Four Atlanta-based artists, all in their early 30s, are currently having shows that offer unusually revealing reflections on the range of today’s American cultural styles in a city and region that’s changing faster than many feel they can keep up with.
If it weren’t for the portentous title written on hand-lettered signs in Evan Jones’ Destruction Derby Dreamland, at Thomas Deans Fine Art through July 12, and the fact that the show opens with a triptych titled The USA on Fire, it would be easy to assume that this is a straightforward celebration of a particular strain of American culture. Tightly rendered paintings of stock cars and loosely rendered portraits of NASCAR race drivers abound.
But before visitors reach the gallery containing these artworks, they are confronted with I Never Paid a Dime and I Got My Money’s Worth. Here an iconic Elvis is posed against the clouds of the Challenger shuttle explosion, his image flanked at the margins by the word that forms the title of one of his movies, Girls! Girls! Girls!
This theme of unrestrained self-destruction is echoed in a painting that repeats the exhibition title. In Destruction Derby Dreamland, a provocatively dressed young woman is shown against the backdrop of the carnival-poster flames first seen in The USA on Fire, with the words “THRILL RIDE!” and aggressive American eagles as additional decorations.
The paintings’ apparent braggadocio is tinged with subtle ambiguity. For example, a Revolutionary War flag’s pine tree emblem is replaced with tree-shaped air fresheners in An Appeal to Heaven. Those are the words written above the tree on the original flag and above the heroically posed car that is the central feature of the painting.
The most conceptually challenging painting in the show is Sunset in the West, in which Caravaggio’s half-clad Bacchus dominates the foreground, framed in grape leaves against a luridly tinted sunset.
Above him are two iconic bull-riding cowboys facing one another. The cowboy mounted on the white bull wears a black hat, and the one on the black bull wears a white hat.
Thanks to a succession of differently portentous paintings featuring contested aspects of present-day American culture, the show turns into a Rorschach test: What the viewer reads into it says more about the viewer than about the artist’s intent.
At Whitespace Gallery through August 5, Charlie Watts’ Entangled presents large-scale photographs of people of various ethnicities (alone or in pairs) nestled in nonsexual nakedness in the greenery of metro Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest – or in a body of water in the same location.
The lushly inviting woodland is the hotly contested site of what’s now known as Cop City, Atlanta’s projected police training site. That goes unmentioned, however, in this gentle evocation of human beings finding a form of renewed harmony with the natural world that still surrounds them. Watts describes her rapidly changing native city as “a fragile, interdependent, entangled world.”
Also through August 5, Whitespace’s Whitespec project room is filled with the paintings in Aineki Traverso’s No te elcanzon los ojos. Translated as “your eyes are not sufficient,” the title denotes what Traverso describes as “a beauty that transcends sight.”
The works are sources of mystery, paintings of her own eyes, traced with her eyes closed, and other fragmentary glimpses of an interior vision that she calls “a world too overwhelming to experience.” They are apt symbols for the complexity of her origin as the daughter of an Argentinian mother and an American father of Chinese and Japanese descent. She is increasingly recognized in this city of entangled ethnicities, being the 2024 winner of Forward Arts Foundation’s Edge Award.
Hannah Adair’s Chapel in the free-standing Shedspace in the garden adjacent to Whitespace Gallery, both questions and honors the ubiquitous small religious spaces of the rural Southern environment. Most of these tiny, unobtrusive buildings represent various Christian denominations with small congregations, but the landscape also holds similarly structured chapels, nondenominational but available for prayer, wedding ceremonies and other moments of ritual.
Fascinated by the forms of arched windows and church bells, Adair has transformed the Shed with ceramic representations of both, but adorned with images from nature instead of religious symbolism.
Do these forms seem to create a contemplative mood because of past experience of such spaces, or do they induce contemplation in and of themselves?
Whatever the answer, Adair has evoked a quiet spiritual dimension that is as much a part of the Southern environment as the demonstrative brand of display that is all over Jones’ exhibition. And both exist amid the increasingly complicated interplay of nature and culture that is an intrinsic part of Watts’ and Traverso’s work.
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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.
