Art review: Affecting work gets under your skin in ‘Transitions’

ART REVIEW

“Transitions: States of Being”

Through Dec. 4. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. Free. Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art, 492 Prillaman Way, Kennesaw. 470-578-3223, http://zuckerman.kennesaw.edu.

Bottom line: Some deeply affecting work, but a tendency for a disjointed approach make “Transitions” a provocative but flawed show.

From terrorism to genetic modification, we live in an age of disturbing flux, uncertainty and ethical quandaries. Being unsettled has become the new normal, and "Transitions: States of Being" at the Zuckerman Museum of Art has a serious creepy-factor with its many forays into some of the things that disturb us the most.

The very visceral feelings “Transitions” unleashes are surprising considering the exhibition’s highbrow ambitions: to examine how we interact with other cultures and species, often in the forum of the museum whose treasures we often assume to be pure representations of a culture or an idea. Instead, this exhibition instructs, those edifying objects are often just booty, artifacts of exploitation or deeply conflicted totems of weird belief systems.

Zuckerman shows often incorporate objects from the museum’s collection. In this case, those objects are early 20th-century African elephant tusks from the Democratic Republic of Congo carved into decorative objects and exhibited here as troubling trophies of European colonialism and exploitation of the natural world. Those ivories, carved into hair pins or weapons, were collected by Dimitri Ziros and donated to Kennesaw by his grandson and Kennesaw Professor Emeritus Apostolos Ziros.

Some of the most interesting and unsettling work in "Transitions" comes from Atlanta-based artist Joe Peragine. His eerie cabinet of curiosities featuring plaster deer and dead bunnies is a disturbing evocation of how animals — gutted and filled with cotton wool and glass eyes — have been shown in carnivals or zoos, circuses or natural history museums to give us, ironically, a feeling of connection to the natural world.

While Peragine has often used humor and kitsch in his work, in the context of “Transitions” that humor has curdled into rank creepiness. In “Transitions,” it feels like an act of savagery to see a squirrel, its fur flayed and peeled back from a body of twine-wrapped cotton that now serves as its innards. Peragine spoils the illusion that we are uplifted and educated by these displays of dead things.

Willie Cole makes a similar assertion in his mandala of shoes arranged into a circle on the gallery wall in “Sole Flower” in a way that suggests both trophies and endlessly, destructively repeated gestures.

One issue with many Zuckerman shows is how fragmented they can often feel because of the physical layout of the museum space, which requires that larger group exhibitions like “Transitions” are split between two gallery spaces with a hallway between them.

As a result of this scrambled arrangement, one half of “Transitions” feels like an exploration of colonialism, whether in Africa or in the natural world, and the ways that cultures affirm their own might and right in their displays of artifacts from those worlds. And the other half of “Transitions” feels far more ripped-from-the-headlines topical, treating issues like immigration and genetic modification in works that often feel less neatly connected to each other as in the first gallery.