Visual Arts

People assault the system in various ways: Student revolutionaries throw rocks, toddlers pitch fits, and punk rockers diss the queen.

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Collage artists get out the scissors and glue.

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In the right hands, collage can be a humorous, inventive form. By culling bits and pieces of popular culture from books and magazines and then assembling them into new arrangements, collage comments on the...

Greeting cards inevitably depict intertwined couples in silhouette, gazing at the ocean from a sandy beach.

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Despite the cliché, something undeniably hard-wired into our beings elicits introspection when confronted by the deep and wide blue sea. That vast space dwarfs our existence and can unleash a profound melancholy, as in the lovely, existentially unsettling drawings in pastel chalk by...

Juan Miguel Ramos' work is reminiscent of the defiant, affirmative, outsider chic of Richard Linklater's Slacker and the late-'80s Gen X zeitgeist that divided the world into the clued-in and the clueless, the with it and the woefully witless.

The San Antonio-based emerging artist's solo show at Romo Gallery has some of the subversive appeal of underground graphic novels by Daniel Clowes and...

The paper-themed exhibitions at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center are about as bipolar as they come.

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Like the "Love" and "Hate" tattooed on Robert Mitchum's knuckles in The Night of the Hunter, there is good and evil, and — to completely belabor the pulpy metaphor — works that soar like airplanes and others that lie as limply as a grease-stained McDonald's bag.

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Local...

For the third year, Atlanta's growing roster of galleries is teaming up for ATLart06, a three-week event that, like the Brand Atlanta campaign, seems determined to remind citizens of Atlanta that there is this thing called culture out there some of you may want to check out when the thrill of lap dances at the Cheetah and the Barney's Co-Op opening wear off.

ATLart06's kickoff event,...

Romo Gallery in Castleberry Hill has tended to gravitate toward edgy conceptual art done by artists in their 20s and 30s. But owner Sam Romo departs from that generational grid in his small survey of works by Philip Morsberger, a 72-year-old artist whose work has a youthful, winsome touch.

Morsberger's spry quality may derive from his source imagery. The artist draws from the image bank of his...

The female body is the conventional muse of male artists contemplating form, vanity, nature and the less high-falutin' matter of sex appeal. The female mind, less so.

Michael Holsomback is the exception to that rule, taking a pointed interest in psychology-infused portraits of women.

His five paintings on view in the Holiday Show at Chrysalis Gallery feel like approximations of memory or...

William Fields is a largely self-taught artist from Winston-Salem, N.C., whose only formal art training came at Duke University where he studied medical illustration for a time.

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That medical connection is apropos. His intricate drawings in colored pencil and pastel look like expressionistic, mystical visualizations of the internal workings of the body. But it's a body rendered not entirely...

Dead at 24 when his Porsche Spyder collided with an oncoming car on Calif. Hwy. 41, James Dean joined the member's-only death cult of the beautiful and the damned whose early bow-outs include JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain.

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Like some of the key inventions of the 20th century — abstract expressionism, the hydrogen bomb — James Dean's rebel-cool image has become...

Small is underrated. In a contemporary art world where photographs keep getting larger and larger, and the '80s mantra of ever bigger Schnabelian canvases still holds sway, tiny is practically a sign of weakness, synonymous with someone who wants their reputation to stay as small as their work.

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Thank goodness for the occasional show that allows one to revel in the minute and just plain puny...

TV preachers divide the world into saints and sinners, but most of us know there's a little bit of da nasty and da nice in human nature. Saturday Night/Sunday Morning at City Gallery East is an exhibition that ponders that moral culture clash.

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Saturday Night/Sunday Morning is more than happy to speak in absolutes and tends to uphold the Berlin Wall division between juke jointing and holy...

Construction workers and window washers were putting the finishing touches on the Renzo Piano-revamped High Museum last week in anticipation of modernism's takeover of Midtown.

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But further down Peachtree Street, classicism made a valiant last ditch effort to storm the city. Slowly, very slowly.

