Atlanta- The Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs will present the Tufton String Quartet at a reception for the exhibition “Ephemeral Eternity: Memory, Ritual and Personal Myth in an Age of Dissolution” at Gallery 72 in Downtown Atlanta on May 1st, 2015 from 6-8 p.m.
Formed in Atlanta, The Tufton String Quartet features Christopher Mosley on first violin, Raphiel Murden on 2nd violin, Reginald Wallace on viola, and Arlanda Walker on Cello. The musical selections for the evening will be a mix of classical, jazz standards, and contemporary compositions. The concert will start promptly at 6:15 p.m.
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 visions, sounds and sacredness.
The exhibition Ephemeral Eternity will be extending its run until May 15TH.
June 4th 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
In related news, opening at GALLERY 72 on June 4th, 2015 will be the exhibition ” Emergence from the Waters” featuring the works of Atlanta metal artist Corrina Sephora. Emergence from the Waters is a collection of water-themed art spanning the past decade, including debuting new works. Emergence of the Waters is a series of sculptures, paintings, animation and installations of boat forms, birds in flight and other aquatic imagery from the spaces above and below the water’s surface. Sephora’s ideas and concepts, from drawings in tiny notebooks to architectural blueprints that emerge into sculptures, will be on display. The exhibit examines water in all its multi-faceted forms and influences, with towering solid steel waves that have boats and birds tethered to them, ladders that climb into the ephemeris and an installation that draws parallels between a fleet of boats and a flock of birds. Sephora’s storytelling talents will be showcased in Flowing as Water, a fairy tale video inspired by her visit to an adoption support group.
Also, starting in May, GALLERY 72 will begin lunchtime gallery tours. The tours will take place from 1pm to 1:45pm every Tuesday and Thursday except during gallery installations . Please contact the Gallery 72 office for more information. The Gallery 72 phone number is 404-546-3220 and the email is Gallery72@atlantaga.gov.
Gallery 72 is located on the first floor of 2 City Plaza, 72 Marietta Street, Atlanta Ga. 30303
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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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Artist Spotlight is a monthly highlight of the work, process and artists featured in the Office of Cultural Affair’s Public Art Registry. The Public Art Atlanta National Registry serves as the preferred list for soliciting artists for major and minor public art commissions and direct purchases of artworks for the City of Atlanta, while also serving as a qualified professional Public Artist list for additional commissioning agencies. Currently the Registry boasts full portfolios and resumes of over 300 professional public artists and is dedicated to expanding the scope of public artwork in Atlanta.
This month’s artist spotlight is Michi Meko
Bio
A skilled multidisciplinary artist and colorful personality that has established himself as a preeminent creative, with an uncanny ability to inspire an urbanized aesthetic that is innovative, challenging and thoughtful. The works allude to conditions both physical and psychological. His work is a proclamation of strength, perseverance and remembrance.
Michi is a creative mentor in the Fulton County Arts and Culture program Art@Work. Michi Meko has been an artist in residency at The Contemporary Arts Center Atlanta. Michi has been exhibited throughout the United States from Chicago to Art Basel. Meko has received a Dashboard Co-op Residency. Michi Meko has been nominated for an USA Artist Fellow and has been awarded an Idea Capital grant, A Flux Project grant, A Beltline Grant. Michi’s works have been commissioned and included in many private and corporate permanent collections Scion Toyota Motor Company, Red Bull, Project Alabama, King & Spalding, and the CW Network. Michi Meko’s works are represented by Alan Avery Art Co.
Interview With Michi Meko
Let’s start off with who you are and what type of work do you do?
Michi Meko I am a Multi-disciplinary artist. My working mediums exist in the painted, sculptural, and sound installations. I make narrative base works that involve personal histories while exploring southern culture and contemporary urban cultures and sub-cultures. I guess I’m a raconteur griot type. I am so interested in alternative ways of communicating mark making; this is what I call an Alabama Rough Touch Or A.R.T.
Your work is very much influenced by the broad cultural essence of the South, both in a contemporary and historical sense. In what way do you believe Atlanta’s own distinct Southern vernacular plays a role in your work? The work derives its Atlantaness from my participation and exploration of Atlanta’s contemporary urban sub culture. My works pulls some of its mark making language from Graffiti Writing and art vandalism. It’s also possible to read the works from the Atlanta music culture. I also continue to look back to go forward. History is an important part of my narrative, but I’m living in the now and communicate this through layers within the works. I try to find narratives that can exist as history but have this futuristic outlook. I am interested in the cities gray areas. These are the areas like Ponce, Boulevard and Monroe. These areas are heavily layered interactions much like my work and the functions of my studio practice.
Do you think that if you lived in a location other than the Southern United States, that this context would change any, or do you believe that your southern upbringing has planted a permanent seed in your observations as an artist and the topics you choose to tackle? I can never not be who I am, that’s the beauty of cultures. We have to be ourselves and operate accordingly embracing and celebrating our cultures’. The failure to embrace cultures also appears in my work. Cultures can be influenced by outside forces and experiences which can and will make the artist grow and question them and their practice. Travel and reading helps a lot with gaining new perspectives. If I travel yes, the work will change but the early influence of my experiences will all ways be within the artist.
Tell us a little about the objects that you use in your work. Do you respond first to the object itself, and then deal with the cultural implications of the materials or do you first decide on the story and then let the objects surface as you piece together the narrative? For me, it’s important to form a relationship with my objects. I have a route that I travel to gather my objects from certain neighborhoods. Once I gather, I began to sit with the objects and have a conversation. For me, it’s not a random put something here or here and hopes for a good piece. It’s a process and it’s thoughtful and made too look effortless and random but, it is ritual in many ways. It’s during this process is where the spirituality and magic may or may not seep into the works. After this process the objects honestly arrange themselves. We have had our conversations and it’s time to apply it within the process of object making. I also look for objects that have a loaded history or a perceived history. Plus a good sense of art history, street histories , philosophy and design also helps.
In which ways do you believe the public has an impact on your work?
Public art is important for me because I enjoy seeing the works along my routes of travel in the city. They offer a moment of reflection a chance to escape the city and question the city at once. It adds flavor to the city. I also enjoy the works because I know some artist has gotten funding for their project and that gives them life and me as well. Like hey maybe one day I can create a big sculpture in the city.
How important is art funding for you as a working artist? Art funding is the start to developing a practice that one can truly began to realize projects without cutting corners. It’s hard to maintain a studio practice and the funding can help relieve some of the stressors. It provides life to scene and the city. More artist will continue to stay in the city instead of moving to more art friendly cities. Without the funding we loose the flavor of the city and that’s the artist.
What other projects or exhibitions do you have planned in the coming year that you are really excited about? I recently received representation by Alan Avery Art Company in Buckhead; I will be having a solo show with Alan Avery in July. I’m nervous and super stoked at the same time by this opportunity and hope it will lead to more projects. I am also on schedule to go to Detroit to produce a huge project. I will be traveling down to Florida for a project as well. I want to get back in the streets this summer for fun after my solo and commissions to crush some public walls. I will be continuing to do beach travels and grow my Cast Iron Cruise Line skillet boats photography project, I have some ideas for sound projects involving marching bands, mass choirs, and preachers that I would like to get funded as well. I will be fishing a lot too. I am also determined to complete a project that I fell behind on so I have to complete that obligation because I feel really bad about the slow follow through. I guess I’m just looking forward to being busy.
For More on Michi’s Work Click Here
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