Author Archive
By Lisa Williamson Wearing a long-sleeved tomato red shirt with matching leggings pushed up to her knees, a woman walks quietly through the door carrying a bucket of discoloured water bending under its own weight. Her bare feet pad across the cold concrete in deliberate steps as she makes her way to the…
By Austin McLellan Austin McLellan: How did you get interested in art? Laurie Brown: Actually, my Dad was interested in photography, so I learned that from him when I was young and continue to enjoy photography to this day. And my mother was very crafty. So creativity, in many different forms, has…
By Lisa Williamson Chen Wang is a recent graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology (MFA 2018 in Photography and Related Media) and a current Artist-in-Residence at Crosstown Arts in Memphis, Tennessee. Wang is steadily growing her national and international success with exhibitions and screenings throughout the United States (Wisconsin, New York and…
By Lisa Williamson The title of a show is our introduction to the artist’s work, the selling point to the end-product, an enticement to tease the imagination prior to entering a space or experience. In the case of Erin Harmon, the title is a loose flap that intermittently reveals hints of a self-generative…
By Kris Bespalec-Davis Objects and images, preserved in archives, or immaterial and memorialized in the annals of memory: these are Relics. They are evocative, even provocative, and, through miraculous belief, these cultural traces and markers of personal identity persevere. They channel people, places, events, and ideas from the recent and distant past. They…
By Maria McDowell Mike, tell me again about your dad’s favorite brick! My dad loves this brick he got from the old Chicago White Sox stadium, Comiskey Park, when they tore it down in 1990. He created a lot of wonderful memories inside that park, and he’s proud to have that brick that represents…
By Sara Lee Burd Sitting in Mel Ziegler’s studio, I see a display case filled with his collection of mass-produced souvenirs mixed with a bounty of rocks, sticks, and other natural wonders he has collected. It sits as a kind of reliquary for sentimental objects that inform his practice. The assemblage reflects Ziegler’s…
By Chase Westfall Massa Lemu’s The sea hums bearing strange gifts (May 10–24, 2018, Oakwood Arts, Richmond, Va.) brings objects, moving image and language together in a complex meditation on the emotional and psychological experience of displacement. Video footage and materials from Lemu’s native Malawi are carefully blended into the site and history…
By Catherine Rush Yanique Norman’s exhibition, Lessons on How to Be a More Interesting Woman, on display in the South Gallery at the municipally-owned Gallery 72 in downtown Atlanta, draws inspiration from a set of poems by Safiya Sinclair, Notes on the State of Virginia, I-III. In her statement, Norman claims the exhibition…
By Casey Fletcher The fourth incarnation of the Hunter Invitational at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga was sold to me by a close friend as one of the more engaging exhibits that the museum has run in some time. The collection of eight working artists invited by the Hunter’s contemporary…