Art Relish

The Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design Gallery is pleased to presents Frank Poor: Mapping Memory on view June 2 through July 29. The public is invited to the opening reception on Thursday, June 2 from 5-8 p.m. The event is part of the Downtown First Thursdays Arts Walk.

Artist and Georgia State University alumnus Frank Poor exhibits new sculptures and works on paper created in response to the landscapes of Georgia and Alabama. This evocative new series was made during Poor’s recent residency at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia.

Vernacular architectural forms appear in this work as mill houses, shotgun shacks and churches, translated into three dimensions via photographic images printed directly onto wood veneer. Poor’s meticulous craftsmanship and playful scale enthrall the viewer with surreal, three-dimensional images. The tension between the inaccuracy of the artist’s memory and the “reality” of the present is reinforced by his methodology of merging the flat space of the photograph with the three-dimensional image of the sculptural form. Poor says, “A recent residency at Columbus State University marked my first sustained visit back to the South in twenty years. It also enabled me to spend four months wandering around Georgia and Alabama photographing landscapes and architecture. These travels served to reinforce the power of place to remind. The work in this show reflects my attempt to map that reminding.

Any return to a place of childhood is complicated by the effects of time. You grow older, the characters change and the landscapes are altered. Our memories and the world they confront are ultimately irreconcilable. If even a faint map emerges from this exercise it would be one that marks the moments when the images I collected rhymed with the ones I brought.”

Welch School Gallery Director Cynthia Farnell says, “Frank’s work encapsulates the dichotomies of the current landscapes of Georgia and Alabama. On the one hand there is the visual insistence of a not so distant past in the decaying dwellings and churches; on the other hand there is the explosion of development and suburbanization that virtually erases any collective memory or sense of place. I like to think of Frank as the Atget of three dimensions. He is able to grab fragments of vernacular expressions in all their beautiful imperfection and humanity.”

About the artist

Frank Poor was born in Woodstock, Georgia in 1962. He earned his BFA from Georgia State University and MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions include Enon Cemetery Project, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2009, Shadows and Signs, at Coastal Carolina University in 2007 and Time, Memory and the Poetic Impulse, at Salve Regina University in 2005. A solo exhibition, entitled Going Home is scheduled for fall 2011 at the Newport Art Museum in Newport, Rhode Island.

Welch School Galleries/ GSU
10 Peachtree Center Ave.
Atlanta, GA 30303

The Welch School Galleries are located at the corner of Gilmer Street and Peachtree Center Ave. Free evening event parking at the United Way deck at Auburn Ave. and Courtland Ave. The gallery is within walking distance of the MARTA Five Points Station. All gallery programs are free and open to the public and accessible to persons with disabilities.

In Don Pollack’s Far From Home , dreamlike landscape paintings reflect on perceptions of time, nature, and observation during a two thousand mile bike ride tracing a historic route.

Don Pollack is a nationally recognized practitioner of landscape painting. His hauntingly lyrical and conceptually stimulating paintings stand as a vital contemporary link in the long chain of American landscape painting. Pollack’s work has been compared to and exhibited alongside such early masters as Beirstadt, Church and Innes, as well as contemporaries Stephen Hannock, Thomas Woodruff and David Kroll. Critic Jerry Cullum of the Atlanta Journal Constitution has commented “This is incredibly beautiful landscape painting with a serious intellectual dimension plus an occasional humorous twist.” In his practice Pollack mines the relationship between photography and painting and considers the question of objectivity with any form of documentation, as well as the ways in which painting contributes to the construction of identity. Conceptually his works proceed from the premise that all vision is historic and constructed. From this perspective Pollack explores the way painting can simultaneously give reference to impermanence and the shifting visions of photography and the transience of a moment.

Believing that what defines us as Americans is a mythic journey that includes the movement west and into the landscape, Pollack undertook a personal epic journey to inform his current artwork with the layers of meaning derived from a prolonged and intimate immersion into the landscape. The paintings in the upcoming exhibition, “Far From Home”, result from a 2,000 mile “reverse journey”that the Chicago based artist made on bicycle in 2010 from Springfield, Ill to Washington, D.C. Opposing the historical notion of moving westward in the expansion of America, Pollack chose instead a route that was more likely to take him to scenes of urban congestion rather than a wilderness landscape. The ride was a continuation of “The Lincoln Project” wherein the artist retraced the historic journey Abraham Lincoln took by train from his home in Springfield, Ill to Washington, D.C. for his inauguration in 1861. “The Lincoln Project” was exhibited during the Lincoln Bicentennial at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill in February 2009 and the Union League Club in Chicago in July 2009. In 2009 Pollack was awarded the Order of Lincoln, the highest honor given by the state of Illinois.

Pollack writes that while riding he came to experience ‘time’ as a somewhat measured visual perception. Typography and numbers are harbingers of maps, GPS coordinates, cell phones and compasses. A tree on the horizon 15 miles away might have been seen as an hour and the bend in the road ahead could have been 10 minutes. “Time and space constantly reminded me that being a casual observer was illusory. Travel is like reading a book, and movement on a bicycle is like watching a movie. The dilemma this poses reveals a paradoxical relationship between the landscape and the methods used to record it. Lines and fades in painting suggest skips and distortions in film. Sometimes an image appears cloudy and clear simultaneously. Subjects are inspired from specific and imagined locations.” Ultimately the artist is aware that while painting what makes nature potent, mysterious, and ultimately untamable, he is at the same time manifesting an awareness that this view of nature is a product of his own mythology.

Chicago based Don Pollack has exhibited in the U.S. and Canada for thirty years. He earned an MFA at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio in 1984 and has been an Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 2005 and a Professor at the Illinois Institute of Art since 1986. He received the Lincoln Academy Award in 2009. His work is in the collections of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Ill, the Union League Club, Chicago, Ill, the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, Western Illinois University, Macomb, Ill, University of Illinois, Urbana, Ill, Republican Governors Association, Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, NY, and the Prudential Insurance Company, Chicago, among others.

June 2 – July 2, 2011.

Marcia Wood Gallery
263 Walker Street
Atlanta, Georgia 30313
404.827.0030

Ante Up, Or Fold, SCAD Photography Senior Project class show, through June 2.

Henley Studios
280 Elizabeth St. NE
Suite A-109
Atlanta, GA 30307

I’ve attached the images of the showcard, front and back.