Atlanta Biennial, 2016; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia. Courtesy of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Photo: Erin Jane Nelson.

The purpose of many biennials is to offer a cross-sectional view of a segment of artistic practice. Since artists often act as vanguards in analyzing contemporary culture, biennials are often a useful tool to discover and explore pressing issues within a society and how artists respond to them. While some themes in the Atlanta Biennial are obvious, like the prevalence of racial disparities in the region, the curators seem less focused on selecting artists for their investigations of these specific issues. Instead, the show presents a loose collection of a wide range of media (including book producers, collectives, and self-taught artists) and thus reads more as a salon-style overview rather than a focused inquiry into the prominent issues facing the South—ones not dissimilar to those facing the country as a whole.

Atlanta Biennial, 2016; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia. Courtesy of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Photo: Erin Jane Nelson.

A striking omission from the show is the lack of wall texts to provide any context for the vast diversity of works on display. While wall texts are not a necessity in an exhibition, they can actively help viewers gain a better understanding of the works on view, especially in the realm of contemporary art. As Ingrid Schaffner writes, wall texts are “an opportunity to transmit insights, inspire interest, and to point to the fact that choices have been made. When there is no wall text, other assumptions are being made, which also need to be read critically.”[2] With the curators’ decision to eschew all wall texts, visitors must rely on their interpretations to gain any insight into the works.

Atlanta Biennial, 2016; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia. Courtesy of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Photo: Erin Jane Nelson.

Indeed, such a lack of texts does a disservice to some works on view. For instance, two sculptures from Jillian Mayer’s Slumpies series, Slumpie 2 – Day Bed and Slumpie 3 – Q Chair (both 2016), are large, vividly textured, haphazardly painted, and seem like furniture. Aesthetically, the works invite one’s curiosity, but many viewers will regard the works as purely formal exercises and miss the context of these objects, each of which is designed to prop up a person who is staring obsessively at a phone screen. Knowing this information, viewers can see the properly placed appendages on the sculptures as apparatuses to hold up users’ arms while they look at devices—a more profound understanding of the work. With adequate context, viewers can more capably grasp the works’ connections to a specific societal condition, such as an overreliance on technology.

Atlanta Biennial, 2016; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia. Courtesy of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Photo: Erin Jane Nelson.

While an interpretation of Mayer’s works may suffer due to the lack of context, other works stand out despite this absence. Stacy Lynn Waddell’s gold-leaf-on-paper works are a visual and thematic apex of the exhibition. Installed on a royal-blue portion of the gallery’s walls, her Landscape (Chain Link Fence View for W.S.) and BLACK LIVES MATTER (Transformation) (both 2016) read as rubbings of a chain-link fence and signs from the social movement, respectively, poignantly speaking to the racial disparities still prevalent in the South. Also striking is Sharon Norwood’s series of digital prints, The Root of the Matter (2016): into images of mid-nineteenth-century prints of white bourgeoisie scenes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection, Norwood inserts masses of hair-like lines as a symbol of a racial Other.

Atlanta Biennial, 2016; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia. Courtesy of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Photo: Erin Jane Nelson.

Though the exhibition excels at presenting a large number of artists who deserve greater visibility, it suffers due to the sheer number of works. Featuring multiple works by more than thirty artists, the exhibition’s walls are crowded. Larger works, such as Kalup Linzy’s touching The Queen Rose Family (2016–ongoing), can barely be seen apart from other works around them. Such proximity magnifies awkward curatorial decisions. For example, a viewer may group together one of Mayer’s sculptures, Waddell’s gold-leaf works, and a suite of video montages by Daniel Newman called Lost Flip-Flop (2016). These works, while intriguing on their own, struggle to effect any meaningful dialogue when seen together

While the exhibition is barely greater than the sum of its parts—a condition that could have been ameliorated with more contextual information—the Atlanta Biennial is a welcome addition to a region where visual arts can play a vital role in addressing societal problems. With its location and focus on collaboration, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center is a great home for a periodic exhibition, and a continuing biennial will benefit the area. The curators fulfill this iteration’s goals by showing careful attention in their inclusion of a diverse range of artists from the South.

The Atlanta Biennial is on view through December 18, 2016.

[1] The Atlanta Biennial was curated by Victoria Camblin, editor and artistic director, ART PAPERS (Atlanta); Daniel Fuller, curator, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Aaron Levi Garvey, independent curator and cofounder of Long Road Projects (Jacksonville); and Gia Hamilton, director, Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans).

