Previous Exhibitions
Andy Moon Wilson
(May 14 2010 - June 26 2010)
May 14 - July 10, 2010
Sponsored by Scion
To see larger installation shot, click here (link will open in a new window)
If you close your eyes and press your knuckles hard against the closed lids, you begin to see patterns. If you could record those patterns, and spray them on the wall to examine, then you might have something that looks like this show. Meticulously detailed, painstaking and obnoxious drawings collide in a sickly-sweet explosion of zeitgeist riffage, architecture and industrial design.
The 550 drawings in this show are intended to be read as a single piece, although they can also stand as discrete objects. The work is designed to provide an open-ended experience, there is no predetermined “message”. The imagery and text within the work function as “phrase triggers”- codes or icons that represent concepts. As the viewer “reads” the work, various concepts, each of which each viewer has his or her own ideas about, are triggered in random sequence, similar to hypertext linking. Philosophically, the work is heavily influenced by existential-phenomenology and post-structuralism. The goal is to stimulate an interesting thought pattern in the viewer.
Dawn Black: Mad Semblance
(March 19 2010 - May 01 2010)
March 19 - May 1, 2010
The gallery contains a large grid of small works on paper. Each is a portrait of sorts culled from the vast information ocean we swim in daily. Sometimes masked, sometimes costumed, children, patients, and religious celebrants share the grid with fashion models, terrorists, cross-dressers, political prisoners, and people who dress up and enjoy over-sharing their private lives on social networking sites. This array of intriguing characters comprises just part of artist Dawn Black’s enormous inventory of personae.
And it is a jumping off point for the carefully considered larger works on paper that fill out the exhibition. In her quest for open-ended narrative, Black’s collage aesthetic is similar to an avant-garde film director’s montage of imagery. Given its surrealist roots, juxtaposition of unrelated imagery runs the risk of appearing hopelessly random. But Black eschews that strategy in favor of creating charged compositions that bring us on occasion to the edges of our moral comfort level.
Why is there a haute couture model wearing a Swarovski crystal skeleton outfit standing thigh-deep amidst a field of human remains in the Cambodian killing fields? Yes, the bones share the imagist relationship, but Black offers a trenchant tale on how culture easily glamorizes war and, in hindsight, how the more people exterminated, the more powerful (and historically memorable) a military campaign becomes.
Another preoccupation of Black’s is the exploitation of children by adults to advance their political agendas. The Brothers Mujahideen for the RaHoWa depicts two children, a suicide bomber and a KKK novitiate, being outfitted by anonymous adults to further their hatred-fueled goals of mass murder and racism. Maybe the small combatant squatting on a reclining red-gowned woman in the Fuseli-inspired The Nightmare has come back to exact a karmic revenge. Other works such as Prey, Justice, and The Base Lepidopterist allow the viewer to inscribe a more ambiguous narrative onto the social bodies depicted, but these, too, evoke power struggles and sinister menace. Black’s accomplished technique seduces by beauty but pulls us into the secret worlds beneath the façade, the veil, or the mask.
Andrea Pollan
Director, Curator’s Office, Washington, DC
Gyun Hur: repose
(January 23 2010 - March 06 2010)
15” x 22”, 5 color silkscreen, Limited edition print (25), available through gallery
image of print >>
detail of print >>
As an extension of the artist’s previous show A Requiem in the Garden, exhibited at Gallery Stokes in 2009, Hur constructs a poignant, visual landscape with layers of hand-shredded silk flowers on an ambitious scale. Collected silk flowers are carefully disassembled and hand-shredded by the artist and a community of people around her. The pattern produced by this labor-intensive installation references the artist’s mother’s wedding blanket, beckoning memories of the past and inherent ephemeral comfort. The artist’s methodical destruction and reassembly of the silk flowers creates an introspective site, transforming the gallery into a place where internal memories lie in repose.
The artist examines her personal narratives of loss, memory, and place through a construction of visual and psychological space. The ritualized processes of choosing, collecting, cutting, and arranging the silk flowers become something larger, encompassing a private and emotional context. The installation process is itself a performance, which can be viewed from outside the gallery window during the week before the opening date (January 18–22). During the exhibition the installation, including the wall treatments and floor patterns will be viewable from eleven feet above the gallery floor through an observation window cut in the gallery’s wall.
