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.

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. 

Many of the works on display take literally the idea of construction, as several of the artists mine materials in their investigation of the built environment. Others display a commitment to the play involved in taking things apart and putting them back together, just absurdly enough to call it art. While still other artists critique constructed expectations surrounding identity, history, and memory both personal and political.

Tearing down and building back up, tearing down and building back up again, once more. Processes that began in individual studios and through collaborative projects, now operate not only within the broader, shared context of the MFA exhibition, but also upon the societal structures these artists reimagine.

Artists in the exhibition include: AJ Aremu, Mickey Boyd, Zahria Cook, J Diamond, Shaunia Grant, Chad Hayward, Huey Lee, Jason Rafferty, Rachel Seburn, Ethan Snow, and Lee Villalobos. 

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. 

Walker’s influences are varied and vast, from the political sketches of Goya, to the caricatures of Daumier, to the medieval Book of Hours. The title of the exhibition suggests a rebuff, a slap in the face but also a familiarity, knowing something like the back of your hand. This paradox may relate to Walker’s own relationship to the South, having grown up outside of Atlanta in the shadow of Stone Mountain, a monument to the confederacy. A landscape can hold both a personal knowledge and a deeper wound infected with a collective history of violence. Here, Walker presents a more ambivalent reading: That which hurts you is often the very instrument you know most intimately.

This exhibition is generously supported by a gift from the Lupin Foundation.

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. 

Some twenty years later, Rasheed has slowly returned to questions of computation, the role of the reader, and ritual in Smooooooooooooooth Operator which considers the menace of smoothness. We know what a smooth thing is; we’ve run our hand over a surface without noticeable projections or interruptions. Smoothing as a practice shows up in music via quantization and again in image processing via filters. Both are procedures of standardization and forced patterning by disregarding dirty data (or noise) in the service of fulfilling the audience’s expectations. Smooth viewing is easy viewing because the brain doesn’t have to second guess what it is looking at–it’s easily assimilable. Smooth images, smooth text make smooth, speed readers.

Smooooooooooooooth Operator examines how image-based GANs and autoregressive language models like GPT invite us (by the risk of doing otherwise), to develop new modes of reading that are attuned against the smooth and new ways of making that introduce noise, fringe, and as Prem Krishnamurthy writes, “bumpiness.” In P!DF, V.6.0.0 (2020), Krishnamurthy offers:

"A little bumpiness—the productive friction that slows things down and forces a moment of reflection— [...] Within a world increasingly oriented towards smoothed out experiences, [bumpiness] argues for the political necessity of things that produce friction: objects and ideas that are created with care, yet remain uncertain."

Rasheed’s installation includes a series of diagrammatic and typographic paintings on various substrates as well as directly on the wall in addition to a video work. Collectively, these works explore what Krishnamurthy calls “a pleasure within the irregular, in what’s not already expected and familiar” and what Rasheed considers “an ecstatic encounter with the unexpected.” This project continues Rasheed’s practice of building accretive fields of annotation, indices, and footnotes through the architecture itself. Smooooooooooooooth Operator thus is an architecturally-scaled reader; a network of references pointing back to one another and elsewhere in this pursuit to map Rasheed’s inquiries. Within the exhibition, visitors can use their whole body as a reading vessel as they move through the space: body as computer mouse, body as planchette. 

This exhibition is made possible from a generous grant from the 2021 Presidential Interdisciplinary Seed Grant Program.

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. 

The title suggests that these artists are moving with the flow or being carried with the current, towards the mouth of the river, where one might be diverted toward a new direction. Just as they have worked alongside one another for three tumultuous years, they will graduate and move on, continuing their practice while inventing entirely new landscapes. Artists in the exhibition include: Rosie Brock, Luka Carter, Casey Connelly, Victoria Dugger, Isys Hennigar, Matthew Hoban, Craig Howarth, Forrest Lawson, and Annie Simpson.