Jenene Nagy, P6, 2013, graphite on paper, 24×40 inches, courtesy the artist and PDX Gallery

The 1996 Olympics was a tricky time for Atlanta. The city was forced to rapidly figure out how to accommodate a tremendous influx of people, and facilitate a wide range of new activities. The planning process required a complete reconsideration of how the city functioned: New buildings were erected while others were torn down, issues of traffic flow and parking needed to be addressed. Suddenly, the overall functionality of our urban space was on the table, as was Atlanta’s branding; the city not only needed to work, it needed to reflect the image of the cosmopolitan place we wanted the world to see as distinctly us.

Former Atlanta resident Jenene Nagy recalls and reopens these issues in her solo exhibition Phenomena, currently on view at Get This! Gallery [April 26-June 8, 2013]. The works utilize Atlanta city maps, both before and after the 1996 Olympics, as the framework for her graphite abstractions.

Nagy’s work draws out and celebrates the potential of both her chosen medium (graphite) and her awareness of audience. She maximizes the capabilities of both—the former’s simple, reflective, and responsive qualities allow for perfect case studies into an amorphous perception of space, and the audience’s ability to introduce variables for testing reinforce her medium. Where a viewer stands, the direction, speed, and frequency of their movements, how they focus their eyes—every component of the spectator’s presence becomes their method of engagement, activating the pieces in unique, dynamic ways.

In Phenomena, the graphite doesn’t merely serve as a tool for rendering the subject, but rather—by its inherent properties and the specific method of how Nagy lays pencil to paper—it becomes unto itself the subject for examining matters of space, light, and movement. Nagy isn’t drawing pictures of spaces; she’s using drawings to create them.

Jenene Nagy, P1, 2013, graphite on paper, 24×40 inches, courtesy the artist and PDX Gallery

This isn’t Nagy’s first time assigning double duty to her media as both material and content. In the past, her work has used drywall and 2X4s for their perfunctory, real world connotations. Phenomena continues Nagy’s tradition of creating gracefully balanced art that’s conceptually subtle without being obtuse; nothing is random. Every choice holds meaning, but the execution is successful enough to not be desperately obvious. Nagy’s work doesn’t immediately announce what it’s trying to communicate, but for any diligent viewer, it unmistakably gets you there. To jump right to the point would be to tragically skip over the lovely slow burn of experiencing these pieces and having their complexities unfurl to us organically.

Flat, geometric spans of haunting and luminescent gray give way, upon closer inspection, to packed hash marks—tightly orderly and collectively comprising the larger shapes. The drawings are visible relics of the process of their creation. You can spend almost as long tracing every moment of Nagy’s time with them as she spent in their creation.

As a whole, the show serves as a testament to an intense period of interaction and discovery between artist and medium. The tedium and energy told in that story carries over into the gallery experience. The almost surprising realization that such a blocky overall effect was wrought through such painstakingly detailed work introduces a fun new layer of urgency to viewing the pieces.

The result presents a challenge to the audience: How careful can you be in your interaction with this show? How slowly can you move your body through the space? How effectively can you let your eyes become the “on” switch that activates work that otherwise sits dormant in the absence of moving eyes? Patience and persistence in observation are richly rewarded. The coupling of the frenetically energy infused into the pieces and the slowness of engagement required to take them for all they’re worth makes for a seductively tense viewing experience.

Like studying the behavior and composition of atoms in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the universe, the environment Nagy creates with Phenomena invites viewers to experiment with how space changes and operates from different perspectives, while the understated presence of the maps carries the conversation from the micro to the macro. And it’s appropriate to see this visual discussion happen in Atlanta, which is very much still evolving and finding its footing for conscientious use of space. This show feels like a much-needed beckoning to basics; a reinforcement of spatial fundamentals gifted to a growing, changing city.

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Radio Version: Click the player above to listen to today’s broadcast on AM1690, or download the MP3.

Extended Version: Click the player above to listen to the extended conversation, or download the MP3.

Episode 78: This week Claire Maxwell speaks with Lloyd Benjamin, owner and operator of Get This! Gallery in West-Midtown. Lloyd talks about the history of the gallery, his own background in art, and how he sees the gallery developing in the future. He also discusses upcoming shows at Get This! such as Jenene Nagy‘s Phenomena starting April 26 as well as a solo exhibition by Drew Conrad beginning June 22.

Special thanks to AM1690, The Voice of the Arts, our partners in producing ARTSpeak with BURNAWAY. The radio program broadcasts over the airwaves every Tuesday in two rotations, 8-8:30AM and 6-6:30PM.

This program is supported in part by Georgia Council for the Arts through the appropriations of the Georgia General Assembly. Georgia Council for the Arts also receives support from its partner agency, the National Endowment for the Arts.

Installation view, Andy Moon Wilson / 10 x 10, Get This! Gallery, March 2-April 20, 2013, courtesy of Get This! Gallery.

Andy Moon Wilson’s drawings are smaller and friendlier than the work of his cited influences—Simon Gouverneur and Anni Albers’s work possesses a stolid here-ness, confronting the viewer with an inscrutable but persistent gaze as if to say, “ I am a gate; you are on both sides of this elaborate gate.” As well-worked terrain, the genre of geometrical abstraction still seems to stare back, inviting and rejecting the viewer’s stare, setting up a hypothetical situation where entrance and differentiation is possible.

Wilson’s most recent work doesn’t really gaze back—instead, colors and images hover as mirage-like webs. Maybe this lack of reciprocation results from an educated viewer’s over-exposure to contemporary artistic mediums and references, or maybe the effect is based on the implicit relationship that contemporary users have with the Internet, a medium that requires less bodily interaction and favors anonymous trolling. Entitled 10 X 10, Wilson’s third solo exhibition at Get This! Gallery, the show consists of 22 mixed media works on paper that adhere to a small non-representational format, despite Moon’s interest in highly-populated, nested doodles in his peripheral bodies of work [March 2-April 20, 2013]. 

Laserwarrior, Wilson’s prior 2010 showing at Get This! included 550 small mixed media works whose images and text were said to act as “phrase triggers” in which imagery represents concepts allowing the viewer to associate—or “hypertext link”—to ideas at random. 10 X 10 claims a more restrained impetus. But in rhetorically jettisoning pretensions for this current show, the work misplaces its strong points in artistic precursors that deal more with physical objecthood rather than flat illusion. 



