Don Cooper's "Indigo Wheel"

The idea is given full expression in “Contemporary Mandala: New Audiences, New Forms,” at the Emory University Visual Arts Gallery through April 15 as a complement to “Mandala: Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism” at Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum.

The works in “Contemporary Mandala” run the gamut from indisputably belief-ful to open to mystery — and to archetypes. One of the loveliest, and least beholden to Buddhist origins, is Marcia Vaitsman’s video “Study of Strange Things, part 3,” in which a single image of a bright-colored stocking pulled onto a leg transmutes kaleidoscopically into a moving circular form that opens like the petals of a flower.

The image rotates like the Wheel of Time, which is the subject of deep contemplation in the Kalachakra mandala encountered in the Carlos exhibition. But as its title implies, Vaitsman’s video is tied neither to any particular belief nor any specific psychological model, but only to its own exploration of what these “strange things” might mean.

Faith McClure's “How Deep the Waking in the Worlded Clouds"

Faith McClure’s spectacular wall installation, “How Deep the Waking in the Worlded Clouds,” is made in a similar spirit of respectful and semi-visionary exploration, as its independent cutout monoprints of biomorphic, quasi-cellular shapes arrange themselves in loose clusters around a vacant center. Whether the void in the middle is transcendent mystical emptiness or the gap left by the death of God as proclaimed by Nietzsche is for us to interpret, though McClure takes her inspiration both from bodily process and from Buddhist traditions.

“Mandala of the B-Bodhisattva II,” Sanford Biggers’ equally spectacular floor mandala and potential dance space, is more directly titled to situate its circular geometries squarely between Buddhist and hip-hop dynamics. (A bodhisattva is an enlightened being who refuses to enter into the condition of nirvana until all sentient beings have been similarly rescued from their imprisonment.) Tentative plans are afoot to use the piece for at least one contemporary performance.

Sanford Biggers' "Mandala of the B-Bodhisattva II" (Courtesy of Michael Klein Arts)

Andra Samuelson’s wall piece “Kunkhyab” (Tibetan for “all-encompassing”) consists of eight mirrored domes arrayed in a circle around a larger mirrored dome. Each dome thus reflects both the room (and the viewer) and parts of the adjacent domes. It becomes a lovely metaphoric illustration of Buddhism’s belief in the intrinsic interconnection of all of human history and natural processes and the meditational tools through which the practitioner comes to understand those connections.

Two decades older than the newest works in this exhibition, the mandalas produced by the late King Thackston are mandalas by virtue of axial symmetry rather than circularity. In some ways these contemporary mandalas are a gloriously mystical mess as all-encompassing as Thackston’s imagination was. The title of “Mandala #48: Beauty Is Re-Established” is based on a Native American prayer to the four directions and on the mapping of the seven chakra energy centers vertically arranged in the human body.

The florid excess of the eclectic imagery — a swinging pendulum arcing over a color spectrum, a turned wooden ball and an astrolabe — reflects the multiple sources of our latter-day spirituality as well as confidence in the discernment of cultural parallels that Jung was one of the first to express in contemporary terms.

Don Cooper’s wall of spectacularly rendered circles (independently created watercolors arranged as a single unit) take their titles and their inspiration from both Buddhist and Hindu sources. The “bindu” referred to in a number of the titles is the circle or dot or “drop,” which, depending on whether the word is used in Indian tantricism or Hindu philosophy, has many possible meanings: the source of male and female generative capacities; the site on the body that generates either the nectar of immortality or the poison of death; the single point through which the universe takes its origin or through which the many become one. Though Cooper has long been in dialogue with Asian spirituality, his particular expression of this peculiarly potent traditional form is distinctly his own.

Christopher McNulty’s circles and sphere (the latter formed with hot glue but looking more like carved bubble wrap) are based on a form of secular accounting that lends itself to the classically Buddhist themes of suffering, old age and death. McNulty determined from actuarial sources the age at which he is regarded as likely to die. Insurance rates are based partly on this sort of statistic, but McNulty has used it as the source for numerically based mark-making in media ranging from burnt paper to traditional etching, with titles referring to how many days he still has in his life.

A detail from Christopher McNulty's "20,045 Days"

The 71-inch circle of densely repeated black-ink rectangles that constitutes “20,045 Days” forms a particularly fine source for reflection about transience and mortality, though it requires the aforementioned background knowledge to see anything more in it than an exquisite example of minimalist formal geometry.

The overall message of “Contemporary Mandala” is this: although we live in an era in which the mathematics and psychology encoded in the world’s religions have been separated out into secular academic disciplines, the investigations of a relentlessly analytical academia may not have exhausted the possible meanings, and the possibilities for transformation of self and world, that were and are contained in those religious beliefs, practices and forms of art. The forms, and the beliefs and practices, are there to be rediscovered or re-invented, as the contemporary artist chooses.

Heather McPherson: "792 Fulton Terrace"

House. Home. Home place. Place.