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Amid the bustling midday traffic on Oct. 27, a team of four ebony horses inched down...

There are cozy grandmas in slippers and aprons and support hose pooling around their ankles.

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There are rich grandmas in princess-y white bedrooms ornamented with gaudy gold furniture and a housemaid standing at the ready.

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And there are vampy grandmas, their thinning platinum hair prodded into a coquettish flip, their come-hither eyes rimmed with black liner and an ashtray full of...

Artists have been asked to paint on all manner of objects: violins, cows, dinner plates. While the relationship between those "canvases" and their makers seems tenuous, there is some suggestive crossover between the subcultural worlds of artists and skateboarders.

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Both, in the vernacular, tend to "fight the power" of traditional consumer values and define personal achievement outside the...

J. Ivcevich is an artist who wears many hats: DJ, sculptor, painter, photographer, sock designer.

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That jack-of-all-trades approach fosters an openness to experimentation that can yield wonderfully fresh results. But it can also demonstrate a refusal to lasso multiple concepts together into one coherent little filly. Both tendencies are on view in Ivcevich's solo show at Barbara Archer...

Making art isn't supposed to be a risky business, but British artist Chris Pig says that on several occasions, his sketches have led to ugly confrontations.

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Sitting in cafes in London or Spain, Pig generally works on three sketches at a time, turning his attention from one subject to the next when someone senses his gaze is lingering too long.

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At times, his subjects have grown wary of...

Pam Moxley's unexpectedly gorgeous photograph "Gotham" captures Atlanta's proverbial ain't-it-grand skyline and serpentine highway. But countering the clichéd, coffee-table-book vision of the city with a vantage point slightly above the frenetic auto action, Moxley's image looks down on cascading foliage that threatens to spill over onto the highway like some devouring sci-fi menace.

Moxley...

Paint will get you close to an artist.

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But it can often feel like drawing gets you even closer.

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You feel as if you are sitting on the artist's hunched shoulder, a co-conspirator in the creation. There is something intimate and direct in looking at the visible weight of the artist's hand on the pencil indicating aggression, control, contentment, caution.

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The majority of works in...

If "gooey" is a genre, then much of the work in Working Artists in Brooklyn is representative of the New Ooze. In highly self-conscious colors and mutating forms, many of these artists convey the power of the bodily and organic, even within a technology-dominated age.

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Les Joynes' abstract paintings done in the fleshy pinks and fatty whites of viscera are reminiscent of painter Philip...

Flesh can be an artist's greatest resource.

Influential feminist artists like Orlan, Hannah Wilke and Adrian Piper have used their bodies - in performance pieces, in photographs and street theater - to illuminating ends to protest narrow standards of beauty, sexual violence or racial stereotypes.

Moroccan-born, Boston-based artist Lalla Essaydi follows in this long-standing tradition. Her...

Santiago De Paoli is slight, with the perfect, vaguely melancholy features of a French New Wave film star.

Born in Buenos Aires, De Paoli studied biology at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. But the work was difficult, too difficult for something he should love. So he made a radical change. In 2000, De Paoli began studying art at the Atlanta College of Art.

He has since been included in the...

Scott Dupree, organizer of You Can't Fool Mother Nature at B-Complex, is a diplomat when he should probably be a dictator.

An artist himself (whose work appears in the show), Dupree clearly wants to show support and offer a forum for his fellow creatives in this exhibition of more than 60 artists.

In theory, it's a noble endeavor. In practice, it's a gut-busting Shoney's buffet, with the...

Yarn has visited some genuine horrors upon the planet: god-awful afghans, the kind of scarves you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy, toilet paper cozies.

But in Annie Greene's outrageously charming works on view in The Farm in Yarn at the Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art, yarn evokes the artist's memories of her childhood summers in the '40s on her grandparents Adel, Ga., farm. A kind of crafty...

When artists talk about process, to paraphrase a New Age clich, they are often invoking the idea that "it's not the destination, it's the journey."

