Dashboard Co-op retrospective at Zuckerman is a mixed bag

Bottom line: Individual works delight in this Dashboard Co-op group show that more often fails to connect.

Almost everything about the curating enterprise Dashboard Co-op is inspiring: its two perpetually upbeat, imaginative founders and co-curators Beth Malone and Courtney Hammond; its propensity for re-energizing fallow spaces by staging "pop-up" style shows in unexpected locales; its ability to ferret out interesting, ambitious emerging artists and allow them to do their thing.

It's too bad that sometimes their shows can suffer from an ample supply of pluck and too little focus. Because even passion and chutzpah can't make up for the flaws in a group show of eight artists, "Rachel's Killin' It" at Kennesaw State University's Zuckerman Museum of Art.

In this jump from indie spaces to a more established venue, the new Dashboard show at the Zuckerman Museum of Art offers the group an impressive forum for showcasing their artists and an OTP space to bring their zeitgeist to a new audience who may not have ventured into their occasionally challenging-to-access intown spaces.

“Rachel’s Killin’ It” has one of those vaguer-than-vague concepts that makes nothing and everything fit within its purview. Though the show functions as a sort of retrospective of Dashboard’s five years on the Atlanta art scene and includes artists that have appeared in Dashboard shows over the group’s history, the curators also make the case that “featured artists were invited to explore themes of empathy and experiment with scale, just as the organization is beginning to do.”

Rather than concerned with empathy, the show can often feel hermetically sealed, a conversation among artists that doesn’t feel especially accessible or inclined to invite viewers to the party.

To stave off disappointment, it’s probably better to embrace the retrospective idea and this combination of previous Dashboard artists, rather than hope to make connections based on those stated themes.

One of the more compelling works in the show, from Nikita Gale, features a hypnotic video in which the words “sensual” and “fear” circle and loop around each other in an endless cycle. Suggesting the twin poles of human experience: the desired and the feared, the satisfying and the terrifying, “Unthought Known” comes with a soundtrack of the whispered, plaintive lyrics to Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s “God Only Knows” with its similar tension between love and death.

Artist Melanie Manos offers her own take on difficult endeavors in “The Climb II,” a projected video featuring the artist scaling a series of staircases and hurdles in the style of a resilient video game character.

But perhaps the most interesting of the artworks assembled in “Rachel’s Killin’ It” is parked outside the Zuckerman where you could easily miss it: a truck painted with elaborate Pakistani iconography from artist Osman Khan. The images of Pakistani creatives and leaders and gorgeous pattern is Khan’s attempt to insert this foreign iconography into the billboards and signage of the American highway as he drove from Michigan to Georgia for this exhibition. It’s a satisfying moment of appreciation for another reality beyond our own.

If you’re looking for emotional engagement and intensity, check out the strange collisions of the personal and the public in the work of Indiana-based artist Jason Lahr, presented in “8-Bit Fictions” in the Zuckerman’s Mortin Galleries. Lahr blends angst-filled storytelling with the tacky neon hues, hideous fonts of pop culture and video games. The collision of genuine human feeling in Lahr’s phrases, “That’s because I’m dead inside” and “Yeah, well, we all got problems,” blends self-flagellation and bravado into an unsettling brew.