One of the most compelling drawings (all are Untitled, 2010-2013) in the show is striated, segmented, and saturated into highly keyed and elongated interlocking units. Patterns of analogous hues emerge and sink back into a frenetic environment, inviting the viewer to contemplate a virtual space.

Andy Moon Wilson, Untitled (2), mixed media on paper,
10 x 10 inches, 2010-2013, courtesy the artist and Get This! Gallery, Atlanta.

Another drawing uses interlaced units in a central and symmetrical composition. A submerged system seems to be at work, bringing to mind the precisionism of Charles Demuth. Among the carefully drawn and colored tableaus, a face momentarily forms from clashing networks and lines of sight forming a cat’s cradle of intersecting visibilities. Primary hues temper the maelstrom and lend an explicit reference to process. Although the work is obviously handmade, the most potent color harmonies of the collection minimize any self-reference to the artist.

Andy Moon Wilson, Untitled (4), mixed media on paper,
10 x 10 inches, 2010-2013, courtesy the artist and Get This! Gallery, Atlanta.

Some drawings in the exhibition have a more improvisational feel. One such drawing includes compositional linear elements that intersect in a hatched formation. The negative areas between elements are filled with flashing primaries and recessed blacks. Black areas provide spatial depth and anchor the harmony. 



Andy Moon Wilson, Untitled (6), mixed media on paper,
10 x 10 inches, 2010-2013, courtesy the artist and Get This! Gallery, Atlanta.

Wilson’s background as a rug designer is evident in the exhibition, as the majority of the drawings alternate between three rough categories: interlacing skeins, pixilated patchworks, and tiled works. The tiled works are subdivided into 100 doubled-paned windows, each containing a composition that either relates to the larger composition or doesn’t. The gridded works that don’t relate have an unfledged spacial quality; the panes have a deadening effect and the physical limitation of the pen creates a disjoint where the line quality breaks from the overall character of the exhibition. One gridded work with tiles that relate to the entire composition, features a centrally placed ‘X’ with strategically pigmented parts. Black functions as shade and alternatively light colors act as highlights. Misplaced tiles impute another dimension of movement. Arched, zigzagged, and crisscrossing elements have both a fixed and dynamic quality. 

Like elements attached to the planar surface of a pinball board, the abstract architecture pivots and fluctuates within the confines of the edges of the work.

Andy Moon Wilson, Untitled (7), mixed media on paper,
10 x 10 inches, 2010-2013, courtesy the artist and Get This! Gallery, Atlanta.

Despite their shortcomings, all the works in the exhibition depict a just-shallow-enough virtual space, with layers both stacked within each work and between the discrete works themselves. The area outside of the decaled edges doesn’t seem to matter. They are to be interfaced and shuffled. No entrance is needed.

Photo by Karley Sullivan.

Atlanta Art Crush is an interview series bringing to light individuals who are making interesting contributions to our city. Look out for more photo portraits and profiles with our latest heartthrobs coming soon.

William Downs began his long series of relocations by moving from Greenville, South Carolina, to attend the Atlanta College of Art, where he developed his artistic skill and impressed his professors. His easy demeanor and ambition have helped him build the relationships that continue to prove essential to his artistic path—he happened into his first teaching job while still a senior when his professor was unexpectedly unable to finish the year. William filled the position while finishing his thesis, and in the 17 years since, he has taught at schools in Louisiana, Maryland, and New York while simultaneously pursuing his art.

Teaching recently brought him back to Atlanta as a drawing professor at Georgia State University. The seasoned traveler has reintegrated into his former home with ease. On the days he’s not on campus, William works in his studio, building upon his preferred techniques of highlighting simple lines and dreamy figures in pencil, inkwash, and watercolor.

He was soon tapped by Get This! Gallery to curate a show: In Unison, a collection of work from a geographically diverse group of artists, opened January 5 to a packed house. The show is as eclectic as William’s list of homes has been: musicians, photographers, painters, installation artists, and more. As we spoke at Octane Coffee in the Westside Arts District, he described the show as an “infinity mirror” of sorts. By bringing these artists together, they reflect the places he’s become immersed in and the impact their work has had on his life. As his first artistic home, Atlanta is a fitting place to hold a retrospective of everywhere he’s been during his sojourn.

Marc André Robinson, Hi Mom, 2010, digital C-print mounted on Sintra, 18 x 24 inches. Courtesy Get This! Gallery.

We met up on an unseasonably warm January day, sitting on the patio as we sipped our coffees. I was curious about how he decided to try out so many new cities, and how that affected his work.

BURNAWAY: Is there a philosophical reason you’ve moved around so much? Was it about chasing opportunities or wanting to start over and refresh—see what happened?

William Downs: I think I wanted to see a lot of places and live in a lot of places. It’s this personal journey that I have. I could be satisfied with any of these places, but I think it’s really exciting to uproot and plant roots again … to experience and explore. I just want to keep moving to see the world. Opportunities happen in those places, which is great. I’m excited that I can move somewhere and things could happen through the skills I have in my back pocket. I’m lucky to have manual labor skills to help make money until other things play out.

BA: And what are those?

WD: Construction, drywall, house painting, art installation. I know how to rig things. I can move anything. I can build crates—but I don’t like to build crates so much. Anything dealing with museum work … installations are my specialty.

BA: How did you learn those skills?

WD: Freelancing at an early age. When I left Atlanta, I had freelanced for a few people. Then when I moved to Baltimore, I freelanced for the Contemporary Museum there for three years while I was a bicycle messenger. From there, when I moved to New York I started working for some really big galleries and had my side projects going on at the same time. That’s how art handling became my main financial tool.

BA: Do you think it influences your art? To be able to do those things?

WD: It does. I’m really obsessed with finding new ways of installing something, in terms of gadgets or tools or painting materials. That influences my work in that it can hang anywhere. I always install my installations, when I do installations. The stamina I have when it comes to doing that …I can do it myself.

Photos by Karley Sullivan

BA: On your website I saw drawings. You also do installations?