Heather McPherson has ruminated about these themes since her college days. They are front and center in” shack, shanty, flat,” her first solo exhibition at Get This! Gallery, through February 25.

The show couples the lovely prints McPherson made in 2005 while earning a BFA at the Cleveland Institute of Art with her most recent work, wall-hung painted cutouts of houses in her Cabbagetown neighborhood.

The 2005 works depict homes in silhouette, often at night. We can peer through windows and wonder, as she did, about the lives within. A Southerner in the Midwest, McPherson may also have been expressing her experience as an outsider, a thematic undercurrent in “The Wanderers,” her installation for the 2010 “Art on the BeltLine,” in which painted cut-plywood figures depicted hobos and other railroad nomads. It was, rather quirkily, a piece inspired by a specific place — the railroad — about people who had lost or chosen to abandon fixed places, and home.

Heather McPherson's "Night House" (2005)

The artist’s home place was a subject of the work in a 2011 exhibition at Get This! In that multimedia evocation of her family and life on the old homestead, McPherson expanded the cutouts into narrative three-dimensional tableaux based on memories and family stories. She elaborated the “scrapbook” with drawings of winding country roads, farm outbuildings and collages of things she found there.

There are occasional indications of domestic life in McPherson’s recent work — the clothing hung on a back-porch clothesline in “792 Fulton Terrace” — but these painted cutouts seem to be portraits of the late-19th and early-20th-century houses rather than imaginings about their residents.

Originally built to house workers at the nearby Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, Cabbagetown remained an enclave of millworkers’ descendants until the 1980s, when artists and others began moving in. Though even more upscale gentrification is now under way, McPherson is drawn to the unreconstructed Cabbagetown, the cottages that show their age, the “shotgun” house that’s narrower than the length of the car parked in front of it.

Working from photographs, she re-creates these structures with careful attention to detail, noting the sagging foundation, the rusty gutter, the grain of the plywood boarding up a window of an abandoned home. Even those enlivened with cheery colors are often close to the edge of disrepair.

Their straightforward presentation belies the artful manipulation of perspective and composition that makes them interesting objects. The geometry of the roofline animates “184 Pearl Street,” for example, and the white clapboard house in “109 Chester Avenue” almost doubles as an abstract painting.

Heather McPherson's "109 Chester Avenue"

McPherson definitely has something. This series shows off her visual thinking and the art of deceptive simplicity. I do miss, however, the quirky wit she has demonstrated elsewhere, and the unexpected visual effects of her previous exhibition, and I look forward to watching her grow.

Lide, who takes advantage of her skills as a graphic designer and natural draftsman, exhibits a mastery of line, color and tonality in her mixed-media series “Recordings.” Using Kozo and Gampi paper (both made in Japan using bark fibers) as her ground, she sparingly employs graphite, India ink, watercolors and oil sticks as pigmentation.

Through these media, her geometric forms take on fragile life. Works such as “Pink Moth” and “Purple Flower” have a soft, tentative presence contained within the restraints of grid-like patterns that resemble the angular compositions and precise color-blocking of artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.

Elizabeth Lide's "Pink Moth"

Often inspired by suggestions of place or snippets of the natural world — a color, an arc, a transparency — Lide has condensed these aspects into what she calls “recordings, notes, suggestions and memories.” The simplicity and elegance of design that she has achieved reveals the ease that comes with maturity: her restrained minimalism and precise mark-making eliminate the unnecessary in order to reveal the most important nuances of her expression. In “Swimming Pool,” the perception of depth of field and light is stored as blocks of color, a condensation of elements that is both economic and powerful.

In other works, Lide’s technique resides solely in the manipulation of the handmade paper itself, with no added pigmentation. By building up the centers of off-white Aback paper with delicate layers of pulp, she has created organic-inspired focal points resembling kudzu, leaves, lotuses and other vegetable objects. The diminutive scale and elegant approach to this subtle three-dimensionality pull the viewer in and engage the eye in an intimate way. This aspect of the viewing experience makes these works a bright companion to the rest of Lide’s series.

If Lide’s work is all about controlled reservation, Sheppell’s is about excess. Thick, built-up layers of acrylic paint on panel, the paintings in her “Surfaces” series are lush and vibrant, exposing complex color relationships. The paint hangs beyond the edges of the panel to create a sculptural impact. Sheppell’s interest in the medium as a surface texture inspires the viewer to pay attention to the sides of the pieces, where the extent of her paint manipulation is more readily apparent.

Elizabeth Sheppell's "For the Love of Indy"

The stratification of pigment that she achieves through layers of glazes creates a spatial illusion that is most evident in those paintings, such as “My Head Is Swimming” and “For the Love of Indy,” in which she also scrapes through the field of color, revealing bright areas of contrast. The color fields serve as a plastic means of creating depth, the abrasions a reference to the push-pull spatial theories of Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffmann and his experiments with the perception of dimension. The more successful pieces are also evocative of aerial land patterns, as in the vein of Jane Frank and many others.

