Whitney and Micah Stansell, Past. Present. Continuous. Image courtesy of Whitespace.

See below for visual arts events beginning Thursday, April 8.

THURSDAY, APRIL 8

Pregnant Men Then and Now: How Transgenderism is Changing the Debate
Emory Visual Arts Building / 4:30-6:30PM

FRIDAY, APRIL 9

Whitney and Micah Stansell / Past. Perfect. Continuous
Whitespace / 7-10PM

Castleberry Hill ArtStroll
Castleberry Arts Distric / 7-10PM

Kenn Kotara / the in between is mine
Sandler Hudson Gallery / 7-9PM

Brett Smith, 15 seconds. Painting. Image courtesy of Sandler Hudson Gallery.

Brett Smith / 15 seconds
Sandler Hudson Gallery / 7-9PM

Collective Conscious: Dodekapus / Launch Party
Raw Space Gallery / 8PM-4AM

Fahamu Pecou / Talk Show: The 15 Project
The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center / 7:30-9PM

SATURDAY, APRIL 10

The Lunchbox Show Cartoon Madness / Group Show
Alcove Gallery / 7-12PM / $5 after 8PM

Edward T. Welburn / Designing America’s Favorite Cars / Lecture
High Museum of Art / 2PM

Kelly McKernan / Fight or Flight
Beep Beep Gallery / 8PM

Book Sale / Fundraiser
Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery / 8AM-3PM

Heidi Aishman / Artist Talk
Hagedorn Foundation Gallery / 12Noon

Films from the Arab World / Dunia: Kiss Me Not on the Eyes
Rich Theatre, Woodruff Arts Center / 8PM / $7

MOCA GA / Benefit GALA
Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia / 6:30-10PM / $125

Kelly McKernan. Untitled, 2010. Watercolor, Gouache, Gold Leaf on Van Dyke Print. Courtesy of artist.

SUNDAY, APRIL 11

Obscura / Dance performance
Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery / 5-6PM

Book Sale / Fundraiser
Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery / 8AM-3PM

TUESDAY, APRIL 13

Johnny Waggener / New Works
Carroll Street Cafe / 8PM

Chung "Fanky" Chak. Doraemon, Japan, 2008.

Chung “Fanky” Chak’s large-scale digital photo collages of crowded metropolises will open tomorrow night from 6PM-9PM at Eyedrum with an artist talk beforehand at 5PM. Each work in The Boxes Project includes hundreds to thousands of window pictures taken from different cities around the world. The resulting collections highlight stereotypes and the personality we associate with each respective city or region. Get a preview of Chak’s work and some insight into his thought process in his interview with Wyatt Williams over at Creative Loafing’s Culture Surfing blog.

Jeff Taylor, Halo Galo, 2008

There’s no need to ever take another picture of a house, a dog, or a sunset. If you open up a magazine or an old newspaper, or if you do an image search online, you will find plenty of what you need. This is a symptom of our age: We hastily cut and paste things together every day in an effort to communicate. This said, it’s an extremely appropriate time for an exhibit about collage.

Mandie Turner-Mitchell’s curation at Eyedrum attempts to make the contemporary connection between more traditional collage work and the information culture of the Internet. She explains, in typical Eyedrum fashion, “Collage is the blogging of the second dimension and blogging is collaging in the virtual dimension, whichever one that is.” Although the philosophy behind this curation is sound as well as provocative, beyond the title exists no actual reference to this idea in the show itself.  At the very least, the posting of an essay is sorely needed. If one overlooks this technicality, however, the actual works on display are classic, refreshing collages made by locals: crude, honest and naïve. Jeff Taylor’s three collages are just strong enough to make me wonder what else he has in his studio. These works present sloppily layered transparencies with repetitious, stenciled images on top of paint and canvas. The largest one, Easy Armed Reach, is quite successful. It seems to have a painted, blue message at its core, but all that remains visible is “tree.” The colors clash in brightness, helping the work achieve dimensionality. Some kind of framing technique that hides the edges might have been helpful. Mostly I hate frames, but in this particular case, the raw edges detract from the work.

