Weekend Arts Agenda: ‘Power Failure’ May 02 2014

• Courtesy Kibbee Gallery
• Rich Gere

Rich Gere is a printmaker, by trade but his career is shadowed by a second, three-dimensional body of work. These are the pieces he’ll be exhibiting in Power Failure, opening at Kibbee on Saturday - found object-y sculptures; an audio installation; a lot of flashlights. “They really underlyingly investigate how we manage power while we are on the planet - both societally, as a group of people responsible for the planet, and individually, how we relate to one another and howe we are able to use and manage the power given,” Gere says.

The aesthetic, what Gere calls “farmpunk,” is grounded in his childhood “keeping things runing and cobbling things together in such a way that you were always modifying a system everytime you repaired it, not necessarily always for the better.” In extrapolating on his work, Gere references Foucault, Y2K and JFK. Audiences have a way of bringing themselves to the work: at one environmental-theme exhibit, Gere says he was surprised by his conservative audience. “They didn’t want to argue about it,” he says. “They wanted to talk about how they fit into the piece.” At Kibbee with a reception from-10 p.m.

More for your weekend, below.

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FRIDAY

• Courtesy Thomas Dean Fine Art
• Scott Upton, “Incoming Tide,” mixed media on canvas 30x48 in.

Scott Upton will open A Golden Sunrise at Thomas Dean Fine Art. The gallery calls him “one of the Southeast’s most talented and successful abstract painters.” That superlative belies Upton’s juxtaposition of texture and color - you want to touch his pieces, get right to the center of them, almost as soon as you see them. With a reception from 6-8 p.m.

SATURDAY

• Courtesy Atlanta Photography Group
• Lais Pointes, “Lais and Gabrielle’s Shena”

Here’s something weird: Lais Pontes will speak about her crowdsourced photography project Born Nowhere at the Tula Art Center. According to the Atlanta Photography Group, which is organizing the talk, the project “uses Facebook as a platform for crowd-sourcing identities. By using self-portraits and modifying them via digital techniques, the photographer transforms facial characteristics, giving herself a new personality.” User comments further refine each persona through the psychoanalytic transposition of “projection.” More simply, “What one sees is what one wants to see.” At 11 a.m.

SUNDAY

PSA: The Spruill Center for the Arts will have its annual pottery/art sale all weekend, with proceeds benefiting the center and its participating artists. So much art! Hours/etc. here.