At Contemporary, 3 talented artists occasionally work well in tandem

Bottom line: Compelling work by three distinctly talented artists that sometimes works together.

“Be Here Now” is Stuart Horodner’s final curated show at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center following a seven-year tenure as artistic director there. Not every show during his stint at the Contemporary was a winner, but “Be Here Now” ends his reign on an up note, with compelling, intelligent work by Atlanta-based artists Andrew Boatright and Mike Black and Madison, Wis.-based artist Sandra Erbacher.

Horodner recently began a new position as the museum director of the Art Museum of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. What he left behind at the Contemporary is a show whose ostensible theme is “site-specific installations (that) investigate issues of presence, form and function,” one of those unwieldy statements vague enough to qualify most any art for the job, and in this case to wedge three different artists’ work together.

“Be Here Now” connects at least two of the artists, Erbacher and Black, quite well. Both deal with unnoticed, unremarkable elements of our physical world — ductwork, drain pipes, beige industrial carpeting — drawing our eye to those objects by isolating them in the gallery space.

A glowing neon exit sign, a photograph of the kind of potted cactus you might find in a bank or museum, and white subway tile are Erbacher’s way of focusing attention on the often humorously banal, unnoticed elements that surround us and can make the rarefied museum or gallery as pedestrian and utilitarian as a bank, school or government building. Inspired by scrutiny of museums and cultural institutions, German-born Erbacher has created a mini-catalog of the sort of elements of design that even institutions devoted to thinking deeply about aesthetics tend to ignore.

Black’s work is particularly interesting as a similar investigation of the mechanics that make buildings function. He creates a kind of kinetic, flowing, graphic graffiti out of ductwork and drain pipes that become cleverly animated in Black’s hands.

One small gallery at the Contemporary is given over to his comical, flesh-colored ductwork in “Disregard Series #12” that emerges from the floor or disappears into walls, its joints leaking a filling of pale pink insulation. It’s hard to avoid a bodily metaphor in the work: the fact that the ductwork seems very much like a casing barely containing those gooey, pink guts.

In “Disregard Series #13,” Black uses rain gutters spray-painted a hard-to-miss teal blue that can be seen out of a gallery window snaking over a hill outside.

Black’s canny works pull off the feat of conveying a snarky sense of humor through incredibly simple means.

Andrew Boatright is in many ways the odd man out, creating objects that are less about using the banal architecture surrounding us in new ways, and more about creating a visceral reaction with his bizarre, grotesque forms. Using a variety of materials including nylon stockings, metal pipe and aluminum foil, Boatright transforms those elements into objects so unsettling and physically repellent, it’s hard not to feel moved on some level by their gnarly, fleshy, gooey presence.

If Black and Erbacher’s works are cerebral and calm, Boatright’s are messy and rude. “Orobulbous” is a pink circle placed on the gallery floor with the texture and color of intestines that riffs on the ancient ouroboros symbol of a serpent eating its tail. “Bulb” suspends a dung-colored form somewhere between a tumor and a gourd on a metal pipe, and “Crazy Horse” suggests an abstracted Don Quixote with a saber at the ready formed from aluminum foil, plastic bags and nylon stockings covered in Boatright’s favorite color, a forlorn greige.

Boatright’s sculptures suggest the tortured, elongated forms of 20th-century Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, the fleshy creatures in painter Philip Guston’s works and the shame-filled artwork of Mike Kelley.

“Be Here Now” features rewarding work by three diverse artists whose connections can at times feel tenuous. While Black and Erbacher are directly, coolly investigating that architecture of the banal, Boatright’s materials are secondary to the more powerful sensations of disgust, shame and mortification they provoke.