WD: Well, drawing installations is how I see it. I pin, like, 500 drawings to the wall and create patterns or quilts of drawings. That’s primarily what I’m doing. I used to be a painter, and now I’m going back to painting. I think that’s something that moving around does to you … I don’t ever want to keep setting up a painting studio because it’s such a process.  But now I have a studio that I can do that in.

BA: I wanted to ask you how being an instructor in drawing has affected the way you see your own drawing and painting.

WD: Teaching foundation drawing has influenced me to craft my tools in the way of what I’m teaching my students. Meaning charcoal, conte crayon, inkwash, sometimes watercolor, sometimes acrylics. I try to use what I teach in my studio so that when my students do see my work they can say, “Oh, I believe in this now. I understand what charcoal means, and it’s not just painful. It’s not just making you dirty every day.”

BA: What are you doing in the near future?

WD: Working on some paintings. I have some shows in the works that I’m going to be a part of. Continuing with drawing. And I’m doing a mural at Octopus in East Atlanta Village.

BA: You’ve said your drawings come from observations of human behavior, and also from dreams. How do those interact in your work? How do you think about them as you’re working?

WD: I think about them in terms of psychoanalyzing the dreams. In my days of walking around or riding my bike around, or meeting people or socializing, my brain is recording the activity that’s happening. So with that it becomes part of how my figures take on different kinds of physical activities in my drawings. That experience versus the dreams … I feel like my dreams are a kind of cinema. I try to remember them so that they can become drawings.

Brian Deran, Illi, 2012, oil on panel, 12 x 12 inches. Courtesy Get This! Gallery.

BA: Do you buy into any dream interpretation? Freudian or Jungian? Or do you take it as a personal, you know, “This is what my brain did last night?”

WD: Kind of both. I do question some dreams, and then when I make drawings about them it’s like, “Ah, what does this mean? What’s going on?” Which is great because it becomes this universal image for whoever is standing in front of the drawing.

BA: It becomes like a dream for them.

WD: Yes, exactly. Or an experience. When I was in undergrad I studied psychology at a different school. So I took classes in psychology. That helped inform me in the way of analyzing the dreams, choosing which psychologists would be my hero or which camp I would be a part of. Knowing all those guys … it’s really rusty now because it’s been so long … but I still keep a little bit of those guys in my brain so when I’m making things I kind of wrap the narratives around those so that viewers can have this experience.

BA: If nothing else, thinking about those guys gives it a common language to showing your dreams to other people. Even if you don’t necessarily buy it, you’ve heard Freud talk about it one time, and now I see it in this drawing. Dreams are such an abstract thing that, if you don’t have some unification for how to describe them, it’s kind of pointless. I think it’s important to have some way … to have a sheet of paper we can point to ….

WD: … to articulate. Exactly.

BA: I’d like to talk about In Unison. I was really interested in that web you showed me of the artists in the show and how they connect back to you. It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut—he did the same thing when he was planning Slaughterhouse Five. He started with one thing and kind of branched off into different timelines …. [At this point, Downs opens his journal to another mock-up of the web] Oh, wow! How many times did you draw this?

WD: A lot.

BA: Can you walk me through it?

WD: This is how my brain needed to think about each person and how each person is a slice of me. I chose them because their work influences a larger art world, but at the same time their work influences me.

BA: So you’ve got here: “bands, music business, nightlife, living together, school, construction, work ….”

WD: “… professors, jobs …”—these are artists who are similar to me in the way they live life. Meaning they do a lot of things at the same time as making art and maintaining an art career.

BA: Did you know that this was how you were going to curate the show?

WD: When [Lloyd Benjamin of Get This! Gallery] asked me to organize a show, I wanted to organize a show that would make me excited about the artists. And I wanted to show artists who did a lot of things: “Art workers.” Also, music has been a huge part of my life, so that was another element that I wanted to tie into the show—to juxtapose people that make it, play it, experience it. Even in the work, in the visual elements of certain people’s work for me, I connect that to sound.

BA: How does that work together?

WD: It works in the way of studying and understanding Kandinsky. The way that he related sound to instruments. The bass drum would be either bold reds or blacks … [Margot Walsh’s paintings are] like two bass drums pounding, because the black is radiating. Or Michael Gibson’s painting is probably like the sound of a violin or some string instrument. That silver to me is a screechy sound.

Photos by Karley Sullivan.

BA: Are there any other connections that these artists or their artwork have, other than being connected to you? Even just as you were putting together the show, did you see similarities you hadn’t realized before?

WD: Landscape, identity, sexuality, theory … I think that as I selected everybody those images were flooding my brain because that’s what I’m interested in. Everybody’s work, to me, carries some of those things. Moving things around the space, they became clearer. That’s what the show is about. Some people made work that’s brand new, so a lot of it was a surprise because I had only seen their older works. That’s another thing about these people … their work changes a lot.

BA: What’s the impact of having these artists, most of whom are presumably not going to be shown in the same town again, in one show? Do you perceive connections might be made between them as a result of this show?

It’s my favorite people in the same room, on the walls. From that, I feel like I would like to share Atlanta with these artists. It’s kind of like a mirror. I’m exposing them to Atlanta, and then the viewers—I’m exposing them to these artists. People that they would never think to go look for in New York or wherever. That’s the main impact.

William Downs will appear for a talk at Get This! Gallery on Saturday, February 16, at 12 noon.

To view more of the Storify, please go here.

Ben Venom, King of Kings, 2012, heavy metal T-shirts, fabric, batting, thread. Courtesy the artist and Get This! Gallery.

Imagine it’s the mid ‘90s in Atlanta. You’re at BLT’s Mostly Pizza, a college lunch spot that doubles as a nightly music venue featuring punk and noise bands such as Quadiliacha and Wheeljack. Now meet Ben Baumgartner, known as “Venom” to his friends—he’s the high school punk rocker sweating in the audience.

Fast forward to present day and Get This! Gallery replaces BLT’s, and Ben Baumgartner is now Ben Venom. Venom is now having his first solo exhibition in Atlanta in the same building he listened to bands some 15 years ago. His exhibition, boldly titled I Make No Mistakes, features a new selection of mostly large-format quilts, smaller quilted and machine-sewn works and embroidered denim jackets pulling from stereotypical metal imagery such as skulls, tattoos, spider webs, and thrash metal fonts.

