Atlanta Arts category interest

From the venue:

Jane Foley: The Gentle Empty

Jun 8, 2024 - Aug 3, 2024

12pm - 5pm

Opening Reception | June 7, 7PM

Exhibition Tickets

Artist Talk | July 18, 7PM

2023/2024 Working Artist Project

This round of Working Artist Projects was curated by Dr. Vivian Li, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA)

About the Exhibition

“I have introduced neon into my studio practice and quickly found a deep affinity for it over the last year. Neon glass and concrete share certain qualities; they’re both liquid in their workable state, and both become brittle solids which can be strong yet fragile. To make some of these sculptures, I have formed ropes from fiber and cement, and made weavings around neons that both hold them up and tie them down. I also cast concrete directly into pool floats and balloons, capturing the shape of cavities made for air, allowing them to solidify with neon glass intertwined. I’m drawn to the care and play that goes into making these sculptures work, physically. Each work often takes several broken versions to create one where the glass stays intact. There are moments where grief and damage move through these media, as well as cycles of repair and resilience. When complete, these forms, squeezed and wrapped by neons and dried in my hands, bear marks of the support and touch required to make them. The resulting sculptures’ hard and soft qualities, appearing both liquid and solid, are poetically thick with parallels to gender fluidity and the precariousness of “passing” as a queer person, existing as both and neither of the binary states, but rather something else outside them.”

–Jane Foley

About Jane Foley

Jane Foley has created public sound sculptures for the Architecture Triennale in Lisbon, Portugal and La Friche Belle de Mai in Marseille, France with Zurich-based Sound Development City, as well as composed sounds that played in taxicabs throughout the 5th Marrakech Biennale in Morocco. In Atlanta, they have created works for the High Museum, Flux Projects, The Atlanta Contemporary, and the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport, among others. Foley currently teaches art at Emory University.

Major funding provided by the Charles Loridans Foundation, the Antinori Foundation, and the AEC Trust, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts.