Sharpening a Screw resists easy resolutions. The works on view signal the value of iteration, returning to a thought, a question, or a method to look for the unexpected. Each of the nine MFA students from the Lamar Dodd School of Art use materials as fasteners, presenting a constellation of themes from which to step back and look anew.
Brooklyn-based artist, Fabienne Lasserre presents Listeners, an immersive and responsive installation consisting of a series of sculptures made of clear vinyl spray-painted with translucent gradients of color. The works obstruct, frame and direct vision, passage and movement. They always imply bodies: people who look through, walk around, and peer over. Simultaneously, the inert objects are dynamic as they reflect light and sway slightly when a viewer walks by.
Often located in the heart of a city or campus, the sports stadium has the capacity to fortify national, regional, or community-based models of identity. Inside, the spectator is bombarded with carefully orchestrated stimuli, immersed in a multi-sensory experience intended to incite an emotional response. In Red Green Blue, Paul Pfeiffer edits audio and visual recordings of the UGA Redcoat Marching Band, examining the mechanics of the performance through close-up footage of band members and their directors during and between periods of play.
re:(de)construction is an exhibition, a circular and continuous call and response, presenting the work of eleven MFA students who studied at the Lamar Dodd School of Art for the past three years. Starting their program during the height of the pandemic, these artists have witnessed and participated in a deep re-examination of the structures that govern society. Through their various material experiments in video, painting, print, photography, metals, clay, and sound they share a commitment to reconfiguring and reinventing new ways of being in the world.
A hand, like a sheet of paper, suggests a verso and a recto, a past and a future closely connected in their reference to one another. This exhibition presents works on paper by the American artist Kara Walker that deal directly in the contradictions of misremembered histories, most pointedly in her career-long representation of the horrors beneath the antebellum South’s genteel facades. In the drawings presented in the gallery, Walker mingles washes of watercolor, gouache, ink and graphite to create a series that calls forth the past at once mythological and real, ancient and contemporary.
Brooklyn-based learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, explores the poetics and politics of machine learning. Having grown up in East Palo Alto, CA, a region that later came to be known as “Silicon Valley”, Rasheed had early access to emerging technologies including adolescent experience with computer coding. This, alongside her syncretic upbringing, a Muslim with formerly Protestant parents who sent her to a Catholic high school, Rasheed was exposed to parallel worlds of religion and computation, both modes of sense-making that relied on prophecy, formula, and close reading.
Downstream opens with a fountain. Created by Luka Carter and placed at the entrance to the courtyard of the Athenaeum, the fountain announces our annual MFA exhibition, featuring nine students connected by their studies at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. The fountain, punctuated by a goofy guppy and a friendly alligator made from clay, gushes forth not with water, but instead Gatorade, a urine colored energy drink favored by athletes. It is a similar product featured in Mike Judge’s 2006 dystopian cult classic, Idiocracy. In that film, the energy drink is marketed as a healthy alternative for plants which inevitably leads to a world-wide food shortage. Not unlike Judge’s spoof on the end-of-the-world, the artists in this exhibition grapple with our contemporary condition. At times the work can appear playful, brightly colored, maybe even light. But look closer and each artist, in their own way, examines the fragile vicissitudes of living in America today. Themes that appear throughout the show include our current climate crisis, past trauma, stereotypes related to race, and late-stage capitalism.
It begins with a blunder. “I pressed stop instead of record,” writes Lisa Tan, in the script for her new work, Dodge and Burn 2017-2020 July 4. The mishap occurs during the first of three, consecutive attempts to film fireworks on the 4th of July, from the vantage point of a passenger on a commercial airliner destined for Los Angeles International Airport. Through this evasion, she discovers how an image refusing capture reveals far more in its absence.
Are vision and seeing the same thing? Across a wide range of photographs, videos, and ambitious interstellar projects, Trevor Paglen has explored this essential question as it relates to the long history of technologies that have aided, and perhaps even eclipsed the human eye. These technologies range from the traditional, for example, the fifteenth-century technique of one-point perspective, to the contemporary, as in unmanned drones that record the world from a point-of-view the human eye cannot physically inhabit. Indeed, the limits of human vision are another essential theme for Paglen, who has consistently trained his camera on things that evade detection by the human eye, sometimes deliberately, as in the case of remote military sites and caches of NSA-tapped fiber optic cables, and sometimes by virtue of the eye’s physiological limits, as with the artist’s photographs of satellites whose traces are visible only with the aid of enhanced photographic technologies.