Westside Arts District

Ben Worley // Bean Summer at Get This! Gallery

Saturday, MAY 16th, 2009, The Westside Arts District will hold their monthly “3rd Saturday” art walk from 11am to 5pm.

Scheduled programming:

BOBBE GILLIS GALLERY–open 11 am – 5 pm, FREE
www.gillisgallery.com
1000 Marietta Street, Suite 108
Painting Demonstration
Bobbe Gillis Gallery presents our very own “Painter of Light,” Amanda Carder.  Please join us for a free, day long painting demonstration as Amanda Carder takes us on an intriguing journey of light, reflection and movement.

EMILY AMY GALLERY–event at 12:00 pm, FREE
www.emilyamygallery.com
1000 Marietta Street, Suite 208
Margie Stewart will discuss her recent exhibition currently on view.
Margie Stewart: New Paintings is the artists’ first solo exhibit at Emily Amy Gallery.  She is intrigued with the contradictions and complexities that abound with still lives and landscapes such as positive and negative shapes, real versus implied lines and the structure and fragmentation that is caused by the way the light falls on her subjects.   Intrinsically she is a ’seer’ who reproduces a banal landscape or still life by looking past what everyone else sees and discovering a unity that exists between shapes, forms and color.

ATLANTA CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER–event from 1:00-4:00 pm
www.thecontemporary.org
535 Means Street, NW
**General admission, $5; Students/Seniors, $3; 12 and under/members, Free.
FUNDRED Project Family Day. Our Resource Room is being temporarily converted into a bank vault repository for the creation and display of FUNDRED dollar bills, the currency of artist Mel Chin’s FUNDRED and OPERATION PAYDIRT projects. This pro-active collaboration with teachers and three million students around the United States takes on the problem of lead pollution in New Orleans. Join us in drawing activities while learning more about this innovative and restorative work of art. See www.fundred.org for more information about workshops, templates, and how to get involved.
*FUNDRED activities are Free; admission fees apply for the exhibitions on view.

GET THIS! GALLERY–event at 1:00 pm, FREE
www.getthisgallery.com
662 11th St. NW
Bean Summer / Ben Worley will discuss his recent exhibition currently on view at
Get This! Gallery
Information is Bean Summer’s or Ben Worley’s first solo exhibition with Get This! The exhibit     will feature experimental digital prints, video installations and explores ideas within new     media.     Bean Summer / Ben Worley is an Atlanta based artist.  Gallery open from 11 am – 5pm.

SALTWORKS–event at 1:30 pm, FREE
www.saltworksgallery.com
664 11th St NW
Director Brian Holcombe hosts a tour of selections of the “Elsewhere” exhibition.      “Elsewhere” is a group show curated by acclaimed New York-based artist Shinique Smith.  Works     in the exhibition share a Romantic sensibility and utopian ideals.  The show encompasses video,     painting, mixed-media and collage.

SANDLER HUDSON GALLERY—event at 2:30, FREE
www.sandlerhudson.com
1009-A Marietta Street, NW
Co-Director Robin Sandler hosts a tour of  the two exhibitions on show, “Kaleidoscapes” by Carol Mode and “Flux” by Caroilne Lathan-Stiefel.
Carol Mode:  Kaleidoscapes- Abstract paintings.
Nashville native, Carol Mode explores the properties of space in nature to create abstracted topographies that reference personal time and space.  Her work intertwines art, architecture and nature in a luminous and tactile fashion.
Caroline Lathan-Stiefel:  Flux- Installations and drawings
This exhibition will feature large-scale mixed-media installations that are drawings in space and intricate, abstract system drawings from Atlanta native, Caroline Lathan-Stiefel.

Additional galleries open for viewing:

KIANG GALLERY–open 11am – 5 pm
www.kiang-gallery.com
1011-A Marietta Street, NW
Meng Jin: Every Room is Illuminated
Beijing based artist Meng Jin, photographs chandeliers in meeting rooms in the People’s Parliament House in Beijing, and other power boardrooms with similar institutional context.  The artist is deliberately inviting a conversation about the ambiguity between reality and perception, perhaps about the impact on political or corporate power on society.

OCTANE COFFEE– open 8am – 1 am
www.octanecoffee.com
1009-B Marietta Street NW
Michaelangelo Wolfe
Chicago native Michaelangelo Wolf is a full spectrum artist; from graphic design and     digital/    electronic music to performance musicianship, sculpting and painting. “Sacred”, his art     show at     Octane Coffee during the month of May 2009, displays paintings that represent the ebb     and     flow of the seen world with the unseen, the physical with the spiritual, and how we relate to     them both.

