Affordably priced art at ‘December Show’

Bottom line: Artists in the Whitespace Gallery stable offer up an eclectic mix of affordable art for the holidays.

Christmas comes and we all have the same thoughts on our minds. Presents and time with family, you say? How about, hatchet-wielding women and sepulchral black crows?

Those are some of the images conjured up by the artists in Whitespace Gallery’s “The December Show.” You can’t accuse these iconoclastic creatives of catering to the cliches of the season in this showcase for gift-giving.

You also can’t deny what curator and owner Susan Bridges has achieved at her postage stamp gallery space in a former carriage house behind her gracious Inman Park Victorian. She has created not just a contemporary art gallery equal to any other in the city, but an actual scene, where opening night events with food trucks and an interesting mix of artists and neighborhood folk and the general haute bohemian air of the space make it a one-of-a-kind presence in Atlanta.

Bridges was once known for her “Big Angel Blowouts” held around the holidays each year in which she’d give over her entire home to selling art and handicrafts by Atlanta creatives. Those massive events are no longer, but their embers smolder in “The December Show.”

“The December Show” is made up of some regulars in the Whitespace stable: husband-and-wife artists Matt Haffner and Laura Bell (working separately), and Whitney and Micah Stansell (working together). Bell’s delicate drawing of a tender-hearted “Barn Owl” surrounded by the artist’s typical lavish ornamentation would make anyone’s new year brighter, and at $325 is one of the more affordable works in the show. Side by side, husband Haffner’s spectral sculpture of a black metal crow suggests the couple have ornithology on their minds. Bell and several other artists have additional works contained in a flat file, for more gift-giving options.

As is typical for such group shows, there are memorable pieces that showcase the best of the artist’s abilities and voice, as in Wendy Given’s deliciously creepy “Serpens No. 1” featuring a white clay snake sculpture with mesmerizing amber eyes. A kissing cousin across the gallery is Constance Thalken’s mystery-laden close-up image of a taxidermied Black Angus steer, gazing out at the viewer from its ersatz golden eye.

There are some affordable treasures, including Bell’s introspective owl, Seana Riley’s quiet studies of the formal elegance of nature and Ann-Marie Manker’s decidedly wacky, saucy drawing of masked women engaging in what looks like some kind of terroristic extermination of roosters. Something in Manker’s wacko juxtaposition of giddy color in those ski masks with her gray-tone rainbow elevates the humor factor in this piece, and unites it with Didi Dunphy’s similarly oddball “Sticker Smoke II” featuring a colored pencil-sketched pile of logs belching up a “fire” of smiley face, heart and star stickers.

Other high notes include Cassidy Russell’s delicate little “drawings” using thread and mixed media, Richard Sudden’s hypnotic sun or moon crafted from holes punched in steel and Amy Pleasant’s “Untitled IV,” an ethereal universe of people engaged in a medley of pursuits, like a metaphysical New Yorker cartoon. Also worth an amble across the courtyard in the small cellar Whitespec space are Karley Sullivan’s drawings of 146 moons, whose sense of wonder is capable of transporting you to another universe.