Art isn't limited to the end result. It encompasses what the artist experiences along the way and the accidents and epiphanies that occur. An art object has a kind of life span, during and after its completion.

For years, artist and printmaker...

Better than anything Jeff Koons ever dreamed up, the yellow Golden Mantella Frog is one of the preposterously hued amphibians on display in Frogs: A Chorus of Colors at Fernbank Museum of Natural History.

The size of a cough drop, the GMF is so adorable, you may be compelled by the paradoxical formula of cuteness, to cuddle and smash it all at once. For those who are drawn more to the dark...

Conor McGrady draws homes. Row houses. Apartment buildings. Individual tract homes.

But instead of the comfort and security synonymous with home, in his images there is only desolation.

In McGrady's neighborhoods, the streets are empty and every window is black, devoid of the warming light of human occupancy.

Drawn in charcoal or painted in gouache, the landscape is devoid of detail, like...

Atlanta's status as a cultural hub is continually debated, but it can take credit for birthin' its share of cultural creatives - even if they end up jumping ship for someplace metro-sexier.

In the early '90s, design firm Graphic Havoc emerged from Atlanta College of Art and Georgia Tech students who started applying their blend of graffiti and text-based imagineering to invites for Young Blood...

The Spruill Gallery is a funky oasis in a slice of Dunwoody that is slowly strangling from man-made lakes, Vegas-scale theme restaurants and super-sized retail.

In its desire to offer a friendly, accessible form of art as an antidote to God Retail, the gallery often errs too far on the artsy-craftsy side and a warm-and-fuzzy inclusiveness. Many of the artists offer thoughtful, provocative...

Abra is a rite of passage, the Playtex armor that signifies double-A or B-cup rank in the army of womanhood.

But panties are forever.

The fabric may change - from the day-of-the-week cotton of girlhood to the polyester leopard bikinis of barstool-hugging adulthood. And that slim stretch of fabric may modestly cover or brazenly announce What Lies Beneath. But the song remains the same. A...

Who knew art would one day come down to a battle for "most alienated" status? As gallery owner Barbara Archer hastens to remind visitors, the term "outsider" has swelled outrageously.

Originally, it referred to the inmates in mental institutions and prisoners whose work painter Jean Dubuffet labeled "art brut." But in recent decades, the term "outsider" has become, ironically, as all-inclusive...

It is 6 o'clock outside of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center's artist studios and the sky has transformed, as if on cue, into a perfect Laura Noel tapestry. The sunset, a lurid Barbie Dream House pink, works in garish harmony with the indigo metallic gleam of the city's skyscrapers.

Photographer Noel has always delighted in capturing the flashy and color-drenched, but empty and soul-less,...

There is something about Annette Gates' sculptures that invites lecherous thoughts.

Who wouldn't want to cop a quick feel of Gates' odd, sensual petting zoo of creatures? They cover the walls of Kiang Gallery like barnacles or some invasive army of Godzilla microbes. If painting is all about fooling the eye with its imitation of reality, sculpture seems to stoke a related but unique impulse....

Meryl Truett's South is a drive-by landscape of decrepit signage, from neon signs advertising greasy spoons and barbecue joints decorated with cartoon piggies to homemade signs proclaiming religious prophesy.

Truett's South, as seen in her exhibition Thump Queen and Other Southern Anomalies at Barbara Archer Gallery, is more Carl Hiaasen than Tennessee Williams. Alternating between color...

Are sports fans doing the wave expressing the wonders of Darwinian progress? How about the woman shown in embarrassing detail contemplating the goober she has just scooped from her eye?

If the video installation NATURAL: SELECTION at Eyedrum doesn't exactly bolster your sense of the human race's march of progress, it does give a sense of the poignancy and quirkiness of being human. Looking at...

The Savannah Gallery may be the most expensive college catalogue ever produced.

