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A One-Night Visual Art and Performance Event

LE FLASH 2009, the opening event of Atlanta Celebrates Photography, promises an extraordinary encounter in that nether space between light and lens.

Le Flash—an evening when art experiments with light—returns for a second year to Atlanta. The Nuit Blanche-inspired event will illuminate the Castleberry Hill district from dusk to midnight on October 2, creating a unique cultural experience along the streets of Castleberry, a historic community at the edge of downtown Atlanta. Rain or shine, the neighborhood will be showered with the light and sound of installations, performance art, music, video projections, an iron pour and other unexpected art happenings.

Internationally known, Atlanta-based choreographer Lauri Stallings, with gloATL, presents a fantastic feature performance for LE FLASH 2009. Stallings is designing POUR, a stunning site-specific work for dozens of dancers that will flow along the back streets of the district.

Curators Cathy Byrd and Stuart Keeler, the team that invented Le Flash, produced last year’s premiere with the support of local and international funding, the neighborhood association and a team of local art students and volunteers. Le Flash 2008 centered on the spatial dynamic of Castleberry Hill, making site-specific use of empty lots and dark streets in ways that captured the city’s emerging, and largely untapped, potential for public art. The curators’ aim was to initiate a yearly ephemeral arts celebration that linked the local community to a broader cultural scene. On October 24, 2008, the legendary potential of the event became immediately apparent. Beneath the cloak of a cold drizzle, the projects were realized in one form or another by improvising artists. A thousand participants ventured out to find a magical happening overtake the district.

LE FLASH shares a transitory aesthetic with cities around the world that take a night out for art once a year. Paris and Toronto, Tokyo and Berlin are among the cultural destinations that light up for NUIT BLANCHE. Santa Monica’s GLOW transforms the pier, the beach and Palisades Park for art encounters from dusk to dawn. Using light as the theme, Byrd and Keeler sparked the energy of the Atlanta artist community, encouraging sound and light installations, projected imagery and illuminated performances. The team designed LE FLASH 2008 as a first step in establishing a sustainable vision for an annual night-long, city-wide event. Creating a successful platform for new-genre public art, they called attention to the need for public and private investment in contemporary projects.

An anonymous donor came forward with funds for Le Flash Atlanta 2009. By financing artists’ stipends and production costs, this generous gift renews the spirit of le Flash and moves the event to a new level. Byrd and Keeler plan to intensify the encounter with art and light for those who visit the neighbourhood on October 2.

In an time economic woes, the City of Atlanta, and Fulton County along with the Mayor Office are unable to contribute, however the community spirit for such an event is present – donors have come forward to contribute with inventive new ways which portray a watershed of cultural production.

Sixty other projects will flare up in vacant lots, empty buildings, galleries and boutiques, sidewalks and street corners, extending to the furthest reaches of Castleberry Hill. Lemon flashlights maneuvered by Steve Jarvis. Caroline Powers invents human fireflies. Dance Truck performers squeeze into a moving van for a light show. Carl DiSalvo and David Holstius stage a zombie haunt in the shadow of tattoo parlor. There will be interrogations and shadow puppets, perambulators and deep breathing exercises, and lots of other unlikely intersections in art and performance.

Art Relish visited the inaugural Le Flash in 2008:

Ohio painter Abril Andrade Griffith’s Solo Debut – The Forbidden Circus, at U*Space Gallery.

Griffith has created a uniquely personal surreal fantasy world. Griffith’s vibrantly colored characters can come across as menacing yet adorable due in part to their creepy but cute oversized eyeballs. We as viewers are allowed to gawk and stare, but ultimately must choose: sympathize or not to sympathize. Griffith’s characters psychologically represent those forgotten, downtrodden, often helpless members of society often overlooked due to the fact that they simply don’t, for whatever reason, quite fit into our seemingly ordinary everyday lives.

Abril Andrade Griffith is a mostly self taught artist whose dark style was already infused within her when she discovered the Gothic subculture as a young teen. She attended a fine art school – ‘Universidad – Lleida’ in Lleida, Spain.

Jackie Brenner, Angela Driscoll, Courtney Egan, Ellen E. Ellis, Jan Gilbert, Debra Howell, Kristen Struebing-Beazley, Michel Varisco

The VESTIGES Project (VESTIGES), a New Orleans-based and inspired artist/writer collaborative, is celebrating its 25th anniversary year and traveling artworks by several native Orleanians working in photography and video to Atlanta’s BUCKHEAD LIBRARY.  The exhibition VESTIGES of New Orleans:  Ritual and Relic is the second part of a pair of offerings presented by VESTIGES and Opal Gallery on this year’s calendar of Atlanta Celebrates Photography extensive programs and festivities focusing on photography across the city.

Jan Gilbert, artist/cofounder of The VESTIGES Project and project director of the VESTIGES of NEW ORLEANS: Ritual and Relic series of installation artworks notes:

“In the past the group has investigated sites that are unknown, overlooked or historically camouflaged, in order to question traditional and commonly accepted ideas of the spectacular.  The Opal Gallery summer exhibition VESTIGES: LAND MARKS and artists’ panel/exchange at Eyedrum provided opportunities to connect this group to the Atlanta arts community.  Longtime senior art editor of ARTPAPERS, Jerry Cullum joined the effort.  He steered us to secure this historically-charged venue for VESTIGES to produce experimental, interactive, site specific, public art installations at the BUCKHEAD LIBRARY.”

This modernist architectural gem designed by Scogin, Elam and Bray recently was threatened by a developer’s plan for the wrecking ball and saved by public outcry. The work created in this exhibition is different from a traditional gallery showing as the artists respond conceptually to the site in varied ways but from the unique perspective of a New Orleans vantage point – a culture where ritual and relic are deeply ingrained and hallowed.

Through December 3.