Selected curatorial projects :)
D O M E S T I C S T R U C T U R E S, 2017
Athica - Athens, GA
Curated by Candice Greathouse
In 1971, Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro organized W O M A N H O U S E, a feminist art installation taking over and redefining an entire house. A provocative and sometimes controversial project, the artists transformed this domestic environment from floor to ceiling, inside and out, reinterpreting the concept of “making a home” and offering a critique of patriarchal oppression. Almost fifty years later, the home is still primarily considered a woman’s domain, and contemporary depictions reinforcing this are abundant. From glossy interior spreads in women’s magazines to the dedicated “lifestyle bloggers” of social media, these portrayals all similarly equate an idealized home with an idealized woman.
D O M E S T I C S T R U C T U R E S aims to expand the ideology of the home/house and relocate it as a site of action and potential. The artists featured in this exhibition critically examine domestic & nostalgic objects through the mediums of installation, sculpture, and photography, and manifest representations and reshapings in regards to the construction of house and “home”. Tactile works conceptualize the monumental and the miniscule, the functioning and the defunct, and offer a nuanced exploration of gendered understandings of domesticity and familial narratives, often relegated as “feminine” and “sentimental”.
How do these objects and structures encapsulate (or limit) the lived experiences of women?
In the broader context of history, to what extent is the domestic structure of the home the foundation for larger social and political structuring?
Parallel Play, 2017
The Finishing School - University of Georgia, 215 Thomas Street. Athens, GA 30602
Curated by Candice Greathouse
Parallel Play, curated by Candice Greathouse and Curtis Ames, features new works from Andrew Boatright, Kojo Griffin, and Kirstin Mitchell. Each artist operates from a theoretical position in which content, form, and process are informed by trial and error modes of conceptual and material experimentation. Showing each subject position to the other, this exhibition highlights points of commonality and difference between the disparate creative practices of the artists involved.
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Andrew Boatright creates sculptures from cast-off and mundane materials that reference bodily forms and structures. Seeming to have emerged from some sort of primordial soup, Boatright’s awkward figures confront the viewer with an intentional lack of refinement. Processes are suspended, materials revealed, and armatures exposed, providing a darkly humorous commentary on the flawed human condition.
Kojo Griffin builds assemblages of discreet structures, gestures, and found imagery. Often puzzle-like and modular in form, Griffin fashions abstracted, layered representations that encapsulate ideas related to the shifting physical and virtual boundaries of a global society – exploring the relationships between his experiences, socialization, education, and cultural perspective.
Kirstin Mitchell assembles living, mutable vignettes of aesthetic experience with materials that have bodily associations – sheets of rubber and weathered hunks of styrofoam that exist alongside atmospheric gradients. Through playful arrangement of these objects and images, Mitchell creates participatory and performative moments that both seduce and penetrate.
LIVE ACTION – A VIDEO EXHIBITION, 2015
Repetition, Routine, and Redundancy in the Moving Image
MINT Gallery
Adriane Colburn, Mark Crowley, Adam Forrester, Kate Gilmore, Lee Materazzi, Justin Plakas
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Do we watch video for video’s sake? What is it about a visual subject that makes it credible, what is worth watching, or first recording? A door slamming shut, ice cream melting, wood being chopped… LIVE ACTION is an exploration and indulgence of these repetitive, routine actions captured within the static video frame.
The featured video works of Adriane Colburn, Mark Crowley, Adam Forrester, Kate Gilmore, Lee Materazzi, and Justin Plakas investigate the relationship between the inactive lens of the camera, the captured motion, and the resulting action, irresistibly compelling. The action not only functions as a valid and provocative subject, but often times as an emotional stimulant, producing anticipation and/or anxiety in the arrested, stagnant (even lack of) narrative.
The use of the static frame in the moving image situates the six artists in a dialogue somewhere in between the history of photography and contemporary video practices - a visual limbo. Their works further evade concrete categorization as references to sculptural and performance traditions become evident through the ever-present action. These works do not exist in abstraction; the artists and subjects (at times, one in the same) are interacting with sculptural, real world objects and using their own bodies to perform familiar actions, pushed further, made just unfamiliar enough to hold our attention. Filtered through the lens of video, a medium that emphasizes the literal, these routine actions become hypnotic - emotive and visceral, yet whimsical and decadently lush. The works of LIVE ACTION are totally worth watching, on repeat.
In Transition, works by Charlie Lucas, 2015
MINT Gallery
Curated by Candice Greathouse
Also called the “Tin Man,” Lucas is a self-taught artist who is known for his figurative paintings and sculptures made from found objects and salvaged materials. Lucas transforms these humble materials into vehicles of personal narrative relating to the people and experiences of the Southeast. The current exhibition, “In Transition” features a curated selection of Charlie Lucas’ sculptural and painting works alongside found and unfinished materials culled from his studio, to serve as a document of his studio practice and artistic process.
Regarding this exhibition Creative Director Candice Greathouse stated, “MINT is very excited to have the opportunity to bring Charlie Lucas to Atlanta, and share his works with new audiences. His work is not only integral to the history of the Southeast and the tradition of folk art, but his emphasis on material and process is also relevant to the broader history of contemporary art and art practices.”
MIDDLE, 2014
City of Atlanta, Office of Cultural Affairs, Gallery 72
Curated by Candice Greathouse
Meta Gary, Margaret Hiden, Brittainy Lauback, Trevor Reese, Christina Price Washington, and Patricia Villafane
Middle is central. Middle is a position between two absolutes. Middle represents an unfinished chronology, an intangible point on a line that has a beginning and an end. The works included in this exhibition serve as a visual dialogue of ideas that investigate notions of this middleness – inbetweenness and potentiality through material and process. Meta Gary’s video work documents the temporary topographic forms created at construction sites during the eradication of the old and the formation of the new. The layered photographic works of Christina Price Washington and Margaret Hiden transcend the medium of photography, as their imagery functions as neither object, nor as representation, becoming through their processes something else entirely. Brittainy Lauback’s mysterious imagery experiments with contrasts, it is dangerous yet provocative, repulsive but alluring. Patricia Villafane’s video toys with and manipulates our understanding of reality and unreality. Trevor Reese’s sculptures of everyday objects embody both wit and sincerity in exploring the realm of the anti-monumental. The artists and works featured in this exhibition represent the middle through a variety of strategies conceptually and aesthetically. They resist concrete categorization and definition, offering instead a provoking ambiguity that prolongs and redefines the “middle”.
…from material to immaterial,
from form to formless,
from instrumental to mental,
from time to timeless.
——— Marina Abramovic, 1989