Finding Answers: Artists Use Humble Items as Statements
Every so often, a show will both address current art-world debates and be tremendous fun. "Assemblation" at Eyedrum fills that bill.
Some of the fun first. In the installation-art room, curated by Karen Tauches, Will Eccleston's astonishing kinetic sculpture features a knife that moves across a rope every time the door to the gallery opens. Eventually the rope breaks, and the sledgehammer it holds aloft smashes down on an egg balanced atop a sacrificial pyramid.
Nicholas Fraser's "The Factory" features a dazzlingly glittering spiral of paper and cellophane cut from junk mail envelopes. The factory is the adjacent table, where envelopes sit next to scissors and plastic bags, waiting for workers to hand-produce the raw materials for more sculpture. Patrick Nolbrook's " The Rise and Fall" features a video projection of parabolas and close-ups of people jumping. In front of the video wall is a stack of concrete casts of Playstations.
Lillian Blades continues the sense of strange and sumptuous spectacle with her largest homage to Bahamian culture yet. She has covered an entire hallway, floor to ceiling with brightly contrasting sheets of fabric.
Amandine Drouet and Julie Ward complete the effect of sumptuousness with modestly scaled objects: in Ward's case, casts of crab shells and a glistening ball of magnetized pins. Drouet turns humble materials such as egg cartons, a bedspread and found light fixtures into a magical array of hanging lights and delicate sculptures.
The back gallery of assemblage art, selected by Angie Asadourian, also includes humble materials, most notably in Greely Myatt's exquisite wall sculpture made entirely of circular cookie tins. Justine Rubin uses a cascade of paint chips in "Celery Green" . By contrast, Jim Frazer's delicate "Curiosity Boxes" combine rolled-up scraps of paper with quartz crystals and gold wire to create tiny, engrossing environments. ANd Veronica Scarpellino, a Philadelphia artist making her local debut among these well-known Atlanta figures, combines an elegant touch with a sense of humor, placing oversize models of robin's-egg-blue and white tranquilizer capsules in a bird's nest, titled "Mother's Little Helper" (as in the Rolling Stones' song about better living through chemistry).
The successful use of found or inexpensive materials leads to the art-world dialogue promised above. There has been much discussion lately in the Atlanta art community about whether big art requires big budgets, or whether money substitutes too often for vision and imagination. Many of these artists have pulled off major effects with materials that were salvaged or purchased in bulk. Chalk one up for vision and hard work.
All this makes for one of the must-see shows of the season.
by Jerry Cullum
for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution