Art review: Atlanta’s construction mania documented in photo project

Bottom line: Interesting work flitting between abstraction and commentary on Atlanta's culture of construction.

Those of us who know and love Atlanta understand that it is a city perpetually in flux.

In flux in terms of the physical, with cranes and scaffolds often competing with skyscrapers to define the skyline. And in psychological flux too, trapped between the South and a more international, metropolitan reality, between small town and big city, forever on the cusp.

It is part of Atlanta’s appeal — that mutability — and part of a frustrating brew of aggravations that also define the city: traffic; wanton demolition of historic buildings; and heedless, forward momentum at all costs.

Artist Kelly Kristin Jones captures some of that flux in her color and black-and-white photographs on display in “Gray Space” at Swan Coach House Gallery. Her images document construction sites; cranes and emerging high-rises sprouting up like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

Jones shoots these scenes of wildfire building in a novel way, photographing that progress through the plastic sheeting that contains dust and disorder at construction sites; plastic that, in her photographs, distorts and renders opaque. We see the buildings and the construction beyond, but that plastic scrim becomes a kind of critique, an intervention between our view and the real view. That barrier often adds an element of abstraction to the photographs: Rather than precise places, they are simply representative of a city in transition.

Architect Kisho Kurokawa, who used the term to describe transitional architectural space, inspires the term “gray space.”

Some of the works like “782 Peachtree Street,” in which sunlight bounces off a plastic barrier, are almost pure abstraction, studies in light and texture variations. Others, like “Peachtree Place I,” convey activity and growth, the camera panning down to capture the antlike labor of tiny, hard-hatted figures in the distance, working at a construction site.

The work often brings to mind another Atlanta photographer, Harry Callahan, who also documented Atlanta as a burgeoning big city, but also Larry Walker’s canvases with their layers of advertising, paint and other detritus, that comment upon the city as an ever-changing palimpsest.

In addition to her large photographs, Jones has sandwiched other images between acrylic and houses them in white wooden stands, like sandwich boards on the gallery floor, a treatment that doesn’t necessarily expand the meaning of the work itself.

Jones is the winner of the 2015-16 Forward Arts Foundation's Emerging Artist Award. The $10,000 award is given to a promising Atlanta artist and also results in a solo show at the Swan Coach House Gallery. Runners-up for the award — Dustin Chambers, Antonio Darden, Pastiche Lumumba and Vanessa Brook Williams — also have a small portion of their work on display.

I was particularly struck by runner-up Chambers’ work in “Beyond the Dome,” which would make for a wonderful double bill with Jones’ commentary on Atlanta and urban growth.

Chambers has undertaken a fascinating study of the people and environments in the Vine City and English Avenue neighborhoods surrounding the rising Mercedes-Benz Stadium, work that shows people eking out a life in the shadow of Atlanta’s construction mania. Looking at Chambers’ images, of cop cars and Army vehicles, boarded-up buildings and wheelchair-bound people, you see a demarcation of two Atlantas. There’s the one defined by a billion-dollar sports complex and the other by abject poverty and struggle. There is a lonely quality in Jones’ work that is taken to the next level in the sense of isolation Chambers renders.