calendario eventi  :: 

X

26/3/2010

Deluge

Athica - Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Athens

Curated by Lizzie Zucker Saltz
Guest Essayist: Ben Emanuel

Participating Artists: Tom Berenz (Oshkosh, WI), Jeff Lawerence Brown (Lawrenceville, GA), Mindy Kober (Houston, TX), Katherine McQueen (Athens, GA), Katherine Taylor (Atlanta, GA), Chuck von Schmidt (Dix Hills, NY), Mark Steinmetz (Athens, GA) and others TBA.

ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art presents its spring exhibition, Deluge, which features artists' explorations of our relationships with floods, their aftermath and the weather leading to them. Deluge is a study in how humanity reacts to the impacts of environmental forces beyond our control. A thought-provoking exhibit of paintings, photography, conceptual embroideries and a large sculptural installation, it consequently addresses global warming and land use issues. The works will be enhanced by a 3’ high water line painted directly on the gallery walls, designed to simulate the feeling of wading in the gallery. ATHICA’s 35th exhibit will be accompanied by a catalog penned by guest essayist Ben Emanuel. It runs from Saturday night, March 27 through Sunday, May 30, 2010.

Following the record-breaking floods of this past fall and winter --which followed an historic, severe drought--Deluge is timely in North Georgia. Yet the exhibit also explores fundamental and timeless questions of how people inhabit the natural landscape, both literally and emotionally. The works encourage audiences to look intently at the circumstances and scenes of floods -- some exhibiting an intense sensitivity to the natural environment and the social impacts of a flood, and some created at an intentional remove.

Featured artist Tom Berenz, a young painting professor at The University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, depicts overhead views of flooded urban and suburban landscapes and the automobiles found there. In starkly flat hues ranging from coffee-colored to olive green and even dark ruddy or purplish tones, Berenz presents the calm surface of floodwaters after the rain has ended. The roofs of cars emerge from the turbid water, their hoods and lower parts visible as ghostly outlines bobbing just below the surface. The ordered lines of dozens of cars parked at a shopping center or in a dealer's lot have disintegrated in places as powerful floodwaters have pushed the cars around, yet in Berenz's paintings all is still, calm and quiet.

The work ironically and subtly raises the question of whether gasoline consumption and the carbon it creates may have contributed to the very disaster that befell these new cars--it is as if we are at the scene of a funeral for these expensive material goods, mourning the waste of human effort and destroyed property as well of course as the natural environment inevitably polluted as a result of the chemicals leaking from the submerged vehicles. Berenz also weighs in with paintings of flooded suburban tract housing, pointedly addressing poor land use planning.

Atlanta painter Katherine Taylor, originally from Biloxi, MS, re-creates found images from television and internet media, zooming in here on flash floods in urban settings. This timely series is informed by her larger body of previous work based on the hurricanes and subsequent flooding impacting her hometown, from Camille to Katrina. The drawings she is debuting in Deluge specifically refer to the September 2009 Atlanta floods, representing urban views of flooding such as nearly-submerged road signs, the sites of washed-out culverts and car headlights reflecting off of the creek water rushing over a road.

Perhaps most exciting will be Taylor's large-scale, site-specific painting to be created on one of the gallery’s 19’ long walls the week before Deluge opens to the public. This will be adjoined on all sides by curator Lizzie Zucker Saltz’s request for a gallery-wide water-line painting to create the feeling that the gallery itself is underwater. The water-line will be executed by the artist’s assistant Jeff Brown, working collaboratively with Taylor on the 3’ high original piece. Brown is a recent Kennesaw State BFA graduate and former student of Taylor’s. Taylor is represented by Marcia Wood Gallery.

Conceptual sculptor Chuck von Schmidt of Long Island, New York will exhibit thirteen works from his ongoing and ever-growing series "Antediluvian Memories." Begun in 1995 near von Schmidt's birthplace in Paducah, Kentucky, each piece in the series consists of a handcrafted hourglass containing soil in its lower half and water in its upper half collected from a significant, history-making flood site. Later locales include New Orleans, Galveston, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Java, Venice and Prague. In addition, a brand new Atlanta piece created last fall in conjunction with ATHICA interns will be debuted.

Each hourglass is accompanied by a page in an artist-authored booklet featuring details about the historical location and the major flood in question, along with a picture taken at the scene of the soil and water collection, amusingly cordoned off by yellow ‘Art Scene’ tape. An experienced artist and art professor, von Schmidt has been exhibiting since 1968 and received his undergraduate degree from The Cooper Union, NYC in 1973 and his MFA from the City University of New York, Brooklyn College in 1977.

Newly Athenian Katherine McQueen, formerly an Austin, TX artist, turns the exhibit's gaze skyward, albeit through the lens of modern weather-map technology and images of rainstorms on Doppler radar. More salient is McQueen's choice of medium: cross-stitch embroidery. Her 7" by 9" cross-stitched series reflect the greens, yellows and reds of heavy rain moving across a landscape of county lines which, in some cases, could be anywhere in America. Initially ironic--with her tight stitching also rendering the loud screen text of TV weather reports and "severe weather alerts"--McQueen's meticulous handiwork asks viewers to examine their relationship to (and removal from) what might be a faraway disaster, but which may be wholly important wherever it's happening.

