Cullum’s Notebook: Symbols, surprises, a touch-me sculpture, eggs and more

Krista M. Jones’ Patchwork, at The Hudgens Center for Art and Learning through July 22, is a guided tour through personal experience via symbols. That combination, emerging from the show’s carefully arranged paintings, provides numerous points of entry for viewers.

Jones gives us semi-representational compositions of grids that resemble aerial views of fields or streets; semi-abstracted profiles of birds; and other even more abstracted images, among them automobiles, skeletal parts and internal organs.

Through them, viewers can contemplate their own “human complexities and glimpses of the world we live in,” as Jones’ exhibition statement puts it, and thus create their own stories.

Completing the show are two other elements: sculptures made from vine branch cuttings, and a soft sculpture encased in a frame. In the latter work, the artist states in her gallery text that the different fabric textures are designed to offer both sighted and visually impaired attendees a tactile way to explore the details of the paintings.

The show represents Jones’ journey over years of recovery from opiate addiction and is an example of how an artist’s unconscious can speak eloquently to the unconscious of the viewer.

Jones will deliver an artist’s talk at the Hudgens on June 17 at 2 p.m.

In the main gallery at Whitespace, Jered Sprecher’s Wonder & Dread (through June 17) presents variations on floral themes mingled with more disturbed and distributed imagery. In the adjacent Whitespec project space and the Shedspace, two independently conceived exhibitions in the “creative incubator” rhyme with each other in provocative ways.

Rachel K. Garceau’s scale covers not only walls but the floor of the Whitespec foyer with rectangular white porcelain tiles. It’s an up close and personal encounter with the medium that would gladden the hearts of fans of Edmund de Waal’s passionate homages to the material’s many uses. (Her oval sculptures on the walls and smooth stones on the floor create a similarly structured allover surround in the main project gallery.)

The hanging sculpture formed from broken eggshells in Chintia Kirana’s Echoes of Time in Shedspace’s repurposed garden shed creates a parallel rhythm of visual repetition using the eggs’ naturally formed white ovals, as different a medium from Garceau’s porcelain as can be imagined.

Continuing through June 16, the Decatur Arts Festival’s national juried show Small Changes is a valuable reminder, if one were needed, that there is always more art than there are commercially viable contexts in which to exhibit it. Even artists with long and distinguished careers may have gallery shows only occasionally.

There are probably more unwritten back-stories in this exhibition than anyone has time to research properly. For such reasons, it is particularly helpful that the organizers of the exhibition have provided complete online documentation of the works and the artists’ accompanying statements.

One of my personal favorites here is Mark Schoon and Casey McGuire’s Crater Lake, a haunting, otherworldly landscape photograph — except that the lunar landscape being photographed is a fiction, a meticulously constructed sculpture.

Another of my faves is Christopher Shadwell’s 3, a surrealist-visionary landscape painting that resembles one of Max Ernst’s frottages. I could cite any number of others — national as well as local — at length, including such works as Ann Wood’s politically pointed digital photograph Citizenship Day.

I haven’t had the opportunity to see it, but I should mention that through June 25 Oglethorpe University Museum of Art is presenting Indian Miniatures from the Mehta Collection. This exhibit features many works that were formerly in the collection of the legendarily esteemed art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. This alone makes the exhibition worth considering.

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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.