© Suellen Parker 2008 | Powered by PortfolioAtlas MT
How does a curator shape a group show whose participants share little more than a metro Atlanta address?
Stuart Horodner's solution for the Contemporary's 24th Atlanta Biennial is the conceit of the talent show. The idea has pop currency — "American Idol" and its spawn — and could be applied to art-world blockbusters like the Venice Biennale, which purport to show the global crème de la crème.
Judging from the call for participants, however, Horodner conceived it more like the old TV show "Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour," which was as likely to feature someone playing tunes with spoons as a singer who would go on to fame and fortune.
This "Talent Show" encompasses sophisticated midcareer artists like Charles Huntley Nelson — whose video and related drawings are smart, sophisticated and in the thick of contemporary art dialogue — to a group of senior citizens who paint in their art therapy class.
While this approach flushed some promising artists out of the shadows, its drawbacks outweigh the benefits. For many metro artists, the Biennial is the one opportunity for validation from a major institution. It seems unwise to take up space for amateurs that would otherwise go to practicing artists.
In addition, the hobby and the serious art make awkward bedfellows. They don't speak to each other, and it seems subtly dismissive to put them on the same plane.
That's too bad for the worthy artists that are included. I'm a fan of Shana Robbins' delicate, eerie paintings of her costumed self and of Jennifer Hartley. Perhaps taking a page from regionalist Thomas Hart Benton or Athens artist Art Rosenbaum, Hartley depicts scenes that reveal Athens' (read: America's) cultural spread.
Suellen Parker's manipulated photos could hold their own anywhere. The artist sculpts clay figures, which she inserts into photographed scenes to create jarring images about our obsession with our bodies. The clay figures are grotesques, along the lines of performance artist Orlan, who undergoes plastic surgery as art, or characters Cindy Sherman has portrayed in her photographs.
Like the body, media and information are a source of interest to many contemporary artists. Bean Worley alludes to the glut and instant obsolescence of both in his elegant abstractions created from illustrations found in old encyclopedias. Ben Roosevelt speaks to the way we perceive information. He makes decals of familiar figures or objects — a park bench, a woman in a burka —and places each in one of the squares of the Contemporary's gridded facade. Shorn of context, isolated in a frame, the most banal object becomes a portent, and the images that are already loaded become more so, or fraught with ambiguity.
These and other artists make the Biennial worth seeing despite its framework.