Some of the smaller works in Sheppell’s ”Fat Series,” which offer little more than a monochromatic swatch of color, are less fully realized than the others; they come off as studies. This doesn’t render them completely without merit, as they allow the viewer to see the evolution of this practice. A standout in this series, “no. 1,” is a roux of yellows, amber and reds that superficially mimics the hues of sepia-toned photographs or the play of light in a sun-drenched field.

An additional contributor, Marshall Davis, adds a bonus piece. Installed on the gallery’s roof, “Container Still Life” is a large sculpture that offers interesting juxtapositions of materials and scale.

Marshall Davis' "Container Still Life"

Reflecting Davis’ interest in “the geometry of hoarding,” it consists of a chest of drawers topped with a milk crate and flanked by an iron bedstead. It brings up questions about the meanings we bestow upon our personal effects. In this work, the utility of these household objects is stripped away; this and its out-of-doors installation leave us to contemplate these items as mere forms.

Vivian Maier: Self-Portrait, August 1955. Courtesy of Jackson Fine Art and the Jeffrey Goldstein collection.

On the face of it, Vivian Maier led an ordinary, if solitary, existence. A single woman, she worked as a nanny in New York and Chicago and kept to herself. But Maier, who died in 2009 at the age of 83, had a secret passion: photography. A Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex, her constant companion, was the vehicle through which she participated in the multifarious experiences of the two great cities in which she spent most of her life.

And she was good. Damn good.

Like every successful street photographer, Maier approached the world with curiosity, an eye for the composition hidden in everyday visual clutter and a knack for seizing the telling moment. People of all ages and stripes fascinated her: the joyful innocence of children, the passage of time etched on wizened faces, the pensive faces in the lonely crowd. She had a special empathy for those surviving at society’s margins, whose condition foreshadowed her own descent into penury at the end of her life. The image of a homeless man below, curled into an almost fetal position, evokes WPA Depression-era photographs and the figures of Picasso’s Blue Period.

Vivian Maier: Untitled, New York, 1953. The Maloof collection, courtesy Lumière.

Maier also took pleasure in finding beauty in unexpected places – the unplanned geometries of a pile of crates, say, or, like Aaron Siskind, the peeling signs and paint on urban walls — and humor, too. Brazenly poking her camera through a car window, she captured the strange and amusing perspective below, of a seemingly headless man napping in his vehicle.

Vivian Maier: Untitled, New York. The Maloof collection, courtesy Lumière.

Maier never showed her pictures to anyone. She didn’t even develop most of them, perhaps because of the cost involved, perhaps because her principal joy was in the act of taking them. She and her photographs probably would have remained in oblivion had not John Maloof of Chicago bought 30,000 negatives from her storage locker, auctioned because she couldn’t pay the storage fees, in 2007.

Maloof did not find the pictures of a Chicago neighborhood that he was looking for, but he sensed something important about the photographs, an intuition confirmed when he shared some of the images in online chat rooms. Promoting Maier has since become a mission for him. He has purchased most of the contents of the locker: some 100,000 negatives and 1,000 rolls of undeveloped film. Still others are owned by fellow Chicagoan Jeffrey Goldstein, who purchased them from a third party. Both are working to bring Maier’s photography to light and to market. Both have published books, are making films and are exhibiting the work through dealers around the country.

There are, at the moment, Maier exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and two in Atlanta. Lumière gallery, which represents the Maloof collection, is exhibiting a selection of her street photography as part of “Photography as Propaganda: Street Talk.” Jackson Fine Art, which works with Goldstein, offers a sampling of various genres, as well as vintage photographs printed during Maier’s lifetime.

Vivian Maier: Untitled, New York, circa 1951-55. Courtesy of Jackson Fine Art and the Jeffrey Goldstein collection.

Lumière’s is the more satisfying visual experience, because one can get close to the pictures; the flat files are in the way at Jackson. But both shows are worth seeing, and both galleries have unframed images they can show you.

Maier’s story is part of her appeal. Who hasn’t dreamed of finding a treasure in the trash? Who isn’t tantalized by the uncovering of a secret life? The excitement brings to mind the discovery of the voluminous oeuvre of visionary artist Henry Darger, another Chicagoan, though the photography books that Maier owned suggest that she, unlike Darger, was aware of the art world that her work is now entering. Adding to the myth, the tall, thin, long-faced nanny conjures up associations with the magical Mary Poppins.

But Cinderella might be the more apt fairy tale here: once a humble domestic, Maier is now mentioned in the same breath with photographic royalty such as Helen Levitt and Harry Callahan. The shoe seems to fit. Maier may well take her place in photography’s pantheon. See for yourself.

On our home page: Vivian Maier’s “Couple Kissing on Beach, 1955.” Courtesy Jackson Fine Art and Jeffrey Goldstein collection.

