Leia’s Lens: Long live the summer group show

Summertime. Home of watermelon, blueberries, pool days and backyard barbecues. In the art world, summer also means one thing: Bring on the summer group shows. Although in no way formalized, summer has become the unofficial season of group shows with artist lists as long as summer days themselves. 

With themes ranging from size to medium and content to concept, these group shows are practiced the world over, and Atlanta is no exception. The Marietta Cobb Museum of Art, Thomas Deans Fine Art, Echo Contemporary Art, Atlanta Contemporary, Spruill Gallery and Swan Coach House Gallery are among the local institutions presenting large group shows this summer.

And I say bravo — let’s keep doing it. I find it delightful to engage with the global art world through the somewhat whimsical and uncomplicated tradition of a summer group show. I believe it shows Atlanta is tapped in without such a heavy lift (like the Atlanta Art Fair, returning this September). Plus, group shows are a fabulous way to open the doors to new talent and invite people into galleries who otherwise might not be included. Sometimes one can find real gems. In search of this, I visited three group shows around the city and picked one artwork at each that really caught my eye.

At the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art, Metro Montage XXV (through August 31) is the latest iteration of the museum’s annual exhibition series. Culled from an open call, this annual event exhibits more than 100 artists throughout the museum and presents awards for Best in Show, Honorable Mention and Visitor Favorite. At this year’s edition, an artwork by Laura Smith stood out. 

A narrow four-story apartment building is faced head on, its verticality emphasized by the equally slim rusted metal plate upon which it is painted. The composition is drenched in sunlight; the highlights have become nearly washed-out while the shadows wallow into deep violet. Although a perfectly ordinary subject, something about Smith’s palette and paint application makes it remarkable. The frontality of the composition mirrors the oppressive heat of summer, while the high contrast and limited color palette perfectly evoke the blazing sun of high summer. An artwork that feels both topical and captures something ineffable — it was so lovely.

Swan Coach House Gallery presents its annual Summer Invitational (through July 31). As the title would suggest, this invite-only group exhibition is curated by Artistic Director Jacob O’Kelley and presents more than 60 artists working in mediums ranging from paintings to ceramics to textiles. At this year’s edition, an artwork by Tennyson Corley caught my eye. 

An ornately painted dinner plate lays flat against the wall, in the serving area rests a perfectly roast chicken flanked by two singular pieces of asparagus. Although created from glazed ceramic, the food items have been rendered so realistically that they are verisimilar to their edible counterparts. Masterful manipulation of material aside, it has been a long time since I have truly laughed at an artwork, a streak this artwork broke. 

The perfectly glazed and arranged food on the vintage dish is so carefully curated as to be almost absurd. The scale of the chicken notwithstanding, the composition looks like it was created for the cover photo of a Food Network magazine — and perhaps that is exactly the point. As the artist shows how surreally similar a man-made object can become to the original, the struggle to discern what is “real” or not becomes ever harder. Comedic, conceptual and masterfully crafted — this dish has all the major art food groups.

Sublime continues at Atlanta Contemporary until September 7. The title of the exhibition also serves as the conceptual grounding for the open call group exhibition, curated by the Contemporary Executive Director Floyd Hall. Within this medley, I was particularly drawn to The Original Candy Wafer by Sam Lasseter. A super-sized roll of circular sugar wafers is mounted to the wall. The right side of the packaging has been undone, the paper trailing down from the candy. As with Corley’s dinner plate, the scale of the candy here is part of its humor. It becomes truly absurd — its final form is rendered dozens of times larger than the original. 

While Corley’s artwork is joyful with intrigue, Lasseter’s feels eerie. The scale of the candy feels ominously large, the partially unwrapped but completely unconsumed contents speak of a violation, wandering hands that have gone too far. Its sugary appearance belies an unspoken gargantuan mouth — for what else could consume such a sweet? Here, pleasure is underscored by fear, a tension that works remarkably well in such a simple object. Concise and complex, this piece offered such a treat for my visual taste buds.

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Leia Genis is a trans artist and writer currently based in Atlanta. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, Frieze, Burnaway, Art Papers and Number: Inc. magazine. Genis is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design and is also an avid cyclist with a competition history at the national level.