Cullum’s Notebook: Stunning new gallery opens, another closes, beauty thrives

February is brief, and one of the shows in today’s column opened well into the month, but it seems appropriate to mention these exhibits anyway since they explore the literal truth of “ars longa, vita brevis” — art is long, life is short. One way or another, they’re about the preciousness and lasting qualities of beautiful objects, but each takes a different position on the topic.

The launch of the well-known art professional Jane Jackson’s new venture The Object Space (sharing a gallery with Sandler Hudson) has been spectacular. Through March 4, Form + Surface presents mostly European ceramics and tapestries of exquisite simplicity or complexity. Subtlety is the unifying aesthetic factor.

Jean Arp and Jean Cocteau are only two of the legendary names in a list of artists that includes some still at the peak of long, or rapidly risen, careers. The exhibit includes a combination of classic and never-before-seen works. For instance, the gallery commissioned a new tapestry by fabric artist Veronique De Soultrait. Combining figuration and abstraction, delicacy and intensity, the exhibition resists easy summation and one can only wish its run were extended.

The same could be said for the shows at Whitespace and Whitespec, Layers and Markings and In Plein Air, closing February 25. Teresa Cole’s complex, layered incorporation of digital technologies into craft media results in objects almost impossible to represent adequately in photographs. The digitally printed wall hanging Redeem is an exception, and even there the texture-based contrast of the word “Redeem,” rendered in puff paint, is not apparent except when viewed in person.

William DePauw’s witty incorporation of words into ceramics (“As Is” being one example) combines skill with low and high humor. MaDora Frey’s transmutation of landscape into objects and videos in Whitespec equally eludes easy description and is well worth seeking out.

At the other end of the collector spectrum, 378 Gallery’s final show, Last Call, is one of its best ever. The exhibit, and the gallery, close February 25. Last Call’s combination of the sweetly seductive and the outrageously repellent includes baroque, emotionally complex heart-shaped collages by Susan Cipcic alongside two of the most willfully dark assemblage sculptures to have appeared in Atlanta recently, Cipcic’s Tea With Miss H. (Bitter Brew) and Aileen Loy’s nail-encrusted The Unseen Saint aka My Sister’s Chair.

The exhibit is a reminder that these artists, and classical realist painter Katherine Mialkowski, deserve more gallery time than they have gotten. It also marks the debut of collage and assemblage artist Gina Edmonds, whose work is aptly summarized as “reflecting the beauty and simplicity of imperfection and fragility.”

Last Call is yet more evidence that we need more venues for accomplished artists who, for whatever reason, have not found consistent recognition. Atlanta galleries’ aesthetic choices cover a range of styles but still leave considerable gaps.

If 378’s show is a reminder of the lasting value even of the inexpensive object (one priced as little as $90), the near-opposite is deliberately true in longstanding conceptual artist Kathryn Refi’s solo show, at The End through February 26.

What’s Left Will Burn is both a title and a declaration: Refi states that any unsold remainders from these works (all India ink on paper overlaid with mesh) will be burned. The prices, starting at $50, seem to reinforce the intentional lack of preciousness of these physically dark but compelling abstractions; however, the larger works go for as much as $1600.

Lack of preciousness is a main point of Titanium, an ironically titled show at Take It Easy through February 25 by two multidisciplinary African American artists, Caleb Jamel Brown and Faith Icecold. Both deal with craft traditions, subversively and at times sarcastically.

The titles of Icecold’s If All Else Fails, Apply to Cooper Union and Made Someone Else Cry During Crit are insider art-school witticisms, but the elaborate materials of the latter work and of Look at the Metrics (which features a burning candle and hence also has “linear time” as a material) demonstrate that there is thought behind the wit. The same goes for Brown’s humble-appearing objects, which in the case of Self-Portrait (goes right through you) starts the materials list with “Glycerin, hair, X-ray, cornstarch, Georgia clay” and continues through five more improbable-seeming but necessary materials.

::

Dr. Jerry Cullum’s reviews and essays have appeared in Art Papers magazine, Raw Vision, Art in America, ARTnews, International Journal of African-American Art and many other popular and scholarly journals. In 2020 he was awarded the Rabkin Prize for his outstanding contribution to arts journalism.