Continuing threads and conceptual frameworks from past work, Venom explores the connections between heavy metal music and traditional quilting methods, with self-admitted references to the famous quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, who were an initial inspiration.

Ben Venom, I Make No Mistakes, 2012, installation view.
Photo courtesy the artist and Get This! Gallery.

However, how does the conceptual conversation go beyond the initial collision of metal and quilting? This is a question, while not explicitly asked nor answered, that follows Venom’s work. Venom adopted this methodology during completion of his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007, in the city where he still lives and works.

The installation is controlled and generous on space, which is important especially for the larger quilted works, the largest—a commanding presence—hangs at 5 x 9 feet. The main gallery space holds three new quilts. I Go Where Eagles Dare features a two-headed eagle and King of Kings depicts a griffin, both figures on black void-like backgrounds. The griffin is a mythological and legendary protective figure with the body of a lion and head of an eagle, used frequently in nationalistic flags or royal crests. Almost fittingly, heavy metal concerts have been compared to a sensory equivalent of war, described in Metalheads by psychologist Jeffrey Arnett.

But perhaps a more promising discussion is that, up close, Venom’s work almost warrants a connection to painting, something that would benefit from a slight push. Selections from individual units start to read as compositional forms. Some of the colorful and particularly graphic clippings show discernible references to horror films (the influence of stylized horror on metal and metal fashion is well established), as well as other contemporary artists. Could Venom’s quilts serve as machismo counterparts to the gooey, monstrous-feminine paintings and performances of Francine Spiegel, or perhaps an alternate sail to Matthew Day Jackson’s Sepulcher?

Ben Venom, Living on the Razors Edge, 2012, hand-made quilt, used denim jeans, fabric, batting, thread, 83 x 63 inches. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

On the right, an all-denim quilt with the text Living On the Razors Edge (2012), an Iron Maiden lyric and subtle nod to Venom’s sewing practice, is composed of the faded knee-sections from denim jeans donated by friends. This quilt is in fact the only work in the exhibition that reads as quilt and landscape; the horizontal background knee-sections form the architecture to support the floating text.

Venom constructs his quilts from cut sections of heavy metal T-shirts, originally his own collection, but now mostly consisting of donations from friends and purchases online. But there are several other works in the show that do not involve T-shirt components at all. For example, two studded and embroidered black denim vests—Iron Hand and Slayer Player (both 2011)—contain imagery of militia and Russian prison gang tattoos and symbols. Venom uses the same embroiderers as the Hells Angels, though Venom’s denim vests nod more to punk and metal scenes as opposed the Angels’ leather counterparts.

While many find the conflation of these two perhaps disparate activities—heavy metal music and the act of quilting—as a dissonant union, it’s not too large a stretch to discuss them together, albeit a bit unexpectedly. Both quilting and the music genre have strong ties to a community identity. At a most basic level, they imply extremes (metal is hard and masculine while craft is soft and feminine) but do not necessarily deliver those extremes always. Both can border on kitsch—and hey, it’s no secret that most pioneers of heavy metal are now senior citizens themselves.

Heavy metal is known for attracting large fan bases but is often critically reviled. The majority opinion surrounding Venom’s work obsesses over this fusion of metal with quilting, which fearfully reads as one-dimensional analysis of his work and could in fact be criticism in disguise. It’s easy to make no mistakes following in your own tracks; such a conversation continually labels Venom as a one-trick-pony and thereby requests he leave the safety of his previous footprints and enter new territory. The question has to be asked: Will he deliver?

The exhibition I Make No Mistakes is on view at Get This! Gallery through October 6, 2012.

This photo of The Blue Flame highlights its qualities as an exhibition separate from the events programming planned around it. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

For Ben Roosevelt’s solo exhibition The Blue Flame at Get This! Gallery, the space has been altered to imitate the look of a dive bar, authenticated with faux-wood paneling, a manned bar, and a small stage. The concept of the Blue Flame came to Roosevelt in a dream that took place inside a bar with the same name, in which seminal figures for the artist’s identity contributed to his ruminations on success, art, and the future. Both in the dream and in the exhibition, references and replications of Iggy Pop, Joseph Bueys, and Dante’s Inferno interconnect as testimonies of lives and careers in crisis. These replications, such as the drawings compiling existing renderings of Beuys’ eyes, Iggy’s lips, and Dante’s noses provide a thread to a question that Roosevelt continues to explore in his artmaking: can you make something new by re-doing something that’s already been created?

When I interviewed Roosevelt last month, he explained that his works are often articulations of his investigation of an idea. Exploring the Blue Flame as a psychologically interior space, he visualizes the facades of its various physical manifestations in the exhibition. As an imaginary place, the various Blue Flame marquees are a mix of references to the artists in his initial dream, disrupting the logic of who and what belongs on the conventional advertising format. In two instances, the artist depicts different glimpses of the Blue Flame from the outside. Standing as a solitary sleepy outpost, the views maintain a distance from what may take place inside.

By contrast, this photo shows The Blue Flame in action during the exhibition's opening. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

Ben Roosevelt, The Blue Flame 2, 2012, colored pencil and watercolor on paper. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery and the artist.

Furthering his investigation, Roosevelt has considered the experiential nature of his mythical bar. Beginning with establishing a tone, Roosevelt asked curator and critic Chris Fite-Wassilak to contribute a piece of creative writing for the artist statement, which reads like a bar patron’s unfiltered ramblings on life and art. The exhibition is not intended to function solely as an installation, but as an environment in which to display Roosevelt’s work. The installation-like quality attempts to reproduce the kitsch present in bars that earn reputations as dives, a characteristic that reads as irony when replicated.

This tension between authenticity and simulation is most notable through the show’s use of wood. On the gallery’s promotional postcard, the garish photo of a wood-paneled wall stained and scratched beyond repair associates the exhibition with the rough-and-tumble spirit of a dive. In contrast, the faux-wood paneling in the actual exhibition highlights the space as a construction; its newness reinforces the Blue Flame as a space—based on a bar—that occasionally functions as an actual bar. With the white walls of the gallery still visible, the paneling acts as an allusion that ultimately recognizes itself as an imitation. This self-awareness, Roosevelt stated, is at the basis of his artmaking, which he views as an outlet that allows him to participate in contemporary culture while being transparent about that participation.

