Four Georgia artists compete for $50,000 prize at Hudgens

Bottom line: You be the judge in this show of four Georgia artists competing for a $50,000 prize.

Local heroes and darlings often rise to the surface of the Georgia art scene. Sometimes those favored artists are deserving, sometimes not.

But the perspective of someone beyond our borders can be a wonderful way to see how others evaluate the regional art scene. The biennial art award, the Hudgens Prize, invites a panel of art world professionals to select Georgia artists for a $50,000 prize and solo exhibition of their work at the Hudgens Center for the Arts in Duluth.

The 2015 jury panel features Shannon Fitzgerald, the executive director of Minnesota’s Rochester Art Center; Buzz Spector, a professor of art at Washington University’s School of Design and Visual Art; and Hamza Walker, associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

This year’s finalists — Scott Ingram, Ryan Steele, Orion Wertz and Bethany Collins — are exceptionally different from one another, showing the incredible diversity of artists in the region. There is something for just about everyone, from fans of documentary photography to devotees of Renaissance-inspired painting.

On the surface, Columbus artist Ryan Steele’s photographs of a Florida planned community, Ave Maria, seem the most conventional. His image juxtaposing a gold-plated Madonna statue and a golf cart comes from a tradition of photographer — like suburbia-chronicler Bill Owens — riffing on the charmingly absurdist dimension to American life. Steele’s series focuses on a planned Catholic community in South Florida, defined by golf carts and meticulous landscaping that is in direct contrast to wild Florida vegetation, uniform architecture and scrubbed-clean streets. Steele’s project shows the subtle evocations of tradition even within this spanking new place, from the metal ribbed arches inside the local church that reference Gothic cathedrals to the vaguely Mission-style architecture harking back to European traditions. Old and new coexist in Steele’s surprisingly nuanced vision of this world apart.

Another artist blending old world and new is Orion Wertz, whose subtly nightmarish paintings mash-up — believe it or not — Renaissance paintings and video games. The Columbus resident often features a stark division between his portraits of addled, stressed-out people set against a gray, pitiless post-apocalyptic landscape. Fires rage in town squares and consumer goods swirl around their heads like taunting cyclones. Wertz bases his repetitive, partly-real, partly-dreamscape backgrounds on contemporary video games. But he’s also inspired by the Renaissance-era painters he name checks like Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Altdorfer and Andrea Mantegna, and their often grotesque, bloody, sexually-charged religious parables of crucifixion, war, death and murder. Time-tripping through the centuries, Wertz’s images stick with you, like a bad dream.

The most politically-engaged of the four artists, Atlanta’s Bethany Collins, tackles the topic of race with a deft hand. Collins uses the iconography of education: chalkboards, academic journals, dictionaries and pencil erasers to create sculptures, paintings and installations about how race is understood in language and in cultural conditioning. In “Colorblind Dictionary” the artist has smeared and obscured references to color, from the “red” in mistletoe to the “white” blossoms of the mock orange shrub. In “Southern Review,” Collins blacks out thick sections of that academic journal, suggesting these essays focused on revelation may just as likely mystify. The artist leaves you wondering if language doesn’t leave us stuck in a trap of our own devising.

Atlanta artist Scott Ingram revisits material he tackled in a recent Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia solo exhibition, centered on art world paradigms. Referencing the art traditions of minimalism and modernism, Ingram uses ordinary materials including sheet rock, plywood and brick to create minimalist artworks like “Charlie Meets Malevich” in which a brick has been tethered to a piece of plywood with a moving strap. In other works Ingram uses gesso to criss-cross expanses of sheet rock embedded in the wall in a cheeky straddling of the disciplines of painting and home improvement. These occasionally tongue-in-cheek works are clearly fascinated with blurring the lines between art, architecture and remodeling.

Unlike previous Hudgens Prize finalists, where one artist seems to stand above the rest, there is no clear winner. More than anything, the selection may come down to a matter of taste.