Preview: Radcliffe Bailey at the High

The High will exhibit the most comprehensive exhibition of Bailey's work to date

By Wyatt Williams Tuesday June 21, 2011 01:31 PM EDT

COURTESY JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY
Radcliffe Bailey, "Tricky"

Atlanta's Radcliffe Bailey has been showing at galleries around Atlanta and across the country for the two decades now, amassing a body of work that will culminate this weekend in Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine, a career-spanning exhibition at the High. The large exhibition, the most comprehensive of Bailey's work to date, includes works that reach back to the early nineties, when Bailey had just graduated art school, to new works that haven't been exhibited before.

Bailey studied as a sculptor at the Atlanta College of Art, but his work has taken shape in wildly different forms - gouache painting, collage works, modified found objects, installations of piano keys, glass works, and so forth. Often, the pieces seem to utilizing a number of these disciplines - combining sculptural practices with layers of painting and collage - to a degree that his works fall outside of simple description as either sculpture or painting.

Instead of a chronological arrangement, the works have been installed around themes in Bailey's work: "Blood,""Blues," and "Water." Combined this way, Bailey's references to the MIddle Passage, for example, are brought into greater resonance through their appearance in works throughout the "Water" group. A massive installation, "Windward Coast," dominates the center of the exhibition with a water-like arrangement of piano keys. The piece includes a clattering recording of Bailey's process (scattering piano keys on the wood floor) emanating from a conch shell.

Bailey's work is often influenced by, or makes reference to, African sculptural work, some of which has been installed alongside Bailey's work to emphasize the link. In a press release, Carol Thompson, the High's Curator of African Art, asserts, "Bailey's art traces the complex network of his aesthetic DNA to create an antidote to cultural and historical amnesia."

Preview a few images from the show and get more details about the exhibition after the jump.