Spalding Nix Gallery Winter Exhibitions (fridays)

From the venue:

FORGING AHEAD

January 17 - March 7

Spalding Nix Fine Art proudly presents FORGING AHEAD, a presentation of four solo shows by Heather Bird Harris, Andrew Herzog, Robert Hightower and Jamie Bourgeois. ‘Forging’ is defined as the act of making or shaping a metal object with heat; the act of creating a relationship or new conditions; or to produce a copy or imitation of something for the purpose of deception. ‘Forging ahead’ is to make quick progress, moving boldly against resistance. Marking the first exhibition of 2025, the artists in this show examine our history and our impacts on the planet and one another, creating work that informs how we might move forward to shape our future.

Heather Bird Harris’s series of new paintings “love as large as grief demands” transforms mapped industrial scars in Georgia and Louisiana into regenerative landscapes made with site-specific materials. Andrew Herzog’s “Day(‘)s End” is a series of rock pigment and mixed media paintings that meditate on the residues left by human activity—material, cultural and temporal—and the ways in which they inform the landscapes of the present and future. Robert Hightower’s “Icons of the Toybox” is a series of oil and enamel paintings that reflect on the mass production and marketing of non-essential products starting in the 1950s, inaugurating our transition from basic capitalism to ‘American Consumerism.’ Jamie Bourgeois’s “Petrochemical PLANTS” is a series of earth pigment & assemblage paintings that explore the pervasive and insidious nature of plastics and petrochemicals as they disrupt and accumulate in ecosystems and in our bodies.

Opening Reception - Friday, January 17, 6 - 8 p.m. & Saturday, January 18, 12 - 4 p.m.

Heather Bird Harris

love as large as grief demands

Heather ‘Bird’ Harris is an Atlanta-based artist and educator who prioritizes caretaking and connection. Her work explores the throughlines between history and ecological crises, engaging with communities, scientists, and site-specific materials to investigate land memory, systems of complicity, and possibilities for emergence. Her recent body of work, “love as large as grief demands,” transforms mapped industrial scars in Georgia and Louisiana into regenerative landscapes made with site-specific materials. Through shapes that can either build the future or jeopardize it— mycorrhizal webs, children’s drawing, coal and soil runoff, heliotropic growth —the works offer personal reflections on what hangs in the balance and what’s in our water, emphasizing the necessity of imagining possibility grounded in the physical histories of our landscapes.