January 17 - February 23, 2023, The Suite Gallery, Lamar Dodd School of Art

Insatiable Fire features new works by Atlanta-based artists Demetri Burke, Noah Reyes and Sergio Suárez. These artists bring contemporary painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking to exciting new terrain at the intersection of narrative figuration and abstraction. Their works deftly open up and explore spaces between individuals and cultures, drawing upon personal and collective histories of affection and trauma, navigation of borders, translation and the porosity of language.

The Mesoamerican post-classical ceremony of Fuego Nuevo (New Fire) symbolizes the renewal of the universe and a collaborative effort to delay the end of the world, as Sergio Suárez described in his recent solo exhibition with that title. Demetri Burke evokes fire as “always steady, but never still.” The artworks in this exhibit reflect these associations, feeling situated both in the present and in dream-like or mythic spaces, with forms incessantly generating and dissipating. Burke incorporates collage of found imagery to rupture the cohesive picture space of his figurative paintings. Reyes densely aggregates layers of gesso and marker to create an atmospheric personal iconography of forms-in-flux. Suárez displays meticulously carved and inked woodcut matrices embellished by accompanying sculptural forms. The works elicit a palpable intimacy with the viewer, inviting close looking and contemplation of renewal through material process.

(Photo credit: Sidney Chansamone)

In the Spring of 2022 I worked with MFA Costume and Scenic Designer Jordyn Seever at the University of Georgia to assist with the set design for UGA Theatre’s production of Avery Crozier’s play Eat the Runt. I organized an art call featuring sixteen artists from Athens, Atlanta and Los Angeles, creating a stage set replicating a contemporary art museum.

Featured artists include: Peyton Bailey, William Ballard, Sally Garner, Chad Hayward, Kate Kosek, Eric Martin, Leeza Negelev, Jason Rafferty, Maya Ragbeer, Alejandro Ramirez, Quynh Tien Ngoc Tran, Jose Trejo-Maya, and Rachel Warren.

January 28 - February 22, 2022, Lupin Gallery, Lamar Dodd School of Art

Co-curated with Shaunia Grant

Play Along is an exhibit of recent works by Dodd MFA candidates Shaunia Grant, Huey Hyuk Lee, Jason Rafferty and Ethan Snow. An aesthetic of playfulness and colorful spontaneity melds with weightier themes such as childhood trauma, reflections on mortality, climate change and corporate deceit. The exhibit features a variety of media including ceramics, metals, photography, painting, assemblage, and collaborative works.

The title “Play Along'' is an innocent invitation as well as a signal of deception, a lie in which we might be instructed to “play along.” It is at once whimsical and sinister. Childhood is filled with exuberant anticipations leading to such disappointments that mirror experiences that continue through adulthood. Larger deceptions require more people to energetically persist in “playing along” for an indefinite span of time.

Irreverence, the tongue-in-cheek, and furtive collusions with the viewer exist throughout the works in this exhibit. They reward close inspection. In offering fresh takes on pressing and relatable themes, and addressing anxieties perhaps shared by the viewer, the artists offer a grab-bag of provocations that they hope may be cathartic.

April 4 - 22, 2022, The Glass Gallery, Lamar Dodd School of Art

Artists:

Emily Albee, AJ Aremu, Kate Burke, Hannah Ehrlich, Katie Ford, Sally Garner, Kate Kosek, Kengel Maysonet, Jacob Pet

“Plush” evokes not only thickness and softness, but an affect that is “abundantly rich, lush, and luxurious” (Merriam-Webster.) This exhibit displays innovative works of soft sculpture, fiber and textile art from nine contemporary artists exploring new terrain in these disciplines. Featuring anamorphic abstract shapes, fragments of bodies, pliable grids and draping text, these works eschew strict horizontals and verticals in favor of shifting, folding undulations. Their subjects evoke bodies, adornment, interior spaces, autobiography, and the materiality and making processes of fiber and textile arts, amongst other themes. Material and color choices are often surprising and playful, subverting the viewer’s expectations about the appearance and function of familiar forms. The works present compelling hybridities, often an assemblage of highly differentiated processes and materials - tufting, stuffing, sewing, weaving, wrapping, bending, cutting, layering, coating, moulding, welding. The result is an exciting exchange of objects and ideas amongst nine artists who are pushing creative practice and traditional fiber and sculptural processes in compelling new directions.

October 1 - 17, 2021

650 Gallery, Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design, Atlanta & Glass Gallery, Lamar Dodd School of Art, Athens

Co-curated with Sally Garner and Kate Kosek

The Georgia MFA Invitational Exhibit featured two exhibitions of works by MFA Candidates at the University of Georgia and Georgia State University in the Fall of 2021.

Exhibiting artists:

Emily Albee, Shir Bassa, Mickey Boyd, Luka Carter, Felicia Castro, Casey Connelly, Jeremy Diamond, Darya Fard, Katie Ford, Sally Garner, Shaunia Grant, Getsay, Alyssa Hood, Chad Hayward, Isys Hennigar, Matthew Torchiana Hoban, Huey Hyuk Lee, Nick Kakavas, Katie Kearns, Kate Kosek, Kengel Maysonet, Azya Moore, Leeza Negelev, Jason Rafferty, Alejandro Ramirez, David Robertson, Rachel Seburn, Corran Shrimpton, Ethan Snow, Lizzy Storm

Fall 2021, The Corridor Gallery, Lamar Dodd School of Art

This three-person exhibition features new works by Zahria Cook, Chad Hayward and Jason Rafferty. The exhibit displayed the artists’ mutual interests in shifting fields of color and movement, and revealed surprising formal and tonal commonalities between the mixed-media paintings, collages and assemblages.

Zahria Cook’s oil and watercolor paintings explore decision-making and intuition and how they relate to her blackness. They attempt to mimic her body and abstractly represent her thoughts. Chad Hayward’s work on handmade paper investigates the use of repetitious meditative movement as a way to access a unique psychological space known as a flow state. The accumulation and repeated use of the circular forms exhibit the nuance and materiality of color. Jason Rafferty’s paintings, prints and assemblages explore feelings of uncertainty related to climate change with a lighthearted, color-saturated sensibility. They imply that collaboration and creative innovation are matters of ‘life or death’ for us all.