For Art’s Sake - On the upswing
Atlanta Celebrates Photography gets new director
Just three months ago, it looked like the annual citywide photography event Atlanta Celebrates Photography might have gone the way of the dinosaurs and Milli Vanilli. Staff members were burned out and exhausted and ready to call it quits. But ACP co-founder Corinne Adams says outcry at the news of ACP’s folding and a sudden cash windfall saved the group from obliteration. An anonymous donor stepped in with a $15,000 challenge grant and ACP tapped into its own $25,000 cash reserve. The group decided it had enough moral and financial support to dig in its heels for the long haul.
Toward that end, ACP has hired a new executive director to lead the group’s phoenix-like rebirth.
Former Lowe Gallery Director Anne Dennington has left her post at the high-end Tula arts space for the new position with ACP, which began April 26. Dennington is a native of Arkansas and has been in Atlanta since 1989. In addition to her work at Lowe, Dennington has been an active fundraiser for 7 Stages and IMAGE Film & Video Center and has served on the boards of Art Papers and ATL Art 04.
Besides her long-term experience and connections to the Atlanta art scene, Dennington brings a pragmatic business edge to a world always in need of fundraising and networking talent. Dennington’s contacts with Atlanta collectors undoubtedly were selling points. “She already is as plugged in as anybody could be,” says Adams.
Dennington, who studied 19th-century French painting at Emory, is now stockpiling photography books and immersing herself in the medium that will surely dominate her thoughts in the months leading up to the October 2004 event.
Christopher McNulty’s wood sculptures at Saltworks Gallery (www.saltworksgallery.com) are old-school Sol LeWitt-style minimalism crossed with a healthy dose of understated humor not usually associated with such macho academic art movements. McNulty reveals that minimalism’s order is illusory, or at least difficult to attain — it took a lot of sawdust and wood glue to manufacture, the artist intimates.
Also on view are Anne-Marie Manker’s drawings, which would be almost sweet if they weren’t so haunting. Manker hones in on domesticated animals — rabbits, parakeets, dogs, guinea pigs — filling them in with full color while leaving her backgrounds as rudimentary sketches. These caged, groomed, manhandled creatures demonstrate, in a different way, the human desire for order and control of the natural world.
If Dan Flavin could make fluorescence his medium, why can’t Zane Lewis use water? The artist returns to his preferred H2O muse in the funny “Pink Lemonade (itty bitty)” in Saltworks’ Project Room. Viewers enter a pitch-black room where they are greeted with a crashing, locust swarm of human voices — the kind of scary-operatic orchestration familiar from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Only this time, viewers are not contemplating the origin of the human race, but a tiny vial of pink lemonade sitting on a pedestal.
The standout in the strong work on view in Georgia Photographers 2004 at the Atlanta Photography Group gallery (through May 21) has to be Savannah College of Art and Design professor Liz Darlington’s extraordinary images that suggest vintage daguerreotypes or film stills. Darlington’s black-and-white “piezographic prints” involve printing directly onto transparency film, which is then sandwiched between two panes of glass. Taken in countries from Latvia to Mexico, Darlington’s images of rural graveyards, sheep herders and a soldier confronting a grizzly bear look more like a visualized memory, something ethereal and fantastical magically caught beneath glass. In spirit and form, Darlington’s images harken back to the earliest days of photography, when the medium bewitched and delighted with the possibility it offered — of capturing nothing less than our imagination, and maybe even time itself.
Got myth?
Two versions of contemporary spiritual questing will be on view at local art spaces this May.
In conjunction with the Mythic Journeys (www.mythicjourneys.org) touchy-feely symposium at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, the Defoor Centre gallery will be presenting an art exhibition highlighting the works of some myth-esthetes.
Hollywood hunk and Lord of the Rings actor Viggo Mortensen is also a photographer whose images of Native American ghost dances will be shown in the Ancient Spirit, Modern Voice: The Mythic Journeys Art Exhibition May 1-June 12. Also featured will be work by film conceptual designers and artists Alan Lee (LOTR) and Brian Froud (Faeries, Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal).
And Atlanta’s own mystical mischief-makers will launch another Dirty South answer to Burning Man with their second annual Ripe event May 15 (www.ripeatlanta.com). Despite Ripe’s future-shock aesthetics, this year’s event is notable for some nostalgic Americana, including epic Frosty the Snowman and Giant Zippo Lighter sculptures.