike Odeleye on the Atlanta Art Now project. She did a fantastic job as public liaison for the 2011 production, and right now she’s taking an expanded role going into 2013 to keep things rolling. Fortunately, Atlanta Art Now is between cycles with a little breathing room, and I can give my utmost attention to Art Papers.

WW: What challenges does a potential editor-in-chief have set before them?

CH: The new editor-in-chief will have many of the same challenges that face arts institution in most major US cities. Things like funding and a sustainable structure come immediately to mind. But Art Papers also has this challenge of how to speak to an incredibly diverse array of audiences that includes not only our own diverse local audience, but a national and international audience as well. It can be breathtaking how differently different constituencies see the world, and it’s natural that each of those constituencies wants to see their particular reality reflected back to them through something like Art Papers. So an editor has to make hard choices about when that can be done and when it can’t be done.

But again, that challenge is also an opportunity. How amazing to be able to look at all these different ways of understanding the world through the metaphors of art. It’s exciting to see where they crash into one another, where they lock horns. I’m looking forward to that challenge, even if I only get to dip my toe in for a short while.

Hicks presents a recognition to former Art Papers staffer Jerry Cullum honoring his essay in Noplaceness at the 2011 Atlanta Art Now launch party. Photo by John E. Ramspott.

WW: What do you have to say to naysayers that see Sylvie’s departure as a sign of instability in the art community?

CH: I say, “Stability is overrated.” Sylvie’s going on to fabulous new adventures and so is Art Papers. There’s no great failure there. There’s been a lot of turnover recently in Atlanta: [at the] Fulton County Arts Council, MAACC, NBAF, Atlanta PlanIt, and other institutions I could name. Those are the institutions with the larger footprints. Ironically, many smaller institutions and the maturing underground have been remarkably stable. But things have to keep changing, or they get stale. Each of these transitions is an opportunity for something new to take root and grow. It won’t happen in every case, but in some cases it will.

WW: Beyond the job description, what is Art Papers looking for in an editor-in-chief?

CH: I really think it’s all right there in the job description. It’s all out on the table. To the credit of Sylvie and the staff at Art Papers over the last several years, the magazine is recognized nationally and internationally in a way that it hadn’t been before. The organization is looking for someone who can take that platform and find new ways to advance the vision of being a transmission belt for art ideas flowing into and out of this region. The editor is important as a connector between this region and the rest of the world.

Jordan Poole beams optimism about his organization's growth. All photos by Kathryn Burnes.

I arrived in Summerville after a two-hour drive northwest of Atlanta. As you continue deeper and deeper into the countryside, the rolling green expanses and picturesque scenery are breathtaking. My destination was Paradise Garden in Summerville, Georgia, the iconic folk art mecca of the South, built tirelessly by the late Reverend Howard Finster. My best friend and I have come to visit Jordan Poole, recently named executive director of the Paradise Gardens Foundation, who also acted as field services manager when the garden was added to the Georgia Trust’s “Places in Peril” 2010 listing of the most endangered properties in the state. As of March 27 this year, Paradise Garden is also a site officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places, thanks to all of Poole’s hard work and dedication to the project.

Poole gave me a heartfelt and informed tour of the gardens that only a native to Chattooga County could. “The stars are aligning,” he said repeatedly throughout the day explaining that a streak of good luck has followed the nonprofit since January of 2012.  Since then, Paradise Garden, which was once known as the Plant Farm Museum House, has incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, received a nomination to be on the National Register of Historic Places, and opened a new art space downtown called Vision Gallery.

Howard Finster did not begin painting folk art until he was 60 years old, but in the short time until his death at the age of 87, he became a legend among outsider artists and the art world in general, even achieving mainstream fame outside of the arts. His prolific oeuvre total more than 48,000 works, most numbered and labeled with the exact location and time of completion.  He has been featured in the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Esquire Magazine, People Magazine, and recently the Chicago Cultural Center held a large retrospective of his work in the summer of 2010. Other prestigious collections such as the State of Georgia Folk Art Collection, Southern Visionary Folk Art Project, Georgia Masterpiece collection, Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institute, National Gallery, the Venice Biennale of 1984, boast Finster originals.

However, folk art is not the only legacy Howard Finster has left behind.  He began his life’s masterpiece, what would come to be known as Paradise Garden, in 1961, 15 years before Finster said he received a vision from God telling him to “paint sacred art.” The large, outdoor installation occupies nearly four acres of former swampland by his home in what is technically Penneville, Georgia, in a small neighborhood surrounded by dilapidated mill homes. The sculptures and buildings on the grounds are constructed entirely of found objects and made possible by 30 years of collecting, planting, painting, building, and dredging trenches. Iconic pieces in the garden include the Folk Art Chapel, Bicycle Tower, Mirror House, Hubcap Tower, and the Bible House and are comparable to nothing I’ve ever experienced. The grounds are breathtaking and filled with all of the energy that was left behind after Finster’s passing in 2001.

