Inman Park Business Association

Tangent
new paintings by Tommy Taylor

Opening Friday Jan 15 | 7-10 PM

Whitespace is pleased to present Tommy Taylor’s newest body of work, Tangent. Kinetic and vibrant, Taylor calls his paintings “intuitive anthropomorphic abstracts”. The spontaneity and organic forms, drips and splatters support this statement well. While his palette retains the upbeat and quirky colors he is known for, this work is less playful and more contemplative than it has been in the past.

exhibition dates: January 15 – February 20, 2010

opening reception: Friday, January 15 | 7-10 pm

whitespace
814 Edgewood Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30307
404-688-1892

whitespace814.com
whitespace814.blogspot

ADVENTURE CLUB / Ann Stephenson

Tuesday November 17, 2009
8 PM

Ann Stephenson is the author of the chapbook Wirework (Tent Editions, 2006). Her manuscript, The Poles, was a finalist for the 2008 Bateau Press BOOM Chapbook Series. Her poems have recently appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Coconut, Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, Gerry Mulligan and Sal Mimeo. She recieved her MFA from Bard College in 2007 and relocated from New York City to her hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. She is currently at work on a new collection of poems entitled Adventure Club, from which she will be reading.

READY SET READINGS is a bimonthly reading series at whitespace committed to new and innovative writing.

Whitespace
814 Edgewood Ave
Atlanta, GA 30307
404-688-1892

www.whitespace814.com
whitespace814.blogspot

Conversion
installation by Kelcy Chase Folsom
OPENING THURSDAY, OCT 22 | 7-10 PM

Conversion, an exhibition by Kelcy Chase Folsom opens on Thursday evening, October 22 at whitespec. Folsom’s intention is to tackle the process of deconstruction, rebirth and destruction. For over two years, Chase collected cast off shards and other discarded ceramic objects that covered his studio floor. Folsom had a choice, either dump the pieces or work with them. He chose the later and began sculpting the mass of stacked and strategically placed objects and by doing so, reconstructed a new aesthetic. He recorded this process with drawings and photographs. After the completion of each sculpture, he then smashed it to bits with a hammer. Next, he carefully and meticulously sieved and separated the materials into various gradients ranging from pebble-size to that of a fine powder therefore returning the ceramic to its original state. Five wall installations document Kelcy Chase Folsom’s very unique approach to working with clay.

continued at whitespace:

In The Thicket Of It
photography + site-specific installation by Sally Heller

OCTOBER 16 – NOVEMBER 21



whitespec: Conversion
Opening: Thursday, Oct 22 | 7-10 PM
Exhibition: October 22 – November 21

whitespace: In The Thicket Of It
Exhibition: October 16 – November 21

Gallery Hours:
Wed – Sat | 11 AM – 5 PM
or by appointment

Studio 106 will have its 15th annual studio tour this November 14th and 15th. Holiday gifts, tableware, jewelry, soaps, lotions, clay works, paintings and home decor will be shown. Studio 106 is located at 1083 Austin Avenue in the Horizon Theatre building.

There will be a 15th Anniversary Art Party on November 15th from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm.

New Orleans-based artist, Sally Heller, creates unique structures that are at once familiar and strange by presenting mass-produced, disposable objects in unusual contexts. Through a process of subtle twists and turns she strips everyday detritus and disposable, low-end consumer goods of their original use-value, recycling them into organic forms that are repositioned in room-size installations, creating bizarre landscapes from the generic and proliferous discards of our disposable lifestyles. Fascinated by the poetics of contradictions, oxymorons and double entendres, Heller is less interested in her work’s inherent commentary on consumerism, waste and ecology than she is in seeing humor in our world’s plasticized realities.

The photographs provide documentation of the installations and are expressive as abstract paintings; their immediacy clearly reveals the dynamic energy that goes into building these colorful and animated installations. In the photographs, one can make out the havoc caused by nature’s powers, yet the intensity of the color and wry plastic objects evoke anything but disaster. They are highly finished and elegant objects.

Opening Date: Friday Oct 16 | 7-10 PM
Exhibition Dates: Oct 16 – Nov 21, 2009

Gallery Hours:
Wed – Sat | 11 AM – 5 PM
or by appointment

whitespace
814 Edgewood Ave
Atlanta, GA 30307
404-688-1892

Artist’s Talk by Sarah Emerson
Saturday, October 10 at 2 PM

and-

Wishes, a collaborative film by Blake Williams and Robin Bernat
Saturday, October 10 at 8 PM
Sunday, October 11 at 8 PM

Saturday, October 10 is the last day to view
Soft Trap, new paintings by Sarah Emerson
and Withershins, sculptural works by Jeff Grant

Gallery Hours
Wed – Sat | 11 AM – 5 PM

Atlanta painter Sarah Emerson is inspired by the tragic romanticism of a decaying environment and civilization. Her paintings express a precarious balance between the innate splendor of nature, and the mysterious fear and violence that lurks beneath the surface as natural landscapes are encroached upon and exploited. Emerson’s newest body of work is a nostalgic projection of a “future Eden” filled with fear and awe. These paintings are uniquely haunting in their whimsy and playfulness, effectively blurring the line between fairy tale and horror story.

