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... til the lights go out

Location

West Side- Atlanta, GA

Project type

Exhibition

Year

2018

Artists

Sarah Emerson, Craig Drennen, Amy Pleasant, Pete Schulte, Michi Meko, William Downs, Kirstin Mitchell, Scott Ingram, Joe Peregine, Jason Scholtz, Sarah Hobbs, Paul Benjamin, Wihro Kim, Krista Clark, Lloyd Benjamin, Esteban Patino
With special presentation by Howard Gallery Athen, GA

til the lights go out.

Since Atlanta was awarded the 1996 Olympics, the city has been consumed with change. Labeled “the city too busy to hate” we have learned to adjust to the constant shifting of our community. From Google Maps the city often looks like a game of Tetris as buildings come down and empty lots are filled. When I moved to Atlanta in 1995 what is now known as the Westside was an un-monikered expanse of empty low-slung buildings, mostly warehouse spaces consuming the landscape and occasionally a more significant structure such as the building at Howell Mill and 14th, formerly the U-Haul building, stretching vertically above its brick peers. It is now a trendy Jamestown property with everything from hip eateries to Lululemon, Room and Board and of course the ever-brilliant Knoll.

The U-Haul building was home to many Atlanta College of Art students, and housed art studios and DIY galleries for years. It was a no man’s land and the well-established Northside Tavern did not seem out of place. This area in general was the place to go for DIY galleries, art shows and rave parties. About 10 year ago galleries like GET THIS! and Saltworks joined Marilyn Kiang, Sandler Hudson, and Emily Amy among others on the Westside creating a vibrant arts district, one of many over the years. It was another short chapter in Atlanta’s art history as the neighborhood changed and the arts were pushed out to find new neighborhoods.

But as we well know, this is not a new phenomenon for the arts. This is the way it works. In most cities, development follows the artists. The arts have a way of showing a community its own potential. Think back to Chassie Post in Virginia Highlands, Solomon Projects, and Macintosh Gallery in Midtown. No one ever thought that Memorial would be a place that people wanted to go before there was the Mattress Factory, or Castleberry Hill before the artists and galleries made that the hot spot for a time.

So creating/curating an exhibition in an art gallery that will be destroyed just days after the gallery closes shouldn’t be un-expected. It is impossible to find an artist in Atlanta that has not been affected by these shifts in our landscape. The difference this time is that we saw it coming and could actually create an opportunity for ourselves. This was a unique moment to create without the limitations of a future functioning space. This is about painting directly on the walls, floors, and ceiling, creating environments, messes, and leaving the clean up to a bulldozer.

As a curatorial project, I see this as a collaborative effort amongst all the parties involved – artists, curator, gallerist, and developer. I have a fascination with creating art in structures that are being raised. In 2015 I used a backhoe to pierce a home in Ormewood Park with a 47 ft. I-beam just weeks before the architect took down the house. In this project I am offering a collection of artists the opportunity to create a large-scale work of art that will remain intact until the demolition of the building. We will document the destruction of the works from inside and outside the building during the demolition of the structure. In this way, the developer becomes a part of the work. Every artist in this show understood the importance of the destruction of their work as a metaphor for the trajectory of artist spaces. Creating the work was about community, the feelings of ownership of a space, the recognition that like every exhibition the experience is fleeting, but this time so is the space. It seems a fitting end to another gallery space in Atlanta. The artists will go on, the gallery will go on, and Atlanta will go on turning old into new.

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