Did you see that?! Exhibit Review

Many thanks to Jeff Stafford of ArtsATL who has written a review of the current exhibit, Did You See That?! Stories of Urban Oddities.  

Within this review Stafford states, "Sometimes [Steve Steinmans's] effect is taken to extremes, resulting in a sort of hyper-reality that looks more like a fantasy painting than a photograph — as in PUNKTURED, which exploits the exterior of a body piercing shop in Brighton, England, as a lurid marriage of DayGlo pink, neon aquamarine and hellish red hues."

Astutely Stafford observes that, "[The exhibit] also includes a handful of black-and-white compositions, but they tend to get lost displayed amid the color prints...There are some tantalizing standouts, however. Did You Know Flash Gordon Lived in San Francisco shows a gigantic metallic rocket, poised for blastoff, at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. In what is otherwise an unphotogenic urban strip, the conspicuous sculpture represents an irrepressible but quintessential aspect of the area’s eclectic appeal."  

Check out Stafford's entire article including his thoughts on Steve Steinman and the current exhibit by clicking here.

Spruill Gallery in the news!

The Reporter Newspapers wrote a fantastic feature piece on Did you see that?! Stories of Urban Oddities featuring the photography of Steve Steinman.

View Jenna Goff's article: here!

Upcoming Photography Exhibition

Spruill Gallery Presents

Inspiring Connections 

 September 5 - October 26, 2013

Opening Reception

Thursday, September 5

6 - 9 PM

Spruill Gallery joins with Le Meridien Atlanta Perimeter, Children Inspiring Hope and Colorado photographer Steve Chin in the upcoming photography exhibition, Inspiring Connections.

Le Meridien Atlanta Perimeter Hotel and Spruill Arts announce their partnership in Le Meridien's Unlock Art program by featuring A Photographer's Journey, a special photography show produced by Le Meridien Hotels and Air France.

Fellow nonprofit organization, Children Inspiring Hope celebrates their 5th anniversary with a special showing of photographs taken in the course of their travels and outreach in Ghana. All photographs make up Faces of Hope and are from the numerous volunteers involved in the program.

One such volunteer is Steve Chin; a Colorado photographer.  Spruill is proud to present him and his work to Atlanta audiences in this joint showing.

Felicia Feaster reviews show for AJC

Atlanta gallery showcases Southern women’s photos
By Felicia Feaster 

Judy Lampert, Barn in Bainbridge 2, Bainbridge, GA, 2012,
Pigment Inkjet print on archival paper

The three photographers in “Southern Women — Southern Photographers” at Spruill Gallery are fixtures on the Atlanta art scene. Corinne Adams, Lucinda Bunnen and Judy Lampert have been around long enough to have played their part in shaping the city’s photographic image bank. But in many ways these three women have gone further than that, and even helped make Atlanta the photo-centric place it is.

Bunnen is a cheerleader, both financially and philosophically, for photography in Atlanta. Adams was one of the three co-founders of the annual Atlanta Celebrates Photography event each October, which has done much to raise the profile of photography locally. Lampert has made her own mark serving on the boards of many area arts organizations, including “Art Papers” magazine and Atlanta Celebrates Photography.

The emphasis on “Southern” in the show’s title makes you crane your neck for shared regional features in these photographers’ work. Southerners have long been defined by their love of history and the past, and Lampert certainly delivers on that front. Her appealingly plainspoken color portraits of the well-worn buildings — farms, apartment blocks, small-town businesses and ramshackle barns — that dot the Southern landscape are like pictures of familiar friends. Take a drive out into the rural communities that ring Atlanta and you will inevitably encounter one of the decaying barns Lampert photographs, whose weather-stripped wood has turned the color of Spanish moss, and whose rusted roof is the hue of dried blood.

Lampert captures not only those rural icons, but also the similar obsolescence of Southern downtowns and even Atlanta’s architectural turnover — as in her portrait of a “Gray House on Irwin Street” whose windows have been boarded up and whose sad appearance suggests a dog tied up in the backyard, neglected and forgotten. Shot from the middle distance with just a snippet of their surroundings, the houses and businesses Lampert documents take on something close to a personality not unlike portraits of animate subjects.

Lampert measures time’s passage — the march of decades — in a building’s decay. That concept of chronology is echoed in Bunnen’s photographs, which capture nature’s continuous molting. As in Lampert’s work, there is a touch of melancholy in Bunnen’s chronicle of the withered blossoms that mark a season’s end on a Southern pond.

Bunnen has been documenting the gradations of life and death on the surface of Hatcher’s Pond in Tiger, Ga., since 2008, says the show’s curator, Tania Becker. In “Southern Women,” Bunnen focuses on the sad, bending stalks of lotus flowers whose beauty has dissipated, leaving only deflated brown husks behind with the look of crumpled party dresses.

Adams makes her own effort to trap the beauty of the natural world under glass in her series of moody and, like Bunnen’s work, exceedingly romantic photographs of seed pods, flowers and eggs. Adams takes various presentational tacks in photographing nature. Her smaller “Flower Dreams” images in the 9-by-12-inch range, present a variety of blossoms against a black backdrop to highlight their flamboyant prettiness.

Large-scale photographs of “Lilies” and fragile white petals in “Floating Tulip” tend to pale next to the scientific, antiquated look of Adams’ more arresting images mounted on wood — a lovely series of seed pod studies. The images are coated in a thick shellac of varnish, which gives the photographs the look of pages in an aged and yellowed botanical book. In these works, rather than highlighting the beauty pageant winners of the natural world, Adams focuses on a litany of almost extraterrestrial shapes. These striking photographs highlight the fascinatingly odd forms that exist in nature. These pods show that form is clearly Adams’ obsession — a trait she shares with her companions in “Southern Women.”