The mirror house and gardens.

Enthusiasm for authentically preserving the Finster legacy exudes from Poole, as does passion and commitment to the large-scale project of bringing Paradise Garden back to its original grandeur. After high school, Poole attended the Savannah College of Art and Design, graduating with a master’s degree in historic preservation. He went on to work larger projects including the restoration of Mount Vernon in Washington.

Dredging Finster’s original trenches are a very important part of maintenance at Paradise Gardens, which was once a stretch of swampland.

He never thought his career would take him back home, but sometimes life takes us in a different direction and fortunately so, because Poole is the perfect man for the job.  As the main caretaker of the gardens, Poole hears dozens of stories each day and claims word of mouth has always been his best source of information. Those who knew Howard Finster, either as a bicycle repairman or the eccentric banjo player who once owned a grocery store, each have their own personal anecdote about the Reverend and are more than willing to share when prompted. However, these are the people who grew up with Finster, members of his generation or acquaintances of the family, a group of people who are becoming fewer and fewer as the years go by. Each story represents the people of Chattooga County, past and present, and connects them to the unique culture of the area.  The foundation is currently in partnership with Kennesaw State University to record and preserve each memory with the goal of eventually returning all the oral histories to an on-site research facility to be housed in the Folk Art Chapel.

The Folk Art Chapel.

Community outreach and education programs are also a part of the new vision for the Paradise Garden Foundation, which is also launching annual membership program with discounted rates for students and families and a young collectors club that encompass artist classes at Vision Gallery, lectures on-site in the gardens, auction market guidance, and continued education series in preservation. The foundation is discussing plans for an artist residency program featuring gallery and studio spaces right in the garden.  Poole understands that the biggest obstacle at the gardens is selling it to the locals.  He sees heritage tourism as an important part of revitalizing and sharing the Finster legacy in the community.

Finster’s Hubcap Tower.

The recent purchase of Paradise Gardens by Chattooga County was a major success and is helping to literally and symbolically return the gardens to the people of the community.  The previous director of the foundation, Tommy Littleton, sourced much of the labor, materials, and even board members needed from as far as Atlanta and Chicago.  Poole has a different plan and intends for all of the hired work to be sourced locally as much as possible. He believes in a grassroots campaign that incorporates the enthusiasm and experience of the people in town to maintain the site’s authenticity.  Unlike Littleton, Poole’s vision for the garden is tied to the economic development of the area, and with the opening of Vision Gallery only a short drive away, he also hopes to create a sustainable arts market to support the next generation of artists as well.

We made the ten-minute drive from the garden to Vision Gallery, which opened its doors on March 10 of this year. Charged with the mission of promoting the artists of Chattooga County, the gallery has identified over 50 living artists in the county, the majority of whom are self-taught.

Fran Meyers, artist and director of Vision Gallery, stands in front of her work.

Fran Meyers, director of the gallery, is also on the board at the Paradise Garden Foundation and the Mentone Arts Council of Alabama. Vision Gallery is a product of her investment in the community and network of friends and artists, and part of a larger mission of creative community placemaking in Chattooga County. The research of Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa (click here for PDF version of their study) has shown that creative placemaking creates jobs, attracts visitors and businesses, keeps money in the community, and increases property values, especially in small towns like Summerville that have been affected the worst by manufacturing flight. Meyers hopes Vision Gallery will not only animate the existing infrastructure, but also inspire the next generation and give young people the courage to show and sell their work.

Before leaving I asked Poole, “How can people help?” and was surprised by the answer that followed. I expected to have a conversation about funding, donor campaigns, and grant support, but instead he asserts that volunteers for work days and visitors to the gardens and gallery are the most important priority in the growth of Paradise Gardens. There is more work to be done in preventative maintenance simply dredging trenches, sorting through Finster’s never-ending collections of recycled materials, trimming rose bushes and cutting back kudzu, but he adamantly believes that if people will simply come and get their hands dirty, they will form a direct connection with the gardens, spread the word, and bring back friends.

Paradise Garden will reopen to the public on May 5, the first day of the 21st annual Finster Fest, a weekend of folk art and music to be hosted in Dowdy Park in downtown Summerville. Highlights include bus tours of the garden accompanied by live music, performances by Patterson Hood of The Drive By Truckers, Roger Allen Wade, Nikki Lane, and artwork for sale from vendors near and far.

Read more about creative placemaking:

http://www.nea.gov/pub/CreativePlacemaking-Paper.pdf

http://policy.rutgers.edu/abc/knowledge/creative_placemaking_cced_definition.pdf