Visual arts events in Atlanta are usually dominated by blockbusters like this summer's Monet exhibit at the High Museum or by the numerous galleries that continue raise Atlanta's profile as a city that supports world-class art. However, one of the most fascinating venues for seeing contemporary art in Atlanta is the Global Health Odyssey Museum at the CDC.
That's right, there is an excellent contemporary art museum at the Centers for Disease Control here in Atlanta — and the current exhibition at the GHOM is definitely worth seeing.
"Consequential Matters" is an exhibition of four Atlanta-based artists doing work on the consequences of urbanization, technology, consumption, indulgence and globalization.
Peter Essick has documented the exponential growth of "e-waste" over the past two decades that has overwhelmed our abilities to safely handle the trash, producing a cottage industry of toxic recycling efforts in developing countries. Essick's work hits the primary goal of environmental photojournalism by visually documenting and exposing social issues that would otherwise be buried and obfuscated by statistical data about high tech trash.
Carl DiSalvo and Jonathan Lukens' "Smog is Democratic" speaks directly to the relationship between scientific representations and artistic representations of information. DiSalvo and Lukens present large quasi-scientific, but clearly more expressive, prints and a video of data visualizations of particulate counts in Atlanta. Where Essick's photos evoke empathy for third-world laborers willing to work with deadly chemicals in order to eke out a living by handling first-world e-waste, DiSalvo and Lukens provoke a discussion of how information on the environment is expressed and interpreted.
The final local artist in the exhibition is Mark Wentzel, who also has work at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. For the CDC exhibition, Wentzel has created a piece called "XLounge x 3" in which he has taken a classic 1956 Eames lounge chair and ottoman and added stuffing to match society's current level of overconsumption. Wentzel's work suggests questions about how manufacturers have altered their product designs to fit the current supersizing of society, but the piece hits a poignant visceral note as the once stylish over-stuffed chair has become both tragic and hilarious.
A site covering Atlanta's visual arts, Art Relish, www.artrelish.com, will post live updates and video interviews from the exhibition.
Steve Aishman teaches photography at SCAD-Atlanta. Jason Parker is SCAD's manager of social media.
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