Burn Away: New Atlanta Art Blog

Susannah, Jeremy, and I our collaborating with a few other Atlanta writers on a new art blog. We'll be reviewing lots of shows each week, and presenting a few features you won't see anywhere else, like visits to artists' studios, articles on theory stuff we're interested in, and discussions of what makes up the Atlanta art "scene."

It should be pretty interesting.

So I'm going to be letting this blog lie dormant while I work on Burn Away. I may occasionally post goofy stuff here that wouldn't make sense for BA, but I wouldn't expect more than one update per month from this point on.

Thanks for reading, and check out Burn Away!

SCAD@Large

This seems like it might be really cool, but I can't find any info on it. Here's the press release:

Thirteen students from the illustration, painting, photography and sculpture departments at SCAD will show their work in "SCAD@Large," an exhibition featuring work too large to be exhibited on the SCAD-Atlanta campus. The exhibition will be on display Sept. 19 - Oct.5 at the Factory, a 6,000-square-foot space with 25-foot ceilings. Students and faculty have worked together to develop site-specific work for the space. Morgan Alexander, Yana Dimitrova, Harrison Fraley, Suzy Maier, Macy Moore, Charles Parham, Seana Reilly, Richard Robbins, Brandon Sadler, Whitney Stansell, Cynthia Taylor, Yukari Umekawa and Whitney Wood are participating in the show.

Can any of you SCAD students/groupies tell me more?

DragonCon (Still) In My Brain

Clint Zeagler of Pecan Pie Gazette posted a collection of his Dragoncon photos a few weeks ago.

They're very spur-of-the-moment type shots, but a few of them (my favorites) are really closer to abstract art than portrait or scene photography. I think they do a good job of capturing the quieter, more ornamental side of the convention: waiting for panels to start, climbing between levels of the Hyatt, and just slowly weaving your way through a crowd.



Anyway, I really am working on writing about some more gallery stuff, I just haven't found much to inspire me these past few weeks since Matt Relkin's awesome Young Blood show. I'll be at Rabbit Hole and Beep Beep tonight, so we'll see.

Content Coming Soon

I took these two pictures on my last day in Istanbul. The top one was taken from above the city's old wall pointed South, looking slightly West (into the city), and the bottom one was taken looking slightly East, towards a few fields in the unclaimed area around the base of the wall.

Things to see this week:

Whitespace
Youngblood
Othersound Festival (Thursday through Saturday)

and there's a band playing Eyedrum on Monday called "Duet For Theramin and Lapsteel." Which is going to be awesome, as long as you dosed up on your pill of choice beforehand (Ambien for me, thanks!)

Yehuda Moon

Yehuda Moon's been blowing my mind lately. It's a comic centered around biking and working at a bike shop. There's a strong focus on bike advocacy - in a recent series, the title character painted bike lanes onto a busy stretch of road, then spent the next few strips fighting with the city government. The plot based strips are fine, even though they tend to be a bit preachy. But Rick Smith really excels in the strips he draws to mark each new season. The one above was spring; this is fall:

And this is early February:

Read the comic's first strip here.

Banksy @ New Orleans

Banksy's graffiti has been popping up in New Orleans over the last few weeks.

It's all pretty awesome, but this is my favorite:


In the months after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was filled with these fridges. Can you imagine the smell that comes from a fridge after it's been sitting in water and sunlight for a few weeks? Cleanup wasn't easy, and you can still stumble on Katrina Refrigerators around the city, either waiting on a curb to be picked up, or still in flooded homes.

The Nola Rising blog has a great post on Banksy's recent additions to public art in Katrina. (I can't say enough good things about this blog. If you're at all interested in public propelled art, this is the place to look.)

Group Seven @ Whitespace

Patrick Toups, Matt Sigmon, Phil Proctor, Julia Hill, Kate Hannon, Don Dougan, Antonio Darden, Melinda Crider.

"Each artist's affect was not blind or random, but a thoughtful and challenging role in both creating and incorporating what had come before."

Also see Imagillaboration.













We find these enchanting.

More text by Tuesday.

Day After the Harold Group House Show

We are all pretty tuckered.

The Harold Group's myspace has artist links, and the best bicycle song since Queen's "Bicycle Race."

Two Pages from Troubled Souls

Written by Garth Ennis, illustrated by John McCrea. Published 1990.

Buy it here. Or email me for a digital copy.

Repugno Selects Blogzine

The Repugno Selects blog hosts "poetic work in the public sphere or work given away/left in public." Their first issue was published August 1st, and features mainly local poets: troylloyd, Scott MacLeod, James Sanders, and David-Baptiste Chirot*.

They're currently collecting submissions for issue 2, which should be out by early November.


Many of troylloyd's pieces rely on both written meaning as well as the aesthetics of placement and decay to create their larger impact. It's an interesting path for a author/poet to take, and a logical extension of what I've seen in his other pieces, which are usually along these lines:

Şunu mu aradınız:
legibility, legibly, legality, legerity, legible

Did you mean: legibility ?


Re: Neurofeedback

Legibilty is a measure of the writers sense of purposefulness.

(Right-Justified
Navigation
Menus
Impede
Scannability)

LEGIBILTY: The ability of the individ
ual elememts of an image to be seen

clearly.

But beware of the person whose
writing is impressively legible --
These wolves are people
in shepards clothing.

-----------



I'm not sure if it's easier or harder to decipher David Baptiste-Chirot's work. Many of his pieces remove the question of location - they're photographed so closely that the picture frame is filled by entirely etched and wheatpasted surfaces, giving no hint of where Baptiste-Chirot's placed his graffiti. As a person deeply interested in the physics of location (especially in The South), I was a bit disappointed that he hid the location of his pieces. Additionally, I've always thought that some of the most interesting elements of graffiti was the artistry behind getting to a wall and making art - the viewer of graffiti likes to be able to imagine police sirens, complex climbing rigs, and omnipresent danger when we're seeing these pieces in the light of day...

Anyway, removing location does narrow the viewers' focus, which is probably a good thing when there's such visual richness and layering in a piece.

*at least, I think those first two are local.

(all images from the blog)

Last Falcon Lords Related Post, I Promise

The Falcon Lords

They're playing Star Bar Thursday night with Tenth to the Moon, Missile Command, Rev Rebel and the Sound Supreme, and Ice Caps.

Really EXCITED.

Downtown

(text reads "Second Amendment"



(text reads "#1 in Sex Traffic," the scraps at the top read something like "Atlanta, GA")

Daniel Duford at The Contemporary

A few close ups of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Centers most recent main gallery exhibit. In addition to paneled comics on paper, Duford showed wall murals and sculpture, also part of the larger comic.

Speaking of paneling, Duford makes some pretty interesting choices in that department - along the lines of what you'd see in most good indie-comics, but with a more unified overall feel. If you're ignoring the images Duford uses, and only seeing the layout of his panels, you can still get a pretty good idea of his comics narrative path. The boxes swell and overwhelm each other on some pages, become rigid boxes within boxes on others, and, very occasionally, a box expands to fill the equivalent of a double page. Still, Duford is relatively rigid in his use of traditional comic panels - you never see an image without a black border around it, and each page of his comic is surrounded by a larger border.

If you don't get a chance to see the exhibit before it closes August 31, you can still check out Daniel Duford's webpage, which has extensive samples of Naked Boy and his other work.