Multi-artist pileup

If you are an artist within a 150-mile radius of Atlanta and have ever included a car or highway in your artwork, chances are you are featured in Reading Between the Lanes: Artists on the Road at Spruill Gallery.

There are some 38-plus artists represented in the show, resulting in a serious visual bottleneck. In addition to artwork, the show features odd tchotchkes like a vintage model car, T-shirts airbrushed with car graphics and a plaster rendition of a birthday cake decorated with a tiny road scene. The vast collection of art and stuff suggests some legal accumulation of evidence in the case to prove that America is one car-crazy nation. But why struggle so mightily when not too many would dispute the centrality of the automobile in American culture?

So, just what do the Lanes artists have to say about the road? Many simply document the car and the highway as features of modern life. But the best artists, and Carl Martin is undoubtedly one of them, dig a little deeper. Martin’s jaw-droppingly gorgeous photographs locate a hard-knocks stretch of American despair in his portraits of grizzled, beaten down-looking people and their equally abject rides.

On the opposite end of the car-centric spectrum are Judy Kuniansky’s delightfully sexy close-up photographs of hood ornaments, tailfins and taillights, which establish just why some people go loop-de-loop for a vintage coupe.

Several artists capture the sensory aspects of one nation under asphalt. Wendy Alexander’s existential landscape photography features overhead shots of parking lots and highway cloverleafs that offer a vertigo-inducing view of our antlike insignificance. And Bill Orisich’s video combining a driver’s-eye view of the road and multitrack audio of talk radio prattle and stream-of-consciousness rants suggest our cars as a kind of sensory deprivation chamber where we are left alone with the cacophony of our mental soundtracks.

But the trouble with Lanes is the same with any top-heavy group show: Many good ideas get lost in a maddening traffic jam.

Reading Between the Lanes: Artists on the Road runs through Aug. 22 at the Spruill Gallery, 4681 Ashford Dunwoody Road. Wed.-Sun., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. www.spruillarts.org. 770-394-4019.