City Cafe Hilights Exhibit

NPR's City Cafe with John Lemley featured 
Spruill Gallery's current exhibit 

Southern Women - Southern Photographers 

in This Week's Best Bets.  

Check out the audio here  
and then come on by and see the show!

Laura Noel: Subject Matters
through October 29

Laura Noel, Daniel Clowes' Art School Confidential, Atlanta Central Library, 2011 Chromogenic Print, 20 x 16 inches

"I created a series of photographs of books that have been withdrawn from libraries. Some of these books were rejected as no longer relevant to current culture, others were battered, and some were the victim of popularity - too many copies and not enough room.

These books and papers represent time and yet, are inevitably destroyed by its passing. The librarian's "Withdrawn" stamp is like a silent slap across the face. A once loved volume is ostracized from the family home."

Laura Noel

Mark Your Calendars!

Closing Reception Saturday from 3 - 5 PM

Join us at the Spruill Gallery on Saturday,
October 30, for a Closing Reception for
Michael David Murphy's Certainty Principle and Margaret Fletcher's Ocus.

Murphy and Fletcher will join the festivities
from 3 - 5 PM for refreshments and closing remarks. Help us to celebrate this great show by sending the artists out in style!

Review by Cathy Fox in today's AJC

Here is an excerpt from an AJC review of "Certainty Principle" and "Ocus" written by Cathy Fox.

"Margaret Fletcher makes a stunning debut in her concurrent exhibition of drawing and paintings. She composes these ethereal abstractions using press-on letters that are no bigger than the head of a pin. She has the crisp Helvetica letters specially made and places them with the precision of an architect, which she is, who knows that God is in the details.

The letters are fixed, like insects in amber, by layers of milky, translucent encaustic (wax), sometimes infused with an aqueous blue-green. Her application is so extremely thin and smooth that it makes other encaustic paintings look vulgar.

These small works may evoke the stars in the night sky, swarms of microscopic beings, or other naturally occurring patterns. In one series, the letters hover at the edges, a suggestion of dispersal. Mostly, they are elegant, meditative and really, 
really beautiful."

See the full article on accessAtlanta.

Praise for "Certainty Principle" on ArtsCriticATL.com

Review: Michael David Murphy explores instability of photographic truth in smart solo at Spruill

by Jason Francisco

Sometimes it seems that it could not have been an accident of history that photography and writing fused to form photography’s very name, which conceives of camera-made images as inscriptive illusions made using light, “light writings.”

It isn’t just that so many important photographers have been writers, but that photography as a medium is deeply solicitous of language. What is more natural in response to a picture than to broker it with words — to talk about it, to it, around it, to position and reposition it in terms of “stories” that it exclaims and hints at, prompts and doesn’t quite finish? Is it wrong to say that a photograph is a disquieted form of language, language displaced from grammar and usage, expelled from words so that the surfaces of the world might be made to beckon names and identities, and be reconstituted as sound and the logic of speech?

“Certainty Principle,” Michael David Murphy’s smart new exhibition at Spruill Gallery, offers a droll and philosophically rich meditation on the complications of photographic thinking as the mutual searching of words and pictures.

The show consists of four rooms, three containing photographic works and one with video — each room conceived as an autonomous statement in a larger, dialectical project. The first in Murphy’s suite of inquiries, Spruill’s front gallery contains gridded clusters of untitled, undated pictures all made in public places.

Taking on the guise of an everyman with a camera who appears anywhere and everywhere without explanation, Murphy approaches the commonplace as a field of random connections, or more strictly, random connections that seem ineluctable once made. He is a conceptualist alternately chasing and being chased by his own observational acuity, an artist for whom clear-sightedness is enigmatic. He is deeply concerned with photography as a power to heed.

Many of the photographs in this room deal in Americana and Americanism, intervening by turns gently and archly into culturally unself-conscious events and locations, both high and low. With what seems like remarkably consistent good luck, Murphy throws out vision upon vision of American normality coughing up its contradictions...

click here to read the full article

Certainty Principle and Ocus Debut

The Spruill Gallery would like to congratulate Michael David Murphy and Margaret Fletcher on the opening of their art exhibitions. We had a wonderful reception which included insightful artist talks from both Michael David Murphy and Margaret Fletcher.

Look for photos from the reception and talks on our blog this coming week.

The Spruill Gallery Presents:

Michael David Murphy

Certainty Principle

and

Margaret Fletcher

Ocus

September 24 - October 30, 2010

Opening Reception

and

Artist Talk

Thursday, September 23

6:00-9:00 p.m.

The Spruill Gallery is proud to present a retrospective of Atlanta artist Michael David Murphy. The show contains several works that span a range of projects including Unphotographable.

Margaret Fletcher's paintings take inspiration from pattern. In her new body of work, Ocus, Fletcher focuses specifically on issues related to thought, emotion, and expression through swarming and flocking of letterforms.

Thursday is a busy art day in Atlanta, but you won't want to miss this show! Artist Talk at 8. Remember: Spruill Gallery is open until 9pm!!

Coming Soon!

Michael David Murphy
Certainty Principle
and
Margaret Fletcher
Ocus: Recent Work

Join us for an Opening Reception and Artist Talk
Thursday, September 23 6-9 pm

Stay tuned for more updates.

Atlanta Celebrates Photography Interview with Peter Magubane

Please go check out Peter Magubane's interview with Atlanta Celebrates Photography's, Michael David Murphy.