Mandala of 13-deity Yama Dharmarāja

According to Emory religion professor Sara McClintock, who has worked with the Carlos on the presentations accompanying its remarkable transmutation of an exhibition originally organized by New York’s Rubin Museum of Art, the mandala should actually be considered a symbolic representation (in the form of a palace) of the sphere of energy that surrounds an enlightened being. One might compare it to the force fields of radiant glory that surround the saints in certain Eastern Orthodox icons, or envision it, as one scholar has put it, as a bird’s-eye view of the soul.

The show begins with a stunning object that has never been on public view before, simply because it wasn’t completed until two months ago. The monks of Gyuto Monastery in Dharamsala, India, spent several years carving an immense wooden sculpture of the Guhyasamaja mandala, representing the palace and its gates in fully dimensional splendor. Juxtaposed with flat representations of the same image in the type of mandala paintings we are familiar with, this introduction to the exhibition instantly accomplishes the perspective-flipping described in the first paragraph above.

There are other types of mandalas designed for specific purposes. The familiar combination of squares and circles that we have seen in previous exhibitions are juxtaposed with other examples of sacred geometry, most notably the triangle that serves as a trap for the ego, which has to be gotten out of the way if enlightenment is to be achieved. Furthermore, mandalas appear in more forms than paintings of the type attached to brocaded thangkas; there are examples here of wooden plates on which other objects (a tripod, for example) would be placed during rituals.

If this suggests that a good deal of wall text is needed for visitors to understand the complex visual pleasures on display, the same is true for would-be initiates. One mandala is displayed with a Tibetan drawing of the same image with the parts labeled and some of the recitations associated with the mandala written alongside.

For those who might have failed to imagine how the mandala is not only to be viewed three-dimensionally but explored through the practice of visualization, a remarkable computer animation of the Kalachakra mandala takes us on just such a tour of the walls and gates of the palace, in one of the only 21st-century American interventions in an exhibition otherwise consisting exclusively of traditional objects.

Kalachakra deity in an embrace with Vishvamata.

The Kalachakra mandala itself is hung on the adjacent wall, and as the wall text observes, the meditational practice associated with this mandala “develops the concept of structural correlations among all things, in particular the connection between the universe, the mandala and the human body.”

With eyes thus freshly opened, viewers will then be able to consider the vertiginous depth and breadth of Buddhist cosmology, symbolized in metal offering trays through which the devotee is expected to present an analogue of the universe one rice grain at a time. In addition to representations of the universe in such objects, the Buddhist world system is illustrated in instructional paintings of sacred Mount Meru at the world’s center and the 25 heavens that rise above it.

Some of these objects are being presented publicly for the first time after centuries in which they were viewed only in the context of initiation. They are not art objects, or objects for worship; they are precise instruments for the transmission of wisdom, to use the technical term. They have an immediate emotional resonance even without any initiatory practice, but they weren’t created for aesthetic enjoyment, or even to be contemplated apart from the rituals through which they are introduced to the initiate. As with the simpler case of devotional objects, when we encounter them as uninstructed viewers, we understand only the smallest fraction of their contents or their purposes.

This doesn’t change the fact that simply to view these objects is to alter your perspective, in ways that may surprise you. In its own subtle, sometimes dizzying way, this show itself is transformational.

The Carlos exhibition, which will run through April 15, is the centerpiece of a campus-wide immersion in mandalas, which should provide more diverse ways of contemplating their meaning and function than have ever before been offered in Atlanta, if not in the whole United States. A sampling:

• The monks of Drepung Loseling Monastery will make a sand mandala at the Carlos February 1-11.
• A “living mandala” of perennial plants will be installed in the spring in the Pitts Garden of Emory’s Cannon Chapel.
• “Contemporary Mandalas: New Audiences, New Forms,” at Emory’s Visual Arts Gallery.
• “The Sacred Round: Mandalas by the Patients of Carl Jung,” at (and organized by) the Oglethorpe University Museum of Art.

Takuro Masuda: "Excel-erated State"

Co-curators Nina Katchadourian and Stuart Horodner, the Contemporary’s artistic director, pose this question: ”The day job can stand in the way of ‘freedom,’ but is complete freedom necessarily the best climate for productivity?” It’s especially pertinent in light of current economic conditions and the life choices engendered by personal financial concerns, not to mention the toll taken on the arts and arts funding in general.

Lane Ketner: "Gossip"

If work other than art-making costs hours of personal time, the best-case scenario would include an artistic response that draws inspiration from the skills of the day job, or that taps into its frustrations and corrals them as creative energy. In this way, the limitations are the creative juice. Matthew Barney makes this point in his ongoing series “Drawing Restraint,” based on the idea that growth occurs through constraint — that artistic development requires the confines of limitations, that creativity is fostered in pushing against restrictions. If that’s true, complete freedom would never provide the necessary foil.

