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Marcia Wood Gallery closes out the season with an invitational invitational. Wood asked the members of her stable to select an artist who interested them to participate in “Summer Guest House,” reviewed today’s print edition of the AJC.

Most of the “guests” will be familiar to those who follow the Atlanta scene, but the conceit injects some unpredictability into the traditional summer group show. 

Among the promising young artists in the show are Cosmo Whyte, whose pencil drawings Lisa Alembik introduced in a show at Agnes Scott College, and Lorie Corbus. If Fairfield Porter went surreal, his painting might have looked like Corbus’ strange “Trucker’s Embrace.”

“Inhale/Exhale: Officials Beat the Nakeds 10 to 10,” gallery artist Monica Cook’s five-foot long drawing, is a show-stopper (detail below). It pits women in soldierish/dominatrix uniforms against a group of terrified naked women, whom the ”officials”  blow up like balloons and puncture with darts so that they explode into a shower of body parts. That is, when they are not embracing the very phallic oxygen tanks.

As I wrote today, “If the epic battle and its perverse eroticism bring to mind self-taught artist Henry Darger’s ‘The Story of the Vivian Girls…,’ the New York-based artist’s crisp realism and beautiful technique give the piece its wink-and-nod tone.”

The most novel inclusion is Lance Ledbetter, whose Grammy-winning record label, Dust-To-Digital, specializes in historic American vernacular music. Although Ledbetter is not a visual artist per se, his recordings are unusually artful in their presentation and often paired with art books. You can thumb through the books, watch the performers on the video monitor and listen to the music all at the same time.

One Comment

1. Jeremy Abernathy

   1

   Ah, dear old Mister Darger.
   There’s something eerie about those phallic oxygen tanks. Hurm ….

   17 Jul

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