Review: Artist Angus Galloway dives into family, naval history in striking exhibit

New Found Land by Angus Galloway, at Gallery 72 through August 5, is composed of five large wall drawings. The artist began these black-and-white and grayscale drawings during the pandemic, when he undertook a two-year investigation into his grandfather John Dymond’s service in the British Royal Navy during World War II on the Newfoundland, a Fiji-Class destroyer. The exhibition extends the artist’s search for family history and demonstrates his continuing passion for experimentation in drawing by using a different mode for each wall, all related by content but not form.

Perhaps most striking is Razzle Dazzle, an all-black cut-paper collage work attached to a white wall. This pictorial representation of a World War II battleship is abstracted into patterns similar to op-art that use both positive and negative space to create shifting viewpoints. The stark and precise means used in this playful arrangement are visually exceptionally strong: The wall positively vibrates with energy.

Galloway created these works on-site during a two-week residency at the gallery, pressuring himself to produce a full body of work during that time and emphasizing the spontaneity of the result. By allowing occupants and visitors to the building to see him at work, he drew the public into a conversation about the process of art making.

This experimentation and transparency reflect the vision of curator Kevin Sipp, an artist in his own right, who understands that insight into an artist’s method of working can be integral to viewing and understanding the work. He places art in contexts that engage both artist and viewer in a discourse of ideas around the production and reception of the work.

Engine Room, charcoal on paper, fills an entire wall. The drawing employs perspective to create a deep space. This drawing portrays the inside and mechanical underbelly of a naval destroyer as an intriguing space filled with the functional parts of these large ships. This drawing was made in the gallery; the use of space and tone, the lines and gestures have an energy akin to writing in highly expressionistic squiggles and curvilinear marks.

In the adjacent gallery are three wall drawings, each of which fills the entire gallery. Each is completely different from the others in its medium and the manner in which it was created, but all pertain to Galloway’s delineation of the naval destroyer. Picture Day, a three-dimensional work, juts out into the space. This work is in gray and white paper made into cones and shelves that mimic the bow of a ship. It is not clear what the cones are meant to represent but their regularity and spikiness suggest a barrage of weaponry. It is fierce.

Graveyard is an installation of drawings of parts of submarines and ships in cut outs of black, white or gray paper hung directly on the wall in a delightfully haphazard fashion. These have been drawn on with charcoal to render the details of naval war vessels, many which were torpedoed during the war and left floating in vast disarray.

The drawing that is most different in concept and realization is Wake, the most abstract of all the works in the exhibition. Its white marks feel like swirling bits of energy on a black ground. These marks have the character of automatic writing meant to recreate the sense of ripples of light on water as seen from a boat, but they read more as an abstraction. Wake is a significant departure from the war-themed naval machinery presented in the other drawings; however, this kind of experimentation is essential to Galloway’s art.

Right after the opening of this exhibit, Galloway departed with his family to Nashville, where he will be a professor at Vanderbilt University. His passion for teaching drawing is evident in this exhibition in which he presents five different ways of drawing, all addressing his family history. He will be missed here in Atlanta.

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Deanna Sirlin is an artist and writer. She is known internationally for large-scale installations that have covered the sides of buildings from Atlanta to Venice, Italy. Her book, She’s Got What It Takes: American Women Artists in Dialogue, (2013) is a critical yet intimate look at the lives and work of nine noted American women artists.