The Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs will present artists:
Robin Bernet, Jessica Scott Felder, Karen Tauches and Wendy Phillips in an artists’ talk on the exhibition “Ephemeral Eternity: Memory, Ritual and Personal Myth in an Age of Dissolution” at Gallery 72 in Downtown Atlanta on April 2nd, 2015 from 6-8 pm
Ephemeral Eternity is an exhibition addressing the power of myth, memory and ritual experience to forestall vanishing and contested histories and identities. Please join the us for a moving evening of insight into the creative ways these artists process the memory, love, and sacredness.
Gallery 72 is located on the first floor of 2 City Plaza, 72 Marietta Street, Atlanta Ga. 30303
This event is free and open to the public. Visit our Event Page to RSVP
Robin Bernat
Robin Bernat’s art practice involves several media: She began her artistic career as a book artist and, in many ways, aspects of bookmaking carry over into filmmaking in terms of creating a narrative through the sequencing of images. Poetry and prose frequently provide the narrative structure of her experimental films and installations. Additionally, there is a performance component to her work.
In all of these endeavors, poetry, film and performance Robin Bernat investigates ideas about love and loss, faith and longing in attempt to capture what is both beautiful and fleeting. The primary activity of here work is an effort to distill, slow down, observe, remember and recover these fleeting moments. Something about this kind of reflection lends the work a, perhaps, unavoidable melancholy feeling.
She relies heavily on classical ideas of beauty; I find using landscapes, figures and objects a powerful and, frankly, more pleasant way of addressing the provisional. She is a cultivator of beauty and feeling in language and in visual art as a kind of defiance of irony and what I feel to be the ultimate emptiness of irony.
Jessica Scott Felder- Painting , Sculpture, Installation
Jessica utilizes drawings and installations with antique objects to transform spaces into psychological realms that are suggestive of maternal figures and ancestral and social narratives. Initially, the chairs represented matriarchal presence and have currently expanded to ancestry. Jessica’s work addresses issues in identity, heritage, culture, and society’s rapidly disintegrating connection to the past.
In performance, Jessica’s body becomes a catalyst for altering the social dynamic of a space. Every aspect of her presence is considered important to the ephemeral work, from the details within the antebellum era clothing (inspired by the drawings of chairs) to the object-filled vessels that are carried during the performance. Whether the audience is inside of a gallery or on a sidewalk outside, Jessica’s presence silently demands attention through slow and graceful movements. During Jessica’s presence, the physical and social self (or character) creates a psychological mark within the room and in the audience upon its completion.
Karen Tauches
Karen Tauches an Atlanta based designer, curator and multimedia artist who works in photography, film, painting, and sculpture to name just a few. Her works often focus on the transitional worlds between past and present, and the contrast between interior and exterior spaces.
WINDOW WORLD:. A window can double as a mundane object, and yet, also a transcendental symbol. It can offer light, a view, or a portal to alternative realms. I document special moments of contemplation, from two view points –the interior room merged with its adjacent exterior landscape. Each interior view connotes the cozy, privateness of the interior mind. The images are made “in camera” with a medium format Mamiya rb67, using the polaroid back. Through multiple exposures and the bracketing of the aperture, a magical window emerges and disappears. Wilderness and light filter into the ordinariness of a dark room. The window becomes the liminal space between life and other possibilities of existence.
Wendy Phillips
Wendy Phillips is a photographer and visual artist based in Atlanta. Her recent work has focused on the documentation of the lives of women of African descent in Latin America. Her projects often combine ethnographic interviews with photographic images. Her ethnographic work provides inspiration for her conceptual art projects.
Wendy has studied photography at the International Center for Photography, Maine Photography Workshops, The Penland School of Crafts, and at the Manuel Alvarez Bravo Center for Photography in Oaxaca, Mexico. She is also trained as a psychologist. She is drawn to the alchemy of the darkroom, and her favorite medium is silver gelatin printing on fiber. She has recently begun studying some of the traditional photographic processes including wet plate collodion and ambrotypes.
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