Emerging visions
Up-and-coming artists shine in Georgia 7
The Georgia 7 show is solid evidence that what Georgia lacks in book learnin’, it makes up for in talented young artists.
There is plenty of reason to be invigorated by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia show. Not only does the work look sexy and new, but, more importantly, much of it contains trace elements of big ideas and an engagement with art history — offering not a regurgitation but an essential addendum to what’s already been said. All of the Georgia 7 artists prove that great work alone is like a gorgeous woman in a coma. Sure, she looks good, but unless you’re Pedro Almodòvar, you don’t want to spend a lot of time in her company.
Take for instance Zane Lewis’ neo-minimalist installation “Tubescape.” Composed of 16-foot-long, floor-to-ceiling plastic tubes filled with blue liquid, the piece responds to the cold, hard steel of minimalism with fresh, clean water. And while much conceptual work has dealt with routine, systems and how perspective changes everything, Kathryn Refi brings an almost tender, humanist approach to such lofty ideas. Her satellite-view paintings of friends’ street addresses suggest that within each city grid and heat-seeking missile’s target, there’s a beating heart.
The best two examples of artists with something profound to say are Marcus Kenney and Sheila Pree, who couldn’t be more different in style.
Archeologist-meets-conceptualist Kenney is like Noam Chomsky on a thrift store spree. He’s a mix-master of the mad mothball flurry of imagery and matter that makes up our cultural legacy. For his brainy decoupage, Kenney takes aged bits of found objects — scraps of paint-by-numbers paintings, roofing paper, vintage wallpaper, magazine and newspaper ads, receipts — and assembles them into pieces that suggest visual culture as a boneyard. Somehow, we keep buying what the man is selling, even when the wear and tear begins to show.
Artists from Richard Hamilton to the Soviet Constructivists have used this collage technique before, but there is something special in Kenney’s work, which pushes a retro-pleasure button without letting the gray matter off the hook. And unlike other members of his generation, Kenney is no facile high-ironist. His image of a ’50s-style family merrily preparing a barbecue while garbage piles up around them manages to contain political critique beneath its pleasing kitsch. In the distance, behind that barrier of trash, Middle Easterners, oil derricks and American soldiers supply the exotic reality propping up their delusional paradise of charcoal briquettes and perpetually green lawns.
Likewise, Kenney’s “Myth of Progress” offers a witty commentary on humankind’s quest for knowledge, linking the discovery of fire with that other hallmark of evolutionary progress: Coca-Cola. From civilization’s heat source to sugar water — just think, it only took about a million years!
Though not immediately apparent, Pree’s color photographs of suburban Atlantans mix documentary and staged photography techniques to say something powerful about the complexities of assimilation. She photographs nicely appointed homes, scrubbed to a spotless shine. No speck of dust or worry clings to the Venetian blinds or the fluffy white rugs. But within these comfortably middle-class surroundings are people far more exotic than the Cleavers: athletic, prosperous African-Americans reading O magazine or reflected momentarily in an antique secretary’s mirror. Pree is after something more political than is immediately apparent, suggesting both a process of blending in while holding onto the touchstones of one’s culture — a vintage photo of a relative, an antique couch, black dolls. One understands immediately the difficulty of that two-pronged proposition.