An inspired mix of international, local work featured in ‘Pause’

Bottom line: High-quality work examines the idea of time in historic and contemporary portraiture.

It’s rare to see a contemporary art exhibition in Atlanta that blends memorable work by both regional and internationally known artists.

For a time, spaces like the defunct Atlanta College of Art Gallery at the Woodruff Arts Center or the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center were adept at mixing talented locals and notable artists outside the city. It was an excellent way of acknowledging the greatness in our midst and suggesting homegrown artists were the equal of those in the recognized art capitals of the world like New York or Los Angeles.

The group exhibition “Pause” at the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University is a revisitation of that sorely missed strategy of using a common theme to bring together artists at radically different stages in their careers, from internationally known to emerging. The show is focused on the portrait and a recognition of the time element involved in capturing the human form in video, photography, film, sculpture and drawing.

“Pause” features internationally known art stars like Andy Warhol, photographer Dawoud Bey and Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra, who are exhibited next to Atlanta-based artists including Diana Flowers and Christina A. West. Both locals hold their own with engaging, clever work that explores how the portrait has evolved over time, from a means for sitters to affirm their social standing to a way of examining the relationship between viewer and subject.

West’s delightfully unnerving sculpture, “Pause,” which shares a name with the exhibition, is a larger-than-life effigy of a partially disrobed woman. Video projection allows the sculpture’s eyes to blink, an eerie, disconcerting effect that challenges the power and control we typically feel when regarding a portrait. The art world has made us plenty comfortable contemplating the nude female form, but when she blinks back and towers over us like a stony Amazon? Not so much. Add the element of movement, or time, to a portrait, “Pause” affirms, and its effect can change dramatically.

Such is the case with the showstopper piece among much strong work in “Pause,” an excruciating 19-minute video piece by Dutch artist Jeroen Eisinga. “Springtime” features the artist enduring the 19th-century practice of bee-bearding. Shot in gorgeous black-and-white 35 mm film transferred to HD video, the video shows the seated artist being consumed by 150,000 swarming bees who covered him with 30 bites over the course of the video.

Wearing a cloak of bees, the artist remains still for the practical reason of not being stung. The aristocrats, children and soldiers featured in a number of 19th-century daguerreotypes in “Pause” are stock still for another reason: to meet the demands of long exposure times. Also on view: the metal stand that would keep the head steady for the three- to 15-minute exposure time required in early photography.

The notion of time and endurance and what an audience is willing to withstand is nowhere clearer than in a dark room where Warhol’s 1963 endurance test “Sleep” plays. For five hours, the film (shown here as a 50-minute excerpt) captures, in close-up and wide-angle, poet John Giorno, sleeping. Works like Warhol’s make the themes of “Pause” clear, that portraiture is a richly malleable form uniquely able to alert us to the pleasures of standing still.