The sleek white gallery on Roswell Road is an expertly designed, well-positioned 3-D recruiting tool for the Savannah College of Art and Design, which operates the space. And shows at Savannah can at times feel curated more around its artists' SCAD affiliation than any cohesive theme. That is certainly the case in...

At the heart of every portrait lies a virtual impossibility. How can a person's essence be captured in one image when human beings are by definition so changeable and manifold?

And yet, painters and photographers remain certain that their subjects' souls lie within their reach. Several of the five photographers represented in the ArtWalk at Lenox Square show About Face aspire to capture that...

African-Americans undeniably needed a better ad campaign for their race than the one they've gotten from white spin doctors whose previous representations of "black" has been a public relations fiasco.

Cedric Smith's artistic mission in Deeply Rooted is to alter and correct decades of propaganda. His solo show at Matre Gallery features two bodies of work — portraits and advertisements...

The Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University is a sanctuary of the ancient in a city fatally in love with the tear-down. And its plethora of Greek and Roman antiquities consistently earns it a top five slot among university-owned classical art collections.

In consultation with the building's architect, Michael Graves, the museum's Greek and Roman Art Galleries have been renovated and...

French slang for "orgasm" is "le petit mort," or "the little death." Sex entails a sudden spasm of life immediately followed by a lull, and it is that lull, the aftermath of a great shock, that concerns painter Katherine Taylor.

A powerful atmosphere of eros hangs over the car crashes and other disasters in Taylor's solo show at Marcia Wood Gallery. Taylor taps into a morbid, perverse...

What you think of Pat Magers' paintings may be influenced by what you think of family.

If the associations are cozy, Magers has work to fit that bill. If they tend to be more cynical, it would be easy to find ammunition for that, too, in her aesthetically varied, but thoughtful work in Little Family at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center Gallery. Family is the source of both comfort and anxiety,...

For three decades, documentary photographer Wendy Ewald has centered her art on the omnipresent but often ignored world of children.

Ewald has worked to change what documentary means and what it can do. Earlier generations of documentary photographers were often outsiders charting hidden worlds, whether it was Jacob Riis recording the abuses of young laborers and the horrific living conditions...

On Labor Day weekend, while families engage in wholesome picnicking and ladies bid adieu to their white shoes, hordes of black-clad disciples of myth and legend will descend on Atlanta's Marriott Marquis for their annual rite of passage, the 2004 Dragon*Con.

The event will also feature the Dragon*Con 2004 Art Show, with more than 250 artists represented, including the female answer to...

What with Folk Fest last month and Artexpo Atlanta on the horizon, Atlanta is becoming a veritable art fair hub.

Art fairs — from Art Basel in Miami, the Armory Show in New York and the Frieze Art Fair in London — have become some of the most prestigious cultural events on the arts radar. They're much like any trade show, only instead of, say, medical supplies, the articles being...

Why do Southerners go loop-de-loop for the nutty, the eccentric and the otherwise touched? Is there something programmed into the regional DNA to make us revere people like Elvis and Howard Finster or the freak-show characters of Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews and Carl Hiaasen when the rest of the country shakes its head in wonderment?

There is no better illustration of the local deification...

Matt Haffner's Scenes from a Hero's Tale makes one ponder all of the ways movies have come to define codes of behavior and morality. In a time when real-life heroes seem as rare as an honest man in Washington, the movie heroes portrayed by Humphrey Bogart, Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger have become our icons of what is sexy, cool and brave.

The "hero" in Haffner's works is the...

Before the Chattahoochee River became Atlanta's Big Gulp, there was a little tributary trickling through the city called Peachtree Creek, which quenched the thirsts, powered the lights and baptized the souls of the city's citizenry.

Photographer and urban explorer Dave Kaufman was so drawn to the idea of this forgotten crik around which much of Atlanta once flourished, that he put his canoe...

If you are an artist within a 150-mile radius of Atlanta and have ever included a car or highway in your artwork, chances are you are featured in Reading Between the Lanes: Artists on the Road at Spruill Gallery.