“Day Job: Georgia” comprises 15 Georgia artists whose artwork has been influenced by their daily employment. These works show that what happens “on the clock” can seep into the artistic consciousness. Most interesting are the remarkable variation in the day jobs and the way different aspects of them surface in diverse expressions. With some, the transference of technical skills is evident; with others, materials have been repurposed. With others still, the influence is highly theoretical. The most successful works are those that express a creative departure from the demands of the day job that arises from thoughtful resourcefulness.

Andy Moon Wilson, a full-time textile designer by day, has created a series of 24 small-scale drawings that presumably echo the patterns he uses in his work. Here they appear as colorful, mandala-like images that showcase his precise attention to detail. Likewise, the lush patterns of former wallpaper designer Zuzka Vaclavik inform her subtle, pastel-hued paintings.

Decorative design is also a theme in Christopher Chambers’ collages. A remodeler of domestic interiors, he seems concerned with the disposable nature of materials in a world of ever-changing tastes. Chambers’ images, which appear to have originated in slick magazine ads, are cut and reconfigured to remark upon the superficiality of commercial domestic culture.

Ashley Anderson: "Cups" (detail)

Using humor as a safety valve from the pressures and boredom of work, Ashley Anderson’s installation “Cups,” paper Coca-Cola cups decorated with cartoonish images, provides both levity and a reminder of the amount of downtime that comes with many jobs. Anderson, a food server at Fellini’s Pizza, has “documented” his workdays in more than 200 cups. Besides the relief of sheer entertainment, this speaks volumes about the determination of many artists to find an outlet, even on any available ephemera. One can’t help but think of Picasso and his cohorts drawing on café napkins and tablecloths.

An exhibition standout is Romy Aura Maloon’s installation “What Rough Beast, Its Hour Comes Around at Last.” An event coordinator for a high-end catering company, she appears interested in the details of staging and the exercise of artifice. Utilizing marketing materials and cast-off items from buffet displays, Meloon has crafted a large-scale jigsaw-cut sculpture of a lion and its prey, an antelope, linked by a golden chain. Red, blood-like glitter demarcates the edges, a surfacing technique that covers the work’s “imperfections” to highly dramatic effect — one of the many aesthetic masking skills Maloon learned on the job. Through its simplicity and elegant design, the piece re-imagines the kitsch hunting-trophy sculptures of South Africa in a way that is both playful and slightly disturbing.

Sarah Emerson and Harlow Emerson: "No More Dreaming Like a Girl"

Another installation that combines materials in haunting juxtaposition, working mother Sarah Emerson’s “No More Dreaming Like a Girl” is a focal point of the show, both in scale and execution. Emerson’s artwork here draws from her relationship with her daughter and collaborator, Harlow. A large and foreboding black-and-white mural of ravens descending in flight from a tree is paired with Harlow’s sweet, crayon-scrawled images of bumblebees, anthropomorphic soup bowls and friendly animals. In front of these images, an actual child’s school desk emits the sounds of a Disney soundtrack on a loop. In its totality, the piece offers a stark reminder of the loss of innocence and the perceived lessening of creative freedom that adulthood, and the working world, bring.

Matt Sigmon: ""Don't Copy. Don't Copy That Floppy"

The work of the four artists in “100,000 Cubicle Hours” is confined to one small gallery. Beginning with the idea that the average person spends about 100,000 hours working during a lifetime, this exhibit portrays the “gray space” of the typical office environment, in which individual personality is subjugated to the grim realities of banal tasks.

Unlike in “Day Job: Georgia,” we are not offered the off-duty retooling of the minutiae of the day into more creative endeavors. Other than the suggestion by Matt Sigmon in his piece “Don’t Copy. Don’t Copy That Floppy” to photocopy our own derrieres in his photobooth-style installation (as many doubtlessly have done to relieve the boredom of office work), we are left to contemplate the level of hell to which our own day job may (or may not) take us.

In Nikita Gale’s installation “53.1 Seconds (Efficiency),” the shallow pleasantries of water-cooler chitchat are writ large. The work consists of the inscription “Hey, How’s It Going?” over a stark white cooler lined on both sides by white cups printed with the most predictable and least revealing of responses. Gale’s work points to a lack of true interpersonal connectivity in the workplace as the restrictions of efficiency engender an impersonal environment.

On the opposite wall, Takuro Masuda’s video art, created by Excel software, offers little respite in its recurring color patterns, which mimic the visual fatigue of habitual monitor-gazing.

Overall, the works at the Contemporary offer an interesting insight into the daily lives, motivations and inspirations of the chosen artists. The takeaway message seems to be that, regardless of how uninspiring a day job may seem, creativity may flourish in spite of, or in direct opposition to, the limitations of the work. A job is what you make of it. If the artist is responsible for his or her own survival, the ability to remain intellectually curious and resourceful seems to pay off. “Don’t quit your day job” may be the best advice yet. Clock in to see this exhibition before March 24.