THE ROBERT C. WILLIAMS PAPER MUSEUM AT GEORGIA TECH — open 11am – 3 pm

http://www.ipst.gatech.edu/amp/exhibits/index.htm

500 Tenth Street, NW
Jiha Moon/Nate Moore: Recent Works
Nate Moore’s Origami jets rely upon rigorous geometry and give dimension, depth and sometimes movement to found object paper.  Mr. Moore is represented by Get This! Gallery (www.getthisgallery.com).  Ms. Moon creates beautiful, dream-like landscapes on Japanese hanji paper inspired by the opposing social norms and cultural references experienced throughout her travels in the East and West.  Mrs. Moon is represented by SALTWORKS (www.saltworksgallery.com).

Christine Bailey, Kanin (video still), 2007, edition of 10.

ELSEWHERE
A group exhibition curated by Shinique Smith.

Opening reception Saturday, April 25, 7-9M
Exhibition runs April 25 – June 6, 2009

Featuring works by Justin Anderson, Christine Bailey, Jane Benson, Jennie C. Jones, Marcus Morales, Erika Ranee, Sean Ryan and Mickalene Thomas.

The works in this exhibition embody the definition of “elsewhere.” They make references to locales and scenes either witnessed or imagined, while sharing a romantic sensibility that manifests through varied processes. Within this Romanticism, the landscape becomes a hybrid of place, history, myth and illusion. As contemporary works they are loosely connected to ‘Golden Age’ or utopian ideals of pastoral literature and art. Through imaginative and subjective approaches, these artists strive to express suggested states of feelings too intense, mystical or elusive to be clearly defined. Though these works share a relationship to the history of painting’s long romance with the land, they are of the Now. These are visions shaped not only by their awareness of the past, but also by their keen perceptions of our current time. Each artist is affected by the reality and technology of today, as demonstrated in the way they choose to embrace or repel these notions. There is a ‘quaintness’ and ‘sentimentality’ in these works and though they are not necessarily laments for the past, they are infused, at times, with disenchantment for the urban environment and quest for the ideal of somewhere else.

Justin Anderson documents his experiences through Polaroid photography and then uses them as a ground for paintings that become composites of personal meaning, painting and poetry. Christine Bailey investigates the practice of making art through projects that question ideas of authenticity. Her work Kanin is a video document of 24 virtual hours in the alternate reality of ‘Second Life’ wherein Bailey discovered a landscape and simply captured its existence, as though it was as unfettered as any ‘real’ forest. Jane Benson creates a dialogue between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ in her work, Library of Eden, an interactive collection of travel books in which all of the urban structures and objects are painted over with landscape or shrubbery, leaving only human activity amidst the green. Marcus Morales portrays hidden perceptions and events culled from the artist’s past and imagination. Through his drawings, Morales is able to express a universal nostalgia for life’s identity defining moments and the inner thoughts surrounding them. Jennie C. Jones’ audiotape drawings express the improvisational nature of jazz, as well as music’s ability to transport the listener through memory and visualization. In her Breathless series, the artist ‘re-works’ Kenny G by creating gestural drawings from an album with songs titled, “morning” “in the rain” and “Homeland” evoking romantic ‘inner-scapes’. Erika Ranee weaves tales of the personal and the mythical within lush paintings that unrelentingly “re-evaluate the implacable blueprint of fairy tales and real life scenarios”, in paradisal settings where the vegetation mirrors the underlying emotions of each story. Sean Ryan deftly and thoughtfully attempts to capture transient moments. In his Cloud series, Ryan uses silver point to halt the ever-transforming clouds in the sky, which speaks to man’s inability to control nature and the indescribable experience of witnessing the sublime. Mickalene Thomas, well known for her colorful and gleaming portraits of women, has often used collage to compose her paintings. Recently, Thomas has turned to the landscape as a source of inspiration, which further expresses concepts of fertility and femininity.

Elsewhere is curated by artist, Shinique Smith.  Smith’s installation Like it Like That is currently on view at The Studio Museum in Harlem until June 28, 2009 and her works are featured in an upcoming solo exhibition, Ten Times Myself at Yvon Lambert NY opening on May 21st.

In case you missed it, these are photos from the March Art Walk.  Our next “3rd Saturday” art walk will be held April 18!  Scroll down for the full list of galleries and art talks.

Goode, Untitled 12, 48" x 48"

Paint as Subject: new works by Dorothy Goode, James Leonard, Melanie Parke and Carl Plansky

Opening reception this Friday, from 7- 10 pm.

Show runs through May 6th.

Paint is not often thought of as the subject matter or genre of a painting.  Quite the contrary, subjects usually include landscapes, figures, or still lives.  However,  for these four talented artists, paint takes center state in their vibrant and colorful compositions.  By studying their application, manipulation, and removal of paint from the canvas with brushes, trowels, palette knives and other tools, it is clear that each of the artists featured in this upcoming show value the importance of paint.  In fact, it becomes what the painting is all about.