[2]. Ingrid Schaffner, “Wall Text,” in What Makes a Great Exhibition?, ed. Paula Marincola, (Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2006), 156.

The 5th of July, 2016; installation view, far left: Katherine Bernhardt. Cantaloupe, iPhones, Nikes, and Capri Suns, 2014; acrylic and spray paint on canvas; 96 x 120 in. Courtesy of Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

In many ways, the desire to cultivate an uneasy dialectic between celebration and despair is what animates the vast majority of contemporary art—a lesson learned from Pop Art, which seized upon the slick, disposable, literal image-culture of the postwar era in order to point to the anxious cultural desires at the core of capitalist consumption.[2] This tension between transcendence and travesty is at the core of modernism. And yet, despite the exhibition’s many rhetorical prompts that ask viewers to hold these works together under themes of regretful failure and empty promise, I was struck more by the ways in which certain works of art seemed to struggle under this narrative. If anything, there are moments within the show that resound with an optimism and euphoria that are difficult to ignore.

The inclusion of a constellation of garish name-brand logos and sweet consumables might point to the depressing core of disposable modern life, yet Katherine Bernhardt’s electric orange and pink cacophony of Capri-Suns, cantaloupes, and Nike sneakers, Cantaloupe, iPhones, Nikes, and Capri Suns (2015), rattles with a repetitive patterning that seems to celebrate brashness with humor and joy. Bernhardt’s jazzy color harmonies and playful rhythms of pattern speak less of conspicuous consumption and more of the formal history of modern painting through their cheeky merger of decoration and consumer kitsch.

The 5th of July, 2016; installation view, far left: Chris Wiley. Dingbat (38) and Dingbat (37); archival inkjet prints mounted on aluminum in artist frames with Ettore Sottsass laminate; 43 x 29.5 in. Courtesy of Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

While there are excellent examples of sculpture included in this exhibition—Robin Cameron’s collection of delicate and fragmented ceramic object–sculptures and Charles Harlan’s monumental Tire (2015) stand out—the strongest work comes from the photographic and filmic work on display. Unfortunately, many of the photographic works are placed at such distance from one another that visual resonances are nearly unable to occur across the vast expanse of the gallery. Lucas Blaylock’s archival inkjet print 4-box (2014), with its slick and seductive surfaces and ontological exploration of the real and the imitative, seems excommunicated from the main gallery, which hampers a potentially juicy dialogue with Chris Wiley’s series of “dingbat” prints, their bright, flat planes of color and mass-produced surface textures reveling in their silliness on the white-cube walls. Alex da Corte’s three-minute film Chelsea Hotel No. 2 (2010) takes the dialogue a step further by squeezing and smashing cheap, processed junk foods such as white bread and artificial food coloring into a balletic montage that is uncanny, disgusting, and sublimely beautiful. These artists are engaged in a productive discourse on contemporary photography and asking difficult questions of the image in a world where formal properties are structured by spectacle and kitsch. Rather than the nostalgic failure of image-making in an era of permanent “post”-positions, I see euphoric, productive moments that prove beauty and meaning are still possible.[3]

Alex da Corte. Chelsea Hotel No. 2, 2010 (still); HD video, color, sound; 3:07; installation view, The 5th of July. Courtesy of Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

While The 5th of July succeeds in asking us to think through a diverse assemblage of aesthetic choices and cultural themes that resonate within the current landscape of contemporary art and our current fixation on the role of popular culture, consumerism, and the legacy of the found object, the constellation of differing projects and positions seems to resist a strong curatorial perspective. This is a well-worn criticism of the group exhibition—that the desire to create interrelations between a group of artworks exchanges coherence for multiplicity. While one might be able to see a certain irreverence and playfulness across the spectrum of these artists, this does not an exhibition make, particularly when the theme is not strong enough to provide either a foundation or a fence. Despite the power of the individual works on display here, the overall exhibition never shapes that energy into anything usable for the viewer.

The 5th of July is on view at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center until May 1, 2016.

[1] An excerpt from the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center’s curatorial statement for The 5th of July reads as follows: “This show is about the day after—the day after the neighborhood block parties’ the day after when the smoke and smell of sulfur linger…each work is unified in its exploration of failed promise of the day after.” See: https://atlantacontemporary.org/exhibitions/the-5th-of-july.

[2] For more on Pop Art and the structural violence at the heart of its many presentation techniques and strategies, see Hal Foster, “On the First Pop Age,” in The New Left Review, no. 19, Jan–Feb 2003, 14-31.