Panel discussion: “Creative Lives & Careers: On Ambition.” Artists Craig Drennen and Nikita Gale, gallerist Jennifer Schwartz and Artistic Director Stuart Horodner will discuss ambition as evinced by Atlanta artists, galleries and collectors at 11 a.m. Saturday, January 21.

Benita Carr: "Morning Sun #410"

Carr’s photographs and videos confront desire and sexuality as undercurrents in mother-child relations. There are many debates about the emergence of sexuality, but most agree that it is connected at some point with both the early satisfaction of drives (nourishment, elimination) and the infant’s relations with the primary caregiver. Witness Carr’s “Morning Sun #410,” in which a woman wearing stockings, cowboy boots and silky black lingerie is summoned by a male child just out of frame by the evocative pull of the robe’s tie.

These early relationships are often wrapped up in the messiness of bodily care and the establishment of new personalities, but their representations can seem saturated with the heaviness of survival and fantasy. One of Carr’s narrative series begins with a photograph (below) depicting a room whose walls display a couple of jungle animal murals and are also childhood-beleaguered. A close look reveals nicks, stains and sticker remnants, from images of Batman to words like “Wonder Power” and “terror.” The shadow of a boy in a superhero costume looms menacingly over the scene, in which his mother’s body lies sprawled across the stripped bed.

In the second photograph, the shadow reads like an explorer perched on high ground, though in reality the son, dressed as the Flash, is atop his mother’s body, whose head is lowered in a supplicating manner. In the final photo, the mother sits alone on the son’s bed, neither triumphant nor really defeated: she has survived the play attack, two words that fit nicely together in this exhibit.

Indeed, the most successful aspect of this new work is its ability to embrace ambiguity in a realm that our culture manically guards as sublime, to represent ugliness and the struggle of motherhood without reducing its complexities or erasing its conflicting realities. Carr captures dominance and abjection without denying her subjects their self-possession, even when evidence of this is as slight as a gaze in a mirror.

The fantastic scenes that evoke such strong and well-known cultural tropes are a blend of careful construction and generous relation with her subjects. While some of the shots are theatrically directed, their contexts and meanings read as very believable. Students of art history will notice visual references to Bernini’s “The Ecstacy of St. Teresa” and Duchamp’s “Étant Donnés,” among others. The most overt reference is to Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” in “Morning Sun #1524.”

Its video companion, “Day is done, gone the sun,” co-produced with Bill Orisich, presents an interesting up-tilted view of a day in the life of a mother and her two children. Its strength lies in its ability to encompass the intimacy of singing in a sun-touched living room and the mundaneness of breast feeding in a laundry-riddled carport, as well as the anger of a child who feels ignored when the mother plays her cello.

Benita Carr: "Morning Sun #1524"

During this tantrum, the little girl yells at her mother about excrement somewhere that needs cleaning up — yet another example of how deftly Carr incorporates psychoanalytic themes into the unglamorous, everyday details of motherhood. The girl screams “Clean it up!” but then also thoughtfully adds “Mama,” playing out her vacillating needs to both destroy the bad mother who ignores her and to restore the one she loves. At times, Carr guides the viewer to compare how the woman handles her daughter with the attention she pays to tuning her cello, underscoring the paradox inherent in relationships that require such deep sacrifice and connection.

The love and hate in “Morning Sun” brings to mind Mignon Nixon’s work in the mid-1990s, especially her essay “Bad Enough Mother,” in which Nixon posits that the work of many female artists is now operating in a paradigm outside the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Her work opened the door to new psychoanalytic interpretations of artwork that did not always reduce it to patriarchal power structures.

It has been said that the lullaby “Rock-a-bye Baby,” which wraps a mother’s hate (“the cradle will fall”) into a socially acceptable song, enables her to express her frustrations and feelings of being compromised within the caring acts essential to child rearing. Carr’s visual narratives are not so different, eliciting the darker moments of motherhood within a well-constructed visual practice.

The new installations, videos and mixed-media works of “In a Landscape Anew” are one outcome of the young Korean émigré artist’s year as the first recipient of the $50,000 Hudgens Prize. The award gave her, in addition to this exhibition opportunity, the resources to revisit her native city of Daegu, which she left with her parents when she was 13, and to recalibrate her already successful aesthetic.

Hur came to public notice spectacularly with the March 2011 piece “Spring Hiatus,” a carpet of shredded silk funeral flowers laid down by the artist and her assistants at Lenox Square mall. The colorful stripes of the temporary installation quoted the look of her parents’ traditional Korean wedding blanket.

The installations of “In a Landscape Anew” use a more subdued and minimal palette. Instead of clearly separated stripes, one piece consists of bands of closely related shades of yellow-green, blending almost imperceptibly one into the other. The result is more organic and ambiguous. The possibility that this ambiguity might be a metaphor for some larger concept is reinforced by the use of mirrored boxes that flank the rectangle on two sides, each box topped by the green of artificial turf, as blatant as the powdery shredded silk is subtle. An adjacent wall presents dim, washed-out projections of photographic images showing a vintage Korean garden and the greenery of contemporary nature in Kentucky, as glimpsed on a road trip.

