The High Museum of Art has announced Renée Stout as the 2010 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize. Based in Washington, D.C., Stout creates assemblages from a variety of media, including photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, and printmaking. With a focus on self-exploration, empowerment, and healing, her work examines the impact of the African Diaspora and the traditions of her African heritage. Stout uses a variety of visual languages, including African aesthetics and secondhand materials, to piece together narratives that link history to contemporary society. (more)
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Chance encounters: Grassroots spirituality, art, and politics
Andrew Imm collects photos of missing people, and also the thin plastic innards from keyboards that look like Star Trek consoles. Held at Eyedrum last year, Systems of Chance was the artist and mathematics teacher’s first show. In classic “clusterfuck” style, Imm overlaid them with network-like graphics and piles of other cosmic junk. Anne Chance, a volunteer with an organization that helps fight sex trade trafficking in Atlanta, came to that opening merely because of the title. By synchronicity, the work accurately represented her cause. She contacted Imm to do a similar installation in a most adventurous found location. The result was a rather odd outsider event that combined art, politics, and energy. It moved me totally by surprise.
Susanna Starr: Pass the rag
It’s not uncommon for an artist to start with a material and end with an image. Cézanne turned some pigmented oils into apples and oranges; Picasso turned some sheet metal and wire into a guitar. It is less common, however, for an artist to stage the transition from material to image as a dramatic conflict. In Susanna Starr’s solo exhibition, Not So Domestic at Marcia Wood Gallery, the fraught and contradictory relation between material and image is the artist’s central concern.
To Do List
See below for visual arts events beginning Thursday, February 4. There’s still time to order advance tickets for the ART PAPERS Silent Auction this Saturday! Check out Art Relish for a preview article by Gray Chapman.
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Limitless at Dalton Gallery
The first show of 2010 at Agnes Scott College’s Dalton Gallery opened Thursday night. Entitled Limitless, this group show honors the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s invention of the telescope, inviting artists to “‘reveal hidden worlds’ by taking wide-ranging approaches to art making while using an expansive scope to view the universe.” Considering the extraordinary example set by the show’s inventor-of-honor and its promising list of participating artists, I went into the exhibition with high hopes. But I also was mindful that such a broad statement of intent left considerable room for half-baked ideas, trite sentiments, and over-the-top diluting of the purity of spirit I was hoping for. However, my fears were unnecessary. With only a few exceptions, Limitless was earnest, well-balanced, and endlessly interesting.
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Gyun Hur at Get This! Gallery
Gyun Hur’s Repose is the kind of show you wish you could love, want to love, but somehow the chemistry never happens. You walk into the gallery and there it is, beaming up at you from the floor: a big, brightly colored carpet of thousands of tiny pieces of shredded cemetery flowers, arranged in long, alternating bands of color. There’s an immediate sense of tension between the work’s visual power, and seeming permanence, and the realization that a quick blast of air could send the whole thing tumbling and whirling away. In addition to this “carpet,” there is a clear acrylic shelf that runs along the back and side walls of the gallery which is covered with the same striped pattern of finely-chopped, almost minced, fabric flowers.
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