Because the works on the wall never give a view of the bar’s interior, the Blue Flame is reinforced as a place that will continue to exist in the imaginary. According to the context of a visit, visitors are prompted to imagine various incarnations of the bar. Even though it’s clearly a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the show’s success relies on visitors’ willingness to make that leap.

The glow from The Blue Flame's neon sign permeated the space during Yo Karaoke hosted by artist Fahamou Pecou and mc'ed by Kimkaze. Image courtesy Brandon English.

As one of several events planned during the exhibition’s run, artist Fahamou Pecou hosted karaoke at the space late last month. The glowing Blue Flame neon sign in the storefront signaled the gallery’s activation. Bodies filled the bar stools, tables, and stage, and as the night wore on, the imitation bar generated the spirit that the promotional postcard sought capture.

Of course, the downside to such a spectacle is that the work in the show becomes secondary to the experience that’s created in its space. But to some conceptual degree, that is probably the point. As the programming continues to generate different kinds of experiences, memories, and images within the space, the myth of the Blue Flame continues.

Ben Roosevelt’s The Blue Flame continues at Get This! Gallery through April 28, 2012, with an artist talk on April 21and additional programming throughout the run of the show.

Photo by John E. Ramspott.

In the final hours before opening the curtains at 7 Stages Theatre this past Saturday, Craig Drennen silently reviewed his notes. He stood with the airy, smirking confidence of a Gilded Age robber baron, unfazed as volunteers in red t-shirts buzzed about like a swarm of crimson bees. BURNAWAY’s Art Crush Bash volunteer services auction would receive nearly 200 guests later that night. But Drennen, the official host of the evening, already knew his strategy.

The beginning was a roast. Drennen required no warmup; he opened with a fiery salvo of jokes aimed at yours truly and Susannah Darrow, my fellow cofounder. I don’t think my receding hair line is so extreme that it merits comparison with an Oscar statue …. But I’m proud to have been the first victim in a line of increasingly crude, but genuinely funny, jabs and ripostes between Drennen and his cohost, Jason Kofke.

This edition of Dodge & Burn includes nine photos by John Ramspott capturing scattered moments throughout the night.

Craig Drennen disarms with his impish smile. Photo by John E. Ramspott.

Photo by John E. Ramspott.

Photo by John E. Ramspott.

Photo by John E. Ramspott.

Photo by John E. Ramspott.

Photo by John E. Ramspott.

Photo by Sandy Hooper.

The last image above comes from the photo booth set up by Sandy Hooper, the main photographer for the Art Crush article series that inspired our auction. Click here for more at our Flickr site.

Special thanks go to Justin Weaver who created video interviews with our participating artists. The audio-visual dimension added dynamism and personality to each individual auction. Coupled with our hosts’ commentary, these segments stirred the crowd even further into a cackling frenzy.

It was wonderful to see so much generosity in one room. Bidding wars erupted over several items, between auction veterans and first-timers alike. Thank you so much to everyone who won, or at least attempted to win. Either way, your show of love has contributed towards funding our publication’s mission.

We’d also like to send our appreciation to 7 Stages Theatre, our devoted corps of volunteers, and everyone else who spent countless hours working before, during, and after the event. Our fantastic sponsors included Binders Art Supplies and Frames, Sutra Lounge, Braves, Bang! Arts Management, CORE Performance Company, Octane Coffee Bar & Lounge, Tough Love Yoga. FitWit, Dad’s Garage, Museum of Design Atlanta, Modern Atlanta, Parish Food & Goods, Alternative Apparel, Rosebud, Center for Puppetry Arts, Aviary Organic Beauty Collective, Starlight Six Drive-In Theater, Ansley Golf Course, Midtown Lanes, Get This! Gallery, Intown Healthy Hound, El Myr, Pozole, Concentrics Restaurants, and the High Museum of Art.

Please forgive me if I’ve left out any names. The event was a ginormous success because BURNAWAY is bigger than any one person. Thank you for supporting the movement for local art.

Photo by John E. Ramspott.

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!

FLUX 2011. Photo by John Ramspott.

Early Modernism saw two visions of the relationship between art and life emerge. One held that art was autonomous, whereas the other sought to integrate art and life. The former, traceable to such artists as Velazquez and Manet, and subsequently brought to the fore by the Abstract Expressionists and Clement Greenberg, is supposedly self-referential and self-reliant. The latter can be shown to move in two directions; one, via Russian Constructivism as influenced by Marxist historical materialism and the Bolshevik Revolution, sought to dissolve art into life; the other, sometimes associated with rationalist utopianisms of the Bauhaus, De Stijl, and other movements in western Europe, sought to make all of life an aesthetic experience. Two lines, faint and meandering as they may be, can be drawn from the two aforementioned primary modes to the two major ways of making art today. Autonomous, self-referential art could be associated more with objects of the gallery or museum (and permanent outdoor sculpture), while work descendant of “art-merging-with-life” relates more to performance and outside-the-gallery happenings. Throughout the Modern period, myriad art movements have leaned one way or the other in attempts at creating an art that would most accurately reflect and critique the Modern experience. Often, this critique was focused on the project of capitalism; paradoxically, artists of both camps remain reliant on capitalists in order to subsist.

Elevate: Art Above Underground, 2011. Photo by John Ramspott.

Some critical thinkers move beyond the paradoxical relationship with capitalism into the precipitous problem of experience. Walter Benjamin, in an essay titled “Experience” (1913), concludes that an adult (probably an analogy for modernity) loses the ability to have real life experiences in favor of knowledge and cynicism. Giorgio Agamben furthers Benjamin’s thesis in Infancy and History (1978), wherein he applies a linguistic-semiological interpretation to the problem, suggesting that the only thing we experience is language, and our most valued experiences relate to words with no clear referent. For neither writer is experience merely raw stimulus reception, but that which changes us on a deeper level. As Agamben notes, “For modern man’s average day contains virtually nothing that can still be translated into experience. Neither reading the newspaper, with its abundance of news that is irretrievably remote from his life, nor sitting for minutes on end at the wheel of his car in a traffic jam…Modern man makes his way home in the evening, wearied by a jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will have become experience.”

