For Art’s Sake - Outside looking in
All walks of life represented in Mirror Project
Next to private detectives stalking unfaithful spouses, there is one other profession where a solitary nature and an ability to blend into the background are richly rewarded. Photographers have often profited from their ability to observe from the sidelines and create art from the outside looking in, as three Georgia State graduate student photographers so deftly illustrate in __The Mirror Project film series.
Fiona Buttigieg, Hadley Breckenridge and Brittany Lunsford are the intriguing subjects of the ongoing social documentary, which screens April 26 at the Apache Cafe (404-876-5436).
In the short film “La Visiòn,” Buttigieg, Breckenridge and Lunsford talk about their photographic pursuits, which have taken viewers to the hidden worlds of men’s bathrooms and Atlanta train yards. Growing up, all three artists seem to have shared the experience of looking at society from the margins, a perspective that has greatly affected their art making.
The Mirror Project is the creation of Colombia-born Roberto Arevalo, a longtime filmmaker who recently became an MFA candidate at Georgia State.
Arevalo grew up poor, one of five children to a single mother living on the outskirts of Bogota. That seminal experience of observing life from the margins inspired his mission to represent people from all walks of life in The Mirror Project, which he has been working on since 1992 and will continue in Atlanta.
“So often when people think of mosaics — I’m not trying to offend anybody by saying this — they think of craft kinds of things, with broken china,” says Jennifer Tipton.
Tipton is a Duluth artist who is trying to make mosaics, if not sexy, then at least contenders in an art scene which tends to push them to the margins.
Her Dichroic glass mural “Identity,” a glistening 41-inch-by-28-inch image of the artist’s thumb does a great job of exploding mosaics’ fusty connection to kitchen back splashes and banality-by-committee public art projects. “Identity” also received the “Best in Show” Modesto Lanzone award at this year’s Society of American Mosaic Artists convention in San Francisco.
Though it’s the material and the form that preoccupy Tipton, her “Identity” also speaks to an age when our identities are reduced to Social Security numbers and fingerprints, and to a climate of surveillance and suspicion that has only intensified in the wake of Sept. 11.
You wouldn’t necessarily think, from her perch in a Duluth subdivision, that Tipton was a rule breaker. Her brick colonial on a quiet street is an orderly place where the children are as bright and shiny as the bits of cut glass in her studio. Tipton homeschools her four young children in a classroom off her home’s main foyer. The demands of home schooling and piece work in the evenings to pay for her art supplies means her artwork occupies the lowliest berth on her “to do” list. But like hundreds of local artists plugging away in various locales — city and suburb — across Atlanta, Tipton sticks with it. She dreams of mosaic geodes made of carved Styrofoam and fused glass jellyfish mosaics and all the other possibilities the form, which has been seen as so limited for so long, might allow.
And speaking of prize winners, Hampton artist Benjamin Jones is now the proud recipient of a $20,000 award from the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Jones’ folk art-inspired drawings were selected from among 430 national nominees by jurors including artist Cindy Sherman. Jones says he will use his award for travel and art supplies. His work will be featured in the solo show Isolation at Barbara Archer Gallery May 7 and in Contemporary Southern Drawings From the Permanent Collection at the High beginning April 22.
Buckhead seems like the last place you’d find a peep show. But if you part the lurid red velvet curtain in the back room of the Jackson Fine Art gallery you’ll get what the old carnies like to call “an eyeful.” Photographer Alvin Booth’s conceptual skin show “Photo Booth” is a witty variation on the turn-of-the-century nickelodeons where scientific fascination and sex collided, as they do again in Booth’s filmic parade of fetishy, pregnant, graceful — and plumb nekkid — beauties. Through May 1.
Audacious, rude and exceptionally naughty, Elevation Gallery’s Atomic Pop exhibition looks at the U.S. of A through the twisted lens of its own pop culture, with nods to quintessential Pop stars Oldenburg, Warhol and Rosenquist. Smarty britches curator/artist Denise King roasts the NASCAR holy sacraments of Slim Jims and Skoal while Bethany Marchman’s trippy, beautifully rendered paintings put a woman’s spin on Mark Ryden-style big-eyed waifs. And Kathy King’s baby cradles/coffins ornamented with frank, gut-churning assessments of parenthood offer a dose of heady content to anchor the wild style show. Through May 7.
Many may be surprised to learn that the High Museum even has a curator of modern and contemporary art, since post-Impressionism art is a rare occurrence at the increasingly old-school museum. Contemporary art curator Carrie Przybilla will leave that curatorial post in August to pursue a Ph.D. at Emory and a national search for her successor is under way.