The Wiley Eye
Almost unrecognizable from the previous group show "Switch." the downtown venue called Eyedrum is once again the site - and sight - of Atlanta's newest wave of multimedia artists. Juried by Art Papers Editor, Jerry Cullum, the new show is entitled "Something Not Quite Completely Different: Tradition, Innovation and Their Uncanny Discontents" and claims to consist of two parts: "Uncanny Bodies: Pleasure, Pain, Personality and Political Incorrectness" and "Jars, Paintings and Well-Wrought Urns: A Second Look at Rules of Making."
It's hard to imagine any contemporary work being left out in the selection process for this show, but the theme seems to require a balance between an irreverancy of formal rules and a rethinking of the way in which a figure is rendered as a central subject. The focus seems to be on the art object itself. "We used to know exactly how to make things. If now we don't, there must be some good reason for it..." said Cullum. More acutely, then, the question here regards a specific cultural attitude that is feeding this current creative process.
According to Cullum, " The felt experience of being off-center is something else again. We would like, some of us, to live again in a world that makes coherent sense, but something in our deepest selves won;t let us..." He goes on to suggest that the actual assumption of a "deeper self" may, in fact, be the distraction. our evolutionary stage in art seems to waver, implies Cullum, between our discomfort with the "well-made" object and our plain uncertainty about what a "well-made object" is at all. The notion of an absolute truth is not really dissolved but, rather, disseminated into various pockets of rivaling principles.
Freeing himself from curatorial tradition, Cullum has refrained from arranging the works in any coherent way. Instead, he tempts us to discern for ourselves between the two parts of the exhibit-though this distinction is not really necessary, since it is the art that attempts to define the space around it and not the other way around. This concept is quite effective when a piece does in fact appear to be colonizing its place, the first sign of restlessness on a quiet front.
Nicholas Fraser's "164 days," for example, first consumes us with its bold color and confrontational form and then absorbs us into powerful visualization through and beyond the object's unconforming construction. Mary Beth Andrews' "Archetype I" almost transforms the surroundings, making the walls around it collapse and melt into its own antithetical shape. Interestingly these pieces fit in to both of the show's partitions.
The venue's space is often too distracting, however, with irrelevant objects cluttering the purposeful ones. And it is unclear whether this thematic appearance is deliberate or merely ironic. Regardless, Eyedrum continues unparalleled in its magnanimous mission to expose diverse expression in any medium, stripping the commercial pretense away from art and, inversely, exploring artistic expression as a product of, and not for, its environment.
by Christina Kline
for the Atlanta Press