In addition to the paintings, a collection of drawings titled “The Final Girl” is on display. The collection emerges from a concept explored by author Carol Clover on the last surviving girl in horror films. The drawings are intimately connected to the paintings as Emerson’s paintings place the viewer in the position of  “the final girl”, or last survivor. She paints strange, yet familiar scenes, using common images (such as deer, beehives, fruit, locusts, bubbles, and bullet holes) to evoke a landscape of intuitive impressions. Ultimately, Emerson presents a new environment that we are left to contemplate in our own human solitude.

Work by artist Jeff Grant will also be integrated into the exhibition. Similar to Emerson, Grant explores themes of urban encroachment into our natural environment. He works in a variety of media (drawings in ink, wood and yarn sculptures, lighting installations), to create classic forms that resonate with the viewer. Together, Emerson and Grant’s exhibition, titled Soft Trap, encourage imaginative exploration into their work by creating a landscape of memory and ambiguous symbolism.

Exhibition dates:            Sept 4 – Oct 10, 2009

Withershins sculptural works by Jeff Grant

Artist’s Talk by Sarah Emerson
Saturday, October 10 | 2 PM

Saturday October 10 is the last day to view exhibitions

Gallery Hours
Wed – Sat | 11 AM – 5 PM

Atlanta painter, Sarah Emerson, is inspired by the tragic romanticism of a decaying environment and civilization. Her paintings express a precarious balance between the innate splendor of nature, and the mysterious fear and violence that lurks beneath the surface as natural landscapes are encroached upon and exploited. Emerson’s newest body of work is a nostalgic projection of a “future Eden” filled with fear and awe. These paintings are uniquely haunting in their whimsy and playfulness, effectively blurring the line between fairy tale and horror story.

In addition to the paintings, a collection of drawings titled “The Final Girl” is on display. The collection emerges from a concept explored by author Carol Clover on the last surviving girl in horror films. The drawings are intimately connected to the paintings as Emerson’s paintings place the viewer in the position of  “the final girl”, or last survivor. She paints strange, yet familiar scenes, using common images (such as deer, beehives, fruit, locusts, bubbles, and bullet holes) to evoke a landscape of intuitive impressions. Ultimately, Emerson presents a new environment that we are left to contemplate in our own human solitude.

Work by artist, Jeff Grant will also be integrated into the exhibition. Similar to Emerson, Grant explores themes of urban encroachment into our natural environment. He works in a variety of media (drawings in ink, wood and yarn sculptures, lighting installations), to create classic forms that resonate with the viewer. Together, Emerson and Grant’s exhibition, titled Soft Trap, encourage imaginative exploration into their work by creating a landscape of memory and ambiguous symbolism.

Exhibition dates:            Sept 4 – Oct 10, 2009

Opening reception:        Friday, Sept 4 | 7-10 pm

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to see this little known cinematic work.

As part of the SUMMER FALLS programming, Whitespace is pleased to announce the screening of Matthew Barney’s De Lama Lamina (ca. 45 min.). Set in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil during Carnaval 2004, this film/performance collaboration with avant-garde musician Arto Lindsay is further evidence of Barney’s continuing fascination with “biomechanical erotica.” Barney says, “De Lama Lamina” is a meditation on the creative process . . . Candomble . . . became a catalyst for finding a way to express a faith in the balances in nature . . . and through this faith being able to look at the world today without feeling hopeless.” Click Here to read the advertisement used to hire an adult film actor to play the auto-eroticizing “Greenman” (includes a full synopsis and artful film treatment of De Lama Lamina).

SEATING IS LIMITED TO A MAXIMUM OF 50 PEOPLE. Please arrive early to secure a seat or email us to make a reservation. Screenings start promptly on the hour.

Screening: Friday, August 29
two shows 9 PM & 10 PM
$5

From Whitespace:

SUMMER FALLS opens next week when Summer slowly begins the process of giving way to Fall. In this temporary “hit & run” installation, John Otte seeks to meditate on the ongoing collapse and erosion of many previously considered “stable” systems, both locally and globally, thus making way for other arrangements and different forms. In an ongoing exploration of creative destruction, Otte employs photography, text, collage, sculpture, and film sources creating porous abstractions where systems collide, contaminate, and overlap one another, forming strange new hybrids and mutations – an uncertain world where fact and fiction are inextricably bound, “beautiful things grow out of shit . . . things evolve out of nothing,” and “everything disappears.”

John Otte, is well known in Atlanta as an artist, DJ, and curator. His multi-disciplinary work is primarily abstract, containing numerous references to the body, music, architecture, and landscape.

