The Hudgens Center for the Arts is devoted to all things paper this summer. Its four exhibits encompass limited-edition prints, book arts and -- surprise! -- dress design.
“Pulp Fashion” -- which, like the Altered Book Competition, is presented in collaboration with the Gwinnett County Public Library -- is the equivalent of a great beach read. Teams of staff members from the various branches created the delightful dresses on view from newsprint, magazine pages, tissue and the like, employing, among other techniques, origami and woven strips of paper to construct these imaginative ensembles. The flapper dress, replete with a “feather” boa, “beaded” skirt and numerous pleats, is a highlight.
“Pressing Matters,” which occupies the main gallery, is a juried presentation of works by members of the Atlanta Printmakers Studio, a 6-year-old cooperative and grass-roots success story.
Juried exhibitions are an expeditious way for artists to get their work out to the public. The exhibition -- juried by Linda Lindeborg and Anne Morrow, Hudgens board members on the curating committee, and Vanessa Boggs, owner of Boggs Gallery -- succeeds on this count. For every artist who was familiar to me -- Tim Hunter, Atlanta’s Audubon, contributed two striking woodcuts, for example -- there were two more I didn’t know.
The show also serves as a demonstration of skillfully executed printmaking techniques, though few works struck me as particularly ambitious or inventive. (The students and amateurs featured in the community art exhibition, “Altered Books,” were more uninhibited, if less polished, in their approach.)
Skill and variety make for a perfectly pleasant exhibition, but the format is ultimately limiting. It isn’t conducive to learning much about individual artists or to seeing the work in any illuminating context other than the medium they share.
You can, however, make your own connections. Landscape, for instance, is a preponderant theme. The delicacy and serenity of “Devotional,” Hannah Skoonberg’s Asian-inflected silhouette of a tree in a scroll-like format, contrasts with the fairy-tale aura of Jan diPietro’s “Sybil,” in which a hybrid woman-tree (which reminded me of performance artist Shana Wood’s character) seems to pal with a panther while confronting a menacing reptile.
Eileen Wallace contributes an entirely different take on landscape in her handmade paper pieces in the adjacent book arts exhibition. “High Cotton,” a crinkly white sheet empty but for the red thread stitched across it, is a cunning evocation of her native Mississippi Delta, in which acres of fields extend to the horizon line, uninterrupted by buildings or billboards.
“Alluvium: After the Flood,” a 2-foot-tall stack of sheets of mud-colored paper, is her geological poem referring to the Mississippi River’s cyclical floods, which create the rich topsoil the stack represents. As current news reports document, the floods also wreak terrible destruction. Seen in that light, the sculpture’s form resonates as a headstone.
Catherine Fox is chief visual art critic for http://www.ArtsCriticATL.com.
Review
“Pressing Matters: Atlanta Printmakers Studio Annual Members Exhibition,” “3rd Annual Altered Book Exhibition,” “Book Arts Invitational Exhibition,” “Pulp Fashion: The Novel Art of the Paper Dress.”
Through Sept. 3. $5; $3, seniors, students and children; free for children under 2. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. The Hudgens Center for the Arts, 6400 Sugarloaf Parkway, Building 300, Duluth. 770-623-6002. www.thehudgens.org.
The bottom line: A summer celebration of artful printed matter.
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