Since 2007 the Working Artist Project award, granted by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, has acknowledged an admirable diversity of Atlanta artists. The past nine recipients of the award have ranged from the freshly hatched to the deeply entrenched.
In the latter camp is 67-year-old artist Katherine Mitchell. A retired art professor at Emory University where she taught for 29 years, Mitchell has been making art even before she graduated from the now defunct Atlanta College of Art in 1968. Along with artists Alan Caomin Xie and Micah Stansell, Mitchell is one of three 2010-2011 WAP award winners who represent MOCA GA’s efforts to reward talented artists who stay in Atlanta instead of fleeing for the art beacons of New York or Los Angeles.
In addition to a stipend and a studio assistant, the award entitles Mitchell to a solo exhibition at MOCA GA. Mitchell’s exhibition “Places of Memory and Dreams” continues the artist’s fascination with maze-like patterns that can suggest architecture, fabric, aerial views of landscape or, in a more lyrical mode, memory.
Mitchell’s works on paper and on canvas, rendered in gouache, pastel, ink, graphite and acrylic, are layered affairs. They are visually complex compositions of grids, drawings and text, the integration of often indecipherable text being the least successful element in the works.
The show builds like a story as viewers move from the first small work to the final, large sculpture. As the work progresses, growing in both scale and intricacy, Mitchell layers more and more visual information. Her most dynamic motif, first seen in the work on paper “Louveciennes/Mississippi,” is a vortex that draws the eye toward a vanishing point in the painting’s dead center.
At once hypnotic and tranquil, Mitchell’s works can suggest spider webs visually entrapping viewers within their circuitry of grids and spirals. You find yourself traveling deeper and deeper into their pictorial space, before suddenly realizing you have been caught within the sticky trap of the artist’s imagery. It seems appropriate that the one piece of sculpture in the exhibition, “For Willie” composed of wood and twine, is Mitchell’s recreation of an animal trap she made as a child.
As one moves around the room, Mitchell builds upon her motifs of the grid and the vortex. She adds rudimentary sketches of homes from the artist’s past and present. These spaces are clearly formative in Mitchell’s life, but her subdued, watery colors and delicate mark-making emphasize an idea of that architectural past fading from view.
A series of three long, 72-by-48-inch works are standouts in color and form. In vaporous shades of blue, Mitchell’s three paintings of European buildings and landscapes give a sense of experience vanishing into memory. The images vividly convey an idea of landscape, of memory and travel. Like the best works in the show, the paintings are thrillingly transportive.
Art Review
“Katherine Mitchell: Places of Memory and Dreams”
Through March 31
Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., closed Sunday and Monday
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia
75 Bennett Street, Suite A-2, Atlanta
Free to members; $5 non-members; $1 students with ID
404.367.8700, www.mocaga.org
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