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THE EXTRAORDINARY AND THE DELIGHTFULLY MUNDANE
Dream Big: "Wish," the latest exhibit curated by Didi Dunphy
at the Gallery@Hotel Indigo and on display through March,
includes the works of nine Athens-based and UGA-schooled
professional artists aspiring to add a bit of glitter and gold to
an otherwise dreary winter landscape.
Seeking to portray "the delightfully mundane in a scale
of massive proportions," the macro oil paintings of Margaret
Morrison show tantalizing close-ups of realistic gummy worms
and old-fashioned candies in bold stripes of red, yellow, blue
and green. Claire Joyce's "Latching," a dazzling image of baby
bottles lined up on a windowsill created with glitter, similarly
attempts to present a seemingly ordinary human experi
ence as significant and gleaming. "Ruby Reds," a large-scale
photograph of a pair of worn out sparkly red shoes by Jason
Thrasher, makes an obvious allusion to Dorothy's ruby slip
pers in the Wizard of Oz. The inclusion of Thrasher's other two
photographs, "40 Watt Lights" and "Georgia Theatre Curtains,"
reinforce how central aspiring musicians are to Athens culture,
while the cartoon and basketball player oil paintings on por
trait linens by Joshua Bienko may reference children's dreams
of becoming professional athletes.
The collection of jewelry designed by Mary Hallam
Pearse???three brooches, a ring and a necklace made from sil
ver, precious gems and digital prints on aluminum???are both
visually striking and playful. Combining inspiration drawn
from 18th???19th century "lover's eyes" and portrait jewelry
with classic children's dexterity games, each piece resembles a
daguerreotype with little impressions that free-moving pearls
can be rolled into.
Jennifer Crenshaw's "Metallic Bloom," a hand-woven clus
ter of geometric flowers resembling gold lace, and "Ice Cream
Cone," a photograph of a delicate hand-constructed paper wig
by Nikki Nye and Amy Flurry of the Paper Cut Project, both
suggest the desire to step away from mass-production and
return to hands-on methods of creating art. Thom Houser's
"Murano 37:7-8 Reawakening" and "Murano 37:1 Resurgence,"
large, moderately digitized close-ups of colorful broken glass
in a landfill near Murano Glassworks on the Venetian island of
Murano, raise issues surrounding recycling and the yearning to
preserve the planet.
A Life-long Feminist: New York-based painter and printmaker
Minna Citron had a lengthy and distinguished career as a
social realist-turned-abstractionist at the forefront of signifi
cant artistic movements including the Fourteenth Street School
and the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. "Minna
Citron: The Uncharted Course from Realism to Abstraction"
is on view at the Georgia Museum of Art through Mar. 3.
Many of Citron's earliest urban realist works focused on
the role of women in society, often in a satirical manner. Two
lithographs from the '30s???"Beauty Culture?" a scene of women
lounging around a salon called Scalpers getting perms and man
icures, and "Demonstration," a depiction of middle-aged women
hovering around a young department store saleswoman demon
strating a cosmetic???criticize the shallowness of vanity and the
trivial pursuit of achieving modern ideals of feminine beauty.
Over time, Citron's energy for humorously confronting frivo
lous norms in society was redirected into producing strong
statements about social ineguities. "Need Women Age Limit
75," for example, documents the hardship of elderly women
seeking labor opportunities in a competitive and ageist job
market. Aiming to record and promote women in path-breaking
social roles, Citron created works such as "What the Well-
Dressed Woman Wears to the Opera," a 1943 charcoal drawing
of two WWII-era women in Navy uniforms, which was part of
the "New York in Wartime" series that marked the end of her
early career in social realism.
As social and cultural movements slowly progressed, Citron's
style drastically evolved into abstraction, focusing on tex
tured surfaces in printmaking, found-object assemblages and
geometric compositions. Stressing the idea of "chance" as a
philosophical element to her creative process, Citron incor
porated randomly found materials like scraps of paper, paint
can lids and yarn into her works to add three-dimensionality.
"L'Arraignee," an intaglio print from 1963, began with a frayed
piece of rope Citron found while walking near her home.
After running it through the press, the converging black lines
against a magenta background suggested a long spider web,
from which its title was derived.
Public Personas: I can't help but
wonder how Minna Citron would feel
viewing "The Sorority Girl Project"
by post-MFA Photography Faculty
Fellow Kelly Kristin Jones, currently
on display at the UGA Lamar Dodd
School of Art in Gallery 101 through
Thursday, Feb. 7. The series of a dozen
30 X 40-inch color prints, a play on
formal portraiture, presents straight
forward images of nicely dressed UGA
sorority girls within the neutral set
ting of their houses. Documenting
Greek culture with the intent of either
perpetuating or challenging its com
mon stereotypes would have been an
obvious, albeit interesting, approach
for a community with such a strong
Panhellenic presence. Instead, Jones
explores something much more com
plicated through her body of work:
the mythology of perfectionism and
the fagade of self-curation. Rather
than capturing candid shots that may
have revealed girls at moments of
vulnerability or unexpected exhibi
tions of individuality, the subjects are
considerably posed and rigid, aware
that their presentation in front of
the camera lens will be shared with
the general public. The inclusion of
a film loop of a girl applying makeup
is a particularly important aspect of
the exhibit, in that it stresses the effort undertaken to main
tain the best appearance possible. While the exhibit does not
answer the mysteries of who the girls are behind their Greek
guises, it does suggest the unsettling lengths to which many of
them go in order to safely guard their images and reputations.
Jessica Smith
Margaret Morrison
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10 FLAGPOLE.COM ??? JANUARY 23, 2013