Spruill Center Gallery, 4681 Ashford Dunwoody Road, Atlanta, GA

The curatorial approach in Take A Second Look (Spruill Center gallery, June 16—August 19) bodily disregards qualitative judgments in favor of a generous thematic consideration of artists who use recycled materials. The result is an uneven show that, nonetheless, provocatively bridges conventional boundaries between high art and kitsch, fine art and folk art, installation and object, scared and profane. It is an exhibition that potentially appeals on some level to everyone’s taste, and in a culture increasingly defined by its conspicuous consumption, not to mention waste, the issue of recycling is timely for the visual arts. The reconfiguration of found media inevitable conjures up the passage of time. In her sculptural assemblages, Mary Deacon Opasik incorporates family history, alluding to the cycles of life through the literal use of old clock faces or through the creation of portraits of great-grandparents from pieces of wood. The latter, transform the graceful lines of antique furniture into elegant and reverential formal portraiture. In Pandra William’s work, it is not the implied history of the found objects, but their reconstruction into goddess figurines that refer back to the earliest extant examples of visual representation. Offering an updated version of Paleolithic fertility sculptures, Williams creates “Venus” figures that link modern day obsessions with female beauty to sacred and profoundly mysterious icons of the distant past.

In much of the work in this show, animate form emerges out of the creative combination of inanimate material. In Y2Kitty, Bobby Hansson reshapes yesterday’s discarded tin cans into a playful creature for the new millennium. Richard DeWalt likewise fashions lighthearted, colorful figures out of painted tin, steel and wood. He then adds titles that pun on the resulting forms and coyly poke fun at Southern and African American cultures; Georgian artist Mary Engle encrusts ceramic figures of dogs and humans with glass, buttons and other pocketsize objects. Like the richly textured and colorful “memory jars” of old, Engle’s figures are further replete with personal and symbolic significance, effectively embracing spiritual and aesthetic concerns.

For octogenarian Hawkins Bolden, the reuse of material grew out of economic necessity in the tradition of self-taught Southern artists. Bolden has been making objects all his life from refuse he scavenges from alleys, gardens and vacant lots near his home. Blind since age five, he relies upon touch and memory for his inspiration, creating simple yet powerfully evocative, anthropomorphic forms. In contrast, Leonard Streckfus, who has also constructed animal forms for the past 20 years from found objects, consciously invokes the aesthetic tradition of Picasso’s relief assemblages. Paradoxically, however, it is the austerity of some of Bolden’s objects that the expressive power of Picasso’s work finds a worthy legacy. Streckfus’ animals, while imaginative in their own right, seem overly deliberated in comparison.

For Atlanta viewers who recently viewed Virginia Kollarik’s installation of eviscerated stuffed animals in the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center Show “Here Kitty Kitty” earlier this year, the reappearance of these disemboweled toys in “Take A Second Look” offer a slightly different experience. Gone was the anthropological display of the bizarre creatures, neatly lined up along shelves like clinical specimens. Here they spilled haphazardly out of their natural habitat–a child’s toy chest–at once evoking tumultuous, domestic histories of love and abuse at the hands of young owners. Domestic associations also inform the work of Sally Mankus. In Tower of Pans the artist evokes rituals of cooking and serving food in a sculptural installation of charred and rusted bake ware combined with a sound recording of kitchen activities. Mankus also incorporates photography into her work, transferring images of people onto pot lids, or manipulating portraits with rust carbon lifted from used pots and pans, suspending the images from roughly fashioned clotheslines. The multiple layers of her work elicit comforting memories, whether real or imagined, of daily sustenance served by familiar hands.

Home is the title of one of Robert Walden’s wall pieces, which consist of city maps carefully cut apart to leave a spidery configuration of streets and nothing else. Home in this instance is both a literal site one can potentially locate in the intersection of roads and an abstract entity delicately suspended within a network of cultural configurations. The sheer fragility juxtaposes with Linda Armstrong’s cumbrous and claustrophobic installation, Loon, clearly the most ecologically oriented work in the show. Consisting of Tibetan prayer flags, stuffed birds, deflated balloons and strands of rubber tubing evocative of beach debris, and featuring a soundtrack by Dick Robinson, Loon recreates a tragic environment where nature loses out to industrial waste.

While some of the work is easily forgettable, offering eye candy and little more, most of the 18 artists represented in this show leave a lasting impression on the viewer. But in either case, kudos to all of these artists for exploring the creative potential of materials hastily discarded by the rest of us.

©2000 Art Papers