When Jeff Demetriou attended Flux 2010, a public art free-for-all in Castleberry Hill one night last September, the former resident of the loft-warehouse neighborhood on downtown’s southern edge was surprised by all the art-making and art-viewing, the teeming-with-life streets and sidewalks.
One work in particular among the two dozen “projects” simultaneously unfurling galvanized the Atlanta multimedia artist and has helped alter his own art-making course. “Between You and Me” was a monumental five-channel video projection (each 80 feet tall by 140 feet wide) by Atlantans Micah and Whitney Stansell that covered the Norfolk Southern Railway Building’s epic facade.
“I saw that and thought, wow, that’s something I wouldn’t have expected from Atlanta,” said the 33-year-old painter and Stone Mountain native who’s well-represented in art collections around the city and well-versed in its gallery scene.
Inspired, Demetriou now is putting the finishing touches on his first major art installation, a nature-themed, 3-D projection piece with sound titled “Homesick,” which promises to be a focal point of an expanded Flux 2011. The free event Friday will feature 34 projects by 219 artists, and will include projections, dance, theater, music, sound and light installations, parades, puppetry and iron pours.
If that sounds a bit everything-but-the-kitchen sink-like, Flux Projects has been at the center of a growing movement in Atlanta that has broadened the definition of public art. In the less than two years since its founding, the nonprofit has hybridized it to varying degrees with performance art, creating something new and difficult to categorize. Outfits that have helped energize Atlanta public art happenings include Art on the Atlanta Beltline, the City of Atlanta’s Office of Cultural Affairs (notably with its new Elevate/Art Above Underground series) and the gloATL dance/performance art troupe.
Flux was founded with the mission of engaging an often-unsuspecting public with temporary art in their daily lives, outside the usual museum or gallery setting. One notable example commissioned by Flux: Gyun Hur’s “Spring Hiatus,” a rainbow-striped installation of chopped up silk flowers on the Lenox Square mall floor that caused shoppers to do double-takes in March.
Demetriou embraces the take-art-to-the-people notion with a street preacher’s fervor.
“I like the concept of an on-site installation because it’s a one-shot thing,” he said. “Like ‘Homesick,’ for example — it never could be reproduced anywhere. It’s unique for the site, it’s unique for the night and it’s something that’s wholly original. ... And it will have a built-in audience and [an outdoor setting that] takes it out of that sterile gallery environment.”
No one would mistake the gritty site “Homesick” will occupy Friday, a gaping four-story-tall shell of a building at 311 Nelson St., for sterile — at least not in daylight. One recent morning, Demetriou had doffed his shirt and was shoveling weeds and debris from the basement level, which also serves as a parking lot for an adjoining business.
On the night of Flux 2011, it will be transformed, via the hocus-pocus of super-sized (40-feet-tall-by-65-feet-wide) 3-D projection on the walls and an 8,000-gallon “reflecting pool” in front of it, into a primordial forest filled with swaying trees, splashing waterfalls, flying birds and more. Over the course of the seven-minute piece, accompanied by what the artist describes as “a massive, deep-space” soundtrack, nature slowly devolves, presumably because of the neglect of uncaring man.
Viewers will watch the piece, which will be looped throughout the night, from behind a chain-link fence. The barrier has long stood on Nelson Street as a safety feature, to keep passers-by from falling into the basement of the building shell. But the artist feels the fence is a fitting symbol of man’s detachment from the natural world.
Demetriou does not consider himself an environmental artist though he’s long been concerned about how humans have lost what he calls their “primitive connection to nature.”
Even the business card the Atlanta artist hands out from his sustainable design-build firm, Concourse E, is inscribed on its green front with the message: “’Ummm ... you can stop now.’ — Earth”
“Humans probably felt for tens of thousands of years that we’re all part of the same thing [with nature],” he said. “And I think the past few hundred years that people have moved away from that. They think they’re something separate from nature, and that mentality has gotten us into the position where we’re in today, where we think we can operate separately from nature without any consequence. And that’s ridiculous. I mean, we’re animals just like everything else on the planet. If you see anything else that abuses the environment, it usually dies.”
Flux 2011’s commissions are relatively modest, ranging from $23 to $8,000. The stipend to create “Homesick” is at the upper end of that, with more than a quarter of it paying for the rental of the 3-D projector from Barco, the same Belgian company that Stone Mountain Park tapped this year to help bring its Lasershow Spectacular into the 21st century.
To create the animated piece, Demetriou linked up with the New York production boutique Fake Love, led by his friends Layne Braunstein and Josh Horowitz.
