Madison Art Exhibit Features Stellar Work

originally published June 18, 2008

Curated by Sylvie Fortin, the editor in chief of the Atlanta-based magazine Art Papers, the Madison National Juried Art Show at the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center features 27 artists from around the nation, although a majority of the artists live and work here in Georgia.

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Now Voyager: The exhibition is divided into three galleries, the first devoted to a single installation "Battleship, Battle at Sea" by Corrina Mensoff and Hartmut Koenitz. The room is darkened, and 10 miniature battleships hang from rods and strings like puppets in front of a projected looping video that shows images from battles at sea. The imagery moves between black-and-white footage and colored footage that alternates between red, white and blue. Three fallen battleships, their strings disconnected from the ceiling, rest on the floor in front of the screen. The installation suggests the way war is controlled and disconnected from the actual ships and the people who live, work and die in them.

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Domesticated Animals: The other two galleries feature a mix of painting, photography, prints, fabric sculpture and metalwork. Three photographs by Jody Fausett are the centerpiece of the second gallery. Reminiscent of Gregory Crewdson’s highly staged photographs of domestic scenes, each large color photograph shows an animal in a dated interior space, creating a surreal and dreamlike mood. "Horse" depicts a nearly empty, carpeted dining room whose sole furniture is a wooden table. Olive-colored, tasseled curtains occupy the center of the almost perfectly symmetrical composition and frame an opaque window that reveals the time to be night. Also framed by the curtains is the most uncanny element of the photograph, a tiny cloud that transforms into a white galloping horse, surreally hovering over the table.

The window of a sliding-glass door gives the next photograph, "Broken Window," its title, although the focal point of the image is a fox sedately sitting in a velvet gold chair. The scene is set at dusk, and a tiled porch and discarded saw are visible through other glass doors. A bright light, whose source is obscured by the chair, illuminates the scene and adds further mystery, and like "Horse," the space seems abandoned, further evoking the eerie quality of a dream.

The third photograph, "Bobcats," shows two bobcats seated on floral-patterned sofas and ottomans that have been pushed together to take up the entire composition, creating a densely patterned field. The dominantly orange and green 1970s leafy pattern suggests their natural habitat, while simultaneously playing the wild animals off of the crowded assemblage of furniture and the implied interior space.

Carnal Knowlege: "The Present Moment," a smaller color photograph by Brook Reynolds hangs near Fausett’s photographs. A weathered sign is inscribed with Bible verses, yet it is hard to read any of them completely as bamboo and other plants have grown up around the sign and some of the letters have fallen off, leaving the text incomplete. Like Faussett’s photographs, there are no people present, only the traces of human existence, therefore giving the scene a deserted, forgotten quality and imbuing the otherwise commonplace sign with the aura of a ruin.

A color pencil rendering of two headless plastic Barbie doll bodies by Philip Carpenter titled "Intelligent Design," seems to imply cloning and the various means of altering one’s body in contemporary culture. Using the term for the allegedly scientific version of creationism, the drawing conflates the Christian narrative of creation with contemporary expectations and alterations of the body. Due to the drawing’s title, the anonymous but “perfect” male and female bodies recall Adam and Eve, and perhaps indicate the binary construction of gender in Western culture, although offering little hope for the breakdown of gender stereotypes. On the adjacent wall, an acrylic painting by Donté Hayes, "Altered Body," deals with similar themes. A broken gingerbread man has been stitched back together and augmented with a mechanical leg and arm, referring to the current technological means of altering and repairing the body.

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Circular Logic: Dominating the third gallery is a large drawing by Barb Bondy entitled "RW" that hangs from a high point on the wall and unrolls onto the floor. Although the drawing extends almost midway through the gallery, it does not completely unfurl, so the viewer is unable to see the entire drawing. At the top of the drawing, Bondy has rendered tiny intricate circles with an almost mechanical style that collectively form images of larger, irregular circular - almost cellular - shapes. As the paper unrolls onto the floor, the pattern shifts into a rigid and formulaic alignment of the tiny circles, and the drawing becomes even more mechanical. Of course, the final outcome of the pattern is left unseen since the remainder of the drawing is rolled up. Finally, the drawing looks like a giant print-out of some sort of coded information, although it is the process of a meticulous, obsessive hand.

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Reprise: Maria Watts’ "Admiration of Nostalgia" is a pair of small color photographs that seem to be enlarged images of smaller photographs depicting two views of the same event. Almost entirely black, one image shows exploding fireworks over a lake that is only visible through the reflections of the fireworks on the surface of the water. Its pendent is another dominantly black nighttime image that shows only a few tiny sparks of fireworks about to explode, and at the bottom edge of the photograph, a crowd of people whose faces and the details of their bodies and clothing have been blurred by the process of remaking the image. By blowing up the photographs, Watts conjures the impossibility of precisely recreating memory with a medium - photography - that is typically associated with capturing and preserving the details of a certain moment.

Likewise, playing with nostalgia, is a photograph by W.A. Chamberlain, "3431," with a title taken from the spray-painted address of an old gas station. Among vintage gas pumps (a black-and-white cat sits prosaically on top of one) and quaint old signs that are obviously only decorative elements meant to invoke nostalgia, is a sign that reads “If You Can Read This You Are On Video.”

Overall, the Madison National is interestingly laid out and includes an extensive range of work. The exhibition is up until the end of June.

Rebecca Brantley