Day Job: Georgia
Curated by Nina Katchadourian and Stuart Horodner
Ashley Anderson, Mac Balentine, Christopher Chambers, Sarah Emerson, Sharon Lapin, Jody Fausett, Lane Ketner, George Long & Jessamine Starr, Romy Aura Maloon, Ignacio Michaud, Michael David Murphy, Valentina Custer O’Roark, Monet Taylor, Andy Moon Wilson, Zuzka Vaclavik
Day Job: Georgia brings together 15 artists whose various modes of employment have a clear link to the art that they produce. Selected from a statewide call for submissions that yielded hundreds of applicants, those chosen work in the food, architecture, gardening, sales, security, customer service, home improvement, and childcare industries.
Co-curator Nina Katchadourian posed two questions as Day Job: Georgia’s guiding concerns: 1. The day job can stand in the way of “freedom,” but is complete freedom necessarily the best climate for productivity? 2. If you choose to work, do you choose a job that’s very different from your creative work, so as not to sap energy from it, or do you parlay your artistic abilities into something that you can get paid for?
Most people do not have a choice about working; they must. What is clear about the artists in this exhibition is that their art is empowered by the skills, materials, and rituals of their day job. Their works address the ways in which labor can be boring, humorous, stressful, and satisfying.
At a time when Americans struggle with record unemployment rates and economic woes, the issues of working for money and pleasure take on added relevance. Perseverance and nimbleness, characteristics that have defined artists for centuries, become the modus operandi for anyone seeking a satisfying work life.
A catalogue documenting Day Job: Georgia will be available in March 2012.
Day Job has been organized by The Drawing Center, NY. The presentation of Day Job: Georgia at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center is co-curated by Nina Katchadourian and Stuart Horodner.
Image: Ashley Anderson, Cups, 2010-2011, Litho crayon and sharpie on polyethylene-coated 16 oz paper cups, Courtesy the artist
Craig Drennen
[Dramatis Personæ]
Join us this month as SALTWORKS celebrates 10 years of exhibitions!
January 14 - March 3, 2012
Opening reception, Saturday, January 14, 7 - 10pm
Artist talk, Saturday, January 21 at 1pm
Timon of Athens 8, 2011
oil on canvas, 92 x 72"
SALTWORKS is pleased to present Atlanta-based artist, Craig Drennen's first solo exhibition at the gallery. Continuing his exploration of overlooked and unknown cultural contributions, Drennen's latest subject is Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. For this exhibition Drennen has created new paintings, works on paper and a performance.
Timon of Athens is Shakespeare's most challenging and obscure play. It was unfinished and never performed in his lifetime and is generally free of critical analysis and deterministic theories. According to Drennen, this lack of history and public perception provides an open stage onto which he projects his subjectivity.
Utilizing a bottom up approach, Drennen works through the play's dramatis personæ, using contemporary associations to depict each character individually, then eventually in combination. The process is similar to the evolution of a language as it begins simply, then moves toward greater complexity. Iteration and nuance can be seen in four works on paper in this exhibition--each titled after the character Painter--featuring a large scrawled 'X' in the center, overlayed with a polka dot pattern borrowed from a woman's skirt, and a hyper-realistic rendering of a Polaroid.
Sustained viewing of Drennen's work reveals subtle differences in composition and palette spread across a broad spectrum of painterly effects. This verisimilitude alludes to an actor's craft and the use of trompe l'oeil, gestural marks, and hard-edge abstraction is less about pastiche and more about allowing the physical material of paint to perform as many tasks as possible. Drennen states that"…'Painting as acting' is more important in that I'm making the paint become many different things".
Craig Drennen lives and works in Atlanta, GA. His work has been reviewed in Artforum magazine, The New York Times among other publications. This is his first solo exhibition at Saltworks. He teaches drawing, painting, and critical writing at Georgia State University and serves as Dean of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has shown in international art fairs such as NEXT, Scope, MACO, and Volta. Since 2008 he has organized his studio practice around Shakespeare's Timon of Athens.
Scott Ingram at Emily Amy Gallery
Scott Ingram, Black, 49" x 73," framed polish on paper