Tara Escolin visits the Atlanta-based studio of Jackson Markovic to discuss his practice of analogue photography and documenting Atlanta’s dance scene. I certainly don’t think he would call himself an abstractionist, and some of this work is definitely nonfigurative. I’m guessing most readers are also familiar with Jeffrey Gibson, another queer artist whose work ties into dance music. Jackson also did a review himself recently of Ross Landberger, another photographer pushing materials. And yeah I do love some photography, with a bent that won’t be surprising.
Jackson Markovic reviews 5 Mountain Dews, Ross Landenberger’s solo exhibition of color field photographs exposed with soda, at THE END Project Space, Atlanta, for Burnaway. More
“Involuntary Photographs,” emerged over the past five years and involves “a different mode of seeing.” That is, the results of unintended taps and stray gestures on his mobile device. Or, perhaps, the device’s own autonomous “dreaming”:
“Without traditional framing or subject matter, the resulting photographs form soft abstractions of light, texture, and motion, resembling Color Field paintings more than conventional documentary images. They exist in a liminal space between conscious creation and mechanical observation—photography without a photographer, vision without deliberate intention.”
Based in Athens, Vasilikos is deeply influenced by Eastern mysticism and drawn to the meditative and transcendental dimensions of image-making.
along with Dean Semashima is part of a two-person, intergenerational display which, according to Quingyan Deng at Hyperallergic, represents two drastically opposed approaches to queer history. While Hunter’s pieces in this show do sometimes dissolve into something abstract, it was not the only work they made (Hunter left us in 2022).
recently left us after an amazing career that included the ground-breaking Pixilation from 1970. Artforum allowed Rebekah Rutkoff’s 2016 essay Painting by Numbers out from behind the Paywall briefly (which recounts a pretty wild encounter with Dali).
Like Kristy, Brent was one of the artists I discovered at Artfields. About the cyanotype below he wrote that his grandfather was a medic in world war Il. Honeybees carry their dead to the front of the hive as a ritual within their life cycle. These two concepts inform this installation of works on paper. Each red cross image is made up of many dead honeybees, salt and earth. The bees were donated to my project by local beekeepers. More
Saw below at Artfields, about which Gary wrote “Fibonacci Series #2” is part of a larger, multi-part series of dye-sublimation digital prints on aluminum; each abstract image’s frame size is a 3 x 5 ratio, based on the Fibonacci Number Sequence. The digital paintings are made up of layers of scanned 3 x 5 negatives of photographs taken by my father during his years of service in the U.S. Air Force. Afterward, I generated digital paintings of the organic elements within those negatives and composited them together along with various gradient maps and textures I captured on various hikes during my own travels.More
I’ll begin my run-down for the exhibits I enjoyed the most this year by using the same phrase I began last year’s wrap-up post– I am not even sure how to write a sentence that expresses how lucky I feel to live in the Triangle. In terms of what it means to me to have a community within which a satisfying practice can be established, I can’t think of a better area to settle (this year was number 20 living here btw).
I’ll also append above to note that the Triangle is home to a (really big) handful of the venues that the Carolinas have to offer, and there were certainly exhibits in other cities that I enjoyed immensely- a worthy aspiration to think about having the time to visit every city in the Carolinas regularly. While I don’t repeat local venues below, I’ll also note that all of them had more than one worthwhile exhibit this year, and there are other locations that are not included that I hope you will also continue to give your attention in 2024 (I will). Regular readers will also not be surprised by my preference for non-figurative work- I also hope that the presence, even predominance, of narrative work in this “review” is evidence that the Art world remains a place to surprise each of us if we are open.
Just like last year, this year I also had a favorite show. The CAM‘s Neo-Psychedlia, co-curated by Dr Kathryn Desplanque and Raj Bunnag (two outstanding and quickly rising stars in their own right) features Kathryn’s work as well as that of Charlie Dupree, Chieko Murasugi, Jerstin Crosby, Tonya Solley-Thornton and Zach Storm. The strength of the painting (and love of materials in general) in this show aside, I can’t hide the fact that the premise of the show resonated strongly with me because of themes that influence my own practice. I’ve written recently myself about the idea of revisiting former epochs, so I relate to Desplanque’s jumping off point which she conveys in the show statement (IE noting the what/when/where of Psychedelias’ original iterations). She then points to the context of our current moment and the relationship of the impulse to create alternative realities to a broader cultural and social agenda. Plus, the CAM is such an amazing venue.
BTW, despite this truly being my favorite exhibit, I was hard to keep to my rule of not repeating venues, given how important From Warehouse To Our House: The Monumental Work Of Vernon Pratt was to me, as an abstract painter. So, we’ll give that one an honorable mention. Go team abstraction!
Anchorlight brought us Maxito: A Memorial Exhibition by Lope Max Díaz mid year. Anyone who ever thought hard-edge abstraction was cold and impersonal should consider this work. Wonderful to see Lope’s production and the arc of his career here in the Triangle recognized, and this particular group of objects were/are a solid synthesis of high Modernism’s calls to contemplation with a context (Lope’s loss of his son unexpectedly) that merges the personal with the universality of loss.
