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Landscape, Memory
and Identity: Still More Stories From the World We
Live In
Past Work
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By
Catherine Fox
The Atlanta Journal
Constitution
Published 09.18.95
No
slackers here: The 12 artists in this Arts Festival of Atlanta
exhibit are a focused lot, operating admirably in their chosen (two-
dimensional) mediums and seriously going about the business of
setting their artistic courses.
Curator Jerry Cullum selected the group, all younger than 30 years
old, with an eye for diversity of approaches. Jennifer Cawley and
Darius Hill represent the resurgence of abstraction. Pods, seeds and
spheres float on a heavily inflected white ground in Cawley's
handsome paintings. She deftly manages the large scale, adding
visual weight to the fairly spare compositions by texturing the
surface with wax, incised lines and heavy paint. If her vocabulary
and not-quite-refined execution bring to mind Terry Winters, Hill's
more angular abstractions are strangely reminiscent of French
abstraction of the '50s and '60s. The works on view are
characterized by vaguely mechanical-looking imagery, sensual
surfaces and a palette dominated by white, black and gray but
punctuated by touches of brightly colored marks.
Jena Sibille is the lone example of work that addresses social
issues. Given the level of ranting to which we have been subjected
in the past years, her emphasis on hope and reconciliation is a
welcome anomaly. A young black girl clutching a curiously
alive-looking doll of a white woman is the protagonist of the eerie
"With Hope Good Morning." A wall of flames behind her separates her
from a tree with a lynching rope hanging from a branch and a
plantation in the distance. Executed in broad strokes of pastel,
this "exvoto," as she calls it, appears to symbolize putting the
past behind.
Regressive cartoon stuff is all the rage in New York and Los
Angeles, a descendant of primitivizing art brut, pop art and the
modernist game of shocking the bourgeoisie. Or maybe it's just a
love of comics. At any rate, this genre, favored by Jordie Hudson,
who makes her kidlike drawings on ruled paper, and Wendy Given, who
works with a cast of Pinocchio-nosed creatures, seems to me aimless
and adolescent, if at times endearingly goofy.
Caroline Lathan-Stiefel's latter-day Wedgwood - ghostly white
reliefs on castoff wood - are considerably more resonant.
"Reaching," the largest and most interesting piece, features
enigmatic vignettes on an old door that seem at once personal and
archetypal: a disembodied arm reaching, a la Michelangelo, toward a
young girl; a young woman navigating a boat; an anxious bedside
vigil. They suggest life, death and the journey in between: an
exemplar of the festival's theme - messages from the everyday world.
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