‘Blue Collar Modernism’ hurt by info overload

Bottom line: An idea-filled show whose copious references to art history and architecture often distract from its full potential.

A fascination with architecture and art history comes together with varying levels of success in Scott Ingram’s intriguing solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, “Blue Collar Modernism.”

Referencing a host of artists and architects, Ingram name-checks, among others, artists Jackson Pollock, Gordon Matta-Clark and Constantin Brancusi and architects Eero Saarinen, Alvar Aalto, Irving Gill, Philip Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The references are head-swimming and can often suggest a graduate student, drunk on art theory, offering shoutouts to every artist or creative who has inspired him.

Ingram’s title “Blue Collar Modernism” is a winking reference to the cerebral, idea-saturated labor of the modernist movements in art and architecture, founded on innovation and a break from the past. Ingram mixes up that highbrow -ism with his own dedication to blue-collar pursuits, using drywall, plywood, cinder block, heavy machinery and other utilitarian materials. Ingram’s show is about the intellectual work of modernism, but also the real-world blue-collar labor involved in pursuits from drywalling a living room to building a wall.

Construction of many types underpins much of Ingram’s wide-ranging mix of artworks including collage, installation, painting, photography and video work. Viewers are greeted, upon first entering the exhibition, by an impressive “Wall” that divides the space. The wall appears to be composed of cinder blocks, but is actually formed from blocks printed onto fabric.

In some respects, Ingram’s work is about the ephemeral nature of the material and built world: His walls of cinder blocks are in fact vaporous curtains easily parted by a breeze, and in his digital photograph “Catacombs,” the artist documents how a building he came across on a walk through Atlanta has crumbled under the weight of a heavy rain.

Another piece reaffirming an idea of work and construction is “Stack,” a frighteningly precarious tower of plywood boards reaching to the gallery ceiling and lashed together with plastic straps. It’s as if Ingram was remaking the idea of the monumental and heroic — Mies van der Rohe’s buildings or Pollock’s paintings — with the most bare-bones, working-man materials imaginable.

But Ingram’s tendency to name-drop and offer detailed, overcompensatory wall text about his influences and intent can sometimes distract from what might have made for more interesting work if left to its own devices. Much of Ingram’s work, for example, seems rooted in gentrification, redevelopment and how easily one period’s advancement winds up on another era’s scrap heap.

“Pierced #3” features a small home in Atlanta’s Ormewood Park neighborhood pierced, in this collaged work, with a balsa wood beam. That collage work is inspired by Ingram’s actual on-site piercing of an Ormewood Park home with a 47-foot metal beam, a work of suggestive violence Ingram says “reflects an attack or intrusion on our homes by corporate products and the media.” It’s the artist’s explanation of his intent, but viewers might want to reach their own conclusions.

I saw works like “Pierced” as statements about the violence of gentrification, in which neighborhoods can be reimagined and remade, for the better, but also for the worse. It’s tempting to read much of “Blue Collar Modernism” as a statement on Atlanta’s often willy-nilly architectural history, with its own propensity to level first and ask questions later.

Ingram often seems to be building his work as monuments to other artists, but maybe in the process, losing sight of what his own work has the potential to say.