Review: ‘Encounters’ at Johnson Lowe Gallery invites slow looking in a fast world 

Positioned as a response to fast-paced swipe culture, the fall group exhibition at Johnson Lowe Gallery brings together 12 artists whose work explores Encounters — the act of facing something long enough to be transformed by it. The exhibition text asks, “What does it mean to stand before an image in a society that conditions us to skim, swipe, react and move on?” and goes on to claim that “These works demand presence . . . Their complexity unfolds gradually, offering something lasting in exchange for something from the viewer: time, attention, patience.” This exhibition taps into a post-lockdown cultural impulse to return to physical experiences, which has even led some to revert to landlines and other analog practices that resist superficial urgency and reclaim attention.

Embedded in this curatorial framing is a deeper ontological assertion: The artworks in Encounters are not inert objects but have the capacity to form an “exchange” with the viewer. Affect theory, as described by Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, clarifies this relationality, describing it as, “intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman) . . . vital forces insisting beyond emotion — that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension.” At a time of movement-building, this concept underscores art’s ability to compel us to feel what we’ve become numb to and then to act.

The curation largely lives up to this metaphysical claim, offering transformative exchange through works in two main categories: energetic materiality and subversive fabrication through new technologies. 

The back room of the gallery anchors the exhibition’s thesis with works by giants Judy Pfaff, Sam Gilliam and Michael David. Each artist has spent decades innovating their mediums and expanding abstraction conceptually and spatially. Their works don’t just occupy space — they animate it, vibrating the energy from the artist poured into them. 

Embodying this materialism is Pfaff’s Cat’s Paw (2025), a heart-shaped amalgamation that bulges off the wall. The work synthesizes Pfaff’s lived environment into a form of its own becoming: shower sandals and kitchen sponges are reborn as abacus beads, colorful lights illuminate pom poms and marbled urethane contrasts with the zig-zagged order of a contorted plastic mat. Pfaff’s imaginative reuse is a joyous take on the bizarre excrement of the Anthropocene. Her radical looseness opens up a field of possibility, suggesting that these materials could become an infinite number of things: lemons into lemonade.

Nearby, David’s The Bed and the Bell Jar (2015-2025) and Gilliam’s Parted Iron (1973) also offer visceral encounters through freedom of expression. David’s roughly-hewn, painted construction rises into what Robert Smithson describes as a “ruin in reverse,” a monument born out of and into the decay of industrial modernity. Glass shards reflect outward, offering a moment of self-recognition where the viewer is split between seeing and being seen. This fearless and fragile work supports the exhibition’s claim most overtly — that the encounter is a mutual exchange, a mirror through which presence itself becomes material. 

Gilliam’s Parted Iron strikes a more mournful chord, like a cello singing an octave below Pfaff and David’s saxophones. Its stained surface pulses with matter in motion, tapping into a deep time language of universal energy: White specks froth like a crashing wave; patches of burnt sienna spread like rust and an orb of yellow diffuses like the morning sun. To stand before the painting is to face the sublime — the painful awareness of the world’s infinite beauty and the brevity of our time within it. 

The show goes on to broaden its exploration of material encounter through photography, textiles and printmaking. Photographers Letha Wilson and Chip Moody both use material interventions to complicate how place is seen and felt, transforming photography into a spatial experience. In Hawaii Hands Layered Concrete (2024), Wilson interrupts crumpled foliage prints with poured patches of concrete, mirroring the perils of industrial land development. Moody’s Open Swim (2020) arranges 3x5s of abstracted water into the shape of a public pool, a site of communal joy shadowed by histories of segregation and anti-Blackness, with pushpin shadows appearing like ghostly figures across the rippled surface. Both artists trouble the photograph’s flatness, revealing that place is never singular and always constructed. 

Vibrant materialism continues in Jamele Wright’s hand-dyed and sewn BROWN, Conceptually: 2 (2025) and Sergio Suarez’s painted woodcut print Lamentation (2025), tactile works that birth new surfaces out of material traditions. However, the placement of Wright’s work behind a glass wall lessens its affective power, while one of Suarez’s original woodblocks would have asserted the show’s material focus more vividly, as an object bearing the immediacy of his hand-carved details directly into the wood matrix.

The curatorial argument that all works “demand presence” does falter, however. Applied evenly, close observation exposes uneven results throughout the gallery, making some works sing while others lose their appeal, particularly Kathryn Kampovsky’s thinner abstraction Unmade (2025) and Daniel Byrd’s DRY HUMOR (2020) which shrouds its material potential beneath a constructed system. These works could firmly stand on their own in other contexts, but within this curation they neither support nor expand the show’s methods of encounter.

Other artists engage encounters by subverting new technologies to create their work. This inclusion expands the show’s thesis, resisting a good/bad binary of analog/digital, suggesting that intentional hybridity with tech, not mere rejection, is a more reasonable antidote to our current condition. For example, painter Ben Steele turns monuments into ruins, combining 3D printing, age-old still-life practices and little buttery brushstrokes to imagine scenes of ancient technology or future societal collapse. Together with Rush Baker’s Whispers Along the Alexandria Canal II (2024) and Suarez’s Lamentation, both near-apocalyptic renderings, it’s hard to tell the past from the future — but that’s the point. This grouping starts the show with an ending, a poignant reminder of false binaries and life’s cyclical nature.

Photo collages and a short film by Rashaad Newsome deepen this concept by situating AI in a Black, Queer context, revealing how mainstream technology enacts the values of its white heteronormative overlords. The work centers around Newsome’s creation of Being the Digital Griot, an AI model built from motion-captures of vogue fem performers, Black Queer ASL interpreters, Ghanaian textiles, fractal patterns and a Black curriculum, enabling Being to even teach decolonial workshops that have moved real audiences to tears. The work is designed to be an ethic of care, used to heal not harm, which raises questions about how Being is powered, especially since the curation asks us to consider art’s physical impact. Unfortunately, Being is cloud-based which means it still relies on data centers that are straining water and energy grids that disproportionately affect Black communities in the South. This doesn’t negate the resonance of the work, but instead reveals an opportunity to better align its material impact with its values, for example through solar or wind power, carbon tracking, or carbon offsets. Since Being is positioned to imagine a world of freedom for Black communities, could it imagine a non-extractive way to power itself?

As artist Jenny Odell writes, “It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love but for ethics.” Encounters reminds us that art is a space to practice this sustained attention and that attention leads to feeling and then to care. In an age saturated with information and data, we often know all the horrors and even the solutions, but we don’t know how to feel, which may explain our inaction. The exhibition positions exchange as both method and aim, inviting us to slow down and pay attention long enough to be transformed.

Encounters will remain on view at Johnson Lowe Gallery through November 29. 

Editor’s note: the author will be moderated a panel for this exhibition on Saturday, October 25 at 1 p.m., featuring Daniel Byrd, Michael David, Chip Moody and Letha Wilson. The paragraph on Rashaad Newsome’s work has been revised for clarity.

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Heather Bird Harris is an Atlanta-based artist, independent curator, occasional writer and education leader. Her interdisciplinary work investigates the throughlines between land history and ecological crises, engaging with communities, scientists and place-based materials to investigate possibilities for emergence and systems change. Harris’ writing has appeared in ArtsATL, ART PAPERS, Burnaway and Scalawag (forthcoming). She holds a B.S. in art history from Skidmore College, a master’s in education leadership from Columbia University and is completing her MFA in painting at Georgia State University.