At Atlanta’s High Museum, the works of one of its own

Bottom line: Two longtime Atlanta artists offer up compelling, personal work with a minimalist spin.

With an economy of means, Atlanta artist Jim Waters conveys a great deal: excitement, movement, show-biz flash and steakhouse sizzle. His works featuring reflective vinyl cutouts on paper, watercolors and a large installation piece are deceptively simple, like the sparkle icon on a box of dishwashing detergent meant to convey shiny cleanliness. Advertising’s trick bag of glittering promises is rendered in Water’s witty minimalist terms.

“Splendor: The Work of Jim Waters” at the High Museum occupies one of the suitably oddly shaped wedge galleries in Renzo Piano’s High addition: the works make sense in that jagged slice of a gallery, the movement and fun with form in these artworks echoed in the room.

Working on paper, one of Waters’ favorite tactics is to use a blend of resin, glitter and dye to form quirky shapes that often suggest something out of the Atomic Age with their boomerang and amoeba forms conveying writhing, slithering movement and personality. These works in shades of slime green, dandelion yellow and soda pop orange have the tantalizing appearance of Rorschach tests in which abstraction morphs into representation in the eye of the beholder.

Other works, done in watercolor on paper, suggest Alexander Calder mobiles, with spindly, armlike projections sprouting round teardrop and oval shapes that can suggest midcentury modern chandeliers or the tracers of fireworks in the sky.

One of Waters’ motifs in “Splendor” is using the reflective properties of his materials — like reflective holographic vinyl, resin and glitter — and mutating, bloblike shapes to convey a feeling of dynamism. It’s hard not to, again, think of the Fifties when contemplating Waters’ work, that age when advertising and consumer culture reached a fever-pitch. Waters’ work conveys a comparable feeling of starry promises and neon glamour in his sparkling, glittering stars and pinwheels.

Waters plays up that advertising effect to the nth degree in an “Untitled” installation commanding a large gallery wall in the Wieland Pavilion. Like a Times Square marquee on a budget, this selection of 45 sunburst shapes in holographic vinyl and paint on panel creates the effect of a poor man’s neon. But the magic of the installation is how shrewdly Waters uses just the reflective holographic paper and overhead lights in the gallery to allow the starbursts to create startling changes of color as your position in the gallery shifts.

It’s always a pleasure to see the High giving space over to a local, especially a member of their own ranks. As exhibition designer at the High, Waters is one of the behind-the-scenes cultural soldiers who stay invisible but make a museum go.

Waters’ work is shown alongside an exhibition of work by another longtime Atlanta artist and professor emeritus at Georgia State University, Medford Johnston. In “Medford Johnston: Counterpoise,” the artist works a similar vocabulary of colorful minimalism to seductive effect, drawing from his travels in Africa and the painterly alchemy of color and line to convey energy and dynamism. With the High’s recent commitment to highlighting Atlanta artists in the heralded “Drawing Inside the Perimeter” show last summer, these twinned shows also demonstrate the value of delving deeper into the city’s arts community and giving those who have been working for decades in the city, not just the young upstarts, their time in the sun.