Athens Institute for Contemporary Art presents ATHICAEmerges IV: Uncertainty

Written by Katherine McQueen Wednesday, 30 June 2010 20:45

ATHENS, GEORGIA - ATHICAEmerges IV: Uncertainty introduces Athens to four artists whose works all have a metaphorical relationship to the uncertain times we face. Through installation, painting, printmaking and sculpture the selected artworks explore the precarious interconnectedness of our world, reminding us that we must all tread lightly. Curator Katherine McQueen and assistant curator Katherine Holmes selected the work from over 20 entries, with featured video installation artist Casey McGuire having been selected the prior fall from ATHICA’s annual season submissions. On exhibition through 25 July, 2010.

Featured artist Casey McGuire is a video-installation artist who describes her work as orchestrating “various elements to construct a personal narrative that investigates the problematic nature of artifice and perfection.” McGuire--who moved to the Northeast GA region last Fall to teach three-dimensional design at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton--has a surprisingly impressive exhibition history considering that she received her M.F.A. in 2007 (from the University of Colorado, Boulder). She recently had a solo exhibit at Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI and has international and national residencies under her belt at places such as the prestigious Vermont Studio Center. She was interviewed in an extensive Sculpture Magazine article in October 2009 about her ambitious large-scale projects.

For these reasons and more we are delighted that she will be creating a large-scale brand-new sculptural video installation piece for ATHICAEmerges IV: Uncertainty called Diving Through Surface into Light. The installation is comprised of multiple towers of stacked dresser drawers; each topped by a diving board looking down onto a river made out of T.V. monitors displaying videos of running water. At the river’s end is a small tent made out of bed sheets. These elements work in concert to tell a disconcerting narrative; a self-described storyteller, McGuire speaks to the uncertainty of our society’s future. The eclectic style of the precariously arranged dressers’ evoke individual bedrooms and by extension the individual houses that in this context allude to the mortgage-backed securities that were a contributing factor to the recent tumultuous financial meltdown. The fake river of T.V.’s aren’t today’s omnipresent flat screens, but old cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors, symbolic of an industrial society that produces objects, like electronics, which are quickly obsolete and often pollute when discarded. The CRT’s form alluring optical puddles, with the videos of natural and man-made water sources flowing from one to the next, referencing the interconnectedness of our water sources, and thus the threat to the environment posed by production without thought to sustainability. The tent at the end of the river is a humble, mobile structure that could fold up fit into one of the dresser’s drawers, a clear allusion to our fears of displacement. The only possession in the tent is an old dollhouse, a childhood reminder of the warmth of a lost home. McGuire’s Diving Through Surface into Light presents viewers with two alternative futures; one in which we are overwhelmed and paralyzed by the mess we have created and another in which we navigate the obstacles and create a more sustainable future.

Structure also plays a key role in Jon Swindler’s unconventional approach to the traditional print medium of lithography. Instead of presenting pristine finished prints, Swindler uses press misfires or failures. In some of works framed images are hung in a unique fashion on the wall, stacked and overlapping, each not quite matching up with the one before or after, as if the process of coming to a decision was frozen in mid-stream. One image leads into the next, creating disjointed compositions that, as in Trigg’s work, leaves the viewer with more questions than answers. In other works, Swindler collages the detritus from the print studio into large abstract compositions mounted on foam core. The uncertainty created by both his unusual hanging methodology and collages extends into the ambiguity of the identity of the subjects depicted in the lithographs themselves, in which organic forms and forms evocative of medical illustrations jockey.

Swindler received his MFA from Southern Illinois University. He is currently an Associate Professor of printmaking in the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia where he teaches in the Printmaking and Book Arts Department. From 2004-2008, he was Assistant Professor at Wright State University in Dayton OH. Over the last several years he has exhibited in numerous solo, competitive and invitational exhibitions throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. He has also given visiting artist workshops and lectures at various institutions, including: Courtesy of ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art  The Academy of Visual Arts, Ghent Belgium and the University of New Orleans. Swindler resides in Athens, GA with his spouse and son.

Patrick Triggs also confronts viewers with choices, albeit more abstract. In his vividly colored acrylic paintings precarious architectonic structures seem to defy gravity. Operating as a metaphor for society, each piece depends on the others to hold it together. His color use furthers that dependency, with colors separating the individual shapes, but not exclusively. Overlapping shapes may intersect to form a new color or bend into the same color to become a larger more secure shape, reinforcing the implicit metaphor of individuals working together for a greater cause. All of the structures seem to be in motion; whether they are being constructed or falling apart depends on viewers’ out look. Triggs is currently working toward his BFA in Painting from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. His work has been exhibited in Athens as well as in his hometown, Newnan, GA.

Similar to McGuire’s river of videos, the natural world melds with the man-made in Melissa Dickenson’s wall-mounted paper constructions. What at first glance look like pressed flowers are actually forms made of cut paper and paint. Dickenson’s careful arrangements begin with abstract paint on paper, which she then cuts up, finding the flowers and stems in the brush strokes. The juxtaposition of the recognizable plant life and abstracted, paint strokes creates an unusual and fascinating uncertainty in terms of the viewer’s ability to identify the images in ambiguous interplay between the images’ surface and their shapes.

Dickenson received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2002. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as Japan and Sudan. Dickenson is a recipient of Maryland State Artist Awards in both 2006 and 2008, as well as a finalist for the Walter and Janet Sondheim Prize for 2008 and Semi- Finalist for both the Bethesda Painting Award and the Trawick Prize in 2009. Most recently she was awarded an artist grant to attend Masia Can Serrat, Barcelona, Spain for fellowship in 2009. Dickinson collaborated Holland Brown Publishing on Baltimore Counts  a children’s art book, scheduled for publication this fall. She moved to Athens in the summer of 2009.

ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art - 160 Tracy Street, Unit 4, Athens, GA 30601 USA

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