The sculptures, collage, and paintings in Matt Keegan’s Realia are informed by a set of 400 double-sided image-based flash cards his mother made between the late 1980s to mid-2000s to teach English to high school and adult ed students. The cards feature cut up images from clothing catalogs, magazines, teacher union mailers, and other printed matter that came into their home. 

In Keegan’s interpretation, the images become part of an associative game of logic, pointing to the endless construction of codes, both symbolic and cultural. A newly commissioned tabletop sculpture, for example, presents familiar objects cast in aqua resin and then painted, drawn, and pigmented in various media to assert the objects’ colors and textures. These colored casts do not form a cohesive narrative and, in this way, prompt reflection on the associative and disjunctive nature of meaning. “Behind every image is another image” the postmodernist historian Douglas Crimp once said, and now Keegan might add, behind every word is another word in a complex and neverending proliferation of meaning.

Yet Keegan’s reflections on the production of meaning are not only wry. In his recent small-scale oil paintings, which recall the size and pictures from his mother’s teaching aids, the hand of the artist – itself, another signifier– is evident. At times clumsy, the representation of a photo of a door knob, a roll of paper towels, or a slide are stripped from their denotative function and acquire something more poignant: the entanglement of all these systems with subjectivity, memory, and meanings not found on flashcards. Thus, the works invite even more speculative readings, an expression of the language of imagination.

Rose Salane is an artist who uses seemingly mundane objects to explicate systems of evaluation, exchange, and organization that shape daily life. In this exhibition, she arranges collected items of disparate origin from personal and bureaucratic archives—the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, the Atlanta History Center, the NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services—to better understand historic cycles through an object’s recovery and storage.
 
The works in this exhibition offer an oblique view on tumultuous historical shifts: A series of diary entries describing an eclipse during the last year of the Civil War; a 1947 solicitation letter from Albert Einstein to academic institutions asking for the contribution of funding towards nuclear fission and atomic energy research; a set of decommissioned traffic light lenses suggesting a city grid in disarray. Together these object sets form dynamic intersections across time, war, observation, and power; their narrative contingencies underscoring the politics of the archive. 

Challenging viewers to find commonalities and disjunctions among the exhibition’s many parts, Salane also raises profound questions about the voices and objects charged with telling our histories: Whose thoughts, whether mundane or profound, have been preserved for future generations? What objects, though silent, speak on our behalf, and whose job is the work of their translation? Salane’s exhibition, a translation in its own right, is also a careful curation that uses the methods of the archive to put its limitations and potential on display.

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.

Taken together, the artists offer both a gentle sincerity and tongue-in-cheek bite. Where Lindsey Kennedy drills into the pictorial doom of climate dread, Martin Chamberlain and Alejandro Ramirez pull back with a wry grin, presenting witty objects that are convincing yet playful. Kit Rutter illustrates a story of perseverance and care that breaks through paper pulp thickets, while Dylan Lewis crafts a narrative in which sewing and alchemy meet. Yoon Hwang’s drawn and pinched marks imbue clay with all the history that hands collect, as Katie Ford and Ashley Wingo’s sculptural assemblages magnetize traces of memory and identity into form. Lastly, Meredith Emery plays with text in her fantastic and extended examination of the American burying beetle.

The exhibition nods towards the compulsion that often drives these creative processes. The artists are as much compelled by the cultural relevance of their subject matter as they are by the desire to scratch an insatiable itch—to wade through the fog of making until meaning emerges. Viewers are invited to consider the works in the exhibition as meditations in which the artists refine the poetry of their materials, in which the screw is sharpened time and again to see what holds.