An adjacent installation (shown above) consists of a small boulder surrounded by a shredded-silk square that is partly dark orange and partly black, with a clearly delineated, jagged boundary between the colors. This piece, too, is accompanied by a mirror, though this mirror is meant to reflect the scene outside the gallery window rather than the work itself. A mound of the pale yellow-green shreds of which the other piece is made sits alongside this anything-but-Zen rock garden.

The symbolism here is opaque, and the details are intuitive rather than analytical. Emigration brings a psychic displacement as well as a physical one, but the condition of living between cultures can be a spur to reflection (pun intended) as well as life between the faded perceptions of disconnected recollections of past and present and the confusing shape of a new landscape.

Hur situates her striking color combinations and allusions to Asian aesthetic traditions in a context derived from schools of contemporary art in which collisions among geometric form, intellectual concepts and organic nature create an emotionally disconcerting encounter. If the symbolism is elusive, the power of the immediate viewing experience isn’t.

The stripes that Hur made into her previous trademark are an expression of joy wrested from the transformation of expressions of sorrow, and this dichotomy is explored in the adjacent videos and smaller pieces. One video documents the process by which Hur and her family transform discarded funeral accoutrements into the raw material of installation art, while another documents an endurance performance in which the artist and a companion wheeled carts of plastic cemetery flowers through the streets of downtown Atlanta.

The collages and mock-maquettes in a hallway gallery are playful presentations of imaginary placements of Hur’s stripes in situations where they couldn’t possibly be created in the shredded-silk medium: everything from hair coloring to ocean waves. The results are as lighthearted and humorous as the main installations are hauntingly meditative.

MODA’s long corridor gallery is devoted to designs for a temporary portable structure to serve Atlanta’s growing food truck industry, all completed during a 48-hour charrette. It’s a great topic, addressing issues such as repurposing parking lots as public space and place-making, and the architectural teams put forth a slew of creative and visually winning ideas.

Ryan Blanner, Trevor McAllister and Andre James' "Culinary Street Market"

Al-Haddad fuses architecture, science and art in a practice based on pushing the boundaries of materials, digital design and construction. His work is as smart and elegant as a mathematical proof. This exhibit encompasses projects that one might describe as pure architectural research and those that result in structures that straddle the line between architecture and sculpture. Al-Haddad has, in fact, created site works for FLUX and other public-art exhibitions, and he won an Artadia Award in 2009.

The Georgia Tech professor has papered the walls of the gallery with photographs and text to illustrate various projects. For example, his research with high-performance concrete led to a prototype for a new kind of mold-made curtain wall, which contains a system that captures solar energy.

Tristan Al-Haddad's "Möbius" (Photo by Susan Sanders)

Its fluid forms evoke Barcelona architect Antonio Gaudi. Al-Haddad favors the biomorphic, both to suggest architecture’s relationship with bodily structure (or orifices, as in “Pucker Up,” a witty experiment with Corian) and as a counterbalance to architecture’s typically Euclidean geometry. In this he continues a long line of inquiry, most recently by the likes of Frank Gehry and Greg Lynn.

The architect brings his curiosity about materials and formal proclivities to “Möbius,” the sculpture that dominates the gallery. As its title suggests, it is a curvy form, constructed of panels of Corian milled in a method Al-Haddad devised. At present it is a work-in-progress; you can see the spine-like support, devised in conjunction with structural engineer Jamie O’ Kelley. When completed it will be 14 feet high.

Al-Haddad intended to place it in MODA’s plaza, where it would act as a portal to the museum and offer a dialogue with the Alexander Calder sculpture on the High Museum of Art’s lawn across the street. Time, budget and other exigencies foiled that plan. (There was, for instance, no way to bolt down the 4,000-pound piece, and, given its aerodynamic shape, it might even have levitated in the wind.) “Möbius” will probably be displayed in September at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in conjunction with the 2012 Advances in Architectural Geometry symposium.

Closer to home are the four temporary site sculptures on the Atlanta BeltLine, which Al-Haddad created with Tech students. They explore ideas of landscape, memory (the BeltLine’s history as a railroad loop) and how such sculpture can define and animate public space. Renderings of a permanent sculpture he designed for the BeltLine are also on view.

That 22-mile BeltLine loop is at the heart of Gravel’s solo show. An architect and urban planner with Perkins + Will, he conceived the BeltLine project and is design manager for the Atlanta BeltLine Corridor Design. Gravel has taken this opportunity to position the BeltLine in a national context. It is one of two dozen projects he characterizes as “catalytic infrastructure,” his term for public works projects that not only improve the lives of residents and spur economic development but also serve as demonstration models of what is possible in a contemporary city.