The Object Group performs Eyewitness at Off the Edge, 2012. Photo by Sara Keith.

I would think that for many people, this analysis rings particularly true in today’s smart-phone-web-2.0-html5-world. Everywhere you look, people are face down, attentive to a glowing screen, “doing” something other than experiencing the physical world immediately around them. Even when a spectacle worthy of drawing one’s attention away from the screen presents itself, many are still obliged to mediate that experience through the screen via obsessive picture taking or video making. As one can tell by the date of Benjamin’s essay, although our technologies are new, the phenomena that follow are not.

Similar ideas can be found in the writings on Situationism from the 1950s and 1960s, and on Relational Aesthetics from the turn of the 21st century. The argument for a more real and imminent relationship to the world is often used to build a case against museums, galleries, and static art in general, in favor of public and interactive art. I believe that the argument has become so common that it is often accepted on its face value, and its flaws never emerge. I also believe that an examination of the questions I present below can help Atlanta’s art scene, inside and outside the gallery, to strengthen and continue to grow.

KAWS opening at the High Museum of Art, February 18, 2012. Photo by Dylan York.

The first problem is that certain experiences are given preference; the “real” kind are seen as deep and valuable, and the “virtual” kind as passive and meaningless. This bias boils down to a kind of Kantian relativism, in which subjective taste is mistaken for universal law. Although I think most people do find real life more meaningful than a virtual one, the distinction becomes blurred when choosing between mediated experiences. Why do so many of us find information from a book, even if it’s fiction, more important than televised drama? Why can some people sit before a computer all day, then brag about how they “don’t even own a TV”? A mediated experience is a mediated experience—just because a person is dressed up, dancing on the corner of the street, does not make the event more real than someone doing the same thing on a proscenium stage. Personal and social boundaries define the line between “real” space and make-believe, thus the definition of mediated is dependent on each viewer’s psychology.

gloATL performs at FLUX 2011. Photo by John Ramspott.

The second problem is more directly related to the idea of experience, specifically with regard to the popular argument that public interactive works create a sense of physical community, as opposed to virtual, online interaction. In today’s hyper-mediated world, a carnival-style art event is equally likely, if not more likely, to be experienced through the lens of a camera phone than is a gallery show. Also, for many, to “experience” such events as Flux Projects’ one-night art extravaganza, Elevate: Art Above Underground, or similar happenings is to follow a map and a schedule analogous to some bourgie version of TV Guide.

Ben "Bean" Worley's SYNTHESIZ at Get This! Gallery. Photo by John Ramspott.

Finally, the pace required to “see” all of the art at any of these events often mimics the pace required to get a plasma television on Black Friday, leaving little time to socialize with the company in one’s midst. By comparison, the conversation-filled, wine-sipping, partylike atmosphere of any gallery opening may have more to offer in terms of creating community than the best open-air festival. At the same time, the ratio of numbers of works to amount of time a given festival occurs can be unkind to a viewer trying to interact with all the work to be seen. While this evanescence is representative of the drive-by nature of contemporary real-life interaction, it is also counter to being able to engage with the work on a deeper level. By contrast, in the days or weeks following the opening of a gallery show (the opening being a time when work probably gets the least amount of attention), one can stand in front of a work at one’s own pace, take time to communicate, and make a real, deep connection with the work, in a way described by James Elkins in his series of essays How Long Does It Take to Look at a Painting.

Obviously, I am not calling for an end to public art events. They are great fun and offer opportunities for artists to make, and viewers to experience, works that are disproportionate to the gallery. I have participated in them, and will continue to do so, both as an artist and a viewer. I do wonder though: Why is there such a push to move art outside the gallery? If all of our experience is mediated by technology, what difference does it make where art exists? What does art outside the gallery promote that art inside a gallery does not? Does the apparent need to evangelize the visual arts mark a failure in its ability to compete with the kitsch found on television, in movie theatres, and the on the Internet; are we, as “fine” artists jealous of the popularity of these “lower” art forms? Most importantly, I question why we go to such lengths to produce and receive art: to be able to say that we have experienced its existence, or to actually improve our own existence and experience?

Heather McPherson, 647 Bryan Street, 2011, acrylic and pencil on cut wood, 18 1/2 x 24 inches. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

Heather McPherson’s shack, shanty, flat, a solo show at Get This! Gallery, offers a unique self-portraitesque experience through the artist’s painted woodcuts. After all, they present images of places Atlantans call home. McPherson’s statement indicates that the works include “clues about the depicted houses’ inhabitants,” but even beyond clues about these people, the art includes beautiful and often funny pieces of information that remind viewers they are not viewing something created in some distant locale, but rather something made right here at home. Whether we see specific house numbers, or leaf-filled Home Depot bags in front of a Cabbagetown home, or even graffiti visible on a wall along Boulevard, we get a sense that we could know these places. These homes have the telltale signs of comings and goings, including run-down—but not forgotten or abandoned—architecture, and even a mysterious sense of strife in 184 Berean Avenue, which harbors an unclear story about the moving in or moving out of a family, what may be a realtor key box on the doorknob, and a car parked in front. It’s both a portrait of lives lived and a portrait of the city.

Heather McPherson, 792 Fulton Terrace, 2011, acrylic and pencil on cut wood, 14 x 26 1/2 inches. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

I have always been a sucker for art that hangs in the gallery but also has some depth because pieces of it rise from an otherwise flush, squared-off object. I love how such work invites us to step closer and look deeper, to examine from different angles and vantages, and to explore for things we could otherwise miss by facing the work in a straightforward way. McPherson’s detailed woodcuts put a grin on my face while I was exploring her individual works, trying to be a detective and locate indicators about the inhabitants and their histories. The shapes of wooden fences, rendered as woodcuts in relief; the bulge of tires on the ground, flattened slightly by a car’s weight; all these details exhibit both thoughtfulness and skill. McPherson’s works combine technical skill reminiscent of folk art with traditional painting to nestle stably in the nexus of sculpture and painting.

