Kamrooz Aram @ Atlanta Contemporary - Ancient Blue Ornament

Kamrooz Aram: Ancient Blue Ornament
Atlanta Contemporary
Through April 1, 2018

Atlanta Contemporary presents Ancient Blue Ornament, a solo exhibition by KAMROOZ ARAM.

Kamrooz Aram utilizes painting, sculpture, and photography to examine the intersections between ornamental non-Western art that has often been deemed “minor” throughout Western art history, and Modernism with its great phobia of the ornamental. He believes in the transformative power of form, function, material, and pattern as tools that operate beyond western art history books. His painterly works transcend the specter of the decorative by blending ornamental motifs with geometric patterns common in vernacular modern architecture. At once political and ornamental, the works are alive and alert, aware that one vibrant art history should not reduce another history to a whisper. 

Kamrooz Aram (b. 1978, Shiraz, Iran) received an MFA from Columbia University in 2003 and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001. He has shown internationally and nationally, including solo exhibitions at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium; Green Art Gallery, Dubai; The Suburban, Chicago; LA ART, Los Angeles; and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams. Aram’s work has been shown in many group exhibitions, including Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, 2014; the Busan Biennale, 2006; Greater New York2005, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2005; and the Prague Biennale I, 2003. Public collections that include his work are The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; and M+, Hong Kong. He has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Aram lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

ATLANTA CONTEMPORARY 

535 Means Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30318
atlantacontemporary.org

Sable Elyse Smith @ Atlanta Contemporary - How We Tell Stories to Children

Sable Elyse Smith: How We Tell Stories to Children
Atlanta Contemporary
January 11 - February 4, 2018

Atlanta Contemporary presents a solo exhibition with Sable Elyse Smith.

In Sable Elyse Smith’s video How We Tell Stories to Children, 2015, nothing stays still for very long. As big industrial sounds pulsate we see the back of a young man running away in slow motion alongside a filtered expanse of color, or the memory of color. There are several intercuts, but the video centers on a recorded half of a conversation with the artist’s father who is currently incarcerated. At times, it is personal portrait from loved one to loved one, emotionally close moments where he refers to the artist as “Daughter”. He is no longer an abstract idea of the imprisoned, he is man, a father and this is his new normal. He is far, but not forgotten. We are also allowed in to the empty moments in the cell, time between time. He sits silent, groves to Alicia Keys ‘Troubles’, and promises a tour of his surroundings. His entire story, his message for his daughter feels just out of reach, but the camera rolls on. 

Sable Elyse Smith has performed at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, Eyebeam, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Her work has also been screened at Birkbeck Cinema in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries, London, Artist Television Access, San Francisco, and MoMA Ps1, New York. Her writing has been published in Radical Teacher, Selfish, Studio Magazine and with Recess Art’s Critical Writing Fellowship. She is currently working on her first book. Sable Elyse Smith has received grants & fellowships from Creative Capital, the Queens Museum, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and Art Matters. She recently received the 2017 Emerging Artist Grant in New York City from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation and was named a 2018 Artist-in-Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

ATLANTA CONTEMPORARY 
535 Means Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30318
atlantacontemporary.org

Lonnie Holley @ Atlanta Contemporary

Lonnie Holley
Atlanta Contemporary
January 12 – April 2, 2017

Atlanta Contemporary presents a solo exhibition with LONNIE HOLLEY. Holley is a man of many myths and talents. Born in Jim Crow-era Birmingham, Alabama, as the seventh of 27 children, Lonnie Holley traveled across the South and held a wide array of jobs before making his first artwork at the age of 29.

Well known for his assemblages, Lonnie Holley incorporates natural and man-made objects into totemic sculptures. Materials such as steel scrap, sandstone, plastic flowers, crosses, and defunct machines commemorate places, people, and events. The exhibition features a selection of sculptures and drawings on loan from the artist. In addition to these works, Lonnie Holley will create site specific installations reflective of the spontaneous and improvisational nature of his creative process.

Curator Daniel Fuller says “Lonnie Holley is one of the most influential artists and musicians of the 20th/21st centuries. His powerful work is improvisational and free in that it goes beyond the autobiographical and chronicles daily life and history of people all over the South. It is as much concerned with all of mother earth as it is cosmic.”