Truett Dietz, The Horror Hasn't Ended, 2008

Examples of what I would call “classic collage,” Harold McNaron’s works are like short poetry. My favorites are the simple ones with lots of background space: culture kite and soundboard swatch. McNaron’s use of found frames is a nice touch. Truett Dietz is a bit spicier in his classicism. Creamy found papers hang vertically by clips; glued on top are sparse combinations of black and white newspaper and color vintage clippings. His titles are humorously political: Women In Space, Not If I Can Help It” and American Den Of Serpents. Both artists rely on original clippings without using computers to scan and reprint. The downside of such simplicity is limitation of scale.  I’m glad this Stan Woodard’s very small collages investigate this issue: They have been blown up, but unfortunately the originals are nowhere in sight. In Woodard’s case, Turner-Mitchell could have simply pasted a very long arrow down the hall to his studio, which is in itself a magnificent installation of three-dimensional collaged materials and lights. I’m not sure why this proximity was not exploited. An outlying participant is Hollis Hildebrand-Mills, whose more mature collage work is in the adjacent small gallery. The awesome muzak that plays over her collage video piece bleeds out over the rest of the show on a quiet afternoon stroll through the gallery. It’s too bad her video is not hovering over the main space since it might have added that contemporary element the show needs to complete its thesis.

The exhibit 2D Tweet is on view at Eyedrum through Saturday, December 19, 2009.

Chi Peng at Kiang Gallery

While murmurs from Le Flash continue, another week of ACP rolls forward.

FRIDAY

Cooper Sanchez
Oakland Cemetery / 7-11PM

Doll Show
Eyedrum / 6-9PM

Chi Peng, The Journey to the West
Kiang Gallery / 6-8PM

Brian Rutenberg and Deedra Ludwig
TEW Galleries / 6-9PM

MOCA GA Collects: The Photographic Image
MOCA GA / 6.30 – 8.30PM

Staff Picks
Studioplex / 7-9PM

Stephanie Dowda

SATURDAY

Stephanie Dowda and John Paul Floyd
Kibbee Gallery / 6-9PM

Chris Carder
Beep Beep Gallery / 8-11PM

Robin Bernat and Blake Williams, Wishes Film Screening
Whitespace / 8PM
Also replaying Sunday evening at 8PM

The NPU-V Photovoice Project: Taking It to the Streets
The Salvation Army Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center / 4-7PM

WEDNESDAY

Through the Lens
Jack Art Gallery / 6-8:30PM

For more of this week’s ACP events and openings, visit their Festival Guide.

Friday: Jerry Siegel at Barbara Archer Gallery

Atlanta Celebrates Photography gets up to speed this weekend, starting with what looks like a fantastic exhibit at Barbara Archer Gallery.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11

Jerry Siegel: Images From the Black Belt of the American South
Barbara Archer Gallery / 11AM-6PM (reception October 16)

Contemporary Collage: Paper’s Many Forms
Emily Amy Gallery / 7-10PM

Group show Zen and the Art of the Arts
Atlanta Soto Zen Center / 7-9PM (continues through October 2)

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12

Atlanta Zombie Symposium: Panel Discussion
Georgia Tech’s Clary Theatre / 1-3:45PM / multiple locations & times

Cellph Portraits
Eyedrum Small Gallery / 6:30-8PM

Steven Dixey: The Road to Damascus
Beep Beep Gallery / 8-11:30PM

WEDNESDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER

Through the Lens of Mundo Hispanico: Georgia’s Hispanic Community
Atlanta History Center / 10AM-5:30PM

John Morse shows at Wm Turner Gallery next Thursday.

THURSDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER

Inside: A Site Specific Installation by John Morse
Wm Turner Gallery / 6-9PM

The benefit will include a silent auction of visual art from over 100 local artists, including Eric Mack, Lilian Blades, Nancy Floyd, Lisa Tuttle, Kojo Griffin, and Angus Galloway. A live auction of art services will include interior and graphic design services as well as packages from the High Museum, WonderRoot, Atlanta Botanical Gardens, and others. Eyedrum merchandise also will be for sale.

Local talent and friends of Eyedrum will provide live entertainment, and there will be complimentary hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar. Admission, which is $10 for guests and free for Eyedrum members, includes one complimentary drink ticket.

Sponsors include Stella Trattoria, Cabbagetown Market, Cabbagetown Bar and Grill, Six Feet Under, Twain’s, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Duke’s Vodka, Joe’s Catering, Decatur Atlanta Printing, and others.