Heather McPherson, 499 Wabash Ave. as seen from Boulevard, 2011, acrylic and pencil on cut wood, 14 x 32 inches. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

What makes a work of art great is not necessarily that you want to look at it for a long time or that it takes your breath away, but rather that you want to look at it over and over again. I think about this every time I visit a museum and experience that nagging guilt when I walk away from a famous work after having viewed it briefly. So I remind myself that I will come back, and I’ll enjoy it again another time. That draw to come back leaves us able to enjoy repeatedly, to create new narratives, to search for things possibly undiscovered, and to let our experience drive itself.

Heather McPherson, 135 Berean Avenue, 2011, acrylic and pencil on cut wood, 16 x 19 inches. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

I made several laps around Get This! Gallery because I kept wanting to re-view shack, shanty, flat, to continue building the narrative of the depicted homes. Each house had character and tales to tell that made it stand out from its neighbors. 253 Powell Street, alley view offered a vantage from behind the house, exposing a pile of unused lumber—something house dwellers typically hide; 792 Fulton Street offered a weathered front porch with clothes drying on a line; and several left parts of the woodcut unpainted, exposing the patterns and colors of the unfinished wood underneath, as if to suggest that the woodcut, like the lives depicted, is a work in progress.

In shack, shanty, flat McPherson reproduces the experience of taking a walk around town, complete with the honest and quirky details of ordinary homes holding ordinary lives. The bright colors and nuanced details allow the audience to investigate what they believe to be happening while comparing it to pre-existing information and opinions about the actual Atlanta sites. McPherson creates a new vision of Atlanta through Atlanta itself, making shack, shanty, flat a familiar yet novel viewing experience at Get This! Gallery.

Get This! Gallery will be exhibiting Heather McPherson’s shack, shanty, flat through Saturday, February 25, 2012. The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday from noon to 5PM.

Bean has been creating video installations for galleries for ten years now, and recording video for much longer. His latest installation, entitled SYNTHESIZ, at Get This! Gallery has been punctuated with multiple live performances over the past two months. While 22 nifty abstract video stills are for sale, the crowds appear when bands collaborate to create an audiovisual experience for attendees.

Many VJs limit themselves to predefined edits of prerecorded music videos; Bean’s approach is much broader. While his library of video clips has grown over the past 10 years, Bean also works with live video feeds and alters the mix and visual effects to match what the band is doing. He continuously adjusts the mix based on feel, where nothing is predetermined and no two performances are ever the same. Bean refers to himself as an “ambient” VJ, a title that suits him well.
Bean’s job has been getting easier as technology improves. Initially he was limited to working with 10-second video clips to match the respective computer-processing limits, and storage required a computer stack. Now he works with movie-length videos, and carries around his clips on a disk no larger than a post card. He also used to record all of his own clips, but now takes YouTube videos and processes them into his portable library. While he really enjoys his gallery performances, like this one at Get This!, his income comes mostly from club shows at venues like Tongue & Groove, Halo, and out-of-town festivals. While technology has certainly advanced, there is still the matter of all of those wires.

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!

All photos by Ryan Nabulsi. Click each image to zoom.

Located in the heart of downtown Atlanta, Georgia State University’s Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design features open spaces with loads of natural light pouring in through the floor-to-ceiling factory-style windows. Photographing this space, however, provides many challenges. The long narrow hallways, clutters of details, and low- and mixed-lighting conditions all present challenges for the camera. Sticking with a strictly digital format for this Dodge & Burn, I tried to capture the variety of details and environments that your eyes try to visually digest.

Students cover the walls with art, fliers, and other information about opportunities and art events, both local and international. Many artists from Georgia State have recently exhibited work around town, such as Ben Worley with his SYNTHESIZ at Get This! Gallery as well as Micah Stansell and other MFA graduates who’ve exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia.

The classrooms have no doors and flow from one to the next. Little nooks and crannies appear around corners where students have experimented with paints or textures. Professors pop in and out of their offices located down a long hallway, stopping to speak with students or hurrying to teach in adjacent classrooms. And, overhead, a mezzanine looks out into downtown Atlanta. It feels as an art school should feel: alive, vibrant, and with an air of creativity that is palpable.

Ben "Bean" Worley, After Ellsworth Kelly, 2011, aluminum print, 8 x 10 inches. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

After seeing Ben Worley’s (a.k.a. Bean Summer) SYNTHESIZ at Get This! Gallery, I almost decided to simply copy and paste Jerry Saltz’s entire New York Magazine article, “Generation Blank,” as a review. Within the first few seconds of seeing Worley’s video work, I was reminded of one of the first lines of Saltz’s bashing of the Venice Biennale: “[…]many times over—too many times for comfort—I saw the same thing, a highly recognizable generic, institutional style whose manifestations are by now extremely familiar. Neostructuralist film with overlapping geometric colors […] projectors screening loops of grainy black-and-white archival footage, abstraction that’s supposed to be referencing other abstraction—it was all there, all straight out of the seventies, all dead in the water. It’s work stuck in a cul-de-sac of aesthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements.” For me, the formula reads something like this:
Although Saltz’s description may not be a 100 percent fit for the work of Worley, it is uncannily accurate. In an interview with the artist, he says that the work is “an ongoing series of direct collaborations that can be called appropriations in action. It’s a very simple honest process in which [he uses] the shape, color, and prints of early Post-Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painters as a basis to build [his] video and prints with [his] own animation devices for the show within the space.” The foreground of the video for SYNTHESIZ is dominated by colorful, morphing geometric shapes that are based on the formal manifestations of Post-Abstract Expressionist artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland. Under that, there is some kind of grainy, filtered imagery, but it is impossible to make out, and thus becomes only confusing visual texture. The soundtrack is a lo-fi mangled mash-up of orchestral tunes reminiscent of early Hollywood, rounding out the apparent comment on the heroic, yet failed attempts of Late-Modernist efforts; a tried and true criticism with equally worn methods.

