Weekend Arts Agenda: ‘MAYhem’ May 16 2014

The Atllanta Ballet’s season-closing MAYhem premieres this weekend, featuring a ballet’s bouquet of first and lasts. (The ballet more simply declares it “a no holds barred explosion of creativity and energy.”) MAYhem will see the world premiere of Three, by Artistic Director John McFall (his first in five years); the final performance by 19-year Company veteran Christine Winkler; an encore of Jorma Elo’s 1st Flash; and the world premiere of choreographer-in-residence Helen Pickett’s The Exiled (who you may remember).

The Exiled is Pickett’s first work since her appointment and her major narrative work - an adaptation of Sartre’s this-is-not-a-play play No Exit. As Pickett told our Andrew Alexander, “We can all look at these plays and recognize the things we do to ourselves. We cringe, we laugh, and we have that moment of recognition. I hope the audience can relate with the work in that way, through what the characters are going through.”

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FRIDAY

• Courtesy Get This
• Left: Austin Eddy, “all this weight,” 2014, 60x46 in., cut paper, spray paint, charcoal, acrylic, oil on raw canvas. Right: Harrison Keys, “Counter,” 2014, 20x16 in., oil on panel

Austin Eddy and Harrison Keys will open dual solo exhibits at Get This Gallery: Eddy’s someone to ride the river with (featuring figurative, bizarre works that are shaded as though the sun is hitting them though a blender) and Keys’ Always Aweigh (“images are suggestive of adult situations even as they evoke the innocence of childhood”) suggest similarities for being so different and for being paired together. With a reception from 7-10 p.m.

• Courtesy the artist
• Macey Ley, detail of “Athena 2000” (installation)

You Are There, an exhibitionary combination of whole-body installations and artist books from Macey Ley, examines that sense of thereness, in time, geography, and personhood. Ley “uses everyday objects and myths as a starting point, creating experiences that both invite and challenge viewers to examine how memory of places and beliefs in myths shape identity.” With a reception at Further Art from 6-9 p.m.

SATURDAY

Craig Dongoski will open The Primates Notebook at whitespace while Charlie Watt’s opens Just Past the Peripheral at whitespace’s whitespec. Dongoski’s style shifts somewhat with each exhibition while nonetheless remaining marked by a Dongoski-ness - he has a fondness for color rendered as billowing vertices, like sound given life. Watts is more discursive and more glam, a polyglot photog. Look at this lady on fire! Receptions for both are 7-10 p.m.