NEXUS TO NOW:
NEXUS TO NOW:
Project Spaces at Atlanta Contemporary
Project Spaces at Atlanta Contemporary
BY LOGAN LOCKNER
APRIL 11TH, 2018
RESPONSE > ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Though it has changed names and locations multiple times since its founding, the museum now known as Atlanta Contemporary traces its history to 1973 with the formation of the artists’ cooperative Nexus. Frustrated by attempts at censorship and a lack of local spaces exhibiting photography, five students at Georgia State University—Bill Brown, Jim Frazer, Jack Front, Deidre Murphy, and Michael Reagan—originally opened an artist-run storefront gallery in Atlanta’s Virginia-Highlands neighborhood, at a time when today’s luxury condos would have been difficult to foresee. Nearly a decade into its operations, critic and curator Tom Patterson described Nexus in Contemporary Art Southeast, a publication that was eventually absorbed by Atlanta-based magazine Art Papers, as “something halfway between a museum and an alternative space.”
Harry Gould Harvey IV installation view. Image credit: Atlanta Contemporary.
Untitled by Harry Gould Harvey IV. Image credit: Atlanta Contemporary.
Opening in conjunction with a pair of headline shows by artists Kamrooz Aram and Joe Minter earlier this spring, Jamaican-Canadian artist Tau Lewis exhibited two sculptural assemblages in the subterranean Chute Space. Though it wasn’t the first show in this gray, cave-like setting (a designation belonging to Atlanta artist Jason Benson’s imaginative installation The Green Dragon), this presentation of Lewis’s sculptures forcefully demonstrated the visual benefits of displaying certain artworks outside of standardized white cubes. (This argument, of course, was most famously articulated by critic and artist Brian O’Doherty over the course of three articles originally published in Artforum in 1976, the same year Nexus received its first grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and began publishing artist’s books as Nexus Press.)
In Lewis’s assemblages, found materials including chunks of concrete, rusted chains, fur, and wire are combined with faces sculpted in blue plaster to create forms suggestive of busts or masks. Positioned on a wooden pedestal near industrial fixtures within the former coal chute, one of the sculptures especially highlighted the material similarities shared by the artworks and the project space that housed them. Beyond a shared patina of rust, Lewis’s assemblages and Chute Space are also both the results of acts of reclamation; in one case, of discarded materials, and in the other, of defunct space.
Opening in conjunction with a pair of headline shows by artists Kamrooz Aram and Joe Minter earlier this spring, Jamaican-Canadian artist Tau Lewis exhibited two sculptural assemblages in the subterranean Chute Space. Though it wasn’t the first show in this gray, cave-like setting (a designation belonging to Atlanta artist Jason Benson’s imaginative installation The Green Dragon), this presentation of Lewis’s sculptures forcefully demonstrated the visual benefits of displaying certain artworks outside of standardized white cubes. (This argument, of course, was most famously articulated by critic and artist Brian O’Doherty over the course of three articles originally published in Artforum in 1976, the same year Nexus received its first grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and began publishing artist’s books as Nexus Press.)
In Lewis’s assemblages, found materials including chunks of concrete, rusted chains, fur, and wire are combined with faces sculpted in blue plaster to create forms suggestive of busts or masks. Positioned on a wooden pedestal near industrial fixtures within the former coal chute, one of the sculptures especially highlighted the material similarities shared by the artworks and the project space that housed them. Beyond a shared patina of rust, Lewis’s assemblages and Chute Space are also both the results of acts of reclamation; in one case, of discarded materials, and in the other, of defunct space.
An audio installation by artist Nikita Gale followed Lewis’s work in Chute Space. An Atlanta native who has been based in Los Angeles since moving there for graduate school in 2014, Gale often utilizes the forms of culturally charged commodities—most notably, cars and music equipment—to consider how interpersonal relationships are altered by individuals’ emotional and psychic attachments to technology. In a text accompanying her MFA thesis exhibition, LOW MAINTENANCE: i only believe in horsepower now, Gale writes, “When I touch I accompany this touch with an expectation—when I touch I expect a swift, consistent, and predictable response. Anything falling outside of those expectations is unacceptable… [and] suggests a need for repair.” The possibility that Gale could be discussing either a lover or an iPhone in this passage reveals the acuity with which her recent work explores the challenges and thrills of intimacy.
An audio installation by artist Nikita Gale followed Lewis’s work in Chute Space. An Atlanta native who has been based in Los Angeles since moving there for graduate school in 2014, Gale often utilizes the forms of culturally charged commodities—most notably, cars and music equipment—to consider how interpersonal relationships are altered by individuals’ emotional and psychic attachments to technology. In a text accompanying her MFA thesis exhibition, LOW MAINTENANCE: i only believe in horsepower now, Gale writes, “When I touch I accompany this touch with an expectation—when I touch I expect a swift, consistent, and predictable response. Anything falling outside of those expectations is unacceptable… [and] suggests a need for repair.” The possibility that Gale could be discussing either a lover or an iPhone in this passage reveals the acuity with which her recent work explores the challenges and thrills of intimacy.
