print March 1991

Clyde Broadway

Clyde Broadway’s work is a satiric faux-naïf attack on glitzy contemporary mythologies. Some of his paintings suggest outsider art, with their bright primary colors and cartoonlike drawing; the series of small one-sided sculptures in this show, entitled “Kicking Ass and Taking Names” might even be taken for imitations of Howard Finster. These works graphically depict instances of hostility and anger, and include the “Hussein Series,” which is right up-to-date. But it is in the larger works that his intentions become clear; this show, entitled “Worries of the Western World: An Investigation of

print May 1990

John McWilliams

John McWilliams, one of the leading photographers of the Southern landscape, has organized this exhibition entitled “Land of Deepest Shade” around a series of apocalyptic quotations from an 1844 shape-note hymnal entitled The Sacred Harp. At the entrance to the gallery the artist presents a quotation from Charles Wesley’s and A. Davidson’s Idumea: “A land of deepest shade, / Unpierced by human thought, / The dreary regions of the dead, / Where all things are forgot.” In the South as represented by McWilliams, however, things are not so much forgotten as ignored. The subject of most of the works

print March 1990

“Art in Berlin: 1815–1989”

“Art in Berlin: 1815–1989,” curated by Gudmund Yigtel, managed to suggest the complexity of the interrelationship of history, politics, and art in Berlin, though without capturing in depth any single era. The first strand of the exhibition was the neoclassical work of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The architect and draftsman was represented by two lithographs and by the 1811 painting Kathedrale (Cathedral), which shows his architectural ambitions as well as the oblique light, Romantic landscape, and shadowed foreground of much German painting of the period. Berlin cityscapes by Johann Heinrich Hintze,

print January 1990

Chea Prince

Chea Prince is one of a number of Atlanta artists who have sought theoretical models in French poststructuralist philosophy. He draws on the eroticism of Georges Bataille, while his debt to linguistic philosophers such as Jacques Derrida is reflected in the irritating tendency to title his works with French puns and to write self-deconstructing artist’s statements. The pieces themselves are mixed-media compilations of Pop art, mass-media imagery, figural references to artists such as Robert Indiana, Marcel Duchamp, and Jackson Pollock, and literal references to bondage, domination, and sexual

print November 1989

Gina Gilmour

Gina Gilmour is a North Carolina-born artist who, in her recent paintings, seeks to render suburbia as an emblematic Southern landscape. She freezes moments of loss or tragedy in symbolic tableaux on front lawns, well-groomed lakeshores, and front steps of suburban houses. Her scenes seem alternately trivial and surreal, empty and meaningful. The ambiguity is deliberate: Gilmour wants to juxtapose the hollowness of the everyday with the suddenness of disaster or epiphany. Subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) weaving symbols into the paintings, she raises moral themes indirectly, in a visual

print October 1989

Tommy Richards

Tommy Richards is a self-taught sculptor who makes wall assemblages from industrial building materials. Richards knows these materials intimately: he is a plumbing inspector for the city of Atlanta, and he began making his pieces inside the walls of high-rise buildings. The works are now independent of the structures that inspired them, but they still bear traces of their source in terms of material, color, and imagery Richards turns the city inside out. The glass and concrete skins of tall buildings are peeled back to reveal a riot of color-coded grids and conduits. Some pieces take as titles

print April 1989

Benny Andrews

Benny Andrews’ recent work projects an extraordinarily humane vision. Andrews never loses sight of his subjects’ hardships. In the group of works from the “Southland” series, 1988, his characters are noble but not artificially so. Thanksgiving resembles Grant Wood’s American Gothic, 1930, but the farm couple are shown in full view and standing next to a pair of mules. In this and many other works, the mule is Andrews’ symbol of rural life, and the parallel between animal and human captures both the realism of Andrews’ idea of life in the rural South and a nostalgia for his Southern roots.

Several

print March 1989

Debra Gavant Swan

In Debra Gavant Swan’s paintings, collages, and reliefs, art and religion are more often carnival sideshows than windows opening onto some truth. 25¢ A Toss, 1988, a canvas pierced by a small window that reveals a grinning mouth and nose, shows us this carnival’s barker most directly. He appears in some sculptures as a three-dimensional mannequin who looks like a cross between the wooden figure-models used by drawing students and the faceless creatures in the paintings of Mark Kostabi. In Under the Circumstances, 1987, this character hides beneath a table bearing a collection of fruit and bottles

print January 1989

Joan Farrel

The subject of Joan Farrell’s paintings and collages is the tacky, glittery surface of everyday life and the desire, fear, and commerce that lie beneath that surface. Speared Heart (all works 1988) demonstrates the opposition of the surface and depth literally: what appears to be a Valentine’s Day candy box becomes, on closer inspection, a heart-shaped funeral piece, with a piercing shaft that is more like a fishtailed worm than Cupid’s arrow. In other pieces, Farrell writes phrases such as “Safe Sex,” “Never Burn Original Mortgage Documents,” and “Fall’s Most Flattering Suits” using glitter or

print November 1988

Wynn Ragland

Wynn Ragland’s recent work comprises a series of color photographs that have been transferred to Cibachrome by a computer mapping process. All five works use the saturated color of early abstraction and sometimes pointedly refer to the abstract styles of the ’20s. The pieces are large (3 by 5 feet and 4 by 5 feet) and combine abstract and figural elements. Ragland imports images into a computer from the media or from life as seen through a video camera, then manipulates them and prints the result from a transparency produced by a dot matrix camera. In some cases, the result is balanced and

print October 1988

Pat Courtney

For several years, Pat Courtney has been reproducing images and text from dictionaries in paintings and photocopies that expose power relations inherent in the language and culture. With her latest work, Courtney has branched out in medium and content, adding to the dictionary pieces several Xeroxes from other sources, a sound installation, a Styrofoam wall piece bearing the word “Ozone,” and an installation of View-master© viewers showing sites of development, demolition, and pollution of the physical and intellectual environment.

One of the dictionary pieces in this show is the key to the

print Summer 1988

Herbert Creecy

This recent retrospective of Herbert Creecy’s work brought together 70 works, including the large acrylic paintings for which he is best known, as well as smaller canvases, mixed-media sculptures, and whimsical toy sculptures. The vocabulary and distinctive style of Creecy’s paintings, characterized by a diffuse focus and abrupt shifts in line and texture, have remained remarkably consistent throughout his mature career. Some works, like Potato Valley Creek under Pressure, 1987, are contests between straight diagonal lines (with occasional graceful curves) and smokelike trails and squirts of

Glenn Harper