Spencer Sloan uses a variety of image-corrupting apps to achieve his colorful abstractions of celebrity paparazzi photos.
First World Problems: Sean Fahie at Notch 8 Gallery
Sean Fahie’s exhibition “First World Problems” features paintings about love, popularity, social media likability and measures of success.
200 Words—We, Robot: Santiago Vanegas at Ger-Art
At a time when AI can test higher than a 4-year-old child, Atlanta-based photographer Santiago Venegas asks us to recognize our humanity in his series of photographs of robots. On view at Ger-Art through Sunday, November 13, “Considering Mortal” features the artist’s digital composites of San Francisco’s urban nightscapes populated by shadowy mecha anime. The…
Fabian Williams at Notch8
Fabian Williams’s exhibition “Contraption” predominantly focuses on police brutality in about 20 works. There is a prescribed path, outlined in chalk on the floor, for the viewer to walk through the spacious gallery, which makes sense because many of the pieces depict misconceptions of police officers and their so-called assailants. Two major paintings, Cop Vision:…
Divine Drips: Jane Braddock at Tinney Contemporary, Nashville
Jane Braddock’s elegant, feminine color palette in “Drip Paintings” at Tinney Contemporary is visually stunning. New works from the artist’s “Shakti” series literally drip with the rich “color of India,” only made more interesting by the literary sources of poetry, prose, historical fiction, and Sanskrit translations informing some of their letterforms. Dynamic and irregular…
Soo Sunny Park at Cheekwood Courtyard Gallery, Nashville
Soo Sunny Park creates a tactile experience of space in Silver Linings, a site-specific installation that winds and twists through the Courtyard Gallery at Nashville’s Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art. Accompanying the installation is a video documenting the installation process, which marks her first time creating a work entirely onsite. Though Silver Linings was originally proposed as a…
James Perrin at Tinney Contemporary, Nashville
Dynamic and demanding, the large canvases on view in James Perrin’s Observations, Integrations, Pareidolia, and Polysemy have a presence and energy that fill the front room of Tinney Contemporary. Perrin engages a visual vocabulary that manages to evoke elements of futuristic singularity while still deeply rooted in art history traditions and aesthetics, making the works feel…
Laila Kouri’s Object Lesson, at the LOW Museum
Contrary to first impressions, the object-based artworks in “Baloonlagoon” are not sculptures, according to artist Laila Kouri. Arguing that even the most abstract paintings have illusionistic qualities—such as color space or the presence of the artist via the brushstroke—Kouri seeks to bypass such trickery by using three-dimensional objects in a painterly manner. If, in the…
John Harlan Norris at Historic Arkansas Museum, Little Rock
In public, momentary eye contact and passing glances is acceptable; anything longer becomes an uncomfortable stare. And yet to be complete a face requires that it be read. When looking at portrait painting, there is freedom to scrutinize a face. John Harlan Norris has elected to obscure the facial features in his portraits on view in…
In 200 Words: Susana Solano at Beta Pictoris Gallery in Birmingham
Possibly one of the most important living female Spanish sculptors, Susana Solano has continually gained recognition since her debut in the late 1970s. Her relevance and renown has grown organically over the course of her 30-year career—from Catalan to all of Spain and then Europe and the international stage. Although Solano has attained international…
In 200 Words: Katherine Sandoz at SCAD’s Gallery See
It’s that time of the year when we Southerners are prey to chilly, gray days. But Katherine Sandoz’s exhibition “Tahoe Hybrids” offers us a hopeful view of the winter landscape. On view at the SCAD Atlanta’s Gallery See through January 23, the show includes studies, a series of small paintings, and an imposing 8-by-20-foot panel…
In 200 Words: Builder Levy at Arnika Dawkins
It’s easy to see how photographer Builder Levy, who was raised in Brooklyn just two miles north of Coney Island, became interested in what he describes as “the excitement, sensuality, earthy beauty and teeming masses of multiracial humanity.” An overview of his work, on view at Arnika Dawkins Gallery through November 22, presents numerous examples…
In 200 Words: R. Eric McMaster at Antenna Gallery, New Orleans
In his exhibition “An Imperfect Force” at Antenna Gallery, R. Eric McMaster—the winner of Press Street’s 2014 Open Call—explores the systems that govern various sports by manipulating their rules and forms. McMaster’s show centers on a video installation, The Obstruction of Action by the Existence of Form (2013), which depicts two six-person hockey teams struggling…
Q&A with South African Artist Sam Nhlengethwa
South African artist Sam Nhlengethwa (b. 1955) had his first U.S. museum show, “Life, Jazz and Lots of Other Things,” at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum, as part of the deFINE Art Festival, when I chatted with him while viewing the exhibition. Not well known in the U.S., Nhlengethwa [roughly, en-clay-geh-twa] was…
In 200 Words: Leslie Wayne at SCAD’s Trois Gallery
Located in the library of the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Trois Gallery serves as a resource for students and anyone interested in learning about art. New York-based Leslie Wayne offers the current lesson in her show “Ragtime,” viewable through July 29. It consists of oil paint “skins” and scrapings made…
Dashboard Co-Op, 9/50, and Atlanta’s Critical Gap
The 9/50 Summit was an art fair of sorts, with booths set up by various art spaces, a couple of magazines, and a record label. For a summit of arts presenters, it was a subpar presentation. Overall, with a few exceptions (like Art Papers), the event was rather inchoate. Many of the booths were decorated with photographs…
In 200 Words: Lalla Essaydi at Jackson Fine Art
“Harem and Bullets Revisited,” Lalla Essaydi’s exhibition at Jackson Fine Art [through July 3], focuses a gaze directly on those who would fetishize women in their eroticization of the “Other.” The exhibition recalls the heyday of such ideas in the 1980s and ’90s, but to simply position her work as new interpretations would be…
In 200 Words: Scott Ingram’s Pierced
For Pierced, an architectural intervention that embodies the pained ambivalence evoked by home, Scott Ingram and his collaborators penetrated a recently vacated, single-family house in Ormewood Park with a 47-foot-long I-beam. The beam passes through a corner of the bathroom and two bedrooms before emerging at an acute angle from the light green western wall….