To volunteer, contribute, or find out more information about the Eyedrum Art Auction Benefit, email eyedrumauction@gmail.com.

I just want to make it known that I could absolutely beat this guy in a corndog eating contest. I would eat him under the table. No one comes between me and a freshly fried corndog.

As one of the longest seeming weeks in my personal history comes to a close, the weekend brings promise of tube meat wrapped in deep fried dough, summer homes, and guerrilla art. So, everyone, make your gallery stops Friday, grab a corndog and music on Saturday, and finish it off by painting some signs with the boys of WonderRoot over at Eyedrum on Sunday. Sounds like a summer weekend well spent to me.

If this card doesn't make you want to head to the lake, you need to get your priorities in check.

FRIDAY

Jennie C. Jones, Charles Huntley Nelson, Alexi Brown-Schmidt, and Rose Marcus

The Contemporary / 7 – 9 pm

“Minus” Group show

Studioplex / 7 – 9 pm

“Offset”: Works by Eric Mercer and Katie Waugh
Gallery Stokes / 7 – 10 pm

“Summer Guest House” Group show
Marcia Wood Gallery / 7 – 10 pm

Rachel Goldstein MFA Thesis Show
Art House Open Space / 7 – 10 pm

Beltline clean-up from February.

SATURDAY

Corndogorama
East Atlanta Village / 12 – 11 pm (Continues through Sunday.)

SUNDAY

Arts Sign the Beltline
WonderRoot at Eyedrum / 1 pm

THURSDAY

The Affordable Art Show
Alan Avery Art Company / 6 – 9 pm

Danny Paulete, Self Topo (Photo courtesy the artist)

Art changes a person. It has a cultish effect on those who decide to delve into and explore its rejuvenating powers. It’s a personal practice that because of its history and its intrinsic cathartic representative nature allows the interlocutor (artist) to feel as if he/she is transmitting the untransmittable: the intangible, pre-linguistic experience of reality. And what metaphor is most appropriate to communicate this process? … The floor.

Among traditional sculpture and painting mediums, floors are a recent obsession. One relies on the floor as an invisible substrate that supports every activity we participate in: walking, dreaming, etc. Paradoxically, every environment/process except for flying (no longer a metaphor) is girded by the floor. Yet, the ground is the most material symbol possible. Conceptual artists par excellence utilize the floor as a space that doesn’t lie, an encyclopedic space where things are rendered visible, defined as clearly as possible for an audience that takes the message as truth, but a truth that is still sullied by the faults in language. This space of truth is necessary for artists whose goal is to show/perform their life.

Danny Paulete, Unresolved Circumstances

Leo Steinberg calls the prone “flatbed picture plane” a revolution in “seeing”, stating that, “The horizontality of the bed relates to ‘making’ as the vertical of the Renaissance picture plane related to seeing.” For Steinberg, the flatbed picture plane paradoxically represents a space where the artist transcends his earthly yoke and creates a more fully collective cultural place devout of figure, landscape, and detestable affect—in short, a space more fully reflecting the truth. This pivoting of the angle of presentation is as revolutionary a dichotomy as the wave/particle duality or the mind/body problem.

Danny Paulete, Unresolved Circumstances

Although not explicitly so, the sculptural work of Atlanta based artist Danny Paulete rather subtly exemplifies investigations of the ground. For a recent performance at Atlantic Station, Paulete actually takes the floor from the ground and installs it on a scaffold, creating Unresolved Circumstance. After seeing his sculpture and remnants of a performance at Eyedrum in 2007, I became interested in its surface bending antics and it’s implication for art theory.

The Climbers exhibition at Eyedrum consisted of an enormous concrete dangling hand crack that Paulete expertly jammed for the opening reception. Directly behind the interactive Climber’s Dream Route was another sculpture built from red steel bars that traced the circumference of a series of vertically arranged rocks, each with its own hand crack. The sculpture, along with several others in the exhibition, not only anomalously existed outside of nature, but also seemed to be turned inside out. Each climbing route was exposed so the cracks in the rock were minimally insulated by stone, leaving the void of the gallery as a stand-in for the mountain. In fact, the performance of Climber’s Dream Route (at least on video) seems a bit like those metaphorical clichés of the artist splattering life onto a canvas. With a wave of the artistic hand, the opaque surface of the artwork is magically transformed into life. Paulete seems to be climbing the inside of the mountain (because of the uncanny presentation), i.e. life itself.

