Sunday, July 18, 2004
Atlanta link comes vividly to the forefront
By Jerry Cullum
FOR THE JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
"Home Grown" can mean several things, and Solomon Projects has taken full advantage of the ambiguity in this show of artists born, educated or working in Atlanta.
John Koegel is the example of home-grown art by an artist raised and trained elsewhere. His baroque, large-scale drawings have retained the same air of mystery, complexity and wit over the years, as shown by a grid of never-before-exhibited 1985 drawings juxtaposed with one from 2004. The other artists here, who range in age from late '20s to late '30s, got their start locally (three at Atlanta College of Art, two at the University of Georgia). All except one then went on to the Northeast or California for graduate school.
Tyler Stallings has gained fame or notoriety as an innovative museum curator, and his little paintings of big-eyed people and animals show the quality of his imagination. Poised somewhere between sci-fi and the kitsch of Margaret Keane, they're disturbing and indisputably serious, mixing and transmuting usually despised genres in the same way that his exhibitions have.
Wendy Given's "Domestic Predators" collages and photography possess a similar willingness to confront cuteness and make it scary. These intelligently arranged critters are totally unthreatening, but you'll never look at doggies or kitties quite the same way again.
Ridley Howard's preparatory drawings for paintings share this general unnerving quality, in part because they render near-cliché scenes (such as a newsworthy figure emerging from a jetliner) in a sparsely composed way that would suggest children's drawings if the faces and proportions weren't so precise.
Douglas Weathersby's photos look both colorful and ominous, since they so clearly feature swept-up dust and debris. But the DVD from which these stills are extracted is an extraordinary piece of visual poetry, creating musical-looking scenes of light and air from the paint scrapings and Sheetrock dust with which the artist works professionally.
After this profusion of emotionally arousing images, the cool abstraction of Kathryn Refi's outlines of driving routes comes as something of a respite. Her grid of linear assemblages in starkly white shadow boxes is also the perfect complement to Koegel's richly filled grid of graphite drawings; we've gone from elusively excessive images in the work of the oldest of the artists in the show to equally elusive conceptual mappings in the work of the youngest. They also happen to be the two who live here, but part of the point of "Home Grown" is the difficulty of separating out the East Coast, Left Coast or Southern strands; it may be home-grown, but it's all art, not "local art."
The verdict: A great survey of a slice of home-grown products.