Lump was home this year to the largest group show they’ve hosted in a minute, with the fantastic name Slump (I hope in the future they’ll program Plump and Clump, Bill that’s a note for you if you’re reading). With 19 artists in all, the exhibit schlizerped its way around the entire building- floors and all areas on the walls- snatching your eye and mind in what felt like 1,900 directions. Fantastic curatorial effort by Jerstin Crosby.
Diamante Arts and Cultural Center really blew me away with Ambiorix Santos Huellas. It is/was a tour de force of gestural abstraction which I visited a couple of times. I was inspired to see another painter who is not afraid at all to reach and strive, who is confidentially making marks and dealing with the results as they happen, keeping what matters and obliterating what doesn’t. Kudos to Peter Marin for programming this one (and for having an outstanding show there himself earlier in 2023).
Meredith College Weems Gallery was the site of Nathan GrimesHome | Body. It’s really hard to convey just how monumental this show was in terms of breadth and scale and diversity of strategies for shaping and informing physical space. There were elements of sound and touch at work as well. I truly hope you all got a chance to spend some time with it and I also hope very much to see it programmed in other venues in our region soon- it is mature work that needs to be seen. I am sure part of the connection I felt to Nathan’s work was the shared adult experience of reflecting on and moving past damage done to us during childhood. I look forward to seeing what Todd Jones programs for this venue in 2024.
Adrift by Oami Powers takes the every day, or at least things we would say we know, and, somehow, makes it strange (or perhaps reminds us of the strangeness that all we can ever say about a thing is to attempt to recount our own memories with which it is associated). Powers notes in her show statement that elements “shift in and out of focus, a dreamlike, fragmented realism that blurs into abstraction.” For me, this exhibit was a very direct way to point at things we can never quite put our finger on. Well done, as always, Annah Lee and Artspace, which continues to be host and home to so much creative energy.
The Rubenstein Arts Center at Duke was the site of Marie-Louise Bennett‘s thesis show Returning to the Point of Entanglement which also leveraged multi-media to deal with the theme of memories as well as societal expectations and one’s place of origin, among others. Like Powers, Bennett uses things with which many of us have experiences- church pews or a “fort” made of household furniture and blankets- as jumping off points that lead to questions (like Powers she also tied the exhibit together through use of materials and color). I thought about the “doll” with an old, analog camera instead of eyes, and reflected on how we store memories in our mushy, very human brains, without meta-data or a cataloging system or anything approaching objectivity, for many days after viewing it.
Popbox project brought us what was easily the most meta exhibit of the year in Jim Lee‘s upstART Gallery project which pointed at the world by pointing at how the art world points at the world. The fact that Jim’s practice was new to me was a welcome reminder of just how rich our scene is- the number of co-collaborators that provided work for this project speaks to how much this practice is respected locally as well. Similar to Nathan’s show, it’s pretty hard to capture the breadth and scope of what Jim accomplished with this project, both in terms of the magnitude of work inverted and emphasized by its scale, and in terms of it galvanizing a community (I found this show in my social media feed continuously for several weeks as we all celebrated it). I very much hope to see what the duo of Mavis Gregg and Laurie Ritchie bring us in 2024.
Those of us who have wanted to see what’s next for Basement were rewarded with a near perfect merging of setting and objects in Martiń Wannam‘s La Eterna Injustica. Having seen the call for the Radicle residency, it’s clear the team at Basement were looking for a creative that would make work for the space. Sure, I share a love of maximalism, and there is also an element of contradiction at work here as well. Then again, maybe what I loved most was the unfinished setting for the unfinished project of building an inclusive future. The team at Basement did us all a service by bringing a vision of life from outside American culture to the Triangle.
And last but definitely not least I want to give big propers to our (NC) Museum of Art for their reorganization of The People’s Collection (and yes, I am totally blissed out that they’ve used the opportunity to pull some amazing abstraction out of storage). The job of museums (this writer thinks) is to educate, and this re-contextualization of our permanent collection was a welcome and necessary move towards celebrating the diversity of human experience and ensuring that future generations have a comprehensive understanding of what they are seeing. And also, abstraction.
I’ll also note that I am very satisfied (and immensely grateful) for having the first two attempts at curating myself this year. In April I got to organize ExtraSpectral in partnership with Durham Art Guild, which featured Jerstin, Tonya and Zach as well as Leif Zikade and Jane Cheek. And in July I was honored to be among some amazing peers in Peter as well as Carson Whitmore, Cindy Morefield, Freddie Bell, Jason Lord, Jean Gray Mohs and Natalia Torres del Valle as a part of Open Source which was shown at Lump and Sertoma Art Center, and which is an exhibit that already has planned future iterations. I’d clearly be biased to include either in my favorites list, and I’m confident that the artists I got to work with have and will get the recognition they so deserve through our involvement together in these projects. Here’s to even more amazing things in 2024! Thanks for reading whoever you are and please share this blog with your circle. Cheers, Sterling.
I first came across Hanno’s work in Liz’s IG feed when she linked to The Borders Art Movement, which exists to raise interest in photographic abstraction and serve as beacon for artists, collectors, galleries and museums.
Galina Kurlat is a photographic artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her BFA in Media Arts from Pratt Institute. She is a recent Hopper Prize finalist.
Painting After Art is Dead 