atlanta arts tagged interest

Two exhibitions currently on display in Atlanta illustrate the growing number of world cultures represented in the city. They also illustrate the difficulty of complete cross-cultural comprehension.

Darya Fard and Lizzy Storm’s Myth Material, at Georgia State University’s Ernest G. Welch School of Art andamp; Design Gallery through August 29, involves the theme of, in the words of the exhibition’s wall text, “how acts of revolution can not only bring about unpredictable change but also a melting of our sense of place in the world.”

Fard, the 2024 Edge Award winner from the Forward Arts Foundation, holds an MFA degree in drawing, painting and printmaking from Georgia State University and MA and BA degrees from educational institutions in Tehran, Iran. Her multidisciplinary installations grounded in Persian culture but addressing contemporary aesthetic and philosophical concerns led curator EC Flamming to ask her to collaborate with Storm, whose work deals with parallel themes.

The immersive installation includes prints arranged in various sculptural configurations, from individual freestanding hangings to linked ribbons of imagery. Images on the wall serve as projection screens for Fard’s videos of dance performances. A soundtrack accompanies the installation, the result of a collaboration between Fard and musician Ehsan Guniyai.

The fact that the musical instrument used in the soundtrack is hard to identify illustrates the problems of what theorists might call “cultural competence.” (Despite a modest familiarity with Persian art and classics, my knowledge of musical instruments used in Persian culture is pretty much limited to the oud.) The installation rather brilliantly induces disorientation, but I am uncertain how much prior knowledge might assist viewers in retaining their “sense of place in the world.” However, the aesthetic conventions (or “cultural codes”) of contemporary art practice are uppermost in this exhibition.

Ger-Art Gallery continues to present Karen Lamassonne’s Uncontainable (Traigo de Todo) through July 20. Based on the retrospective exhibition presented earlier in Berlin, New York and Medellin, the show covers Lamassonne’s artistic career from cinematic collaborations with the avant-garde groups of artists and filmmakers in Cali, Colombia, in the 1970s and early 1980s to recent works made in Atlanta during the pandemic.

The exhibition demonstrates Lamassonne’s versatile range of media, from easel painting to unsettlingly unconventional sculpture (for example, the Mano peluda/Hairy Hand series), with some of her short video pieces presented in a side gallery installation. (There will be a screening of Pura Sangre, Lamassonne’s 1982 debut cinematic collaboration, on July 13.)

Although eroticism and female desire have always been a component of Lamassonne’s aesthetic, she states that her emphasis on non-erotic frontal nudity made her work unwelcome in the commercial galleries she approached when she arrived in Atlanta in the 1990s after working in Colombia and New York. Despite her inclusion in museum shows in New York and Los Angeles in 2017, her oeuvre remained mostly overlooked in her current city of residence until her three-country retrospective was highlighted in Ger-Art’s As South As It Gets.

Just as Fard’s art uses the visual vocabulary of contemporary artmaking to transcend cultural barriers, Lamassonne’s subject matter largely requires no translation. A notably neutral 1979 series simply documents every aspect of a bathroom, both in use and unoccupied.

On an unrelated note, the many admirers of Kate Javens’ monumental portrait-style paintings of animals will be delighted to learn that Good Neighbor, her first similarly scaled portrayal of human subjects, has been extended by Marcia Wood Gallery to June 28. Javens’ emotionally compelling paintings are actual portraits of individuals who have faithfully performed volunteer service in the upper Manhattan community in which she lives. But she regards the works as also representing the more universal “people around you who save your life every day –the people who show up, who you trust, who live lives of service –and, frankly, it’s all of us.”

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Dr. Jerry Cullum’s reviews and essays have appeared in Art Papers magazine, Raw Vision, Art in America, ARTnews, International Review of African American Art and many other popular and scholarly journals. In 2020, he was awarded the Rabkin Prize for his outstanding contribution to arts journalism.