I haven’t yet seen the group show at Town + Culture Gallery or the Day & Night Projects installation in person, but based on my prior knowledge and online investigation, I feel they are well worth mentioning. So are the other artworks and exhibitions I discuss below, which express a particular style of art in very different and distinct ways.
Denise Jackson’s peripatetic Town + Culture Gallery is currently exhibiting How We Become at Suite 102 of The Works Upper Westside through May 22. A response to a Michelle Obama quote that “owning your own unique story” and “using your own unique voice” while “being willing to know and hear others” is “how we become,” the ethnically and stylistically diverse show features six female artists, Chanell Angeli, Roxane Hollosi, Stephanie Jordan-Renz, Uruba Slaughter, Sophia Sobrino and Andrea McKenzie.
Jackson has been curating shows and presenting works in her own galleries for a dozen years, so it’s no surprise that this exhibition combines art by women artists of different national as well as ethnic origins and degree of prior recognition.
The youngest is Oglethorpe University student Sobrino. Her work has already been seen in 2021 in exhibitions at the United Parcel Service headquarters and a solo show at the Mexican Consulate.
In a different part of the city and a different gallery philosophy, Eva-Maria Connolly’s Art-Haus Grant Park continues its six-year record of low-key informality. Experiments in Storytelling, a spiritually inclined exhibition that ends May 21, features the work of Sara Hendrix, Vickie Martin, and Lance Carlson.
A perusal of the careers of these extensively exhibited artists is a useful reminder that there are tiers of the metro art scene within which artists can operate for years, building collector bases without ever attracting much public attention.
Allen Peterson’s Collective Action at Day & Night Projects closes on May 7. In the words of the gallery website, it is “an immersive installation [that uses] social systems of honeybees to provoke questions about our own human systems. Peterson [deploys] a wide range of media and materials — from wall painting and stenciling to sound recordings, welded steel, paper sculpture, [and] honey itself, glowing amber in plexi-encased lightboxes.”
And now for something completely different, as the Monty Python players have said . . .
Surrealism, a Boston Review essay by Jackson Arn recently observed, was “poetic and humorous to its marrow,” although it later acquired explicitly political interests as well. I was struck recently by the frequency with which clearly surrealist contemporary paintings in Atlanta galleries are instead categorized as “whimsical.”
Charles Keiger at TEW Galleries has moved from surrealism’s pure focus on unconscious association (with a dose of humor thrown in) to an emotionally tinged look at the life of environmentally threatened animals.
The Buck, currently in an untitled group exhibition upstairs from the America Martin solo show, is one of several paintings that depict various creatures stranded on their own small raft or pedestal in the midst of the flooded territory.
Equally intriguing are the exercises in classic surrealism that don’t seem to know they are. Since they are meant to be message-less, and are described as “whimsical,” they are unintentionally accurate maps of the artists’ unconscious, which contains, among other things, the sense of proportion, palette and the other things that go into making an interesting representational painting.
At Pryor Fine Art on Miami Circle, the work of California artist Jeff Faust leans towards the poetic side of surrealism; in fact, one work depicting leaves falling into a ceramic bowl is titled “Silent Poem.”
Faust’s works currently in the gallery seem as though they should be symbolic, but if so their meaning remains singularly elusive. “Off the Central Coast” depicts a vase adrift on the ocean. From it, a mature tree trunk, with leafy twigs rather than branches, supports a nest in its uppermost fragile network.
In a neighboring gallery, Mason Fine Art, paintings by Atlanta artist Ashley Surber are featured in Women Artists of Mason Fine Art, up through mid-May. Surber herself calls her paintings whimsical, and they are indeed appealingly lighthearted, with their repetitive imagery of penguins, whether atop an elephant or unveiling mysterious scenes within tents.
That’s where the unintended surrealist core comes in; although the penguins bear out John Ruskin’s observation that it is impossible to be angry when one looks at a penguin, the choice of what they are doing is inevitably a window into Surber’s psyche, although an uninterpretable one. In “The Tent,” the penguins pull back the curtains of a sunlit tent to reveal a night landscape in which luna moths flutter.
“The River” presents a similar tent at night, in which the interior scene is a penguin riding a swan down a river that recedes into a distant sunset. This may be pure whimsy, but how and whence it comes is worth a little contemplation.
My perhaps elusive point is aptly made by a wonderful memorial show for James Clover, who died in 2021 at age 84, in Mason Fine Art’s adjacent gallery space. Clover’s final works, in sharp contrast to many of his earlier ones, paid homage to tropicalia in silhouettes repeated in various combinations that are effectively hallucinatory, but all are derived from a lifetime of devising visual shorthand and unusually structured compositions.
The paintings are extraordinary, but if they are surreal, they are surreal in the sense exemplified by the later, self-conscious phase of surrealism about which Barnett Newman wrote: “instead of creating a magical world, the surrealists succeeded only in illustrating it.” But in this case, that’s enough.
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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.