LONNIE HOLLEY was included in the seminal exhibition More than Land and Sky: Art From Appalachia at the National Museum of American Art in 1981. In 2013 The Whitney Museum, NY, hosted Holley’s debut New York performance concurrent to the museum’s Blues for Smoke exhibition. His work is included in museum collections, including; Smithsonian American Museum of Art, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Milwaukee Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI; Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, Atlanta, GA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; and the American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY. Holley has also gained recognition for his music, and he has collaborated with the indie-rock bands Dirty Projectors and Animal Collective. In 2010, he recorded his debut album, Just Before Music, which came out in 2012. In 2013, his follow-up record, Keeping a Record of It, was released under the Atlanta-based Dust to Digital label.

ATLANTA CONTEMPORARY
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
535 Means Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30318
atlantacontemporary.org

James Herbert, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center - Paintings, Films, Videos and Stills

James Herbert

Paintings, Films, Videos and Stills

Atlanta Contemporary Art Center

November 4 - December 30, 2000

Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (The Contemporary) presents a comprehensive, retrospective exhibition of James Herbert’s paintings, films, videos and stills. This exhibition, organized by Teresa Bramlette, marks the first occasion upon which the entire oeuvre of James Herbert’s work has been presented in one space at one time.

James Herbert has worked in Athens, GA since the 1960s. An accomplished painter and filmmaker, he has been awarded numerous grants in both mediums. He has been honored with film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, where this fall he will premiere his new film Jumbo Aqua. His paintings are large in scale and reflect both his abstract expressionistic roots and his interest in the outsider art prominent in the southeast. Herbert’s films are sensual and poetic depicting dream-like sequences by using various illusory effects--shooting, rephotographing footage, slowing projection speeds, and reversing motion.

James Herbert has been an influential teacher for several generations of young painters. He has not shown a group of his paintings in this area since a solo exhibition at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, in the late 1970s. His films, shown primarily within the context of independent film festivals, are also rarely screened for southern audiences.

Although this exhibition should in no way be considered a retrospective, it is important to recognize James Herbert’s contributions and his accomplishments at this point in his career. It is also interesting to examine the dual nature of his practice—the painting and the filmmaking.

For many years, James Herbert utilized the process of re-photography in his films. He studied each frame of his original footage, editing and then refilming the selected frames to make the final presentation. This deconstruction of the initial film works provocatively, suggesting in its barely perceptible disjunctiveness, a dream-like state. Centered on a concept of beauty as personified by the human body, the work is unquestionably voyeuristic. In contrast to his more distanced stance as a filmmaker, James Herbert’s paintings are direct, with the paint sometimes applied by his hands and other less traditional tools. Where the films are quiet, the paintings are loud. Where the films are fragile and romantic, the paintings are aggressive. To be able to compare and contrast the two will be an exciting and perhaps once-in-lifetime opportunity.

A catalogue accompanies the show with texts by Donald Kuspit, Felicia Feaster, Teresa Bramlette, Genevieve McGillicuddy and Donald Keyes (who also selected the film stills on view).

ATLANTA CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER

535 Means Street NW, Atlanta, Georgia, 30318

thecontemporary.org

Ilya Kabakov at The Contemporary, Atlanta

Ilya Kabakov
The Contemporary, Atlanta
September 9 - October 21, 2000

ILYA KABAKOV emerged from the tight-knit underground community of dissident artists in Moscow in the 1980s into one of the most celebrated international artists of the 1990s. Expatriated from Russia, Ilya Kabakov lives primarily in New York and creates installations (often involving extensive narrative texts written by him) in museums and exhibitions.

Ilya Kabakov has shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (The Bridge, 1995) and in the Venice Biennale (The Red Pavilion, 1993 and We Were in Kyoto, 1997). He focuses on the tiniest scraps that one encounters in the ordinary course of a day—a crumpled gum wrapper, a bent nail, a snapshot or a common postcard. His paintings, stories and installations are fantastic tales, provoked in this way by the trivialities of daily experience.

Ilya Kabakov’s installation The Boat of My Life, addresses his flight from the Nazis to Samarkand at the age of 9 with his parents as well as his internal exile. It also speaks to the persecutions of a "Jewish national" within postwar Russia, and his emigration to New York in the spring of 1988 at the beginning of the Cold War thaw. The show was organized by Jonathan Fineberg, Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is accompanied by a catalogue.

THE CONTEMPORARY, ATLANTA
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
535 Means Street NW, Atlanta, Georgia, 30318
thecontemporary.org