There are some 38-plus artists represented in the show, resulting in a serious visual bottleneck. In addition to artwork, the show features odd tchotchkes like a vintage model car,...

The stodgy old dioramas and woolly mammoth skeletons of childhood natural history museums have now given way to super-fly multimedia infotainment bazaars like Fernbank Museum of Natural History's The Genomic Revolution, whose design features myriad video screens and the sound and light effects of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

The exhibition, which originated at New York's American Museum of...

The five artists in The Man Show at the Georgia State University Gallery want you to feel their pain. But with its idiot box title and an opening night reception sponsored by Hooters featuring a keg of beer and hot dogs (get it?), the irony is that even as men try to shrug off gender stereotypes, society keeps forcing them to conform.

With one notable exception (artist Angus Galloway's...

Ideas of solitude and alienation read loud and clear in the Savannah Gallery show Sense of Otherness. There are countless images in this group show of men, women and children frozen in stock-still, rabbit-in-the-headlights poses that convey feelings of estrangement and dislocation.

Otherness tries to make a case for the cultural specificity of that sense of isolation by centering the show on...

If there's a story going on in the group show Lore — devoted to "myth, magic and fairy tales" — some might find themselves longing for Cliff Notes to decipher it.

Cecelia Kane's "The Memory Bunny" is representative of the very personal but often opaque tall-tales going down in this eight-woman show.

Kane's slapdash, cryptic installation references some vague trauma through its...

In artist Jacob Escobedo's retro-infused universe at Young Blood Gallery, even mildly sinister material looks irresistibly cuddly. The Cartoon Network art director's bunnies, squirrels and birds look like "Ren & Stimpy" characters by way of conceptual artist Takashi Murakami.

Suggesting the acid-tinged demands of Madison Avenue, whose suggestions have come to sound like barked commands, his...

Two thoughtful, complicated perspectives on the body are currently holding court at Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery. Both are informed by the pleasingly off-kilter views of their female curators, Danielle Roney and artist Jen Mazer, whose investigations of flesh and blood have a transcendent dimension.

Eyedrum's Small Gallery has, of late, become a shockingly estrogen-centric place, as evidenced...

Mexico City-based artist Trini paints modern life in the most identifiably modern locale: the city.

Her slightly hazy acrylic paintings of taxi cabs on nighttime streets suggest New York, while other sunlit images of elderly men on bicycles and tiny, European-style cars suggest an Asian metropolis. Trini captures these scenes with a convincing mastery of color. Bright sunlight bounces off...

In his minimalism-meets-M.C. Escher style, artist W.C. Richardson works with subtle issues of perception.

His brightly colored paintings in burnt orange, red and inky blue explore the line between chaos and order. And the urge to impose order, to figure out what visual information to emphasize seems the crux of Richardson's paintings. We tend to assume — as resolution-craving beings...

The word "shelter" can mean the physical protection of a roof, and also the emotional protection of family. Both the literal and spiritual connotations of that word are employed in artist Cooper Sanchez's exhibition at the Inman Park alternative gallery White Space.

Shelter's documentation of the comforts of nature and old-timey aesthetics is steeped in a Southern boy's imagination....

Salvador Dali's surrealist imagebank of garish album cover-worthy dreamscapes is one of the best known in 20th-century art. For that reason the prints on display in Salvador Dali: 100 Years at Skot Foreman Fine Art will feel to many like a shocking departure from the artist's trippy lexicon of melting clocks and headless nude torsos.

A silly, fanciful, even confectionary Dali is on display in...

The colors of the paintings in Puntos de Vista: Five Latin American Artists in Atlanta at ArtWalk are so delirious, they inspire a Wizard of Oz moment.

Real life suddenly seems black and white compared to the juicy limes, molten oranges and Chiquita yellows employed by the five artists. The color scheme speaks a language of sun and water, bright stucco buildings, Technicolor bird plumage and...

When the words "warm and fuzzy" can be used to describe an artist's work, you might expect portraits of glossy-eyed ducklings or Thomas Kinkade's wisteria-draped covered bridges.

