It’s all about the journey in the group show ‘Thoroughfare’

The biggest takeaway from the group show of four Atlanta artists on view in “Thoroughfare” at Spalding Nix Fine Art may be the thrilling diversity of the city’s art scene. On one side of the gallery you have a former National Geographic photographer doing an ethnographic deep dive into the history of Memorial Drive (spoiler alert: there are Confederates involved) and on the other, a woman blacksmith with a taste for cosmic archetypes, returning to her beloved motif of boats and water with a series of metal oars that reference the cycles of the moon.

Credit: Handout

You may not love all of it, but it’s hard to deny the unique visions of these divergent artists and how, together, they tell a story about a city that nourishes their vision.

Most explicitly, photographer Peter Essick is telling a story about Atlanta’s fraught history, unpacking the weirdness we barely notice as we buzz through its neighborhoods every day.

Credit: Peter Essick

Essick has used images to create a connective tissue in pictures between the Georgia Capitol on one end of Memorial’s 15-mile long thoroughfare and Stone Mountain’s mega Confederama bas relief on the other.

Even those of us who have lived here for decades might not have processed the precise meaning of the “Memorial” in that well-trafficked street. But Essick unpacks its problematic history as a white supremacist umbilical cord from the government to a Confederate memorialization in granite.

Credit: Peter Essick

But Essick’s images offer a revisionist view of that stretch of road, an iconically Atlanta bricolage of nail salons and bail bondsmen, a place where you can get everything from a bikini wax to a Philly cheesesteak, often on the same block. In this gumbo of a place bearded men decked out in Confederate paraphernalia breathe the same air as Ethiopian priests, and a drone shot of young men playing basketball can feel as reverential as a graveyard.

Offering a comparable culture clash of signs and symbols, Colombian-born and Atlanta-based artist Esteban Patino is a skilled alchemist of color and found imagery. His absolutely mesmerizing collages weave the modern and the pre-historic in inventive works that recall the Surrealist juxtapositions of Man Ray and the Soviet montage of Dziga Vertov.

Essick and Patino both offer busy and wonderfully complex visual tapestries in photography and mixed media. By comparison Corrina Sephora in her “Uncharted Waters” series and John Dean in “The Undercurrents” are contemplative and somber. Dean is a master printer and from the evidence here, a dedicated upcycler who has taken the paper scraps from his work and turned them into evocative landscapes. With their interplay of shape and light they embody the cardinal forces of photography while conjuring up strange new worlds. His panoramic compositions can evoke cloud forms or undulating sand dunes or modernist sculpture, soothing and satisfying in their shape-shifting.

Credit: Robert West

Talismans of sorts, Corrina Sephora’s staffs forged from copper, iron, brass and bronze can evoke religious relics or ornate weapons. They revisit the artist’s abiding fascination with water, boats and the tools we use to navigate, in Sephora’s case, the raging waters of life.

“Thoroughfare”

Through Sept. 8. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Fridays and by appointment. Free. Spalding Nix Fine Art, The Galleries of Peachtree Hills, 425 Peachtree Hills Ave. NE, Suite 30-A, Atlanta. 404-841-7777, spaldingnixfineart.com.

Bottom line: Serenity and chaos are twin poles in this multifaceted mashup of four Atlanta artists.

Credit: Handout

From August 11-12, the Southside gallery Black Art in America is staging a historic exhibition of prints “Better Days: Joy and Revolution” at its East Point space. This inaugural Fine Art Print Fair features 50 artists from Atlanta-based talents like Jerushia Graham and Jamaal Barber to internationally known art impresarios like Kerry James Marshall and Faith Ringgold. The Black figure looms large in much of these prints, along with social justice messages in works at almost every price point and for almost any taste. The event is free and open to the public.

“Better Days: Joy and Revolution”

11 a.m.-6 p.m. Aug. 11 and 12. Black Art in America, 1802 Connally Drive, Atlanta. 404-565-1493, blackartinamerica.com.

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