Atlanta, Part 2: Guns, Glitter and Youth

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Marketing Mondays will return next week. If you're jonesing for art biz info, the roundup posts from the past three weeks contain links to close to 40 posts from the MM archives. Click here, here and here.

Atlanta, Part 1: My Diamond Life

In this post I continue my Atlanta report with Nancy Baker’s solo, New/Improved, and Mark Bercier’s solo, Youth. Both terrific shows are up at the Marcia Wood Gallery, along with my own Diamond Life, through May 28.

Orienting you: We look from the first gallery where my work is installed into the second, where we glimpse Nancy Baker's show, New/Improved

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New / Improved  is in the second room of the Marcia Wood Gallery. Baker attacks the war machine and corporate greed with gears, grenades—and glitter.  Her 21 Gun Salute consists of small framed collages of ordnance and five scintilating words that reference Charlton Heston’s iconic and oft-mocked stance, “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.” (He was speaking not as Moses but as the equally unlikely president of the NRA.) Baker effectively marries the glitter of Hollywood and the glamour of violence. Scary shit but, god, these collages are gorgeous!

Stepping inside the gallery, we see All Geared Up, left, and Please Stand By, both watercolor, glitter, collage on paper. (The gallery's terrace is visible through the back; we'll visit there in the next post)

Continuing around the gallery: Please Stand By and  New! Improved!

Below: 21 Gun Salute and Charnel 

Two from 21 Gun Salute: Brass Grenade, above, and Golden Gear, each 8 x 10 inches

Charnel, 2011, watercolor, glitter, collage on paper



Charnel, with the interlocking C’s of a certain French fashion house, is one of a series of subverted logos—consumerism intertwined witrh sex and death, or sometimes just a wicked sense of humor. I love them! (I have a small collage that includes the misappropriated logo, SexEd.) If you go to the gallery, ask to see Epiphany & Co, dripping with diamonds, eyeballs and a patch of familiar robin’s egg-blue, and Heresies, rife with pigs and kisses, the block letters of the subverted logo set into a chocolate-brown bar.

A panoramic last look before we walk back through the front gallery and onto the street, where we go next door to the Gallery Annex

On the street: The entry to the Marcia Wood Gallery, foreground. Next door, in the building on whose wall you see "Gowns," is Mark Bercier's solo show, Youth

Panoramic view of Mark Bercier's solo, Youth; all the work gouache on Rives paper

In the Annex, a gallery next door to the primary space, New Orleans artists and gallerist Mark Bercier shows Youth, a series of gouache-on-paper paintings of children on the brink of adulthood. Family friends, they look directly at the viewer with a combination of confidence and utter vulnerability. Bercier’s style may recall Alice Neel, but instead of pain there’s joy and the exuberance of becoming. A grid of six studies for the portraits, visible at left in the pano above, deepened my engagement with the paintings.

Max Head Study, 2010

Caroline Head Study, 2010

Maya Head Study, 2010

Maddy, Aidan and Massey, each 2010, gouache on Rives, 50 x 40 inches

Maddy, portrait, above, and Head Study

In Atlanta, Part 3: On Thursday, a visit to The Goat Farm, Lunch, The High Museum, and back to the gallery

Below: Diamond! A door on a building at The Goat Farm