But Canadian artist Kim Ouellette manages to make cuddly conceptual work. And she does it by using a distinctly warm and fuzzy medium that seems perfectly suited to her regional roots. If Southern artists seem...

There is a long tradition of political and artistic concern for how women are treated in a society. It's called "feminism." But there's no such term to encapsulate the gender typecasting of being male.

However, the provocative show PG-13: Male Adolescent Identity in the Age of Video Culture at Georgia State University's Art & Design Gallery suggests that, like girls, boys play their own...

You can practically smell the aroma of tuna fish sandwiches and potato chips wafting off the exhibits in Lunch Box Memories. Memory turns out to be a very appropriate word choice for these pop culture madeleines of metal and TV graphics, capable of provoking Proustian fugues into the personal and communal past.

This exhibit of that most iconoclastically American of objects charts a progression...

Castleberry Hill artist Diane Hause initially wanted to feature 30 years of her work at her Peters Street workspace and gallery. But she laughs that she didn't have room in her 2,200-square-foot gallery.

Instead, the work in "20/50" covers a 20-year span in which Hause's concerns have remained surprisingly unchanged. Whether in painting, collage, prints, drawing or assemblage, the Hause...

The Atlanta gallery scene is a story of ebb and flow. Just when it seems the city has reached a critical density of galleries and it's blue skies from here on out, something or someone departs, upsetting the balance.

On the blue skies front, 2003 saw the opening of some significant galleries in unexpected locations. Skot Foreman brought his eponymous gallery with its high-end...

1. One Planet Under a Groove: Hip-Hop and Contemporary Art, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art

This sharp, funky traveling show featured a multimedia look at the impact of hip-hop culture on art.

2. Paris in the Age of Impressionism: Masterworks from the Musée d'Orsay, The High Museum of Art

From Eiffel Tower souvenirs to nouveau art vases, this expansive show looked beyond the obvious oil...

The news that Nexus Press was suspending operations last February after 26 years in business came with a mixture of outrage and apathy on the Atlanta art scene.

Nexus Press, operated by the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, was one of the country's few independent experimental offset presses dedicated to the production of artist books. The Contemporary's executive director Rob Smulian...

Even if you've never heard of the Roswell-based design firm of Lorenc + Yoo, you have undoubtedly seen their work.

They have designed the graphic facade of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, the stone entrance markers for Ansley Park and the exterior marquees for North Point Mall and the Woodruff Arts Center.

Since its inception in 1978, the firm has been virtually unlimited in its scope,...

Every picture is supposed to tell a story. But photographers struggle with the fact that an image laden with insight and meaning to them does not necessarily translate to viewers.

In her exhibition of black-and-white photographs, Jennifer Julian seeks to capture people, often friends and family, in gestures and expressions that reveal their inner emotional workings.

Julian's goal is an...

Unless you lived in a plastic bubble á la John Travolta, if you were a child in the '60s and '70s, you couldn't ignore the strains of the television jingle, "Lite-Brite, making things with light. What a sight, making things with Lite-Brite!"

Thomas Edison may have invented the light bulb, but Marvin Glass, the da Vinci of plastic, made it fun. (The Chicago-based freelance toy designer also...

Joy Drury Cox's photographs of domestic interiors specialize in an anti-decor, stripped free of personality or individuality. Like canned air freshener or deodorant, the neat-as-a-pin, color-coordinated bathrooms and monastic bedrooms that Cox photographs serve to deny the bodily functions and, by extension, the human lives that unfold in them.

It is hard to imagine anything like "relaxation"...

Southern Pop couldn't have found a more perfect venue than Lenox Square's ArtWalk. In a space devoted to seductive and crude enticements to consume, Southern Pop examines an American landscape defined by comparable urges to spend! spend! spend!

With a nod to Pop artists of the '60s who took the consumer culture of advertisements, comic books and TV as their inspiration, Southern Pop features...