Danny Paulete, Boat Rock

As soon as the performance is over and Paulete jumps off of his sculpture, we are left again with the opaque mathematical surface of crisscrossing steal and majestically geometric concrete. I guess this link fascinates me. For many conceptual sculptors, the residue from art/life takes the form of geometric abstraction. Think of Tom Friedman’s early bubble performance pieces. The only product created by Friedman’s performance was the perfectly geometric form of his spit-bubble. Whether he is hanging over it, displaying his body as topography, or climbing the vertical version of it on a cliffside, the prone geometry of the ground is implicated in Paulete’s work. Exteriority becomes paramount. Like so many conceptual sculptors, e.g. Chris Burden, Gordon Matta-Clark, Rachel Whitread, and especially Barry Le Va with his overtly geometric rubber coated ground sculptures, Paulete’s work is an exploration of the mute surface of the artwork, and paradoxically how that mute surface functions as a site to live. The sculptures both show and tell. To use Steinberg’s analogy, they make sight.

Artist Nancy Popp climbs a traffic light in Berlin.

If every week’s To Do List has a theme, then this week’s is community. Between site specific performance art, festivals galore, and anniversary parties you should have no trouble relishing in the awesomeness that summer in Atlanta has to offer.

Start your gallery hopping off right this Friday with photography by students at the Center for Pan-Asian Community Services, on view at the new WonderRoot Gallery at Eyedrum. The exhibit wraps up the three month long class held at WonderRoot. The opening reception is from 5-7PM. The exhibit runs through June 15.

Yukari Umekawa, Voice.

Sandler Hudson has a new show opening this Friday as well. Artist Angelbert Metoyer and Dutch sociophotographer Charlie Koolhaas have collaborated to create the exhibit Global Static. The opening reception is from 7-9PM, and the exhibit is on view through July 11. While you are there you can run next door to see the closing reception for Kiang Gallery’s Beijing based-artist, Meng Jin, whose work captures chandeliers in various institutional settings. This reception will also be from 7-9PM.

Whitespace will be hosting the BFA Photography Show for Yukari Umekawa in their small gallery, Whitespec. Umekawa’s exhibition, itodenwa (2 cans + 1 string), will be showing concurrently with Scott Silvey’s Civic Remedies exhibition, which opened last week in the main gallery space. The reception will be from 7-10PM. The exhibit runs through July 11.

The Contemporary is hitting the streets this Saturday with performance artist Nancy Popp. Popp’s work involves climbing up and around various public spaces, which I have to say, sounds pretty fun to watch. Keeping us on our toes, the times and locations will not be announced until sometime today, so make sure to check The Contemporary’s website this afternoon for more details.

The Indie Craft Experience is back again and just as good as ever. Returning to their summer location of Centennial Olympic Park, the crafters will be out and selling in all of their D.I.Y. glory all day Saturday and Sunday. Both days also will include talks on how to turn your plastic grocery bags into everything but the kitchen sink and introductions to weaving. Check out their list of vendors today when you get bored at work so that you can have your shopping list ready to go for the weekend.

WonderRoot's Chris Appleton.

If you want Chris Appleton to woo you with his tiger eyes, this weekend is a good time to do it! The WonderRoot One Year Anniversary Party will start at 4PM and feature everything from an I Love Atlanta art show to WonderRoot TV and BBQ. If we are lucky, there may even be a kissing booth. ($5 after 8PM) Work up some liquid confidence by heading over to the East Atlanta Beer Festival to sample over 170 craft beers during the day so that you can go make eyes with Chris and Witt Saturday evening.

Beep Beep Gallery will be hosting a portfolio review starting at 7PM. Conducting the affair will be Nashville’s Twist Gallery ladies, Beth Gilmore and Caroline Carlisle. Following the portfolio review is the closing reception for their current exhibition, Southern Comfort, which features artwork by Nashville artists Duncan McDaniel, Erin Plew, and John Whitten. As if an evening at Beep Beep wasn’t fun enough already, Thy Mighty Contract also will be playing a free show starting at 9PM.

If you missed Popp’s Saturday climb, you can still catch her for an artist talk at 11AM at The Contemporary.

Beep Beep Gallery's Southern Comfort.