Lucha Rodriguez, whose exhibition “Fluoressence” is on view at Swan Coach House Gallery, creates sensuous art using intricately-cut paper forms.
Some flow in graceful calligraphic lines or bumptious, lumpy tubes. Others, like snowflakes or doilies, are patterns of solids and voids. The Atlanta artist layers them in collages, which evoke some hybrid of embroidery and relief sculpture. She also drapes, floats and twists them to animate space in her festive installations.
Pink is Rodriguez's favorite color, and she exploits its multiple connotations: The lacy elements, sometimes confetti-thin, look feminine and sexy. The bulbous shapes suggest innards and organs. Both make reference to the body and, by extension, interior spaces and states.
Rodriguez, who earned the solo show by winning the Forward Arts Foundation's 2010-2011 Emerging Artist Award, has taken this opportunity to explore other materials. In several large collages, she builds compositions around pink Plexiglas triangles or Mylar squares. To my mind, this dilutes the impact of layering, but it allows her to expand the scale of her wall pieces.
She has also experimented with sound. If you put your ear to the large pink tube that protrudes like a tusk from two vertical white towers of paper, you hear faint sound that might remind you of water (an inside-the-stomach swoosh?) or a conch-shell buzz. This is an interesting idea that could use refining.
Rodriguez has wrapped the free-standing wall of the galley with paper and hung a cute little piece in a ceiling corner, spiderweb-style. These small installation pieces are rather staid and certainly less spatially complex than past work.
The artist describes her work as “neo-pop,” but, in truth, it spans a continuum between saucy cartoonish aesthetic and the refined elegance that dominates here. Perhaps that's a site-specific response to the formality of the Buckhead gallery's architecture and well-bred ambiance. Just know that Rodriguez can blow it out when she wants to.
Through Sept. 24. 3130 Slaton Dr. 404-266-2636. www.swancoachouse.com
An Pham, a recent graduate of University of Georgia's Master of Fine Arts program, is the break-out artist of Spruill Gallery's “Emerging Artists 2011.”
The artist works with a wide palette of materials, from handmade paper and old books to plastic strips, scotch tape and – most wondrously in this exhibit -- rubber bands. Pham crochets, plaits, knots, coils and otherwise manipulates this mundane item into mysterious sculptures, which she presents like the gifts they are in hand-made boxes.
It's a good thing that Pham wants you to touch them because they are irresistibly tactile. They also give off that rubber-band smell and, more profoundly, the feeling of intensity that comes from the hours of repetition and minute manipulations that making these works require. She manipulates books and their pages with similar inventiveness. I'm watching her.
I was also impressed with the winners of WonderRoot's Generally Local, Mostly Independent Film Series. Monica Ellis's “An Untitled Film About Flying,” evokes complex range of emotions that come with being in love. Set in a drab but magical little apartment in which table legs might sprout greenery, the narrative concerns a couple who experience dejection, devouring passion (literally, they eat each other's faces) and quiet euphoria in the space of a few minutes.
You could get motion sickness watching Aaron Keuter and Ashley Anderson's terrifically imaginative “XxxCuzx Me.” It features a kaleidoscopic cavalcade of morphing figures in what has been described as “a meditation on chaos, evolution, and machinism.” Also politics (regime change comes swiftly here) and the experience of being inside a pinball machine.
Through Sept. 3. 4681 Ashford Dunwoody Rd., Dunwoody. 770- 394-4019. www.spruillgallery.blogspot.com
Catherine Fox is chief visual arts critic at http://www.ArtsCriticATL.com
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