The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia celebrates the energy of the Atlanta-Athens art scene in “Movers and Shakers,” the third in a series of biannual exhibits designed to feature up-and-coming artists.
In a welcome decision to include more curatorial voices, the museum invited 11 artists who appeared in the series’s previous iterations to each nominate three artists, as did the MOCA GA staff. As a result of this broader perspective, I’ll bet even close followers of the art scene will discover new artists among the 32 included here or be reminded of some who have fallen off the radar due to lack of attention. A few of the highlights:
Christina West builds an enigmatic narrative in “What a Doll: The Human Object as Toy,” an installation of three-quarters life-size clay figures,which resemble old-time porcelain dolls. Their expressively wrought hands, feet and pained faces, as well as ambiguous positioning, suggest the aftermath of sex and/or violence.
Ting Ying Han embodies the physical distance and cultural and emotional estrangement from her family in Taiwan and concomitant yearning for familial comfort in this sculpture of an American style house constructed out of rice and resin, sitting on a pedestal of an upside-down picket fence. Hopper and Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck come to mind.
The consciously hand-crafted look of Chelsea Raflo videos, which combine stop-motion animation, collage and oil paint, add to the psychological intimacy of their affecting takes on change, fear and memory.
Monica Ellis and Jody Fausett take two very different paths to the numinous. Ellis’s installation of black yarn, which hangs from the ceiling and puddles into mounds on the ground, seems heir to Eva Hesse’s sensuous minimalism. The incandescent light emanating from a hovering goose and metaphorical intimations of the barely open door in Fausett’s eponymous photo made my heart flutter.
The show suffers from conceptual fuzziness and other issues. A “mover/shaker” is a person who already wields power and influence, which is at odds with the term “rising star.” And “rising star” encompasses a rather broad trajectory here, from those still in graduate school, such as Charles Westfall and Phoenix Savage, to those like Brian Dettmer and Jiha Moon, who already have national reputations.
In addition, preponderant media such as video and installation are scant, and each artist is represented by only one work. The former puts worthy artists out of the running. The latter does not always makes the best argument for the artist.
Stephen Hayes’s masks, for instance, barely suggest the scale of his abilities evident in his knockout debut at Mason Murer Fine Art last year. Lucha Rodriguez’s two-dimensional piece gives a sense of her aesthetic and craft, but her installations are a more important direction, as well.
Also, provocation, with the possible exception of Terra Cole’s photo “Tar Babies,” is notable in its absence.
Nevertheless, the value of the exhibition -- for artists, who benefit from the museum’s imprimatur and the exposure, and for viewers who are introduced to new artists and a sense of an active art community -- outweighs its drawbacks.
REVIEW
“Movers and Shakers: MOCA GA Salutes the Rising Stars of the Georgia Arts Scene.”
Through March 19. $5, non-members; $1, students. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesdays-Saturdays. Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. 75 Bennett St., Ste. A2. 404-367-8700. www.mocaga.org
The bottom line: Thirty-two artists at various stages of their careers embody the lively diversity of the art scene.
Catherine Fox is chief visual art critic for www.ArtsCriticATL.com
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