The title of the current exhibit at 378 Gallery (through June 25) is even more provocative than the most likely initial response suggests. ______The World. The underlined gap suggests a forbidden expletive — one artist in the show suggests “Redacted,” as in a suppressed part of transcribed testimony. But the missing word could be anything, from “Bless” to “Enjoy” to “Improve” to a vast array of choices.
Curators Lisa Alembik and Martha Whittington, both well-known Atlanta artists, gave the participating artists only the exhibition title and asked them to provide whatever work they found appropriate. The only criteria was that the work be made since the start of the pandemic, responding to what their curatorial statement calls “the absurdities and the beauties of this time.”
The artists did. Very few of them addressed identifiable topics of the moment. The most unambiguous in this regard is Stephanie Kolpy’s nearly visionary mixed media Go F— Yourself Russian War and the diptych A Great Divide Glory to Ukraine. Alejandro Aguilera’s The Christian might well be read in terms of contemporary issues, and the same is the case with the yellow swept-hair faces of his Mango Chupao which comprise chewed mango seeds with stringy material that forms the faces’ hair.
Otherwise, the messages are broader or more oblique. Steven L. Anderson is unambiguous in his screenprint that proclaims I’ll Never Stop Making Art and another that makes an even more emphatically profane affirmation about the primacy of love.
Most of the other representations of everyday attitudes and daily encounters are more metaphorical, as in Barbara Schreiber‘s Recreational Activities series — Surrender, Flaming Ping Pong and Apology — in which small animals bearing flowers or engaging in an incendiary ping-pong match stand in for human social situations.
Sarah Emerson does something similar in Misshapen Chaos, Just Another Day, What Me Worry and No More Dreaming Like a Girl. These surreal digital prints mounted on panel portray scenes influenced by cartoons and classic underground comix. Raphael Bahindwa’s acrylic on canvas The Street and Playground are surreal cityscapes also influenced by popular media, including noir-tinged graphic novels.
Selena Lillo created actual-size porcelain replicas of pill bottles specifically for the exhibition; it’s her commentary on the psychological aspects of medical trauma suffered in isolation. Doyle Trankina chose to display an impressively diverse set of sculptures. All of them make allegorical statements, from the ceramic representation of rotting fruit in Decay in Clay to a small, metallic Fainting Goat with a Latin motto on its classical base declaring that art is long, even though life is brief.
Found-object collage is put to two very different uses by Amandine Drouet and Coorain Devin. Drouet creates complex imagery from media described as “embroidered reused reclaimed plastic” with imagery that justifies such titles as The Pink Elephant in the Room. Devin has produced Nabisco Ritz Cracker Pot Holders that incorporate actual Ritz crackers beneath their clear plastic in some cases, and cockroaches in others. The nature of the critique in both artists’ work is open to interpretation.
If all of the foregoing sculptural objects dwell on physically or emotionally unpleasant topics, Mario Petrirena’s three sculptures are unambiguously visionary-poetic, even when they bear the titles For they knew not why or The edges of darkness.
The rest of the show deals with the possibilities of abstracted form in a variety of ways. Terry Hardy produced a book that documents his pandemic project The Daily Covid-19 Mask Drawings. Andy Moon Wilson presents a grid of evocative mandala-like ink and acrylic on paper drawings prosaically titled 12 Images.
Craig Dongoski’s works include two pen, ink and lemon juice on paper drawings related to the Testament series he will present at Whitespace Gallery from June 25 to August 6. Viewed in isolation, Testament 27 is oblique, but God Star Man is clearly cosmic even without the greater context provided by the installation-scale “meta-hallucination” intended for the Whitespace show. His drawings at 378 Gallery open the claustrophobic confines of “the world” outward into the infinitude of the universe, and inward into immeasurable psychic depths.
And at that point, the seemingly obvious reading of _____ the World as a simple outburst of exasperation proves to be a simplistic falsehood. As Alembik and Whittington intended.
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Dr. Jerry Cullum’s reviews and essays have appeared in Art Papers magazine, Raw Vision, Art in America, ARTnews, International Journal of African-American Art and many other popular and scholarly journals. In 2020 he was awarded the Rabkin Prize for his outstanding contribution to arts journalism.