Similarly, Texan Mindy Kober's gouache-on-paper Hurricane Mandala takes the all-too-familiar overhead shape of a hurricane (as seen via satellite and/or radar), and removes it completely from its context to ask questions about the image itself--and the image's meaning for us -- as suggested by her title. As we become accustomed to viewing the spinning circle of an approaching hurricane on TV, does the shape still simply call up disaster or, like a mandala, something more? Kober has shown at ATHICA several times before, notably in January 2009’s Running on Empty.

Lastly, eminent photographer and longtime Athens’ resident Mark Steinmetz presents yet another take on the phenomenon of flooding, reminding us that in many cases, it is not a phenomenon at all, but rather something completely normal, seasonal and expected. His two photos, taken seven years apart from the same vantage point, reveal wetlands along Athens' Sandy Creek in winter or spring flood. This point is a key one for Deluge, as any investigation of flooding reveals that it is often an integral part of the function of natural systems. For this reason Steinmetz's photos also shed light on other works in the exhibit. Taylor or Berenz's works may well highlight areas that flood naturally and cyclically, long before they were--often inadvisably--built up by humans, and which may well continue to flood in the future.

More local artists’ participation will be announced at a later date. A series of related affiliated events have been planned to elucidate and supplement the issues addressed by these artworks. Gallery hours are: Thursdays: 6:00 - 9:00 p.m., Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays: 1:00 - 6:00 p.m. and by appointment.

This program is supported in part by the Grassroots Arts Program of the Georgia Council for the Arts through an appropriation of the Georgia General Assembly in partnership with the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center as well as by grants from Athens First Bank and Trust and the A-CC Mayor’s CIP grant. We are grateful for local funding from R.E.M. and in-kind sponsorships from Gameday Condominiums and Ashford Manor also make this exhibition possible. ATHICA is supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NYC and by a multi-year grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for Contemporary Art, NYC.
Curator & Essayist Biographies: Guest Essayist Ben Emanuel is known locally as an environmental activist and as the City Editor for Flagpole Magazine from 2005 to 2009. He currently works at GA River Network and is also the Oconee Projects Coordinator for Altamaha Riverkeeper, Inc. He graduated from UGA in 2002 with B.A. in English.

Curator Lizzie Zucker Saltz exhibited nationally as a sculpture and installation artist for a decade. She is the Artistic Director of ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Inc., which opened its doors in 2002. She founded ATHICA after familiarizing herself with the local art scene, writing art reviews and features for Flagpole Magazine from 1998 to 2000. She has also written for the international, non-profit Art Papers Magazine, publishing reviews and new stories intensively from 1998 to 2003, with two feature articles published in 2005.

As a freelance curator she has developed exhibits for the Athens area since 2000, such as Rock Art: An Exhibit Of Visual Art by Athens Musicians and Eclectic Electric: An Exhibit Of Electronic And Digital Art, both held at the Lyndon House Art Center. She curated many of the exhibits at ATHICA and serves as Senior Curator on all. She received her MFA from San Jose State University in 1993. Shortly after she moved to Athens, GA with her spouse, David Z. Saltz--currently the chair of the UGA Dept. of Theatre & Film Dept.--they collaborated on several large-scale New Media projects, which exhibited at the Georgia Museum of Art (2000), The Sweeney Gallery in Riverside in CA (2002), Presbyterian College in SC and the Detroit MONA in 2003. They have two children.

Affiliated Events:

Sunday, April 25
4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Cries and Whispers: 9/11, Climate Change, and Georgia
A lecture accompanied by animated graphics by Dr. James Porter
Dr. James Porter--Meigs Professor of Ecology at the University of Georgia and a marine ecologist by training--will present a lecture centered on climate predictions for the southeastern United States over the next 50 to 100 years. Employing animated graphics to examine predictions that southeastern states may be more affected by climate change than many northern states, Porter will offer a crystal ball into Georgia's environmental future.
$3 Suggested donation (but no one turned away for lack of funds.)

Thursday, April 29
7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Curator & Essayist Walk & Talk
Curator and ATHICA Director Lizzie Zucker Saltz will talk informally about the works in the exhibition and their relationship to climate change and the politics of land management.
Free!

Friday, May 14
7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Flood Lines: Watery Stories and Poems
A VOX Reading Series Event
Readings of original works by local writers and UGA MFA Creative Writing candidates
$3 - $6 Suggested donation (but no one turned away for lack of funds.)

Sunday, May 30
3:30 – 6:00 p.m.
Closing Day Events:
Panel Discussion with visiting and local artists
Moderated by Curator Lizzie Zucker Saltz & Guest Essayist Ben Emanuel.
Reception with the artists and other events TBA.
Free!

For Deluge information please contact:
Lizzie Zucker Saltz, ATHICA Director
Email: info@athica.org
Home phone (Not for publication) 706-208-0702, Cell 706-340-6891

Image: Katherine Taylor, Site Specific Wall Piece
(Model for ATHICA installation)

Opening Reception Saturday, March 27, 6 - 9p.m.

ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art
160 Tracy Street, Unit 4, Athens, GA 30601 USA
Gallery hours are: Thursdays: 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays: 1:00 - 6:00 p.m. and by appointment.

stampa

permanent link