Teresa Cole teaches printmaking at Tulane University and holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute of Art and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work represents a fine balance between science and craft manipulation from its construction to its presentation. Though many prints utilize digital aspects, she hand carves each mark on nontraditional materials, such as Masonite and pegboard, to create her unique images. Her prints began as an exploration on patterns and illusion. Incorporating many qualities inherent to the science of optics, her work investigates notions of ornament, decoration, and beauty. Through elegant layering and magnification, she examines how the repetition of patterns is used to distort information to elicit a complex sense of security. The prints thus create a safe space where the viewer is captivated, persuaded, and seduced to contemplate the complexity and layers of contemporary existence.

In the same space, Caroline Smith examines human existence through large, organic sculptures. An Atlanta native, she holds a BFA in ceramics from Tulane University in New Orleans. Her work, inspired by the primitive and animalistic motivations found deep within human nature, portrays the fundamental struggle in expressing the deep desires of the heart through the prism of the conscious mind. Her sineous and leafy creatures flow in familiar human gestures to seduce viewers to reconnect with their primal instincts while reminding them of the humanity so easily dismissed in others. Smith aims to “pry at those uncomfortable, awkward edges of life, between animal, plant, and human.” Her sculptures juxtapose course earthenware, silky porcelain, and shiny gilded ornament, as a representation of the hidden beauty in the everyday life. Hostile and tender, fierce yet vulnerable, fearsome and fragile, the creatures are entangled in their own internal and external struggles.

Together, the works of Cole and Smith create a push/pull of seduction and repulsion, drawing the viewer to examine the superficial illusion of beauty and the complexity and distortion beneath.

exhibition dates: July 10 – August 15, 2009
opening reception: Friday July 10 | 7-10 PM

gallery hours: Wed – Sat | 11 AM – 5 PM

According to the Whitespace press release: Photographer, Yukari Umekawa’s art emerges from her efforts to find peace in a state of longing and isolation. Born in Osaka, Yukari left her friends and family in Japan to pursue her BFA in photography at Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. She juxtaposes images of telephone wires and the sky to express a nostalgic homesickness. The telephone wires represent her perpetual desire for contact with home, while images of the sky serve as a comforting reminder that she and her distant home are under the same sky. The exhibition is aptly titled “itodenwa,” which is the Japanese word for a telephone created from two cans and a string. By deconstructing her digital camera, she created a pinhole camera to capture her images. Through the use of long exposures, her constructed pinhole camera returns dreamlike images that are softened and out of focus. Yukari states, “The photographs then become unclear like my memories.”

The show marks her debut, and will be displayed at Whitespace alongside Scott Silvey’s exhibition “Civic Remedies”. In contrast to Yukari, the American-born sculptor and painter now resides in Tokyo and is presenting his newest paintings from Japan. Together, the exhibitions will be a unique opportunity to explore the influences of Japanese and American culture on artists living outside their respective homelands

exhibition dates: May 29 – July 11, 2009
opening reception: Friday, May 29 | 7-10 PM

Friday May 22 from 7 to 10 pm Whitespace Gallery on Edgewood Ave will have an opening titled “Civic Remedies”. This show features the works of painter Scott Silvey. Silvey graduated from Georgia State, but he currently lives in Japan, and this is reflected in his work. To quote from the Whitespace press release: “Scott’s exposure to Asian cultures has significantly influenced this new body of work, Civic Remedies. The richly textured paintings imagine Tokyo as a city devoid of its former human inhabitants. Inside a decaying landscape, vending machines, meters, and electrical lines stand like sentinels among the dwellings where people once lived. Because of unabated consumption, the skeletal remains of human production are all that linger in the faint, enfolding light. Within this spectral scene, soil and medicinal herbs gather in abundance. Their restorative potential has returned to heal an ailing urban landscape. This exhibition presents a continuation of themes that Silvey has explored throughout his career via paintings and installations, the relationship between human construction and natural systems.”

The exhibition will be at Whitespace until July 3rd.

This Saturday, May 9 at 2 PM Whitespace Gallery is holding an artist’s talk with Deanna Sirlin. Deanna will be speaking about her exhibition currently at Whitespace. If you haven’t been to the exhibition yet, it’s a great opportunity to see the work and meet the artist!

Whitespace Gallery has a new show by Julia Hill called “Chaos and Currents”, opening Thursday April 23. The show contains sculptures by Ms Hill which feature salvaged materials and debris gathered from urban creek beds. This show will be Ms Hill’s first solo exhibition.

Friday, April 17th will be the opening reception for a show by Atlanta artist Denna Sirlin, called “Everything is Optional”, at WhiteSpace Gallery. The show includes both painting and sculpture. Don’t miss the art lurking in our midsts.

There will be gallery talk by the artist on May 9th at 2:00.

Friday April 10 is the last of three evenings of art films at Whitespace Gallery. The series is curated by Brad Lapin. This program features films by Richard Kern and Nick Zedd. To quote from the Whitespace release:

Program starts at 9:00. Free admission. Over 18 only.