If the phantasmagoria of the human unconscious could be interpreted not by Salvador Dali, but by a combination of Modigliani, Marc Chagall and Cirque de Soleil, you'd have some idea of the lyrical spin artist Duy Huynh puts on psychology.

This Vietnamese-born, Charlotte-based artist's paintings can currently be seen at Virginia-Highland's Aliya Gallery. Using a palette of rich earth and jewel...

The Altoids Curiously Strong Collection exhibition of emerging artists at the Atlanta College of Art Gallery is an inspiring, provocative look at what's shaking on the national art scene.

For four years, the Curiously Strong show has featured a selection of contemporary artists whose work is chosen by a team of curators and gallery directors for inclusion in this traveling show.

Curiously...

R. Land's art work offers two things currently in short supply on the Atlanta art scene: One of them is humor.

That snarky wit is evident from the get-go in the Mike Kelley-esque faux-religious banner that dominates the entrance to Land's Crescent Room show. The banner's riff on religious boosterism shows a perky anthropomorphic cross beating the devil to an unholy pulp. Executed in felt, the...

Ah the thematic group show. She's a slippery miss, hard to get a hold on but as tantalizing to curators as Mt. Everest is to mountaineers. The bold ones prevail, but a badly broken and bloody majority wind up dropping from her craggy face and plummeting into a great chasm of curators past.

Imagine Nation is one such endeavor, a vaguely formulated exhibition of 11 artists working within the...

In her solo show at Youngblood Gallery, recent Atlanta College of Art graduate Mimi Hashimoto offers some of the more bizarre and distinctive self-portraits to rear their heads in recent memory.

Blood-red and decorated with both English and Japanese text, Hashimoto's portraits feature the artist as a thin, defiantly naked, edgy young thing gazing back at the viewer. The mixed-media works are...

Are the bad boys and girls of Eyedrum becoming white-gloved and easily flustered Establishment-types?

Two months ago, Skip Williamson, a noted local countercultural cartoonist who has worked with R. Crumb and Playboy, volunteered his talents to paint a sign — which has evolved into a mural — on the exterior wall of Eyedrum's alternative arts space on MLK Drive. He began work on...

A child's birthday party should be a consummately happy event. But the talented painter Mia Merlin looks at that celebration through the wiser eyes of an adult. Removing nostalgia's blinders, Merlin's lovely, bittersweet paintings instead capture the truth of childhood as a mixture of expectation, anxiety, wonder and loneliness.

Drawing from home movies of her own family's birthday parties,...

With 178 works of art in the mix, there's a pretty fair chance that something Looks Good on Paper in the Spruill Center for the Arts Gallery exhibition.

The second annual pulp show, which is loaded with riches and fluff, asks artists who have worked frequently on paper and those who are new to the medium to contribute work to this Paperalooza. A doozy of a -looza it is, too. The Spruill Center...

Tom Wesselmann's Great American Nudes are like billboards advertising, simply, "sex." This original Pop artist's nudes are featured in states of perpetual recline and come-hither vamping, arranging their bodies for the best view, making with the bedroom eyes and the parted legs.

Wesselmann's ultra-colorful prints in shades of lime, magenta, lemon Pledge yellow and grape are on the surface a...

Barbie has been used so often as an artistic muse and fantasy appliance, it seemed like she had nothing more to say — that her symbolic critique in the service of feminism had been maxed out.

Recent Georgia State MFA graduate Sheila Pree's work, however, suggests that Barbie has more to teach us about a notion of perfection etched into the mind's eye, which mingles the plastic and the...

Sarah Hobbs translates psychological states to photographs whose trappings are as carefully arranged as a movie set. Give me a disorder, Hobbs suggests, and I will show you its manifestation, whether it's the downy, cottony confusion of "Memory Loss" or the gooey, chocolate-painted walls of "Obsessiveness."

These mini-worlds of psychic distress can have profound resonance, but at other times...