“They come from a more motion graphics background, so they’re kind of wanting to wow and dazzle people on a mass scale, and I’m approaching it more from a high art perspective,” he explained. “The guidance I gave them when they’re animating is to think of it less as a projection and more as a moving sculpture.”
Demetriou is a huge fan of Terrence Malick, whose films such as “Days of Heaven,” “The New World” and this year’s highly acclaimed “The Tree of Life,” cast a spell with their quiet meditativeness and marked lack of dialogue.
“There’s something contemplative about his pictures, there’s so much space, so much reflecting time,” Demetriou noted admiringly.
The artist hopes “Homesick” will spur reflection of its own. He’s not trying to hammer a message, but he wants people who see it to think. “It’s kind of a roundabout way of just getting people to look at themselves from a more objective point of view,” he said, “and kind of evaluate what you do in your life.”
Though he doesn’t plan to abandon his 2-D work, Demetriou is excited about the new frontier that temporary public art represents. He has a newly installed Art on the Beltline work, “Settlement,” a series of “boulders” created from red steel wire mesh ranging from 5 feet to 18 feet in diameter, sited near the Beltline entrance behind the Ansley Mall Publix. He’s also in discussions with a downtown landlord to create an interactive sidewalk installation.
“I don’t want to sound jaded, but people have been saying for hundreds of years that everything’s been done in painting,” said Demetriou, who is not represented by an Atlanta gallery but whose art is sold to collectors by reps.
“A lot of galleries do not want work that’s produced from the kind of concepts that produces the installation work,” he continued. “I think they know what work sells in Atlanta, and they don’t want to go outside what they know works. So for artists who are more conceptually based and want to keep pushing themselves artistically ... the installation avenue and performance avenue offers a more purely artistic expression.”
Demetriou also likes the prospect of the bigger audiences that come out for installation art events. Flux estimates it drew between 5,000 and 7,000 viewers for its inaugural Castleberry event, and there’s no reason, if the weather cooperates, to assume that number won’t grow.
The “Homesick” artist praises Flux founder Louis Corrigan, an Atlanta investment analyst turned arts philanthropist with an ever-broadening influence, for turning Atlanta into something of a greenhouse of installation art.
“I think he’s a great example of what artistic risk-taking gets you,” Demetriou said. “Playing it safe and doing public art projects by committee doesn’t really get a lot of attention because it’s so watered down by the time it gets executed that it doesn’t offend people and it doesn’t wow people. Louis proved that people in the city want something different, they want something edgier.”
Event preview
Flux 2011
Includes projections, dance, theater, music, multimedia, sound and light installations.
8 p.m.-midnight Friday. Castleberry Hill neighborhood, just southwest of downtown Atlanta. Free.
Paid parking is available. Flux encourages visitors to take MARTA to the Georgia Dome/GWCC/Philips Arena/CNN Center station (on the East-West line), less than a half-mile walk to the entrance. A map is available at www.fluxprojects.org.
Atlanta’s public arts programs
Here’s a little help getting a handle on what Atlanta public and performance art presenters are up to:
Flux Projects: To view nine short films (by Atlanta documentary makers Proper Medium) on various Flux Projects, including one on Flux 2010, go to www.fluxprojects.org/films.html.
Dance Truck: This grass-roots dance presenter takes as its slogan, “Bringing Dance to the People,” and it literally does that by presenting its performances on a portable dance venue. www.dancetruck.org,
gloATL: Performance artists will present a new “migratory” work, “Livers,” twice Friday night at Flux 2011, starting at the Peters Street Bridge at 8:30 and 10:30. It’s described as a “contemporary physical experience on a theme of endurance.” gloATL also will present “Physical Suites on a Theme of Non-Fiction,” an in-process work that responds to the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center’s architecture, 6:30 p.m. Oct. 6. www.gloatl.com.
Art on the Atlanta Beltline: Sixty-six visual and performance pieces are part of this year’s presentation, billed as the city’s largest temporary public art exhibition, through Nov. 20. Map and more info: www.art.beltline.org.
Elevate/Art Above Underground: Atlanta’s Office of Cultural Affairs’ Public Art Program presents ongoing video works, photography and sculpture and one-time performance art on Upper Alabama Street and other streets near Underground Atlanta through Oct. 30. www.ocaatlanta.com/public-art, www.elevateatlanta. blogspot.com.
Atlanta Celebrates Photography: It presents 150 photo-related exhibitions and events in October, including, at Flux 2011 on Friday, Monica Cook’s “Volley,” a sound-activated, interactive animation that will explore human-animal interaction. www.acpinfo.org.
Compiled by Howard Pousner
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