[3] One of my frustrations with the ACAC is the shape and scale of the gallery, and the awkward ways in which the gallery walls divide the space. While the works chosen for this exhibition were not petite, and thus deserve ample areas of viewing space, the richness of each individual work would have improved with a more intimate sense of proximity to surrounding works. I felt that the intervals between works frustrated my ability to see works “speaking” with/to one another.

Ebony G. Patterson. Invisible Presence: Bling Memories, 2014; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, Georgia. Courtesy of the Artist and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

The exhibition consists of twenty elaborately decorated coffins mounted on tall wooden poles, objects that originated from a performance conceived by Patterson for the 2014 Carnival in Kingston, Jamaica.[2] On April 27 of that year, Patterson carried fifty ostentatious coffins on poles with the help of local Jamaicans; accompanying them were several dancers and a drum line from the St. Michael’s Steppers community marching band. Evoking a bling funeral, the procession matched the boisterous and celebratory tone of Carnival.

Patterson’s decision to stage the performance during Carnival is a comment on the deep divide between social classes in Jamaica, as the Carnival celebrations are designed for the island’s upper and middle classes. The performance attempts to provide the working poor not only access to the ceremonies but also an unmistakable presence by using the spectacle of bling funerals. In such celebrations, closely linked to the underclass, the dead are remembered through raucous dancing parties featuring erotic costumes and dancehall music.

Ebony G. Patterson. Invisible Presence: Bling Memories, 2014; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, Georgia. Courtesy of the Artist and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

The elaborately adorned coffins in the exhibition are the only remaining trace of this performance, and they offer insight into the opulent displays of bling funerals. In contrast to typical coffins of black and other somber colors, these coffins feature vivid fabrics with bold patterns, rhinestones, lace, tassels, and plastic foliage, among other materials. The fabric patterns range from bright colors with polka dots to elaborate floral and animal prints. Each coffin features multiple swatches of cloth—usually with a different pattern on each face—and is trimmed with rhinestones and lace.

The construction of the coffins also relates to Jamaica’s working class. Upon close examination, the seams between the fabric swatches are not perfect; on some, strips of ribbon or lace are falling off or running haphazardly through the cloth. Many also show signs of wear, reinforcing the idea that these were integral components of a performance. Such qualities emphasize the handmade aesthetics of the coffins, linking them to the textile industry of Jamaica. While some fabric patterns feature the colors of the nation’s flag—black, green, and yellow—most were chosen for their brilliant designs, linking them culturally to bling funerals rather than a national identity.

Ebony G. Patterson. Invisible Presence: Bling Memories, 2014; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, Georgia. Courtesy of the Artist and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

The installation of these objects in the exhibition is particularly noteworthy, with twenty of them densely arranged in a relatively small gallery. Viewers are invited to walk among them. The bottom of each coffin is about sixty inches from the ground, forcing the viewer’s gaze upward and restricting one’s ability to see the upper portions of the coffins. The resulting mass resembles the earlier performance; the coffins are not presented didactically as individual objects for visual consumption. Instead, the installation beckons viewers to participate, envisioning themselves as part of the procession during Carnival. Additionally, though each coffin is individually decorated, the dense grouping of the installation prevents any one from being viewed on its own. The show eschews object labels or any other classification system that would denote them as works of art. They simply are what they are: markers of the performance in Kingston.

Ebony G. Patterson. Invisible Presence: Bling Memories, 2014; installation view, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, Georgia. Courtesy of the Artist and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

Writing about bling funerals, Hope asserts that they “temporarily suspend social boundaries and momentarily rotate the distinctions between those defined as heroes and anti-heroes in Jamaican culture.”[3] The blinged-out coffins in this installation demand attention, and they point to a group of people normally operating at the margins of society. Stretching up toward the sky, the coffins on display in the gallery—as well as during the performance—reinforce Patterson’s motivation to dissolve such social barriers, to include Jamaica’s underclass not only in a typically restricted event such as Carnival but also in the larger society.

Invisible Presence: Bling Memories is on view at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center through April 21, 2016.

[1] Donna P. Hope, “From the Stage to the Grave: Exploring Celebrity Funerals in Dancehall Culture,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 13 (3): 260.

[2] The performance was one of several commissions realized during the 2014 Carnival season in conjunction with the exhibition EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean, curated by Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson, organized by and on view at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, March 7–June 7, 2015, and co-organized as a traveling exhibition by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.

[3] Hope, 265.