Tau Lewis installation views. Image credit: Atlanta Contemporary.
In her Chute Space installation Keynote Drift, Gale draws on a vague narrative that has been suggested in her work before: two lovers/friends in the intimate but confined space of a vehicle caught in traffic on the LA freeway. Instead of reproducing a previously recorded conversation, as she did in her 2016 audio installation Civic Union, in Keynote Drift Gale veers toward auditory abstraction. A large speaker on a wooden pedestal that previously displayed one of Lewis’s assemblages plays the harsh sound of a trumpet, an object that unites Gale’s interests in musical instruments, car accessories, and technologies that extend human abilities. The trumpet seems to imitate automotive noises such as a motor’s hum and the screech of tires, but it also evokes the sort of raw emotional tension that arises between two people because of things unsaid or impossible to say. In a dramatic and canny shift from the presentation of Lewis’s assemblages, Keynote Drift nearly disregards Chute Space’s visual attributes in favor of its acoustic ones.
While the renovated coal chute is perhaps Atlanta Contemporary’s most distinctive project space, the innovativeness it indicates is apparent across the museum’s campus. Artists Sable Elyse Smith, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, and Sandra Mujinga have each shown experimental video works at the museum this spring, and video art pioneer Sara Hornbacher recently hosted a pop-up installation with collaborator Monica Duncan in a vacant artist’s studio next to her own. Artist studios have been a fixture at the institution since 1977—in fact, Nikita Gale occupied one before leaving Atlanta four years ago.
Sandra Mujinga, ILYNL (It's Like You Never Left), 2016; single-channel HD video with sound, 12 min. 23 sec. Image Credit: Atlanta Contemporary.
Consistent with the museum’s genesis as Nexus in 70s, Erin Jane Nelson and Jason Benson began operating the artist-run gallery Species in their former Atlanta Contemporary studio in 2016. Katya Tepper—whose large-scale installation How Does the External Shape Shape the Internal Shape is on view through this summer on the museum’s Atrium Wall—first exhibited similar work at Species before Nelson and Benson vacated their studio last June. Since the opening of the revived Atlanta Biennial at the museum in 2016, Southern artist-run spaces including Nashville’s Mild Climate, Little Rock’s Good Weather, and Lexington’s Institute 193 have been invited to present small exhibitions on-site at Atlanta Contemporary. After curating satellite projects at venues including the Lower East Side gallery Bodega, Species returned to Atlanta Contemporary for the current on-site show, an exhibition by self-taught Rhode Island artist Harry Gould Harvey IV.
Because of the number and variety of its exhibition and project spaces, Atlanta Contemporary can present work by over 100 artists during a single year, ranging from recent Georgia State grads to internationally emerging artists exhibiting for the first time in the South. Regardless of changes to its official name, in this sense Atlanta Contemporary remains a vital nexus—a point of connection and exchange—for contemporary art in Atlanta and beyond.
Katya Tepper, How Does the External Shape Shape the Internal Shape, 2017; mixed media, dimensions variable. Image Credit: Atlanta Contemporary.
Editor's Note: New exhibitions open to the public at Atlanta Contemporary on Thursday, April 12th @ 7PM.
Exhibitions by Harry Gould Harvey IV and Katya Tepper will also remain on view.
Editor's Note: New exhibitions open to the public at Atlanta Contemporary on Thursday, April 12th @ 7PM.
Exhibitions by Harry Gould Harvey IV and Katya Tepper will also remain on view.
ABOUT ATLANTA CONTEMPORARY
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center is a non-profit, non-collecting institution dedicated to the creation, presentation, and advancement of contemporary art by emerging and established artists. Atlanta Contemporary creates a diverse cultural landscape for artists, arts professionals, and the art-interested public through its exhibitions, educational programming, and studio artist program.
535 Means Street NW
Atlanta, GA 30318
(404) 688-1970
ABOUT LOGAN LOCKNER
Logan Lockner is a writer living in Atlanta. His essays and criticism have appeared in Art Papers, Pelican Bomb, Photograph, and elsewhere, and he is a contributing editor for Burnaway. His first curatorial project, Lauren Sanders: Interiors and Props, will open at the Welch Galleries at Atlanta's Georgia State University next month.
RESPONSE
A feature of project reviews experienced in person. Response will provide artists with much needed critical response to their work. Response is opinion-based but is not an op-ed.