The BeltLine is represented by an artful, rather abstract walk-around map that encircles a long wall. Gravel has marked various spots with clusters of circular photos: glimpses of the loop’s past, present and future. A rusty length of rail spanning two pedestals rests on a bed of the same photographic discs.

Ryan Gravel's "BeltLine" (Photo by Susan Sanders)

Gravel devotes most of his show to research he has conducted in Los Angeles and Detroit. The Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan is an effort to restore the 52-mile waterway, now a concrete channel. In addition to its ecological benefits, the restored river, as vista and amenity, will attract residential and commercial development.

Detroit is an irresistible subject for an urban planner. A city with not much left to lose, it’s ripe for imagining and effecting radical change. Plus, as Gravel notes, it has good bones in its strong city grid. In contrast to grand schemes that some have floated, Gravel’s exercises are relatively modest and pragmatic. He goes about humanizing and making car-oriented roads more pedestrian-friendly by inserting linear parks and bicycle paths as boulevards on overly wide roads.

Of such projects across the country — New York’s High Line is small but notably successful — the Atlanta BeltLine is, Gravel says, among the most ambitious. For Atlanta — not a visionary city in matters of urban design, to put it mildly — it could be the brass ring. In addition to transforming how we sense, use and move around the city, it can raise public expectations, a necessary step toward building the political will to change.

Reception: 7-10 p.m. January 13

Al-Haddad talk: 6 p.m. January 17

Gravel talk: 6 p.m. January 19

Potter’s compositions from the black-and-white “Gray Line” series center on carefully posed uniformed West Point cadets, singly and in groups, in rugged yet somehow intimate outdoor settings. Their body language and arrangement echo the figurative poses of classical paintings, which imbues the images with a suggestion of narrative and the figures with an archetypal aura.

Kristine Potter: Untitled, 2009

In one untitled photograph (above), a single man in camo rests languidly in his tableau, blending with his background and offering the viewer a steady gaze — in so doing, he is both subject and object –projecting a sense of vulnerability that belies the virility of his military role. Here the transgressive “odalisque” provides fodder for the heterosexual female and homosexual male spectator, and thus removes the conditioning orientation of the gaze itself.

In her most successful portraits here, Potter provides a portal into the male military psyche that also provokes questions about traditional patriarchal hierarchies and their toll on the individual. She says she “wanted to understand the organization of violence and power … and to humanize the tough exteriors of these men.”

Kristine Potter: Untitled, 2005

But how much of the self is sacrificed in the call to duty? Beyond mere expectations of allegiance and national pride, in the age of “don’t ask, don’t tell” this is a loaded question. In this sense, the camouflage acts as both a leveler and a blind, obscuring the humanity of the man beneath.

Chandler, too, is concerned with male-driven narratives. His subjects are hunters engaged with the natural environment and shown in lush and colorful cinematic vistas. Just as Potter eschews any depiction of war or physical combat, the prey is never present in Chandler’s sporting narratives; it is, ultimately, beside the point.

Jeremy Chandler: "Hunter's Crossing," 2008

The artist seems interested in the relationships among men and how they are shaped by the expectations of traditional gender-based stereotypes. His images offer subversion of gender norms: ghillie suits are created by masses of wildflowers, and men in camo face masks resemble women in Muslim burkas.

Interestingly, Potter has also made symbolic images of huntsmen and addressed similar themes. A series on her father hunting in the Georgia woods allowed her to investigate her complex reaction to the act of hunting, its male dominance and its impact on her personal relationships.

Chandler’s hunting images may be less fraught with anxiety, but, as the Florida native offers, his photographs share a notion of place and a fascination for the ritualistic aspects of hunting.

Jeremy Chandler: "Pot Hunters," 2008

His work exhibits an interest in the perpetuation of certain mythological tropes in depictions of the American landscape, specifically those populated by men who are actively engaged in outdoor sports and recreation. Taking inspiration from 19th-century sporting periodicals, his images are transgressive — mainly through the passivity of the subjects.

Although we know that the young men depicted are engaged in the “masculine” act of hunting, Chandler presents them posed sedately in verdant landscapes, under blue skies and beside roiling rivers. We are left to question whether these men are reinforcing or breaking down the constraints of cultural norms — or, perhaps, neither. It is our consideration of the parameters that is important.

In their exploration of gender and objectification, both artists play with the theme of the fetishization of male prowess and move beyond it. The hyper-masculine roles of military men and hunters are obviously fertile ground for this type of exploration. Potter and Chandler offer oppositional gazes that challenge and deconstruct the traditional male gaze, creating a fetishized subject that is more nuanced. Beneath the “camouflage” of traditional gendered attributes, we glimpse the anxiety of the individual. We are left to consider the man beneath the image, the pressures of societal roles and the shifting meanings of masculinity and femininity.

Reception: 6-8:30 p.m. January 12. Artists’ talk: 1-2 p.m. January 14.