Fahamu Pecou: WHIRL TRADE
(November 14 2009 - January 09 2010)
WHIRL TRADE is atlanta based artist Fahamu Pecou’s first solo exhibition with Get This! Gallery. The show focuses on a new suite of NEOPOP paintings inspired by his travels abroad and specifically in Africa. WHIRL TRADE addresses the impressions, interpretations and misconceptions of blackness that African descended communities perform for each other. Referencing the photos of West African photographer, Malick Sidibe, Fahamu has created a series of black and white images that are interpreted as faux magazine covers. WHIRL TRADE is the mash-up of black bodies influencing and being influenced by one another through popular media and entertainment.
A few words from Fahamu Pecou about WHIRL TRADE:
“Hip-hop has become the dominant contemporary American cultural export. As a US-based artist who grew up as part of the first wave of hip-hop, I often experience a degree of culture shock when I travel to cities, towns and villages around the globe and watch the context and form of my “home” culture appropriated in ways that appear misconstrued and distorted. In part, WHIRL TRADE re-presents, questions and plays with these global representations.
Likewise, African American cultural art forms, like hip-hop, have often recycled the same misinterpretations of African culture and Africanisms that US citizens are fed through media, music and entertainment. WHIRL TRADE, then, is my own dizzying struggle to discover what “blackness” we learn from each other through these cross-cultural fun house mirrors as well as some of the African roots we miss through these distortions.”
Atlanta Journal Constitution review>>
ArtsCriticAtl.com review>>
Bill Daniel: Ground Score
(September 18 2009 - October 31 2009)
(in conjunction with ACP 11 / Atlanta Celebrates Photography)
Ground Score is Bill Daniel’s second solo exhibition at Get This! and will trace the unpredictable course of a self-taught artist who was originally turned on to the practice of documentation while participating in the skate/punk scene of Austin in the early 1980s. Included in this trip are records from a 20-year obsession with traditional rail graffiti, a bike messenger’s eye view of San Francisco’s graffiti that presaged a movement called “The Mission School”, and a range of large-format work resulting from a science and myth-based appetite for apocalyptic landscapes.
Artist talk: Saturday, September 19, 2pm
Film screening: Who is Bozo Texino? a film by Bill Daniel. Saturday, September 19, Doors @ 7pm film 8 - 9pm
Summer 2009: Group Show
(June 19 2009 - August 01 2009)
A exhibition of selected works from a few of the gallery’s roster artists.
Andy Moon Wilson
Ben Roosevelt
Bean Worley
Harrison Keys
Jill Storthz
Nate Moore
Rick Froberg
Veronica de Jesus
Ben Worley a.k.a. Bean Summer
(April 25 2009 - May 16 2009)
A solo exhibition by the Atlanta based artist featured new works and experiments in new media.
Review by CInque Hicks in the Creative Loafing.
Ben Roosevelt: _________ is not always a bad thing.
(March 07 2009 - April 18 2009)
_______ is not always a bad thing. was Ben Roosevelt’s first solo exhibition with Get This! The exhibit featured new works including large mixed media installations. Ben Roosevelt is an Atlanta based artist and was the recipient of the 2007-2008 Forward Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award.
artist’s website >>
Atlanta-Journal Constitution review >>
DREW CONRAD: COWBOYS, LOVERS, LOSERS & NOBODIES
(January 24 2009 - March 28 2009)
“The idea of the American male is something more of a myth, a legend and the silver screen than it is the actual realization of the quintessential man. It is an unobtainable standard handed down from father to son and men to boys, an unbearable mantle. An American Dream in which masculinity and manhood manifests itself from childhood backyard Wild West showdowns to adult laments of the good old days. It is a complex idea of heroes, icons, death, obscurities, anxieties, achievements, trophies, bravado, machismo, cowboys, lovers, losers and nobodies. It is masculinity at it’s best. It is me at age twenty-nine.” -Drew Conrad
Abby Banks: “If you lived here - you’d be home now”
(April 25 2008 - June 21 2008)
An exhibition of photography from the Punk House book project.