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Grand opening of the Serenbe Photography Center and new Photographer’s Print Studio. Fine photography, many photographers, a bit of wine and good friends.

Serenbe Photography Center
9110 Selborne Lane, Suite 220
Palmetto, GA. 30268

N U R T U R E : Video and Photography by Amy Jenkins
An exhibit focusing on breastfeeding, parenting and childhood

Curator: ATHICA Director Lizzie Zucker Saltz
Guest Essayist: Mary Jessica Hammes

ATHICA’s first exhibit to focus on the personal yet universal issues of breast-feeding, parenting and childhood.

It is also their first large-scale video-art exhibit, and the ATHICA space has been transformed in order to accommodate the Jenkins’ stunning large scale video art.

This is New Hampshire-based Jenkins’ first solo exhibition south of Kentucky, which follows two decades of the artist’s exhibitions at national and international museums and galleries.

Ms Jenkins uses herself and members of her family in order to reveal salient aspects of familial relationships in works that are at by turns poignant and humorous, classical and contemporary. In her words “visceral and emotional, these personal narratives offer a window into intimate life, where the commonplace becomes surprising and unexpected.“

In these works from Jenkins’ Cradle Series, she creates classically inspired compositions of tastefully arranged nudes set against dense black backgrounds, which she then videotapes and photographs, the chaste aesthetic highlighting the universal nature of the artist’s themes. For instance, Tug, a photograph in the format of a long horizontal strip, dramatically reveals two parents pulling at opposing ends of a bright red rope, a tot by her mother’s side. The composition elegantly condenses contemporary parents’ struggles with sharing child-rearing responsibilities into a striking image rich with feminist issues.

A number of of Jenkins’ works will be debuting at ATHICA, such as a recent work, Audrey Superhero, which features Jenkins’ seven-year old daughter playing dress-up as Superman, raising gender-identity questions. We are honored to be exhibiting an older piece, The Audrey Samsara, a soothing and sumptuous nineteen-minute video of the same Audrey five years earlier breastfeeding in her mother’s black-fabric draped lap, while sporting bright red shoes designed by Salvatore Ferragamo. This piece provoked a censorship scandal in New York City in 2004 at the designers’ 5th Avenue gallery when a company executive found the artwork “distasteful.”

The surrounding publicity firestorm raised a broad range of vital issues covered by no less than six mainstream newspapers, magazines and even an academic journal: issues ranging from the general public’s ignorance of the significant health and psychological benefits of breastfeeding, American puritanical attitudes and unfamiliarity with non-sexual nudity, and the technological-era distancing from our animal natures. “Drawing inspiration from renaissance painting, The Audrey Samsara echoes depictions of the Madonna and Child, as well as the Pieta.” The work went on to be exhibited at many venues nationally and internationally.

Many of Jenkins’ figures are displayed on large monitors or projected at life-scale for maximum impact. For instance, Held features the full-sized figure of the artist crawling nude into the lap of an eight-foot high painted rendering of an enormous baby ensconced in a cozy yellow snuggie, where she curls up for a brief nap, reversing the nurturer and the nurtured. Milky-Milk is composed of “a tiny LCD video monitor showing a life-sized breast viewed from below…suspended just above head-height. Perilously clinging to the nipple is a single droplet of milk, which in a matter of minutes falls from the nipple and obscures the view of the breast. Tenderly, the woman wipes the droplet away, as if ‘cleaning up’ the viewer who has just been ‘dripped on.’” Other video works such as the brand-new Variations on Contrary Motion (Canon at the Fifth) or Shitfit from 2003–in which the viewer peers through a miniature doorway into a child’s room to view a small video of the artist emulating a child’s tantrum–meditate on aspects of having children.

Through Feb. 28.

ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Inc.
160 Tracy Street, Unit 4
Athens, GA 30601 USA

Quinlan Arts Center presents work of the Atlanta Collage Society, “Collage at the Q”

Through Feb 15.

514 Green Street, N.E.
Gainesville, GA