Ben "Bean" Worley, After Helen Frankenthaler, 2011, aluminum print, 8 x 10 inches. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

I don’t want readers to think that I am some kind of romantic Neomodernist looking for originality or genius in a work of art; in fact, I have written and spoken extensively against such a view on my blog and at this year’s SECAC convention in Savannah, among other places. I sympathize with Worley’s understanding of the process of synthesis, but wonder about the implications of copy-and-paste culture with regards to ideas such as meaning transmission and cultural progress. For now, I can forego the problematic discussion of progress, but with regard to creating meaning, I share Saltz’s worry that, “Their art turns in on itself, becoming nothing more than coded language. It empties their work of content, becoming a way to avoid interior chaos.” [My emphasis added.]

In our interview, Worley insisted that, “All work in any space is inherently charged with meaning, to make art is political. To be an artist is to always strive to create meaning in the world,” and according to Worley’s artist statement, the visuals “communicate messages both random and intentional.” Obviously, all work is open to interpretation, but what could be random or chaotic in SYNTHESIZ is lost because the cipher is too easily decoded; each segment of video is well-defined by a set of glossy-print video stills accompanied by titles like After Joseph Albers and After Mark Rothko.

Ben "Bean" Worley, After Barnett Newman, 2011, aluminum print, 8 x 10 inches. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

The strengths of appropriation as a method come in many forms with multiple functions: as cultural critique, by way of the Letterist and Situationists’détournement; as semiotic lexicon, in the way described by Nicolas Bourriaud in Postproduction; or as critique of originality and genius in the vein of Sherrie Levine, which has been swallowed whole and thoroughly digested by many, including Rosalind Krauss in the 80s, and more recently the sister websites afterwalkerevans.com and aftersherrielevine.com. (Wait, did I forget to mention Marcel Duchamp?) Ultimately, it seems that Worley touches on many of these in what he calls “very original appropriations,” but does so in such a broad fashion that it creates little conceptual impact.

In the statement for his video, Worley asserts that through “simple design and color schemes, [his] overstimulated visual experiments are translated and clarified.” Although his work does recall a kind of Nam June Paik–esque experimental-video psychedelia, to call it overstimulating is an overstatement. When I think of overstimulation, another video artist comes to mind, one who synthesizes a twenty-first-century attention-deficit-hyperactive-disorder version of psychedelic imagery. Ryan Trecartin remixes corporate lingo and utilizes readymade objects as props in videos that critically comment on contemporary identity formation vis-à-vis a corporatized suburban existence. His objects function as easily readable signs and symbols that create a semiological bottleneck that directs the viewer onto the razor-sharp fine line that he wants us to consider. In contrast, Worley’s work seems to utilize the visual equivalent of name-dropping to prop up the thin merits of his final product; the art historical references acting as a declarative stamp to label an otherwise muddy experiment as art.

As a standalone video, it is too easily understood, but the saving grace of Worley’s vision for SYNTHESIZ may rest in is his intention to reverse the role of live video mixing as subordinate to live musical performance. In a promising series of performances at GET THIS!, Worley plans to have other artists and musicians accentuate his visuals, not the other way around. In the same way that Frank Stella sought to break the habit of a four-sided canvas, perhaps these live collaborative veejay sessions can break the rectangle of the video screen, and actively elevate Worley’s project to the progressive critical level it aspires.

Ben “Bean” Worley’s exhibition SYNTHESIZ will remain up at Get This! Gallery through January 7, 2012. The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday from Noon to 5PM. There will be an artist talk on Saturday, December 17 from 1 to 2PM. For more information on related events, visit Get This! Gallery’s facebook page.

Michael M. Koehler, St. Bernard Parish, Violet, Louisiana, 2010, gelatin silver print, 20 x 24 inches. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

At 29, Philadelphia-based photographer Michael M. Koehler produces work that’s strikingly nuanced with life experience, colored by extensive travel and a practiced understanding of how to make a beautiful image. In Between, his exhibition currently on display at Get This! Gallery through Saturday, October 29, 2011, documents urban landscapes spanning from post-Katrina New Orleans, to Detroit, to Croatia, and back to his hometown, Philadelphia. Pulled from several years of shooting, the images describe a blue-collar underbelly from a perspective that feels less like an outsider peering in and more like an intimate afternoon spent with the people and environments he captures.

Despite the diversity of years and locations, the show feels unified. The cohesion is largely attributable to Koehler’s strong compositional sensibility and the softness of the works’ grainy finish. The idiosyncrasies of each city Koehler captures take on a similar connectedness. Decrepit stuffed animals lining a Detroit porch in the Heidelberg Project neighborhood feel as much a part of Koehler’s life as the streets of Philadelphia. The opening line of his artist statement sincerely claims, “In Between is life.” The simplicity and sincerity of this statement is clear throughout the exhibition.

Michael M. Koehler, Before the Storm, New Orleans, 2008, gelatin silver print, 40 x 60 inches. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

Michael, M. Koehler, Waiting for the Bus, Philadelphia, 2007, gelatin silver print, 20 x 24 inches. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

Michael M. Koehler, Katrina Memorial, Shell Beach, gelatin silver print, 20 x 24 inches. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

Katrina Memorial, Shell Beach is one of the show’s strongest images. The photograph depicts a heavy-set, African American woman standing at the edge of a marsh next to a small, memorial-like pile of cobbled rocks. It’s unclear whether the woman was the creator of the memorial or just a visitor, but either way the scene feels intimate. The setting for the image is of Shell Beach in St. Bernard Parish which saw almost 160 casualties during the storm and its aftermath. The warmth of the silver gelatin print lends itself well to the somberness of the image.

The most successful images are those where Koehler’s engagement seems to transcend that of the passive observer to a participant in the scene. Images such as Before the Storm, which shows locals during New Orleans’s evacuation for Hurricane Gustav, and Fireplace, which captures a women standing inside a fireplace to smoke a cigarette, are both emotive and reflect Koehler’s presence in the scene. Since it is his engagement with his subject matter that gives strength to the work, the compositions without human figures lose some of their potency despite the prettiness of the imagery. Koehler’s exhibition presents an honest, personal archive of the human experience.

Michael M. Koehler, Ascending, Croatia, 2007, gelatin silver print, 24 x 36 inches. Image courtesy Get This! Gallery.

Michael Koehler’s exhibition, In Between, is on view at Get This! Gallery through this Saturday, October 24, 2011.