Loss of innocence, rage, pride in institutions like the flag and the noble labor of firemen — all of these issues and more are addressed in True Colors: Meditations on the American Spirit at SunTrust Plaza Gallery. The post-Sept. 11 omnibus struggles to capture the cataclysmic philosophical shift that occurred for Americans in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

True Colors features work...

Entry into someone else's home is entry into an alien universe, where the smells, the furnishings, the pictures on the wall are uncanny and unfamiliar.

Weathering Time, a multimedia installation about home at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, bridges that gap between a familiar idea of home and a strange, unfamiliar one. It is an invitation to occupy, for a moment, another person's home in...

Hodgson Photo Service, tucked into a 14th Street strip mall next to the Silver Skillet, is one of the quirkier venues for the multi-tentacled Atlanta Celebrates Photography event, now in its sweeping-up-the-confetti and pulling-down-the-streamers phase of its month-long photo-palooza.

Some of the work in Judy Kuniansky's show On the Edge can veer into well-trod territory. Typical is a...

Like a mirage luring gamblers to their doom, Katherine Taylor's oil paintings of Mississippi casinos observed from a great distance capture the changeable, bewitching aspects of light. Taylor uses paint to ambient effect, attempting to capture the properties that can make the human animal as susceptible to luminescence as so many moths, flapping against the heat.

Taylor's paintings present...

The fledgling Saltworks Gallery continues its run of aesthetically high standards with a solo show by Kathryn Refi, a recent University of Georgia master's of fine arts graduate.

Cool, architectural — but personal — minimalism defines Refi's rendering of autobiography into clean statistics. The artist documents "The Distance I Walked" in a day on an enormous wall-sized sheet of...

The current exhibition at the Atlanta College of Art Gallery is a must-do. Where else in town can you experience a live seismic data stream from the Hayward Fault line in California? Or see the world through the eyes of Tillie, the telerobotic doll? When it comes to artful play with new media, Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace is off the hook.

ACA Gallery director Lisa Fischman, who...

Duality dominates the bilingual exhibition Belonging / Pertenecer at City Gallery East this fall. Works by 10 Latino artists based in Atlanta, New York and Miami recall the poignancy of acculturation through painting, collage, sculpture, photography, masks and totemic objects.

While many contemporary artists have abandoned explicit ethnic themes in favor of more universal concerns, these...

Amateur-taken night photos rarely turn out well. The blurry, runny images we snap with our 35mm cameras usually end up in the garbage, our hopes for capturing spectacular evening images dashed.

Michael Kenna built his career on moody, black-and-white photography taken at dawn, dusk and pitch-black night. His chilling, atmospheric prints of the snowy Russian countryside, French architecture and...

Artist Olivia ThomAson uses her acclaimed gallery, the Primitive Eye, not just to display unique exhibitions of folk art, but also to expose fledgling artists to the community. "Everybody has got to start somewhere," she says.

Four years ago, Thomason created the Dog Days Folk Art Festival to introduce the public to her new gallery, and give rising folk artists a chance to display their work....

A suburban museum recovering from near financial meltdown looks to reinvent itself and still please — and challenge — its core audience. An impossible task?

The Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art sure hopes not. Opening this weekend, Georgia Crossroads: Intersections in a Changing Landscape takes the museum places it hasn't been before. Curated by Jerry Cullum, senior editor for Art...

When Georgia Schley Ritchie began curating shows in London, she says she was just another person interested in British art. But in Atlanta, Schley Ritchie's shows are a break from the ordinary. This weekend's More Cool Britannia brings a host of works by 18 British artists to a seldom-open downtown space.

More Cool Britannia is the second local offering from Young Masters, the company...

The senior exit show is a rite of passage for graduating art students everywhere, a typically dull affair where pupils, parents, teachers and classmates come together for a final round of backslaps and coos before entering the harsh reality of the market.

But Lee Causseux and Chantelle Minarcine have a grander exit in mind. The graduating seniors from the Atlanta College of Art have organized...